Vedexent

This is getting to be a squadron role call thread :megalol: As noted, there are lots of servers up 24/7 - or as close to it as the platform stability allows. You'll find the 51st, 104th, and 77th to be very good servers with a reasonable number of people on them most of the time. If you want to just fly "pick up games" they're pretty good. The 159th and 314th are both quite good, if they have players on them. Both servers tend to have times of the day when their traffic is good, and other times that are quiet - usually based on the time zone that the squad members are on. ENO's and the Firehouse are very accommodating and open to all as well, worth checking. They too tend to have "hot spots" on the clock as well. Full Disclosure: I host the 314th; it's sitting on the desk to my right as I type :P IMO, if you want to fly casually, on a whim, some of the big, heavily populated servers will probably suit you best. If you want to find a squadron which is dedicated to a particular style that suits the kind of sim flying you want to do, don't overlook some of the "medium sized" servers either. That's not to say that you can't find a good squadron on the heavily populated servers - it's just that the "core" squadrons on those servers are also likely to have times that they're on, and times they're not - so it that regard, large and medium sized servers only differ in their "casual traffic".

I would also vote for the TrackIR 5. The price is total gouge - for $200 what you get is a 100g of plastic and circuit board with a USB cable and it's NOT new or amazing technology - it's tricky to calibrate, and the so called "Pro" clip is made of Kleenex and will snap in half if you glare at it. I also would never ever ever ever fly a flight sim without it. Best piece of hardware as far as added experience in the game, ever. Once I had it all setup, and so long as I have it running when DCS world fires up, I don't even notice it's there: I just "look around the cockpit" naturally. I've never tried any of the free webcam tracking alternatives, but one of our squadron pilots has one of them, and while it is functional, he has occasional issues - especially when DCS updates. I would also recommend getting pedals and a HOTAS, not a really good HOTAS without pedals. I have the X52 Pro and the Saitek flight pedals. Would I get the Warthog, and the Saitek combat pedals if I could justify the cash? Probably, but I'd go for a medium quality set over a really good HOTAS and non-existent pedals, if you can't justify that kind of cash. One word of warning: if you fall down this particular rabbit hole of a hobby, you will end up spending a fair amount of money on hardware, over time. $600 here for your initial controller setup here, $1000 for 2 more monitors and a second video card there, $400 for a fourth touch screen monitor under your main so you can just tap on click-able cockpit controls with your finger, etc. ... ;)

Um ... no. The more test data the better - unless you have the extremely unlikely scenario where the system is always running in exactly the same conditions, and is failing exactly the same way. If I tested any of my projects just once, and then said I was done testing, I'd get fired :P This is why there are hundreds or thousands of people in the open beta: multiple tests with slightly different conditions result in slightly different failures, which give you more data about the root underlying issue.

From the article: So it's not even the same target market as the rift. And ... let's not forget that most people apparently can't use the rift for an hour without nausea because of the movement lag issues. Drop the latency, raise the resolution, and keep the price point in the high-end monitor range, and the rift has great potential ... but it's not there yet.

VapoR - I've been flying CAS flights solo this morning. If you orbit around WP 1 a couple of times, the support mostly catch up. The SEAD flies separately to the same target anyways - and so far no problems with fighters. This morning at least, the Su-24 took out the Avenger, and the two Vulcans before I even got to the target zone, and RTB'd - allowing me to clean up the armor tidily with Karens. The AI may not be consistent or reliable, but it does apparently "get it right" occasionally.

The Su-25SM not only has guided weapons, it is more capable with them. "Su-25SM weapon suite has been expanded with the addition of the Vympel R-73 highly agile air-to-air missile (albeit without helmet mounted cuing) and the S-13T 130 mm rockets (carried in five-round B-13 pods) with blast-fragmentation and armour-piercing warheads. Further, the Kh-25ML and Kh-29L Weapon Employment Profiles have been significantly improved, permitting some complex missile launch scenarios to be executed, such as: firing two consecutive missiles on two different targets in a single attack pass. The GSh-30-2 cannon (250 round magazine) has received three new reduced rate-of-fire modes: 750, 375 and 188 Rounds per Minute. The Su-25SM was also given new BD3-25 under-wing pylons" That's from Wikipedia, but it's cited as coming from: Mladenov, Alexander (January 2013). "Armoured Workhorse". Air Forces Monthly 298: 68–74 As I never got my January issue of Air Forces Monthly, I cannot independently confirm the citation.

The SU-25T is a cool aircraft, and it's ton of automation make it a good entry level aircraft to DCS World. It doesn't appear to be the future of the Su-25 line, however, but an "evolutionary dead end". I'd still like a full DCS World level SU-25 and/or SU-25SM (6DoF, clickable cockpit).

Ender's Game: The Crimean Edition :D

Be interesting how it stacks up against the MilViz FSX Sabre - apart from the obvious "it's a working combat aircraft" aspect :) If someone would just create me a T-38C, an F-104, and an L-39 as well ... I'd be a happy camper.

For those that were interested, our server should now be back on line - on a semi-permanent basis.

Ah - thank you. That's what we had originally, but we saw a different translation, so we switched it. That's OK - we'll change it back :) While all of us love Russian plane design, I don't think any of us actually speak, read or write Russian :)

and here I was biting my tongue to not say it :D

We are still alive and flying :) Our dedicated server has been down, and probably won't be back up until this weekend - but that's due to me moving, getting new internet installed, etc. Right now the members that have internet are getting together and flying on other servers until I can get my high-speed up and running in my new place. Feel free to check out our forums in my signature below, and check us out - and see where the guys might be flying.

You should wait until the launch authorization lamp comes on, then you need to hold the trigger down, not merely squeeze and release.

It seems to be - although I haven't tested it extensively. The Su-25T has a rear facing IR becon to confuse IR missiles. I've heard people claim that diving on an IR AAD unit from the direction of the Sun also helps as the IR missiles can lock on the Sun.

Anyone tried the new patch on KVM? VirtualBox?

Really? Why has no one mentioned this before?

While support from the more popular servers would be great, I think getting enough people/servers online, period, would be good as well. I think it's the critical mass of people that's important. It's just easier with the large servers. We've got 0-10 people online usually - so we're pretty small - but I think we'd jump on this.

Haven't played that scenario/campaign - but does it have limited resources? One of our server missions has restricted resources - several planes re-arming can run a base out of a particular type of weapon and someone gets "short changed". Eventually the resupply depot will ship more, and it will be available again (but too long to not pick something else and fly the sortie). Alternatively, did you fire up the engines in the middle of the ground crew reloading?

So - let us know how your Su-27 flight goes. Until then - unless we have data - it's all speculation, and I suspect some people have ego invested in thinking they "really could do this for real". I just don't think playing a video game makes you a fighter pilot, although I'm open to seeing a demonstration of a counter-example. Next time a DCS World aficionado who has never touched a real plane before ponies up $USD17,700 to these guys, we'll have some actual data.

Firstly, I agree 100% that the server layer needs to be fixed, or - ideally - a stable stand alone server application needs to be found. However you want to measure it, it's clear that we can set servers to accept loads that they can't sustain - whether that's 12 player/hours, or a total player lag of X microseconds, or however you want to slice it. Um ... because the server crashes? However, playing 20 minutes of a mission and having it crash and having to start over from the beginning does not encourage repeat visitors at all, either. ---- I'm beginning to be concerned this might be an "bragging rights" thing in squadrons: "We are squadron X, we have Y people on our server at all times therefore we are fantastic ... oops it crashed", and person #32 - who was new to DCS World MP - gets frustrated, throws in the towel, stops playing MP, the number of MP players overall goes down. Rinse, repeat often enough, and we get threads in the forum like Where are the Multiplayer players? In the end, people will do with their servers what they want - and that's their right. I'm just concerned that a combination of "well, it should work this way, so I'm going to push it to where I think it should work (oops it crashed)" and "we're number 1 because we can cram X people onto an (unstable) server!" could be degrading the MP experience in general for new players - and we have a ton of those thanks to Steam (whether or not you think that's a good thing). Take my argument with a grain of salt, if you will, since I don't seem to be affected directly by the problem.

So ... if you know that over allocating the number of slots is what crashes your server, why do you still do it? Drop the max number of slots, crash less often, provide a better experience (i.e. one where you don't get halfway through a mission and it craps out). It's like the very old joke: A: "The server crashes when I do this.", B: "Then don't do that". Fewer crashes = less frustration = more people playing MP. Given that we're not saturating the capacity of public servers, even if they cap out at a dozen players each, we're fine - we just spread the population out a bit. ---- Edit: and "You" might not be VA; So far as I know VA could be rock steady and never crash - but there are servers out there, clearly, which are crashing.

I don't think even being a master pilot in DCS World would prepare you for 1/10th of 1% of the actual aircraft flight. "Study Sims" give you knowledge of how the systems go together. It tells you nothing about the real experience of flight. You might know the theory of how to do an Immelman; but I bet if you're under 7Gs of acceleration, it won't do you much good. If you're talking about being able to recognize all the controls, and what the systems are for, then you're 100% right. But "armchair pilots" - including me - aren't pilots.

Maybe I shouldn't jinx it, but I don't see crashes more than once every 2-3 days, and that's usually when I'm trying to heavily use the system for other things on top of running the server. True, we're operating under modest player loads, and with missions specifically designed not to be "crash bait" - extensive use of triggers, etc.

Light bulb! Now this makes perfect sense. If DCS World is written in C++ - and I seem to recall that at least part of it it - then yes, there could definitely be memory leaks. Throwing more RAM at the problem would make the OS run better, but not the program. I suspect - as I'm a *nix guy and don't really know the internals of Windows - that you might be putting enough memory in to have some left over when all the allocated memory area for DCS world is "leaked away". DCS World would still be "broken", but it wouldn't take down Windows down with it. If DCS World is "leaky" it means that restarting, or rebooting, might be the only cure (short of the dev team plugging the leaks, of course). This would be true of Servers (probably more so) as well as people using the software to "just play". It may be that servers not only need to rotate missions every X hours, but do a full system reboot - or risk stability issues. Not ideal. I wonder if one could throw a system monitor in there with the logic: "If no one has been on the server for X minutes and the server has been up for Y minutes OR the server has been up for Z minutes, regardless of current activity, reboot Windows" - and have DCS World auto setup as a server? But ... can you setup DCS World to automatically connect as an MP server and launch a mission on startup?