p1t1o

Does anyone remember when DCS was "Lock On: Modern Air Combat"? But do you remember when it was "Flanker 1.5"? Flat shaded polygon graphics, 2D cockpit, 2 dimensional terrain? Oh it was FANTASTIC. Approximately the same level of fidelity as todays "LoFi" modules, flight model notwithstanding. But I've been waiting ever since then for them to do a HiFi Flanker, the Flanker is hands down my favorite fighter jet of all time, its sad that it probably not going to happen :( But then the ability to create a HiFi module depends on a great many things, and we are exceptionally lucky to have so many great modules available. Id always recommend the A10C for starters, its quite forgiving but introduces you to almost everything that DCS has to offer. And its very cool in its own right. But to be honest, pick anything that isnt deep in early access and you'll have a ball.

YES! In modern aircraft like the F18, you should hardly ever need to use the rudder, so you can get to within a harsbreadth of total control realism without physical pedals. I fly with a HOTAS Warthog, and I use the keyboard for rudder (well, actually I map it to hotas buttons). For older aircraft, you may need the rudder more. For helis though, its tough without some real rudder control. For this I use a handily-positioned rotary axis which works ok. So if you want 100% maximum realism, buy rudder pedals, but you absolutely can get into the hardcore sim experience without them. One thing is for sure though - whether the general consensus is yes or no: go for it anyway. You will get enough out of it that you can go without rudder pedals. You will very quickly work out whether or not rudder pedals are essential *for you*. You can continue to fly until they arrive ;) But dont *not get into DCS* just because you dont have rudder pedals, that'd be the worst take of all.

This is painful to read lol!

Many 80-90s simulators and arcade games taught us that military jets have total situational awareness and can detect any missile or enemy. Unfortunately this has never been the case IRL, and now that we have the capability of building sims that reflect reality to a high enough degree, we are finding out. *** Note on missile launch warning systems (MLWS), in case you have yet to come across the information: They are entirely seperate and work independently from RWR warnings. They are simply a system of IR or UV cameras/sensors tuned to the frequency of the radiation given off by a hot rocket exhaust. Much in the same way that an RWR is a system of radio antennae tuned to the frequency of radar emissions. Some are more sensitive than others. Some are sensitive enough to detect the hot nozzle of a missile for some short time after motor burnout. They are non-discriminatory, if a missile is not tracking you, but passes into detection range, you will get a warning. If a friendly launches a missile nearby, you will get a warning. It will be that same warning as you get when a missile is launched directly at you. This is one reason for "FOX" calls. If someone calls FOX1 and you immediately get a MLWS tone, and you are not expecting surprise guests, it is likely that manouvres are not necessary. If the missile has cooled enough, you will not get a warning. So a R27T launched at max range might not trigger a warning. MANPADS (stingers etc) may not ever set it off, depending on the system. Naturally range of detection depends on various factors, basically the temperature of the missile/exhaust and the sensitivity of the system. They generally dont have huge range. If you hear it, you likely have seconds to decide if its time for last-ditch manouvres.

I love reading about stuff like that. You never think about things like "the plug that sits in the end of the missile to stop crap getting in there".

Say you are comparing the F16 and FA18: If you were an airforce of 1 aircraft, and you already had either one, you probably wouldnt go out of your way to swap either of them for the other. They both exist IRL because two different airforces had sliiiightly different specs they wanted to fill. They were even both initially developed to fill the same development program, the FA18 starting life initially as the YF-17 ("Cobra"), developed alongside the F16 for the Lightweight Fighter Program. As things went, the airforce chose the F16 and the F17 saw life later on as the FA18 under another, Naval, project. But in DCS we choose by different criteria. For me its just whether or not I want to learn another startup sequence :D

Helicopters DO really struggle to hide from fighters. If you find yourself in a mission, flying a chopper in a heavy AA environment, your mission has been designed/planned by either an idiot or a psychopath. Helicopters and fighter jets are like tanks and logistics trucks. They have a TOTALLY different role and ought to NEVER be in direct contact with each other, and if they were, itd mean a huge human failure has taken place somewhere. If you get shot down by a fast jet in your Ka-50, its because nobody made plan to remove the threat before your mission took place (whether this means a strong CAP presence or neutralising enemy air strategically). No ifs, ands or buts. And DEFINITELY no talk of doppler radar.

AI for FPS is different to AI for tic-tac-toe is different to AI for combat aircraft. I can imagine its hard to write a good AI combat pilot. Its all very well and good saying that the DCS AI is rubbish, but what if it is the best-in-class? Its the same result but I think its an important distinction, and I for one, dont know what the state of the art is, exactly. Has anyone seen a better air combat AI?

I would not be surprised if various factors made it difficult to match a sim exactly to real life, either due to practical difficulty (eg: having to base in on tables of numbers instead of climbing into an operational aircraft) or due to classified information (eg: tables not available for all possible contexts). This is acceptable to me and I would still consider a sim with these limitations "authentic". However, I think many of these perceptual problems are due to (or at least, made worse by) one thing: None (very rare examples excepted) of us have ever flown in a fast jet, let alone the specific model being simmed. Thus our expectations are based on only a few indirect things, like "how it looks on camera". I once had a conversation with someone about crash test dummies. This guy was saying that they couldnt be realistic because a real person would "hold their limbs in" and not flail about like the crash test dummies. We had an interesting conversation where my point was that these dummies exist specifically to test forces which the human body almost never experiences. Have you ever actually seen a human body exposed to high-rate-of-onset, 200G de/accelerations? Have you ever been exposed to those kind of forces? Expectations are a powerful thing, it is an important skill to know when to take them with a pinch of salt. Thus, crash test dummies flail, and military jets still, even today, cannot be flown around the sky without restriction. There is a reason it takes times on the order of years of full-time training to be any kind of professional pilot - its harder than it looks.

I lent someone part of my Index money on the basis that they swore up and down and sideways that it wouldnt interfere with my preorder. Now I have received my pre-order notification and have missed the window because they, at the absolute last minute, did not hold up their end. My feelings about this are, obviously[REDACTED] /vent

??? It is at the expense of pixel density... I like the Index, it will probably be the one for me, but to be fair, you cannot move the screens closer without decreasing ppd, period. If I had an HMD that was precisely identical to an index, except the screens slightly further from my eyes with a slightly lower FoV, I would certainly have better ppd. Perhaps you simply are referring to the literal, physical pixel density of the displays? That is far less relevant than a pixel-per-degree approach, which is what the Index sacrifices for greater FoV. For example, it has te same resolution as the Vive Pro, but a much greater FoV, its ppd will actually be worse. However, its stripe display with the better subpixel ararngement will offset this, so there will be some increasxe in visual fidelity, but not as clear cut as it could be - unless you also count FoV as part of "fidelity" which is perfectly arguable.

1. Why was this not your first post, were we supposed to extrapolate all of that from a one liner? 2. You are not being as correct as you think you are and to top it off you are using theory against someone with practical experience (knowledge of statistics vs someone with an actual HMD) so your post has, maximum, ONLY as much merit as his. 3. Half your points exhibit the exact same flaws that you accuse others of, lots of subjective opinion and nitpickery. 4. So thanks for your input, it was an interesting read, I mean that, really, but you can dial back the snark, it is entirely un-earned.

If you look up the definition of "shill" and then look at the structure and content of this comment, its quite funny :D

As a distinciton of tracking method, that certainly falls into what "outside-in" is. Lasers come from OUTside, INto the headset. With WMR, for example, cameras INside, the headset look OUTwards. Its just a marketting term for "needs basestations" not a technical term for a specific method, it doesnt have to be 100% technically accurate in all contexts, and it doesnt mean that there is nothing in the headset looking outwards, its just the name for the category that happened to form.

I dont think it is as simple as this, as the optronic sensors on the index (or vive, for that nmatter) are not imaging cameras. There may be an element of "inside-out" but there is also complex sensing and timing of the laser as it sweeps across the sensors, calcuated against the known position of the laser vs time. I think there are even accelerometers to add to the system as well.

Is the 50% improvement stated as being specifically for VR? I could sooner buy that an improvement across the board is possible before one that just affects VR. I think my main gripe is that it is such a bold claim, 50% is a lot, and the more "moving parts" there are, frankly, the unliklier the claim becomes. When was the last time a claim like that panned out? I'll wait and see what happens

Someone made a big mistake when they announced such a huge performance increase. Large projects have a huge probability of not hitting exact deadline, just a fact of life, so thats one reason not to make such an impressive announcement. And 50% increase? With such a diverse array of different hardware setups? I cannot imagine a scenario where the "50%" mark is hit by a large enough proportion of people to make the statement justified in any way. Thats even if a 50% increase is even possible. Like what is the software doing now? Chewing biscuits? A claim of 50% improvement just says to me that whatever implementation they have now is hilariously poorly done. Its either that or 50% is not achievable. Or that there is something fundamental about pixels and processors that I have missed - which is admittedly not impossible, but would have to be something very surprising. Honestly I think it would be healthiest if we all just forgot about this alleged VR enhancement, this way we might be pleasantly surprised, and not "almost certainly disappointed, and maybe REALLY disappointed" (Like at the moment, I get poor FPS with a Vive Pro, but if you compared the number of pixels (ONE eye has more pixels than my monitor...) being pushed, its not far off reasonable actually. Where is a 50% performance hike going to come from? A magic spell on my GPU?) Have I totally misread this?

WOW I can [anyone could], and really want to, destroy this comment on so many levels. Thats not a really healthy thing to do to a forum thread though. Kids eh, amirite?

ffs...If they only gave it the reverb's resolution it'd be a certain market-killer. Question: it seems they have sacrificed PPD density for FOV, good decision or nah?

To run? Yes, almost definitely. Its going to be hard to say what kind of FPS you will get though until we have more hands-on reports. Here are some datapoints for you though: GTX970 (min spec) runs a Vive pro at minimum DCS settings at maybe 30FPS Reverb has 4 times the pixels GTX 1080 is, depending on which measure you use, approx 50-100% faster than a 970 Its not as simple as a straight comparison of the numbers though, but it should give you a basic idea. The reverb has the largestt available resolution, I think most people are going for RTX2080 (and even then it wont be maxed...)

What if we're all actually still playing Flanker 1.5 but they just keep upping the dosage of halucinogens contained within Thrustmaster products?

Prepare yourself, its a trip! And in first with a reverb...you might wanna book some holiday ;)

What exactly is the VR "performance patch" supposed to do? How come there is so much overhead for improvement? Also, obviously skeptical of claims of "50% improvment". Usually means something like "1-50% with an average somewhere close to 8%". And what does improvement mean? 50% faster FPS would be great but 50% blacker blacks not so much.

Valve have patented 10,000x10,000 VR displays :D Whilst we may not see them anytime soon, like, at all, at least we know they are heading int he right direction! Gonna need at least an order of magnitude increase in GPU capability before we get that far though, and thats not a trivial thing.

FLASHFLASHFLASH [str]VR1000-200nn is NOT the Reverb[/str] FLASHFLASHFLASH ********** EDIT: Although, weirdly, this one is: https://store.hp.com/ItalyStore/Merch/Product.aspx?id=2CZ77EA&opt=ABB&sel=DTP The one pictured by @philstyle, and located in several places online, definitely is not. Be very careful... Reverb has an overhead strap, a circular rear pad, headphones, and a fabric covered faceplate.