OnlyforDCS

As the title says, how does the Hornet's long and early access prepurchase timeline affect the release of Heatblur's Tomcat? As far as I know, there was never more than one module available for pre-purchase. Does this mean that we will not see the Tomcat before the F18 hits early access?

Does this mean that they will add a fixed release date at some point when they are confident enough they know they are going to make it?

This would be really, really bad news. Especially considering the fact that there is no fixed date on the early access for the Hornet. I would be incredibly upset if I was Heatblur if this were true, unless the whole "2017 barring death or injury" was just a lot of hot air and the Tomcat is nowhere near ready for early access.

Am I the only one that is dissapointed with the precedent set by this? For a long time now not a single module by ED or another third party on ED's site would go into pre-purchase without a solid release date for early-access. This has insured that no matter what, the module made it to early-access on the date in question. (Or a few days late at most) I get that everyone is excited for the Hornet, I am too, but I will be refraining from a pre-purchase in this case. Before you bring out the banhammer mods, I am aware that Eagle Dynamics wants to make sure that they get most of the things right out of the gate, and that they want to leave themselves some room for showstopping bugs, etc. I just feel that this is not the right way to go about this and hope that in the future they will not put modules for pre-purchase without a solid release date (DD/MM/YY).

This. A million times this. Hummingbird mentioned that something felt off about ALL prop modules in DCS. Perhaps the fact that they do not have any artificial FCS and simulate flight control inputs AS IF THEY WERE MADE BY REAL LIFE-SIZE CONTROLS instead of small plastic inadequate joysticks is the cause of his issues. I've got a MSFFB2 joystick. I think I would feel the same way if I had to use a spring stick again when flying these WWII birds. That doesn't mean the problem lies with the FM, but rather in our interpretation of what we THINK we should see and feel.

Nope. The B version is coming first.

So, as in the title. Are there any videos out there of the DCS Harrier module, doing what it was actually designed to do? I don't have it yet (on my to buy list after another module) but would really like to see how it acomplishes this mission.

So...today is Friday the 1st of December :) The Harrier is out, the F18 doesn't look like it's anywhere close to early access yet, so any chance of getting some news on whether the F14 will be ready in December, and when the early access (pre)sale will start so I can start throwing money at my screen? (I have no interest in flying the F18, the Harrier, or any other fighter jet while the Tomcat is this close to release). Thanks in advance, for any, reply. :)

How do you figure that?

Educated guess: Eagle Dynamics dictates the release schedule. Razbam's Harrier module is first in line, and its currently in presale so they don't want any annoucement of release to interfere with sales of that module. I think that the earliest date we could possibly get for the release of the next aircraft module will be after the Harrier goes into prerelease. Im hoping that we will see the Tomcat in December and the Hornet in early 2018.

Congratulations are in order. Well done Razbam.

I wonder if there could be a workaround to implement this behavior. Would it be possible to make the engine replace the "entire" missile FM code once the seeker goes active? In essence you develop two missiles and then once the missile goes terminal, the engine simply replaces the one missile with the other. It's sort of "cheating" in simulation terms but as long as the results are closer to the real thing, who cares right?

This is the best thing I've seen on the internet in a long time. Wow.

Grats, always enjoyed the GA productions.

Im not buying another DCS module until the F14 is released! No disrespect inteded to ED or any of the other 3rd party developers but I just can't get as excited for the other modules in the pipeline. I hope it's not too long of a wait. :)

Once the Tomcat is released I can die happy. I don't care what comes afterwards, it can't ever be as good as the Tomcat. ;)

Benchmarks don't work exactly, because the type of slowdown that occurs can only described as "stuttering" or "hitching" and don't really affect the FPS counter.

If all of this is true, then why do I have significantly WORSE performance with a system managed pagefile in DCS, compared to NO pagefile or a small pagefile?

I thought the EA for the F14 would be in 2017. Barring death or injury, that was the kind of outlook from Heatblur at least. Still hope they release it in some form this year, but it looks like it will probably be Christmas at the earliest.

This is probably correct. The F14 needs to come first. Any kind of backseat operator needs to have a fully functional cockpit before it can operate it properly. Whether real or artificial, it doesn't matter.

There are still a lot of people who fly with MSFFB2, myself included. There is also the Logitech G940, and a couple of others. I hope at least "some" FFB support will be included with the F14. It's very well implemented in the Su-27, and I hope Heatblur takes a page from ED's book on this.

I think it would cause a bit of an uproar if it happened that way. Personally I think if ED releases any other map before the (FREE) Caucassus upgrade it would be detrimental to their status in the sim community.

@Cobra: Is any kind of FFB support planned for the Tomcat? I understand that the CAS is much simpler than in the F15C, Im just wandering if any of its quirks will be implemented (from a FFB perspective)?

In addition to some of the answers brought up here, the obvious one is redundancy. If you look at modern combat jets (by modern, I mean from the 60s onward) you will find that as many systems as possible on a fighter jet are made as redundant as possible. In the case of a system failure, you have a backup system. Sometimes they are tripled or even quadruple redudant, depending on how important they are to allowing the pilot to survive and/or bring the plane home in case of a systems failure or emergency.

I agree that the water looks kind of flat from high(ish) altitudes, especially during midday, sunny & clear conditions, which everyone seems to be running on their servers. However I don't think this is necessarily very wrong: The sea does lose quite a bit of it's definition from on high at those kinds of conditions.