gospadin

images don't load for me

per what skatezilla said, you can orient bombs however you choose. nothing wrong with vertical

it's expecting a texture that it cannot find. check dcs.log in your saved games folder.

shouldn't a B-17 only have a single weapon "station" with a rack to hold 8 bombs?

Probably a little late, but would have been nice to add Basecamp too. http://www.ufomind.com/area51/org/basecamp/ Tarmac is still maintained: https://www.google.com/maps/place/38%C2%B019'26.9%22N+116%C2%B016'37.2%22W/@38.3241442,-116.279203,819m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d38.32414!4d-116.277009

LOL Ask again in a few years, and I'll let you know then. Maybe we'll even be done with the A-4 by then. --gos

I'm sure that there will be enough bugs that no matter when we release, people will consider it "early access." =P

The dynamic weather system will give you localized weather, but if you don't know how weather systems work, it may take a lot of trial and error to get the effect you're looking for.

\o/ :pilotfly:

That is a primary reason, but we got lucky and the A-4 radar IRL has limited ability to discern smaller objects, so it doesn't feel like a huge problem.

My description assumed you were already on a stabilized approach. In the code, everything is keyed to AoA as you suggest, which is fundamentally a function of gross weight and airspeed when stable. The lights are accurate relative to the AoA gauge recommendations in units, but not the markers on said gauge. We still have excessive lift at low speed by about 11% or so that we need to tune (we'll get to it in the next month or so), and we want to make the climb, cruise, and approach AoA markers adjustable too. Removing the excess lift will require a bit more AoA for the same approach, or the inverse, it means that stabilized center-donut approaches will be slightly faster and shallower. Once those two things are sorted, we expect it to behave exactly as you suggest. (Interesting to note though that various period documentation always refers to the indicators in terms of high or low, not fast or slow) The A-4 btw has a golden donut for on-speed, and green down-chevron, per AFC 456 which is what we implemented. Older A-4s without that modification only used red. The green donut must have been a newer design in other aircraft, or possibly in the A-4M, but we have no "M" documentation. --gos

Yup. It was mostly to find mountains and coastlines, for navigation in bad weather. In air-to-ground mode, it tells you slant range to assist with targeting, but it can't tell you if you're pointed at a tank or a hill. It has no integration into the weapon system. The fact that we're limited in our capabilities since we're unofficial just happens to fit more-or-less with that reality, which is convenient.

Awesome. If you need/want proofreading assistance, I'd be happy to help, just PM me. --gos

FYI, part 2 of my radar introduction video has a number of text bubbles to explain what the A2G mode is showing and why. To summarize, a green line indicating slant range will continuously sweep top-to-bottom until it acquires a lock. Once it has a lock, the black horizontal lines on the display indicate 4000 yards per line, along the weapon datum. So if the green line is 3 lines up from the bottom, the slant range is thus 12,000 yards. As you continue your dive, the bright green line will move down in the display until it reaches the bottom, at which point you fly into the earth. =P The maximum range is roughly 15,000 yards, thus the furthest lock you'll see is slightly below the 4th line. At this point it's just a radar capability, but eventually we'll have it integrated with the gunsight elevation adjustment, to allow accurate release of unguided weapons per the A-4s published ballistic tables. It won't be anywhere close to the accuracy of a modern CCIP pipper, but for the era, it was about as good as it got until the newer fire control radars and ballistic computers in the A-6 and A-7 arrived.

One more quickie demonstration that didn't make it into the other videos... gyrovague was able to implement having the red filter affect the radar scope color, for night missions. Since lua controllers are rendered last, they're normally unaffected by cockpit materials (the radar's red plastic glare shield) from 3ds, so this actually required some tricks.

IMO, decrease saturation instead. Don't add curves unless you have a problem with your stick.

Are you able to get 4/8 contrails working? or only 2?

As I mentioned, I had done it in one of the systems quanta post_initialize() functions and it was in scope there. The scope at module creation vs execution I don't know. Which means I don't know how to get AI to use the data you setup there. It only works for players in the way I figured it out.

Using SilentEagle's example, I did some digging, and figured out how to extract ME aircraft options in lua. First, create your properties in your base .lua file as needed (I used his example above) Then, you simply query the values directly by name using get_aircraft_property(): mr = get_aircraft_property("CheckboxPlaceholder") print("MR CheckboxPlaceholder: "..mr) mr = get_aircraft_property("MassChangePlaceholder") print("MR MassChangePlaceholder: "..mr) mr = get_aircraft_property("CombolistPlaceholder") print("MR CombolistPlaceholder: "..mr) mr = get_aircraft_property("SliderPlaceholder") print("MR SliderPlaceholder: "..mr) The above code was in one of my post initialization functions just for convenience, but I don't think that matters. And it results in output such as: 00065.206 DEBUG C:\Users\xxx\Saved Games\DCS.openalpha\Mods/aircraft/A-4E/C: MR CheckboxPlaceholder: 0 00065.206 DEBUG C:\Users\xxx\Saved Games\DCS.openalpha\Mods/aircraft/A-4E/C: MR MassChangePlaceholder: 1 00065.206 DEBUG C:\Users\xxx\Saved Games\DCS.openalpha\Mods/aircraft/A-4E/C: MR CombolistPlaceholder: 1 00065.206 DEBUG C:\Users\xxx\Saved Games\DCS.openalpha\Mods/aircraft/A-4E/C: MR SliderPlaceholder: 80 Note that I had unchecked the first box (0), checked the 2nd box (1), selected 'ITEM2' from the list (2nd item, which would be index 1 in "C" code), and I set the slider to 80. --gos Edit: Apparently gyrovague figured this out too, told me, and I wasn't paying attention haha. Sorry for stealing the karma.

Emergency fuel simply means any value less than minimum standard fuel for a normal landing procedure, and as was said, you then would declare an emergency and get priority. If you had a stuck gear AND armament you couldn't jettison, they'd likely have you eject and crash the plane off-airport to minimize potential damage to the runway and other stores/aircraft. In Vietnam it was relatively common for battle-damaged aircraft to be ditched in the ocean near the carrier, so as to not risk the boat. The support helos would then fish the pilot out of the water. --gos

CH-53 or CH-53E would be fabulous. A UH-60 would also be great, and allows for many variations. Genuinely not as interested in a chinook / puma or other euro medium/heavy lift helos.

This happens when a missile requires a lock and doesn't have it. Perhaps you're not within the new off-angle restriction of the maverick from a few months back?

This is really on the model developers. If they want to model flaps or gears to an axis, they can do so. The engine capabilities are certainly there. As JG14_Smil said, this isn't how the switches work in real life though. With a Warthog or similar controller with a 3-position toggle, you can map the flaps lever reasonably accurately.

It almost certainly has a small US roundel on the top of the left wing and the bottom of the right wing.

Correct. You cannot query the current state of a cockpit control. You map a device controller to the animation, and when it's triggered and parsed in SetCommand(), you have to record the data provided by the animated value. Then, you can update your external argument based on this input. One annoyance of this mechanism is that animated cockpit objects do not register their commands until the animation finishes. With slowed animations for larger cockpit levers, the lag can be a bit annoying as it also throttles keyboard triggering of the same things, depending on how its coded internally. --gos