Tvol

As I explained in my post, HDR effects in games do nothing to increase the dynamic range or contrast of any frames. You're already maxed-out on that without it. What it does is dynamically adjust the contrast and luminance of the entire frame to attempt to fit as much of the important bits (or rather, the parts that the engine thinks are the important bits) in the dynamic range of the monitor. If you get a bright explosion, the entire scene will get reduced in luminance so details of the explosion aren't lost. Again, when it comes to getting the most out of your display, games already do that. You don't need HDR. HDR is just digital fakery that only works reasonably well half the time. Most of the time it'll screw you out of details you want to see, mainly because it doesn't work like your eyes do (your eyes will adjust to see maximum detail of whatever you're focusing on without damage from bright light sources; HDR effects have no idea what you're focusing on, they just guess).

Or your eyesight. Someone with tritanopia might have trouble distinguishing between the HUD's default green and blues, though that's pretty rare (1% of the male population). Someone with dueteranomaly (most common, 6% of males) has less sensitivity to the green spectrum than normal. Tritanomaly would also do it (blue sensitivity shifted toward green), but that's exceedingly rare (0.01% of the population). Turn off HDR, see if that works. It's extremely unlikely that this is the case in real-world applications, principally because the contrast ratio of even the best monitors for the task (and I guarantee you aren't playing with one, because those monitors are usually limited to refresh rates of 30Hz or less) absolutely pale in comparison to what the eye can perceive. It's easy to understand roughly using photography terminology. In photography, the principal measure used for differences in luminosity are stops. One stop = twice as much light. Most IPS displays are limited to a contrast ratio of about 8 stops. The human eye can perceive 16-20 stops (I may be overestimating that; memory's a bit sketchy), easily. (Incidentally HDR photographs, at least the data used to make them, has even more data than that, landing at around 32 stops of contrast on average. So...yeah...we are way, way better at taking images of things than we are at reproducing them. Odd.) In real life, I suspect pilots just ramp-up the brightness of the HUD so they can see it over the surrounding environment. Those things use fairly powerful light sources; the latest generations even use lasers. They were almost certainly all purpose-built to overpower daylight reflections from clouds. Even the HUDs in cars are able to be seen by the driver easily in daylight. So the main issue here is the limitations of the displays we're using. HDR in games isn't true high dynamic range by any stretch of the imagination. What the game engine is doing is dynamically adjusting the total luminance of the entire scene up or down to fit most of it within the display's ability to, erm, display. Incidentally, this can make HDR a really, really undesirable feature in competitive gaming where loss of shadow detail can be extremely detrimental. It's also why many games still give-up on HDR wholesale and stick to gamma adjustments made by the player in settings (which also has the handy effect of compensating for the player's own ability to distinguish between luminance, which can vary; and no, gamma is not the same as brightness). Can the issue be fixed if it's indeed caused by HDR? Maybe. Probably not the way you might be hoping for. One quick fix that comes to mind is to darken the environment so that the HUD is always the brightest thing on it's part of the frame, even when extremely bright objects are filling most of the frame (that's more-or-less HDR in a nutshell: whatever takes up the most of the screen gets priority, with some tweaks to make it less garish and the effect more subtle). The problem there would be that whenever you pointed your nose at a patch of cloud in daylight, the environment would noticeably change, an effect which can be extremely jarring. It might even look kinda, off, because it is. It's not how our eyes work. Without having any real tangible information about your settings though, let alone the display you're using, all I can offer is the above guess work based on the assumption that you're using HDR and that's the root cause. I'd lean toward the use of HDR since the problem is clear from the screen shot. (That or your eyes aren't normal and that's why you can't see the green on blue, but that'd be pretty improbable.) And that I'm playing with an iMac 27" IPS display without HDR and have had no issues (and I have normal colour vision).

If I recall correctly, it should be: C:\Users%USERNAME%AppData\Local\DCS

I never said space was "at a premium". Nor did I even suggest that the issue here was lack of space. FYI there are 50GB of free space on my Win7 partition. The issue is that DCS will write a really big-ass "temporary" file (but really, they're rather permanent), and NTFS is still just as stupid when it comes to writing files as it was when it was first invented, sticking that one large file into many non-contiguous sectors because it dumbly starts at the beginning of the drive and tries to write to every free one along the way. The result is the temp files get really fragmented as soon as they're written (sometimes in excess of thousands of fragments).

I dunno if anyone else has noticed, but when playing in multiplayer, DCS creates some truly massive "temporary" files. These files don't get cleaned-up when quitting (or if they do, very rarely), and being so massive, they tend to get horribly fragmented. Now, I use OS X for just about everything other than gaming, which neatly avoids file fragmentation almost entirely by simply not dumbly writing any file in the first free space it finds (HFS+ is just ridiculously superior to NTFS in so many ways, and this is one). So, I'm not used to seeing fragmentation so bad, so quickly. I use Smart Defrag to fix the problem after DCS creates these "temporary" files, but I was wondering if there is anything I can do that'd be preventative? (And don't say "buy an SSD"; I don't have money for that.)

Good job assuming and reading way too much into what I actually said. http://www.facepalm.de/images/facepalm.jpg I mean, seriously, you're trying to pass-off what you said as if it were somehow moderate. No, you said, very clearly: "I hope they add so many trees our PCs explode" That certainly implies ultra-high levels of fidelity. What are you asking for? Are you asking for updates to the graphics engine such that it performs better and will still be scalable and accessible to most if not all people still playing, or are you asking for (as your words definitely imply) the game to be updated to a point where "people's PCs explode"; a point at which, it certainly sounds like you're saying that the equivalent of a pair of Titan Blacks wouldn't even cope. If that's what you're asking for, then you're being stupid. The game, at peak hours, has maybe a few dozen people online over all the servers. Any improvements, as I said, need to be scalable. Losing even a handful of dedicated players because of a jump in minimum requirements would be quite noticeable. No amount of being snarky and self-important, or telling people "get a better computer" is going to change that. Guess what, not everyone is rolling in money. If a developer doesn't design for that, as you clearly are suggesting now that they shouldn't, then they will fail.

There's no better sure-fire way to kill your community than to update the game's requirements so that only the people with the best hardware can run it. If that's what they're doing, they're doing it wrong. And collision isn't a graphics thing. O.o Collision calculations are more-or-less always done on the CPU.

The A-10C is $50 USD, the F-15C is $10 USD. I'd say your expectations are flawed.

That supports what I said. O.o

The two are not mutually exclusive, and it's somewhat funny that you're suggesting that is so. DCS absolutely has elements that borrow from games, like abstractions in the flight models, to abstractions of systems used in planes like the F-15C in-game, and other things like the Game Avionics Mode. Just like any other game, it has its own agreed-upon rules, and even has a competitive aspect in multiplayer. Hell, if DCS is just a simulator and no one, including me, plays it for the purpose of entertainment, I'll eat my hat. The Oxford English Dictionary certainly has my back on this one. Video game. Game (see #2). But that's certainly one heck of a tangent. Do tell, was your post meant to suppose that the highest-quality graphics possible are necessary for a simulator game like DCS? If so, would it be acceptable to devote time instead to the graphical detail of minutiae like trees instead of development of the more gamey parts like multiplayer, the flight model, or instrument behaviour?

O.o General rule of game design: People want games, not graphics.

F-15C checklists and references here: http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/722011/

No, you aren't. The HUD starts counting from 0.

You can input the ILS frequency directly on the higher fidelity aircraft, but not on the F-15C.

Determine which airport you want to land at, contact ATC. Once you're cleared for a runway, cycle through ILSN targets until the course on the HSI matches the runway, and then use the F10 map and ruler to make sure that the distance to it reported by the HUD is close to what it is on the map.

For general checklists there is this: http://www.virtual-jabog32.de/index.php?section=downloads&subcat=37&file=474&lang=en I don't really like them because they're big and a tad confusing, but more importantly they're too general, and miss what I think are important steps for certain planes (like turning on datalinks for the Su-27/33). This generality also means that they do not flow properly across the cockpit. That said, they do include the shortcuts, for whatever that's worth. If you wait a little bit (maybe another few days or so), I'll be putting-up my own checklists (for the F-15C first) that look more like what you'd actually see (at least in a civilian aircraft), with some specific additions for quick reference, and most importantly, proper order of actions (left-to-right, top-to-bottom) and separation into small groups for any lengthy ones so you can complete the group, instead of needing to restart the entire thing if interrupted, both of which are in accordance with NTSB recommendations for checklists.

War Thunder is an example of a game that does this right (or at least reasonably well). When you start a match, you can see the enemy's aircraft waaaaaaay out in the distance, climbing to the sky just as you are. DCS...not so much. The point is to correct the failings of the displays that we're stuck using.

Short story: I'm away from home and can't play DCS, so I decided to take some time to make the checklists and references that I wanted for FC3. (I might get around to making purty-fied checklists for the other planes at some point but for now limiting myself to FC3 makes things more manageable.) Anyway, while I was writing it all out, I realized that I'm still pretty confused when it comes to AWACS calls. Here's what I have written in the references for the F-15C, regarding AWACS (the formatting is kinda messed-up on the forums but this should be close-ish): FORMAT: Your Callsign AWACS Callsign “BRAA”: bearing of bandit or contact from you range of bandit or contact from you in nautical miles [*]——OR—— [*]“bulls” / “bullseye”: bearing of bandit or contact from bullseye range of bandit or contact from bullseye in nautical miles [*]altitude of bandit or contact in feet [*]aspect: hot (head-on), flanking (side-on), cold (tail-on) EXAMPLE: Uzi 1-1, Magic, contact bulls 050 for 40, at 25,000, hot This announces a contact at 50 degrees from bullseye, 40nm away, at 25,000 feet, heading toward you. EXAMPLE: Uzi 1-1, Magic, BRAA, 150 for 35, at 20,000, cold This announces a contact at 150 degrees from you, 35nm away, at 20,000 feet, heading away from you. “Pop-up group”: Means that the contact(s) has/have just appeared on radar; they are new. ------------------- Is it right? Close to right? Did I horribly screw-up somewhere or miss something? Also, I'm assuming at this point that for Russian planes the calls are similar, but callsigns are different (e.g. "301"), and all measurements are in metric. Are there any other differences?

Regarding engine sounds, here's an example: In the background you can hear the engines constantly. When I fly the F-15C and have the canopy closed, I don't hear that engine noise. It's relegated to an extremely low-decibel noise that is barely noticeable. Again, realistically, the only indication I have in-game that the engines are even running is the engine instruments. I also can't hear any of those noises that are clearly audible when there's significant loading on the airframe. Also, oddly enough, not a sound problem, but Page Up and Page Down do nothing either, even though they're clearly mapped and are not being trapped by any other software.

*performs thread necromancy* So, what does one do when AWACS says neither "BRAA" nor "bulls"/"bullseye"? Should you infer that they are giving you bearing and range from bullseye, or should you infer that they are giving you bearing and range from you, assuming that you were contacted directly by your callsign.

If there's a way to turn-down particle effects, you could reduce those and probably recover some (or a lot) of frames.

The F-15C module even comes with a 1v1 Guns fight in there. Somewhere under "Single Missions" or "Training" or somesuch. Using guns is pretty easy though. Stick the pipper on the target and pull the trigger. Preferably fill the pipper with their plane before doing so. It only gets really dicey when you get thrown-back to WWII-era targetting because they put some rounds through your computers.

Then...make some? It's not too hard to throw a mission together that you can use for training. Once you grasp the basics of the mission editor, it's very easy to plop-down some aircraft for you to use, and some aircraft for you to shoot. That said, that is absolutely no substitute for multiplayer. Humans beat the AI in DCS, hands-down. I'd suggest using simple missions for basic training like formation flying and familiarization with the aircraft you're flying. Beyond that, it's not really useful.

Download the manual here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/249320/ That's on page 69 (says pg 61 on the bottom but a PDF viewer will say 69 as the true page number).

D: So in other words: Fly faster, not higher. :(