Worrazen

Hello I'm not sure yet about this plane to know whether something's a bug, I'm very fresh started with Mig-21bis after years of planning to do so, but here I am finally. I was following the training mission for missiles, and I selected pylon 3 as instructed, but it seemed to fire from pylon 1 and then missile did not hit the target, I fired again without changing pylon selector knob, and it fired from pylon 4, it was the SAHR mode missiles. The missiles worked fine and the second one hit and destroyed the practice target. If from left is pylon 1 to 4 on the right, right? Tnx

I was thinking way back when I was noticing this, of making sub-modules, like optional livery packs to download, so they're not downloaded automatically when installing a fresh free version of DCS. This is something the main core DCS has to first support. If you don't have a livery that's used in a mission or multiplayer the system would need to use some other replacement one and warn you about it, for example. I did move eventually to a 250GB SSD just for DCS as I took the sim more seriously and reserved more funds so I kinda didn't put this issue up anymore that much, but I can see this being a problem in the future with a lot more space taken by graphics and all the modding and stuff, we'll just have to be used to 1 TB for DCS :)

Fresh player as of January 2020 (but I had it for years) I can't disconnect the chute - it stays connected >> training mission LANDING. EDIT: Seems like it did disconnect either after I drove to grass or after I pulled the flaps up, I'll test later again.

OP: You would need to get more detailed with your steps going forward because now it's more complicated as I can't figure out any clue anymore. If you RMAd like almost everything, ... Did you build/assemble the computer or they did? Or who did? Does this happen with any other game? When you DXDIAG.exe there's a button Save All Information, and there you go, but zipp the file for transfer it makes it much smaller, also there's some private info in there you may want to remove like GUIDs/HWIDs/Usernames/Real names etc, not for us, but for the internetz. You can't replace PSU cables just like that, if they're modular they're proprietary, and unlikely the power cable is the problem, it would haven't even boot if that were the case.

You know, let some thing be a surprise ... I can't believe some people are so impatient when it's been told it's just around the corner

It's more important that it will happen, than if it'll happen, so I'm all cool if it's a long wait, as a big A-10C fan I now finally come to start getting to know this one better, and I bought it so long ago, I mean there's even a real deal custom-build simulator running DCS Mig-21 in a museum in my country which I goota check out already, but I don't want to look like a noob there so I gotta practice here haha! VR support isn't really that stable with much of the DCS yet, so no rush anyway.

And one other thing here, that may not be part of tree system, there's a shadow LOD level around the player that affects tree shadows, but it's placed so that it's quite obvious and sometimes you have this line and keeps following you if you fly in a certian way, it makes the shadows softer and more realistic but less dark and in some cases so much that they almost seem to disappear with some objects, like pylons. I'm not sure yet if the disance of this changes when changing Tree Visibility, I think not. Can be skipped to 1:10 The thing is, it changes the shape quite a bit and it's a big big change in one sweep so this could be improved but it's I guess a minor thing. It's very precise, if I were to change the zoom level with mouse wheel it would go way back, so it took a few tries to get it right, to fly just about the right angle and zoom level.

Searchlights, parachutes and flak cannons, almost there, almost over the hill, my good old company of heroes!!!! :smoke:

Okay here's what I did with an exaggerated low ForrestDistanceFactor setting, which makes it more obvious what's going on, this actually led me to uncover a number of things I'll explain later. From what I see, the LOD levels aren't linear, with the movement of the slider, but they're also not linear at either setting high or low, the high quality 3D trees only appear very close versus most of the forrest.

Oh allright, good point, well, now we can do that when we know how it works and what's going on. There's several "annomalies" yes, I'd like to point them out even if we generally know, we need to point them out one by one to make sure it's all known otherwise the fix may not be complete. For example, there's this Shadow LOD change line going down too close that's very obvious and unpleasing, it affects tree shadows but it may not be part of the Tree system ... more later.

I was overdramatizing, but it lowers the FPS by 10, which is enough to make it lag very noticable and much less playable. Sure, if they will re-chech this thread later fine, anyhow but I'm motivated to continue to dig into this anyway, might uncover something new, I'm already learned infact something new right now, we also need to be on the same page as the devs so we can even understand the fix once it comes, and vice versa. Okay so here's the videos, I'll update this as I go. Youtube degrades the quality significantly, the original quality was a 1080p downscale from 1440p and it looked great until youtube destroyed it practically. But the features we'll talk about should still be visible okay. Keep an eye out for the SHADE/SHADOW bands as well, theres 3 bands when more details are added as you close in, they're assymetric, there's also a lighting band which makes trees lit up and shine a bit, but in the lower ends of the Trees Visibility setting these distances are so truncated they're basically 100 meters apart or so, so you can see all of them in one sceen if you have it located and angled optimally, the thing is, that the higher level shading LODs seem to remove the effect of the lower level and while that's not a problem necessairly, but in this case you ADD more as you go higer level, this is most noticable in the end of the 4 band thingy where the shadows that were just added are completely removed prior to the highest level trees becoming visible, that's quite a weird one. It happens in cockpit too, it really isn't view mode specific to my research, and the LOD is always camera oriented, so if you zoom in (FOV in case of cockpit view) the LODs will adjust as if you have moved your camera that far further.

What is your Trees Visibility, that's the most important number we need? You are using 80% Trees Visibility in the GUI, so you're not at 100% or 30% which is what I'm testing, I'm using 30% as I don't have enough performance for 100%, this is how I noticed this issue from the very beginning of SpeedTrees. For these tests you should either use 30% or 100% to compare between two to see what I'm talking about, no need to test any number in between, the setting just extends the distances between LODs like an accordion as well as the maxium tree coverage distance as well. If you guys all use different settings then you will all be seeing different results and thinking it's some other bug and only some people have it, everyone has it, but the higher Trees Visibilty you go the less obvious it is. I found another weird thing, the Trees Visibility in GUI is linked to "forestDistanceFactor" and not "treesVisibility" in the configuration file. ["treesVisibility"] = 6000, is a value that never changes, when I was testing months before I had no idea, I was changing this setting and it didn't do much, now I know why, but I distinctly remember it working (it would change when reloading DCS) but I forgot to be sure, I wanted it go lower to disable trees but it wouldn't work. Your Trees Visiblity is 80% because you have ["forestDistanceFactor"] = 0.8, But as I previously explained, the tree LOD system is totally wrong, it has to be completely redone, reporting annomalies of how trees look from 50% or 60% or 80% forestDistanceFactor is of no help, the comparison between 30 and 100% is enough to understand this. I wouldn't waste time with the percentages in-between, because this will be automatically fixed once the root cause of the problem is fixed. DCS options.lua Worrazen 30Trees.zip

Well hang on guys, that's not entirely it just yet, the LOD are a loooot more finesse, and complicated, there's probably like a couple of hundred LOD levels in those trees the way they can change with distance away from camera, and it's not only in free camera infact the problem starts Adjusting the FAR LOD alone isn't going to fix this because the whole thing looks like it's using FAR LOD when you have the lowest (30%, distance?) tree draw distance set. It's not really the FAR LOD, it's just because the high quality trees only appear in the first 10-15% of the distance, everything more than 20% it starts to look like "2D Sprites" (not really a sprite in technical terms), the actual 3D models get replaced gradually by multiple 2D textures to make the trees, those 2D trees are made of several 2D textures, 5 or more, the two are vertically placed to make up an X sign and one is placed horizontally to be viewed from the sky, these 2D Textures also follow the camera, their orientation is clamped to the player's camera wherever it is, not the unit the player is using. When you have tree draw distance set to the max (Trees Visibility), the whole thing unravels like a harmonic so the bad looking "2D Sprite" trees only start appearing much further away and blend with the environment which makes the effect very much less noticable, so the LODs were never right IMO, it just wasn't that noticable in the 100% Trees Radius setting. The next chapter is a completely other thing, shadowing, which is a different layer of LODs, the highest LOD level shadowing in the lowest chosen tree draw distance (30% Trees Visibility) is also in effect very very close, the shadowing has much less major LOD levels as there's a few distinct changes in the lighting of the scene I noticed, like 3 or 4 in total, when you zoom out and suddenly the forrest is a lot more lighter, that's the LOD transition, or when you can see how there's a line moving across the screen in the forrest in front of the aircraft, it's much more coarse, or well the distances between the LODs are truncated with the 30% setting, like a harmonic, so this applies, coarsness isn't that of a problem, it doesn't make it look realistic but that's fine, the problem is that there's a band that's near the player where the shadowing disappears. However that's not all, there's a LOD level in the shadow layer, that actually erases the just-introduced higher LOD levels of tree shadows, so that's another separate bug. Distance between each LOD level has to be set-fixed "read-only" and DECOUPLED away from the Tree Radius setting! For example: Tree LOD1 0....100 meters Tree LOD2 100....300 meters Tree LOD2 300....500 meters These baseline numbers have to be determined by development what they objectively think looks fine in terms of realistic visibility, while using a development-only extreme draw distance viewing to infinity, so then you introduce LODs in, and those LODs should become fixed to that what our human eye percieves when looking at forrest to infinity (well modifiable in LUA, but unchangable in terms of graphics settings for general use), and then a sensible maximum tree draw distance is determined but distances between LODs are again kept the same and completely separate from the tree draw distance (Trees Visibility), only then there should be a setting to lower away from the optimal for performance considerations. Same for lighting, same for tree features and their size, but the 2D Sprite effect should simply be used after 50% of the draw distance, now it's used much quicker, I know it's performance, but it has to look right first. You can see in the videos the trees wiggling so much on the lowest distance setting right now, because the LODs are so truncated together they change a lot by just a bit of movement (distance change) of the player's camera. I'm doing videos and screenshots, but I won't complicate this post further, this was the overview while I was recording, but I'll go more in detail with the videos step by step in the next post.

The LODs were probably designed with 100% radius, or draw distance , which is a predetermined number. I'll try to explain what's happening with the example speculation below: Let's assume for example max 100%$ tree draw distance is 1000meters, and there's 5 LOD levels, each 200 meters long. Symmetric LOD 11111111112222222222333333333344444444445555555555 Asymmetric LOD 11111112222222333333333333333333333344444445555555 I didn't took the time to figure out that which type it is, as it could be quite complex if multiple levels are different. At the lowest setting the highest LOD level only works very very close, so you need to be like in your nose to see it, like 20 meters or less, but the "2D Sprite" effect seems encompass quite a bit of range of LODs, from 30% to 80% feels like, (no talking draw distance here), 100% being the farthest out and the lowest quality LOD, but the fathest end of the LOD kinda looks fine as they're just blobs, not distracting at all, again the end of it is also truncated/shortened just like the higest quality LODs, I'm not sure if this is intended or simply looks like this but whatever it is, it's wrong in practice and realism IMO. So you get like this, as it looks at first, at 30% draw radius. 1122333333444555 And I approx written it shorter like this to simultate the lower draw distance versus the above control case example. The LODs are dynamic to the draw radius amount selected, which I think is not the proper way, even if it did make sense kinda, and I could understand. So the distances between LODs change depending on the tree draw distance amount, this seems to make sense in math, but doesn't work in practice, you never get a draw distance option in real life in the first place, and if you stand 2 miles away from the forrest, that forrest will never change it's LOD at that distance separation. The LODs and their distances should be fixed according to a realistic profile determined in development and set fixed, never to be changed in the GUI, or at least not to be changed by the tree draw radius option, unfortunately that means lower quality trees will get cut first and so on, the more you'll lower the tree draw distance the less LODs you will see, and you'll see a lot of high quality LOD levels closest to you, with unfortunately an abrupt ending, is not realistic yes, but that's the cost of using the tree draw radius option, and I think it should be taken as a better method because the LODs would be kept realistic how you would see them in real life, leaving only the tree draw distance setting not realistic, so it's only one instead of two things being unrealistic. 100% 11111111112222222222333333333344444444445555555555 30% 1111111111222

I've been reporting this for some time, the LODs are not great when the lowest radius is chosen, there is a weird 2D sprite effect as well when the lowest radius is chosen and the LOD displayed is low. Yeah there's no location, it's trees in common.

I like both, but they're full of sugar :(

If normandy expands to the east then the channel map should expand to the south as far as france is concernet, problem solved :)

Wow what an update, watching like a freaked out hawk, then I choked on coffee right here Even my little personal favourite things got the mention YAAAY! :thumbup:

Fullscreen shouldn't have anytihng to do with being able to minimize or not, and whether it's always-on-top or not. There's different types of fullscren/windowed and when it comes to newer APIs it was kind of a mix between Nvidia and AMD not everyone supporting everything. I don't normally use anything else except exclusive fullscreen 1440p not just in DCS, unless I would need to do some diagnostics and benchmarking or troubleshooting then I used windowed 1080p for viewing other utilities along the way. Alt+Enter has been the switch historically to switch in-out of exclusive fullscreen to windowed fullscreen but in DCS it makes no visible difference, you can't really know which way it is since the screen blinks and the window flashes, but it looks exactly the same, is it exclusive or not, I haven't found the difference. I hope this whole thing will be overhauled with the Vulkan API update, and we should have clear indications which mode is it running, the sys info should be updated as well to add more info and perhaps even more diagnostic info like in other modern games overlays.

It's not working fine, DCS is always glued on top whatever you do, it's not really minimized, just hidden behind, it's pretty annoying if you ask me honestly. I've tried all kinds of hotkeys and nothing works, ofcourse Lwin key being used and I think I remember seeing an option wether or not to disable it's true function but I forgot, but since the game is made to use LWIN then it's not proper to look for workaround, it should work with some other alternative method out of the box.

Battle damage assessment has a major drawback in the fact that it doesn't report unit kill at 100%, it only goes up to 99% which is why most of the time you cannot know whether or not you killed a unit it will simply say "unit damage 12%, unit damage 35%, unit damage 67%" and if the next damage point is equal or over 100% it will not report it and it only reports unit destruction, which is a later self explosion or if more phantom damage is received (which doesn't get reported as it's killed already) that can take quite some time, only then the unit will be reported as destroyed, but which doesn't actually matter since the unit is practically out of action when the kill happened earlier, if the wreck caught on fire and exploded that's just a detail that shouldn't matter in practice, but it creates confusion as the delay messes up with other units you are shooting, you don't really know which one or how many you got unless you spend all the time paying attention to the battle damage asssesment texts. The target labels are also some internal strings, not the ME name of the unit group, which is fine but sometimes this would be helpful as an option to have it "unit #2 of GROUP_NAME", also the internal strings aren't even the full proper names of the unit GUI/real names, but some shortened versions and in some cases this is bugged and some completely different label is used than the target, I've seen it in other people's videos too, I think when shooting with some missiles with F-18C but I can't remember now.

Well if it's a mix like than then the idea of keeping old one doesn't make sense indeed, I made a post in newsletter discussion about how the old stuff should be preserved. I guess it makes sense to replace the existing hog with the new one then. Or, purposelly create an older suite version as a separate selection.

https://tass.com/defense/1011683 Great to see this aircraft being found some new utility and not being a forgotten type, just great, I like it's shape and it kinda feels like a little brother to Tu-160.

Well no for me, I'm still not sure, the word replace does not mean to add in addition does it. I hoped there be a selection for "A-10C Suite 2 and A-10C Suite 4" for example. (just made up labels for the purpose of the point) Am I wrong or right guys?! I was talking about this months ago, if perhaps it can be done so that the old suite is preserved incase someone just wants to play an older version of A-10C like now, I'd allow myself to assume not all real world pilots have experienced the "newest" A-10C in DCS equivalent in real life when they were on duty. What about the retired pilots that will never get a chance to get back to the real life modern A-10C and even the future post 2020 suite upgrade that may come in the extended service time, they only know the old one or similar to that one, so perhaps one day they might try to recreate their authentic fresh pilot back in the old days experience exactly, and you just can't do that with a completely different cockpit buttons, layouts, screens, and hardware. You know if it wasn't about preserving history then why bother with WW2, why bother with B-52 if it's successor is B-2 and should just replace it, and why bother with F-117 if it's succesor is F/A-22 (I think) just replace then. Now if this has some technical and practical hurdles that outweight this then fine, perhaps it's difficult to maintain two versions, either way I think it deserves a try and a second negotiation, if indeed it's a replacement and not double versions forever. But ... I'll go back and read the rest of the pages, thing is, it's late so I just wanted to put comment this out right now.

Yeah, the internal namings, terms, file folder structure should be refreshed, resorted and standardized, cleaned up, since there's still stuff tied to legacy Caucasus, and stuff like this confuses the mod community, but I guess it's low priority obviously.