Worrazen

^^Oh lovely!

Maybe because you need to use Display Capture and not Game/Window capture, and play with the detection and video settings. And that's quite an old thread there ...

Oh absolutely I meant it as an option.

I think the new indeterminate progress bar effect on the taskbar icon is a new thing with 2.7 and it's cool, it indicates it's indeed loading/preparing or waiting for login confirmation, tho if a crash or hang happens hopefully the code is written in such a way it would stop the progress effect to relay that, otherwise it loses it's usefulness. Technically I'm not sure what exactly is this kind of a progress bar, it doesn't actually look like an standard indeterminate one, perhaps it's a different style in Win10 for the same thing.

Oh Windows and it's default "hide extensions for known file types" settings. Never stops to amaze.

Oh yeah thanks for your extra confirmation, I got a bit to occupied with some other stuff I couldn't provide more visual evidence at the time.

Hello Creating environmental scenery like cow pasture would need to create various headings the way cows are oriented/rotated on the Z axis to make things feel more natural, it is very time consuming doing this manually for each cow. This applies for all kinds of cargo and other stuff laying around. Each time the same type of unit is placed or copy-pasted it would modify the heading, randomly picking a different heading for the next unit to use. With added minimum threshold into the randomizer logic (10 deg for example) so the next random heading isn't too close, eg. 1-2 degree left or right.

I was pretty surprised about the decoupling of the tree distance and details factor, though the distance still does affect LOD in a lesser way and I think I understandy why because they don't want most users to end up creating weird looking forrests by not adjusting this properly or lowering it way too low that it looks too weird, which would get into videos and new people would think DCS looks like that, so I understand. Thing is, I had more to report about trees but didn't make it until hiatus for a years so I'll do it in the coming weeks.

We'll see how MAC affects DCS, I had several theories jumping around, but then because of the lack of high-fidelity eastern airplanes FC3 just can't be removed like that, and it could be morphed into a MAC-planes-package-inside-DCS module keeping DCS likenesses and stuff, without any MAC specific things which will be a standalone game as it was revealed (AFAIK), with it's own GUI and the rest. Infact now I came to a very interesting idea, Flaming Cliffs moniker could be kept, in order to differentiate the addon module from a standalone product, Flaming Cliffs 4 could well infact simply be the name for "MAC-planes-inside-DCS". There's certainly reasons to keep and not keep FC moniker, MAC planes may be quite different and may not reflect the changes if you keep the name and simply add a number to it, maybe it was rewritten all from scratch, but it just depends what factors are more important to the devs, is it legacy of the brand, or they want to move on to another brand for other than technical reasons. Then whether it's even necessary for Flaming Cliffs to mean anything specific, does it denote an idea of the level of fidelity, in this case mid-tier, ... well it doesn't, it only does so historically or how would I properly say it, the usage of the brand does it not the brand name/description it self. Moreover MAC planes may be more advanced than perhaps what Flaming Cliffs 4 was meant to be but I guess that may not be relevant anymore. It is good however to keep branding consistent, but if thigns go into another methodology of grouping products into categories then it should be avoided if that makes sense, currently there really are no official categories in any of the high-fidelity planes, well, there are simulation categories in terms of SFM AFM PFM ..etc but on the e-shop it's all sorted according to other factors and not the fidelity level.

Hi Power Line Facility and a Tree is blocking a paved road in Sazano, east of Kutaisi, on Cacuasus.

Sorry for a bit of a rush to conclusion there, it kinda didn't made any sense if I could see all of those cities and structures from a higher vantage point and certainly from air flying over all of that doesn't make any sort of freezing Unless you let artillery pound one place for hours and hours at an end creating thousands of impact craters High zoom (FOV?) levels would bring the impact craters into rendering, from very far distances away where they're not seen at all, hidden behind other objects or even terrain, so the craters don't need to be actually seen like shown in the picture above, same way they're bringing in distant structures objects, but thousands of these impact craters and the associated effects have a bigger impact than all of the structures around. Basically some missions have artillery programed or bugged to pund a specific place all the time, or that's a bug because they never shoot at my units.

The binocular icon keeps persisting showing and earlier controlled unit using it while it is not being controlled anymore, however I'm not sure if units that were controlled should remain the user's configuration until commanded otherwise, so I guess it may be fine if the unit would continue to actually use it while not commanded like for example keeping the IR laser on a target, but the problem is, when the unit is issued an order to move the icon keep displaying that last location when it was controlled by the player using the binoculars, furthermore it's not possible to keep the IR Marker going once control is lost, perhaps this could make sense when CA gets updated. The icon will disappear once you use another unit with bincoulars. Secondly, a bit more importantly, exiting mission while in binoculars and reloading a totally different mission, but using the same terrain, keeps the binoculars icon in that position while there is no any unit associated with it there. The icon will however disappear once you use binoculars with another unit, and the cycle repeats, unless you exit binoculars before doing anything else.

Hmm, I can't recreate it in a new fresh mission right now ... I also changed my graphics settings for View Range from High to Extreme to give it even more chance of showing this but weirldy enoguh now I can't do it in the same exact location, First is the fact that the CA mission was an old one made with an very old ME. Second is some other factor I'm not taking into account, that mission lasted for 3 hours real time and probably more than half a day in-game as I used a hefty amount of fast-speed for some other tests I was doing. Third, less likely, some kind of unique units on the battlefield (or in view) with some kind of unique positions to them, perhaps.

Hello I was trying to play a relaxed set of CA missions, but it didn't go so well. I think this issue happened to me a year ago, last time I was trying to play CA. I just had to forcefully shut DCS down because the freezing was getting to long. In certain conditions of very high amounts of objects being viewed at high zoom levels in various ground vehicles, DCS will grind to a halt due to either the sheer amount of rendering or also the draw call amounts bogging things down for up to 30-60 seconds depending on the situation. A fraction of those objects are actually visible, this is because DCS does not support occlusion culling, it's rendering everything in that line of sight. If a tree line is blocking the city, it doesn't matter, if a big building is blocking the view of 1000 units behind it, it won't matter, it's going to render and keep rendering the everything in that field of view. Hopefully this feature is supported along with Vulkan API otherwise Vulkan API's benefits may be muffled exactly where it should shine and the results would be mixed, FPS minimums may persist in certain cases like this. Multi-threading really needs to give inputs all the priority and their own thread, and I think there is a thread-priority and an input thread too already, but it doesn't work in this, already but that's I guess not enough, it needs to be able to interrupt the main thread in any possible condition. The mission was the official CA mission "Advance on Kutaisi" and I think looking in the direction of Kutaisi triggers this huge lag and in worst cases long freezes lasting up to 5-10 minutes, or more. This looks like game breaking scenario to me, althought how much are my graphics settings to blame I'm not too sure about because low performance is one thing, but no performance at all is another, I don't even have Visibility Range maxed out, it's on High setting which is the middle choice. I guess I'll have to lower it and see or just avoid such missions with dense populated areas. The reasons why the zoomed views are necessary is because it's the only way to shoot accurately, and visually is the only way to do that. You cannot accurately shoot without being in the most zoomed in view. So this isn't something I would put myself into intentionally, because you normally don't see thousands of objects in front of you, only a few that you're driving throgh, so you inadvertently get into a freezy or laggy position that sometimes is hard to abort once it freezes over. The turret or driver view is the default view, so by chance, when you can take control of a vehicle you may coincidentially fall into a laggy scenario as well. I don't think I would want to wait until Vulkan API, Occlussion Culling and multi-threading to get this sorted ... IMO, a workaround may be justified in this case, there should be some kind of a way to interrupt the engine trying to render so much stuff, perhaps there could be some kind of a special draw-call or FPS detector that would, if it detects draw calls exceeding XYZ number, switch your view into F10, F7 or isometric view immediately, and it would work in a way that has a priority over rendering if possible, it may still lag but it would freeze only for a couple of seconds I suppose. This kind of workaround may be useful in other cases with a ton of units, objects, effects, particularly in beta-testing. At least if this workaround is simple to make and doesn't take too much time. Infact, suspending the rendering thread in DCS also freezes the main thread as per normal so I had no luck with anything I tried on my end.

Clicking again on the drop down menus in ME will not hide them, this is true with all of them, Country, Type, Sub. Type, Skill, etc. Clicking in an empty area will hide them however, this requires a lot more mouse movement.

External model, seen from the external F2 view, the glass cockpit may flicker from being invisible to visible for some time during crashing over the terrain when the fuselage is rolling around, it will stop flickering when the fuselage stops moving.

I don't have time for details right now but I want to remind Win7 folks you can, if you put the effort in, do a really well configured Win10 that's going to function like Win7 ... although in future Win10 will completely get rid of the old control panel dialogs and WIN32 style settings, so it's a good idea to get cheap licenses now and install now so you can keep chugging along for a few more years until something else comes up. https://www.ntlite.com/

As much as I agree with you, I usually let the other part of community enjoy their candies as much as they want, but clouds aren't that of a little thing, I'd love to practice landings with the new cloud and weather system definitely, that's one of the first things I was doing back in 2014 when I started, I didn't do that good in 40 m/s wind haha!

If nothing else you may just found the cause of the bug that's causing this long time issue, but perhaps not the root cause though and/or just one of them. I'm not too familiar with this systems in general to know or have any idea why things turn out different, some factors are not being recorded that then affect the replay ... I'm not sure.

Well there could be Free DCS World Lite and the Full version unlocks for free when you buy at least 1 high-fidelity module. Compromise of sorts, because how much costlier or how much could modules be relied upon to bring substantial core upgrades for sort of "free", so yeah, I would understand, probably some people would be upset but something has to give. Oh and, if I win a lottery, i'll invest in DCS immediately, that promise still holds.

^^ Yeah, nevermind, I checked, and you can copy+paste directly on top so I guess it's fine, I kept remembering years back it would offset or I simply never tried it with direct intention, must have been mistaken there. A 3D Editor is obviously the holy grail, it would allow to display accurate 3D areas of influence, spheres and odd shapes, for fuel trucks and things that only affect ground units you would still rather show those radiuses in 2D, to convey it's not affecting air, for radars, launchers, you could have an accurate radius of maximum and minimum detection and engagement ranges for example, I just can't think of what's the proper name for this, think of it as a transparent and ofcourse non-colliding shape around the unit strictly for visualizing this which has no gameplay purpose and is hidden otherwise ofcourse. Unfortunately many dynamic factors can affect the actual ranges in-game so this would be the absolute maximum/minimum in theory, however if a more advanced type of this is developed to simulate how the ranges (shapes) would change under the in-game conditions that would prove a lot more useful to map makers who really want to place and create a specific scenario and this would be very helpful in tight spaces where there is a valley run and the map designer needs to be very precise where to place SAMs and AA's so they work the intended way, so that the mission difficulty could be more tightly controlled, hard but still doable where you have only a few meters to spare from the enemy unit detecting you and the tree line below for example, this pre-simulation would save time because you wouldn't need to do trial-and-error playing the mission so much.

I'm not sure what kind of stutter you're getting, certainly constant or frequent as in a block of 10-30 seconds with pauses, or 1 minute or larger is something different than what I was focusing on. My FPSs aren't that high anyway so I wasn't really chasing top experience on a personal level, what I was focused on was the huge frame drops that are occasional, sort of sporadic, where it's fine for 2-3 5-10 minutes and then suddenly 2-3 or 5-10 frames simply disappear and never get drawn and the engine continues later, it feels like a freeze but because it skips ahead, I think is the engine is sort of running in the background and only rendering takes a hit, otherwise it would appear to pause and continue. See if you get such stutters, I know for a fact it will do this sometimes when it has to load something from disk it didn't load during the mission loading screen, not the terrain textures, those are streamed in nice and don't affect rendering operation, but the assets such as models and units aren't streamed, they seems to stop the engine rendering if they need to be fetched from disk. For example, respawning your aircraft will trigger dump and reload of all cockpit assets, every time, yes even tho they're loaded before, it will discard/ignore and reload (or overwrite), or perhaps they get discarded on player crash/death which actually make sense to not keep caches of many units and fill too much RAM if you jump to multiple units in one mission. So I did not raise any complaint about that, tho I will go test one day if it really cleans up on crash, or perhaps it cleans up old unit data when you jump to new unit. Sometimes it's hard to be on the same page with the community because who knows what kind of stutter do they mean behind the same terms. I'll admit that I'm guilty of never actually researching some web resources on the definition of micro-stutter (tho I could be half excused as wikipedia's not all innocent it once appeared to be), I'll do that tomorrow, except from an old time ago when it was all the rage with multi-GPUs, since I never had a SLI/CFX setup I never, while the other reason most likely is I never suffered from constant stuttering other than some antivirus job or something in the background which I recitifed quickly. I guess being a power user with a big PC maintenance hobby helps a lot because there's just so many cases I wondered how even get into such issues where I kept going for years without anything. I would say there's definitely a good reason to suspect various background programs and bloatware which I was always very strict about. So it kinda works a bit weird in that because I do not get into an issue I'm sort of avoiding the solving experience and perhaps know less about some topic, which is kinda the opposite of what I'd want, I would want to have this knowledge, even tho I sort of bypass the issue from the start. These 2 paragrahps I'm talking more about 10-15 years back kind of an era and games so this may not apply to my time with DCS, which is also constantly updating, so we must be careful to not jump to conclusions or set things in stone and correct things about DCS may be correct with a time fuze on it haha, for a few months, etc. So this thing I have with DCS on my end I've never really got totally around it whether it's something that's really affecting everyone or not, I did however get a comment on youtube from Cap from Grim Reapers he said he also noticed these subtle freeze-frame-skip stutters, it is not that big of a deal if you blink you wouldn't see it, it does become annoying when it happens one after another, but a fast disk drive also helps a lot to minimize the strength, so instead of like 10-20 frames on a HDD, you get 3-5 on a SSD or even less on NVMe, but looking at the frametime graph with MSI Afterburner I can clearly see those spikes when rendering took a long time. Perhaps your stutters do come from the same cultpirt, but are just more pronounced, more frequent, but I can't really know that for sure. This report in the OP isn't the culprit behind what I was just talking about, so this is kinda offtopic just to clear that up. Still it falls generally in a wider sense, this thread stealing CPU might contribute in a certain circumstance to pretty much any issue that requires CPU, if you get lag in a scene, you'll get lag earlier or harder than you should. Now if you do want to talk about stuttering more you should actually create a new forum thread then.

^^ Well higher VRAM usage is infact welcome, to take the load off RAM, so that's probably a good thing. The RAM acting as a second level cache for textures is what probably needs to be tamed slightly. But the system should kinda dynamically detect hardware and adjust this according to specs, it probably does so anyway, but in some configurations perhaps it's a bit too close to the max for comfort.

Honestly I didn't dislike each of those points being discussed in it's proper depth it deserves in the first episode.