Socket7

You can set DCS 2.0.2 to render in AFR2 mode through the nvidia drivers and it seems to work just fine. Gpu core load drops and is split evenly between them, where the same settings would max out a single card's workload. It's maybe 25% less gpu load? SLI never doubled performance like people hope IME, but AFR does give each card double the time to render the scene, as each card draws every other frame. Considering that DCS 2.0.2 will happily use 8GB of video ram though, Vram is more likely to be the bottleneck that will kill your framerates. I just noticed last night while playing with the gazelle. DCS's FPS monitor was saying it was using 7000mb of vram on "high" detail settings.

I'm much the same kind of flyer as you are. I grabbed it for the same reason too, finally a chance to use all those bonus bux I've been accumulating. I've spent maybe an hour flying it so far, and it feels like I'm flying a mosquito it is so twitchy. I dropped the cyclic saturation down to 30% and it's still twitchy. At times, it feels like I should be flying it by using the trim hat instead of the stick. I suspect I'll have a good time when i finally learn it's ins and outs, instead of bumbling around in my noob phase. The latest beta update apparently fixed some of problems with the FM, so there isn't any serious reason to hold off bug wise anymore. Certainly a fantastic chopper for search and rescue with 5 seats (though our model seems to have 3), but I'm not sure of its maximum weight capacity. I'm pretty happy with the 20 bucks I spent on it overall.

Saitek's have always felt flimsy to me. The button feel is not very good on the X-52 and X-52 pro, and I feel like I might break things by accident. I also had a pretty nasty firmware bug that would lock up or bluescreen my PC. It's been years since that, and I assume its fixed. On the other hand I'm constantly impressed by just how much stuff saitek manages to fit into their joysticks. Good value for money. The plastic gimbal on the TM warthog has never caused me problems. The coolie switch? Not so much, but that was fixed free under warranty.

Fishbreath is correct. Each landing point has a trigger that adds some weight. The soldiers aren't even actually loaded into the helicopter. They just get turned off when the trigger conditions are met. :music_whistling:

I did not consider making it multiplayer, and it's been ages since I looked at the code, which is just built on the mission editors logic. I've no idea if it will work or not as multiplayer. I've no objection to anyone cracking it open in the mission editor and making their own versions. It's really just a bit of fun. :)

When my coolie switch failed after a few months of use, TM shipped me a new coolie switch for free. When that one didn't work, TM shipped me another one for free. When that didn't work TM RMAed the entire throttle. When it came back, the coolie worked, but the throttles would not calibrate correctly. TM had me try and run a factory calibration and when that didn't work, They RMAed the RMAed throttle, and sent me a good one that has worked perfectly to this day. When I mentioned that shipping the unit was a rather significant expense for me, They took my shipping receipts and cut me a check for the cost of mailing the broken units back to them. This is what I call a the textbook definition of how to handle a customer service issue. It sounds like you may have had a blank TARGET profile enabled. That would have the effect of linking the stick and throttle into a single USB HID instead of two. When you link them like that you no longer have enough directX inputs for all the buttons you have. Games will not see a lot of the buttons and switches on the base of the throttle, until you assign a command to that button in the TARGET profile. This is exactly why people do not use TARGET unless they absolutely have to, usually because a game doesn't support multiple directinput devices. DCS sees multiple joysticks and throttles just fine, and has buil tin defaults for the warthog joystick and throttle, but it does not have any built in presets for a warthog with a TARGET profile enabled. Maybe it's time you take it out of the closet and give it a second chance? :dunno:

Yup! you can play all kinds of tricks on your inner ear. Whenever your visual perception doesn't match what your inner ear is perceiving, you feel very uncomfortable. When A2A refueling though, you have many static points of visual reference to correlate with your inner ear. It's a situation where the seat of your pants is probably more helpful rather than less helpful. I think a big part of it is scale too. in DCS, you are aiming for an area a few hundred pixels across on a small screen. In the real world, you're aiming for a box several cubic feet large. Everything may be to scale, but everything is still smaller. Honestly though? Practice. Practice. Practice. I spent a week being hopeless at A2A, then suddenly it clicked and a few hours later I was able to go from fumes to fully loaded in a single plug. There is a dramatic dropoff in difficulty once you figure out the basic skill, but it will take you the rest of your life to perfect it once you get over that hump in the learning curve.

It's a grounding screw. You can find it in real MI-8s too. I don't remember what instrument its wired to.

When I had to RMA my TM because of a bad coolie, they sent me back a unit with a bad throttle axis. I had to RMA the RMA. Do you REALLY want to pay for shipping all that stuff over something that doesn't screw up functionality whatsoever?

They should work something out with Devrim and get his cockpit as the default english cockpit. Why duplicate effort? There are better things to use dev time on if a solution already exists. Unfortunately, I'm sure they have a very good reason for not doing that.

Make sure that you don't use the dust protectors at altitude either. They will also suck a significant amount of power from your engines. Running the standby generator to prevent power cutout due to low rotor RPM would require keeping the APU on. The APU has a continuous run time limitation of 30 minutes. Your CO would probably have some very specific words for you if you just used it all the time. I'm not sure what happens if you just leave the APU on in the game. I suppose you could get away with it in a pinch. Better to keep rotor RPM up, because low rotor RPM not only robs you of your generators, but much more importantly, lift.

TM Warthog isn't going anywhere. It's basically the gold standard. There is no other joystick on the market that combines the quality and feature set at the price point it does. CH products and Saitek have had their market for rudder pedals devastated by vastly superior products at a similar price point with the MFG crosswinds and that other rudder pedal system I don't remember because I don't own it. If saitek/CH pedals go away, they won't be missed by anyone. As for joysticks, The X52/pro is ripe to be taken down by some better offering at the same price point, but that's going to be a high barrier to entry because the X52 really crams a lot of stuff in for what they charge. Feeling built down to a price is the main problem with the x52, so how do you make something also built down to a price, that can't feel like it is built down to a price. The warthog could really use a version 2.0 to correct some of the longstanding minor issues, like the PWM for the LEDs causing the throttle friction slider to judder and some reliability tweaks, but I don't think they feel the need to spend a bunch of money on new tooling to make a 2.0, and it would probably require a price hike which would put off consumers. And of course, people who are willing to spend $160 on a gimbal alone, will continue to have options available to them at higher price points, with the expected jump in materials quality and engineering that price point can afford.

Every monitor out there deals with displaying the rendered frame to user in it's own way. Some are better than others. Some are good for some things, and bad for others. Some monitors induce large amounts of input lag by buffering 2 or 3 frames in memory, and performing built in post processing. Some don't. Some let you turn it on and off. There's a lot of magic going on the user has no access to in a monitor. They aren't just dumb devices wiggling an electron beam according to an analog input system. There are many variables for these sorts of issues so there's no need to think someone is wrong, everyone can be right.

I think the first formation flight mission in the UN campaign is 3 or 4 missions in. It's the one where you have to fly some reporters around. As wild bill mentioned, AI helicopters fly like they are on drugs, making utterly insane altitude changes extremely rapidly. I find formation flying to be the least fun of anything you do while playing the single player campaign because of that. It'd probably be a lot more fun with other humans.

Nah, You use it to keep the A-10's transmission in gear when the synchros are shot, and it constantly wants to pop out of top gear while cruising. :lol:

Paypal. Then only they have my payment info, rather than spreading that info out in god knows how many website databases all over the net just waiting to be stolen.

I suspect they would have to have multi crew support working before they would even start working. Modeling an aircraft interior you can't look at whenever you're actually piloting the helicopter is kind of a waste of resources that are (currently) better spent elsewhere. It'd certainly be nice, but if it's on the to-do list at all (I don't know if it is), I'm betting it'd be pretty low on the list, or at least after multi-crew support is in.

Yeah, you're right. The whole thing is based on a flawed premise, but if you read the thread, you'll realize that it is not about having a rational debate. I tried to point out much earlier the costs involved in mass production, as well as the small size of the flight sim market, and how this all affects the bottom line, but nobody was particularly interested in engaging. I suspect most will be equally unimpressed with a discussion of MTBF's, the merits of DFM, and structural analysis of modern plastics. People want a TM warthog made out of titanium, with software that never crashes, a 0% failure rate, that is upgradable. It needs to have an unlimited, no questions asked warranty, and they want it all for $49.99 (I'll take 2 of them please ;) ). It's just not realistic. The joystick market is saturated. You have options from $40 all the way up to tens of thousands of dollars for a joystick made by the guys who make all of the USAF's simpits. I've owned an Xtreme3d Pro. I've owned an X52 and an X52pro, and a TM warthog. You are getting your monies worth with all of them. Nobody at the joystick company (Except that USAF contractor) is walking home with a fat stack of hundred dollar bills from ripping off consumers with cheap joysticks sold at an insane markup. There is no Martin Shkreli of the joystick world (Rudder pedals are another matter). If people would like to lament how little a dollar seems to be worth these days and how expensive metal is, that is an entirely different discussion than if you paying a lot for something that should cost much less. People are just complaining, and that's perfectly fine. It is only through people complaining that we can discover things about products that we might not like before we spend our hard earned money on them. :thumbup:

Smart man. You get a full warranty now if anything happens in the future. If you ever have to RMA the new unit back to TM, make sure to ask them to reimburse you for shipping costs. They will happily do it, but only if you ask. RMA's are so much less painful when they include free shipping. :thumbup:

This is probably why it was being sold in the first place. I'd return to the seller. TM isn't going to offer warranty service for a second hand owner. It's likely they'll make you pay for any parts you need.

If you want to pay $160 for an adjustable metal gimbal. Yes. So far as I know, it's the only joystick on the market with such a feature. I have my doubts about if such engineering is really necessary, but it sure looks pretty, and with so many adjustments you'll have hours of fun tweaking it just the way you want it (I too get the urge to spend hours fiddling with stuff). As a trade off, you lose quite a few buttons and the dual throttle the warthog has, but it does have a single throttle, and a twist grip rudder, so it's not the end of the world. It's a bit like an Xtreme 3D pro on steroids with regards to its feature set. Pitch yaw and roll on the stick, a single throttle, buttons, and a single hat. I think it's worth what you pay for it, and I think people who buy it will be quite happy with it, but a TM Warthog and a set of rudder pedals seems to be the most flexible setup for the largest number of aircraft.

Your TV is doing some kind of input processing to achieve Vsync if you are not getting any tearing at all. If your TV is 60hz, then all you can see is 60FPS. All the other frames are not seen and thus "wasted". You could try Vsync and see if it works ok. If it does, your gpu will run cooler, as it will not render frames you will never see. If Vsync causes problems, you can try using a framerate limiter of some kind. Every computer and monitor is different, so you really have to experiment.

.... Do you want to play flight sims, or just fiddle around with electronics for the rest of eternity. :huh:

That's because ArmA is not going for any sort of realistic flight model, and DCS is aiming to be as accurate a simulation as possible. You would be FAR better off using the throttle for your collective on the extreme 3d Pro. As someone who's spent hundreds of hours flying helicopters in DCS, I cannot imagine trying to use the collective via key presses. It requires constant fine manipulation that you cannot do with key presses. I don't even think that putting it in game mode instead of simulation mode will accomplish what you want, but I could be wrong on that.

It took me many hours of practice to realize I was several meters too high, and chasing the boom. If you think you are "RIGHT THERE!!!!!" and you're getting no love from the boom operator, you're too high. It got a lot easier once i was in the right place. Light a switch flicking.