vicx

The Moskva in the DCS is really nice. Once you get models that look that nice it makes you wish you could have a bit more control over them.

To be honest it is just semantics. I mean if the system uses a sprite and the setting in the control panel changes the size of the sprite between standard and enhanced then technically that is 'scaling'. Who cares what it's called, if it helps with initial visual contact then I am all for it.

Mbots suppression script disables unit from 'thinking' (AI disabled) which is OK if that is what you want. I mention the damage model for Naval units because it does exactly what you want right now but it only works for ships. For ships the weapon stations have separate zones so if you hit the main gun then it will be disabled but the ship will still be able to manouver and target with it's other weapons. In addition to this if you destroy the radar section of a ship then all weapon stations dependent on that radar section are disabled. It is actually pretty cool. It is just a shame that the AI for ships is so basic that they don't do anything interesting other than sink and launching everything that they have at a threat. (Maybe that IS realistic) Ground vehicles and structures don't have a damage modelling system. Maybe in DCS 2.0 ... so you see it might be best to wait ... and make a wish.

I hope you can continue to work on your boats without internet access. One of the highlights of this forum is seeing your progress on them. Wishing you good days ahead.

Something could be scripted but you script a solution and create a new problem in many cases. There is a basic solution to emulate mobility kills and other mods to unit capability during a mission. It would be possible to track customised alternate units definitions for each and to define in the alternate unit definition, it's new capabilities. Then during a mission substitute unit for unit under certain conditions. Downside is that such a mod would NOT be general. The Mod would only work within a supported mission framework. It is not a bad idea but nothing is known about scripting support for DCS 2.x. and so perhaps it is better to wait. --- Curiously Naval units DO have a limited form of zone based damage that does affect their capabilities. Info here -> http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=135689

Doing some work on particle effects might get you some attention. The effects in the DCS right now are quite primitive. I think that ED and their partners are probably working hard to improve aircraft and munition effects right now BUT that still leaves a lot of work in other areas that would really benefit from modelling. There are heaps of effects that need work but personally I would love to see bow waves from ships receive attention. They look the worst. What would be appropriate in DCS is to see a bow wave effect that is rooted in simulation. Silver Dragon is working on some boats at the moment and has shared some of his meshes. You might be able to grab a hull and work with that. He is also has torpedoes for his boats and there is no torpedo modelling in the game yet.

I just have a feeling that a solution for dynamic campaigns is more likely to come from the Russian side of forum. It is the sort of thing where a person building a good solution is going to need the ear of an ED developer at some point.

I got my student copy of 3dMax and I just bought Substance Designer 5.0 during the Steam Sale. I'm kind of looking forward to seeing what can be modded in DCS 2.0. I probably won't work on my own trademark infringing mods for the Murage and OMG Grand but I'll install them if someone else makes them.

I think you are absolutely right about this. I think we will see a whole bunch of solutions as people work out what works for them and their situation. I also think maybe you miss the point I was making that the fundamental feature of Valves VR Compositor is that we won't have to rely on game developers to support each device we want to appear and utilise inside VR games and simulations. This is a pretty big feature. Leapmotion COULD use Valves VR compositor to put hands into DCS without needing ED to make the hand objects with the animations. Leap would use the compositor layer to render the hands and get people using the Leapmotion while ED works on other stuff and eventually adds hands in the cockpit. This is why Valve sent ED a HTC Vive Kit. It isn't that important for ED to support the HTC Vive itself BUT it IS important for ED to support SteamVR or OpenVR. If ED uses SteamVR or OpenVR then it will enable support for a whole lot of other devices including the HTC Vive ... a lot sooner.

I do think that products like the Gloveone and LeapMotion are interesting for immersive VR solutions but they don't solve many other practical problems of usability and safety in VR which are going to be important. I actually think that Valves SteamVR/OpenVR stack that includes the lighthouse solution will be solving more of the difficult problems sooner than many of the alternatives. This is because Valve made an early decision to pursue more than just a seated experience and this created safety and usability challenges that they have been working on ever since. The Lighthouse tracking system VR compositor and VR chaperone systems are parts of the solution. When the SteamVR hardware is more widely available and hardware hackers and third party manufacturers have released a few Lighthouse tracking solutions you will be able to attach a tracking dongle to objects on your desk or in your room that you want to bring into 3D space immersively AND perhaps just as importantly for utility. I expect that things like the common keyboards and mice you will be able to attach lighthouse tracking dongles to and they will materislise as 3D ghost objects when you reach for them inside VR experiences. This will probably be built-in to the VR compositor because then your keyboard and mouse will appear in every single VR app which is highly useful. If you are enterprising AND thirsty you will be able to attach tracking dongles to drink holders so that you can reach out and your beverage of choice will be overlayed into 3D space. Do you want PHYSICAL 1:1 controls? Well it is still going to be an expensive option but the upside is that you will be able to attach a tracking dongle to your 1:1 pit parts so that you can exactly position relative to Sim so that switches you reach out for are right where you see them. If your pit controls are not perfectly 1:1 copies of the DCS pits I'm sure this is where the VR Compositor will help. A mesh of the REAL controls can materialise in the right spot as your hand reaches out in VR space. I probably won't be using PHYSICAL 1:1 replica controls but I will probably want my X55 controls mapped to the VR compositor so that I can take my hands off and on and operate individual switches without fumbling around. --- This is kind of how I see this stuff playing out. Is anyone here thinking of building pits with VR in mind?

There is a mode in DK2 where you can view in monochrome just the green pixel component. Here it is obvious the pixel layout of the OLED display has more resolution for green than for blue and red. It is actually double the resolution and it improves the appearance of finer details AND it avoids completely the chromatic aberration. An interesting excercise to maximise the resolution of the DK2 in DCS would be to - apply a Black and White shader to screen and map the B&W image to the green channel - use only the green channel for display Does anyone know how to do this with SWEETFX? *OK apparently the monochrome mode is some Oculus magic transform - I cant find anymore information on it other than that*

I really like what Chromium has done. Obviously DCS does not support all the things that we would want but we can probably still have a LOT of fun destroying bridges and keeping that data persistent on a server. What I would love to see is a 24/7 server that keeps track of every single bridge on the map and keeps track of which bridges have been destroyed and how many bridges are left. Our mission as a community would be to blow up EVERY SINGLE bridge on the map. Right now I have no idea how many bridges there are on the map and how long this might actually take but it would be a nice goal to have and pursue before DCS 2.0 and NTTR arrive.

Migla = {} -- Naval IGLA Migla.type = 4 Migla.major_weapon = true Migla.xc = 0 Migla.distanceMin = 500 Migla.distanceMax = 8500 --for test Migla.min_trg_alt = 10 Migla.max_trg_alt = 5000 Migla.reactionTime = 2 Migla.reflection_limit = 0.22 Migla.launch_delay = 1 Migla.barrels_reload_type = 2 Migla.maxShootingSpeed = 0.0 Migla.ECM_K = -1 Migla.show_external_missile = true Migla.sound = { single_shot = "Weapons/MissileLaunch3", } Migla.sensor = {} set_recursive_metatable(Migla.sensor, GT_t.WSN_t[0]) Migla.PL = {} Migla.PL[1] = {} Migla.PL[1].ammo_capacity = 12 Migla.PL[1].type_ammunition = {4,4,34,91} Migla.PL[1].name_ammunition = "9M39" Migla.PL[1].reload_time = 10 Migla.BR = { {connector_name = 'Missile_Sam_5',}, {connector_name = 'Missile_Sam_6',}, {connector_name = 'Missile_Sam_7',}, {connector_name = 'Missile_Sam_8',}, }; local ws = GT_t.inc_ws(); GT.WS[ws] = {} add_launcher(GT.WS[ws], Migla) GT.WS[ws].drawArgument1 = 20 GT.WS[ws].drawArgument2 = 21 GT.WS[ws].omegaY = math.rad(80) GT.WS[ws].omegaZ = math.rad(100) Instead of using built-in IGLA definition - build your own. Important line --> Migla.PL[1].ammo_capacity = 12 IGLA battery reloads 3 times to fire 12 missiles. It is not necessary to name connectors TARGET_KORTIK_1 or any such thing. As long as names in LUA match names in EDM it will work.

I wonder if the types of materials EDGE supports on NTTR and future maps will be available in the Caucasus map after DCS 2.0 and EDGE are released. Will we be able to add normal, self-illumination, specular and alpha maps to buildings in the Caucasus map?

When I saw the Vive controllers my thought was that they were intentionally simple reference designs. I think Valve is deliberately leaving the door open for third parties to make better designs. I have watched interviews with the Lighthouse developer and he said that Valve wanted third parties to use the Lighthouse technology. I also watched a panel discussion where lighthouse tracking was discussed - although hand tracking always gets the attention it was suggested on the panel that putting lighthouse tracking on keyboards, mice and joysticks would have a lot of utility.

Been reading a bit about the Vive recently. One thing I noticed was that Valve is thoughtfully positioning their demos and future development around the concept of room size environments. Only having to resolve detail on objects within a room is going to be something these HMD devices really hit out of the park. Right now roomsize is the sweet spot and everyone who has tried Valves demos has found the content fairly compelling. It is my own opinion that you will be able to use one of the first gen HMD's for dog fighting, but it won't be an ideal use of the hardware. Dogfighting aside are there other opportunities for presenting content inside flightsims that doesn't require the resolution that dogfighting does. Think roomsize.

As far as I knew the HUDS were done with LUA. Is this not how it is done? *ok nope it is all in the dll*

Post the Lua.

I think there is a hacky way to do this. Search the forums for a way to embed a recording that plays back as an intro to the miz. It is a longshot ... I'd wait and see what DCS 2.0 has in store.

The videos are interesting. Making DCS World props does not look hard to do. It is also interesting to see that a bit of attention to detail can make some of the props look really nice - one of the towers with a baked self-illumination texture looked pretty cool. There might turn out to be a few people who really want highly accurate props. If DCS World 2.0 had Steam Workshop support it would be pretty effortless to browse and install them compared to how it is has to be done now.

This is not a direct comparison that can be made. DCS World is more ambitious in many areas than other sims and you must accept that visual fidelity tricks that would work on a pure flight sim will not work and the types of rendering done in other engines will have problems scaling. I personally feel that when it comes to DCS, simulation fidelity should trump visual fidelity every time and I am a lot less interested in Edge than I am in DCS World 2. It might be more sensible to see Edge as an upgrade to improve sim performance which frees up cpu cycles for new DCS World 2 features. If it looks pretty that is just a nice extra. Just my opinion.

I have seen this phrase which is a Snowclone used a LOT here on forums. The only problem with invoking that old chestnut is that is in many cases it is a False Dilemma . Opportunity cost comes into this and sometimes the cost is far cheaper during development than after development. A label modification (overlay graphics) that uses LOS and has a distance bias has all the appearance of being low hanging fruit compared to a fully blown geometrical or shader based solution. It would be a compromise; not one I would completely happy with, but that is what makes it a compromise. I would NOT offhandly discount the practicality of a label based option. Just my opinion.

I have done more reading and used the radio and radio navigation in several aircraft now and it is a very interesting aspect of DCS. I find radio navigation fairly simple but I suppose I was wondering all along what the Korean wartime situation involved in terms of beacons. How many fields were there and how many beacons and what did GCA involve.

Technically DSR is a combination of Super-sampling and Multi-sampling. It probably lets you get a look that is unachievable using one method alone. For someone without 4K it probably is the next best thing (if you have some GPU available due to DCS being mostly single-thread CPU bound). Most times I still would rather have 4K however I do think that screen size is more important and I might actually prefer a 42" 1080P screen with DSR than a 28" 4K screen. Just my opinion. I'm running a 30" 2.5K screen and I do think it would be much better to have a larger screen. It would be great for images on the screen to be 1:1 arc degrees what they would be IRL OR even larger (zooming without having to zoom) so it is easier on the eyes.

Of course I come to join the medium/heavy debate. The Bristol Beaufighter and the DeHavilland Mosquito (which are great aircraft) do not belong in this list. They are heavy fighter-bombers (only 2 crew) and the others are dedicated medium bombers or really close to being heavy-type bombers with two engines. If someone wants to create a thread for heavy fighter-bombers. I'll vote in that one.