Mr_sukebe

Agreed on the idea. We have mainly late war aircraft, so working backwards towards the Battle of France would be a great idea, and the list of aircraft suggested looks reallly good.

Do we have any flak towers on the Germany map? As I understand it, there's still some standing: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/flak-towers.html If not, that would be a mega cool asset to be added as a static, even better if it could be armed.

Just been out of Berlin in a 190. There's balloons there too. One thing I did find was that you can shoot them and they can be killed. We have a new game, pop the balloon!

Just experienced the link issue. My thanks to Timcat, as this worked for me.

Ref using shortcuts for either VR or Monitor, my solution is to use the rather excellent DCS Updater/Launcher App by Skatezilla.

I’d love to have a Pete providing nav guidance between waypoints

Go try seeing how much VRAM is used. Quc and myself have seen circa 1GB difference between a setting of around 45% and 100%

I’m curious about other pilots experience on this. When I’ve checked CPU usage in the last few weeks, the primary loading appears to be on 4 cores. Thats not to say that more cores is pointless, as they can offload secondary tasks such as Oculus VR and various windows apps. it does however make me wonder if ED have optimised the current build for use with 4 cores, as pretty much all DCS player PCs will have at least 4. If that is the case, makes me wonder about the effort required to use 8 cores, which is seemingly becoming the norm.

Use the preset for the Hind for all of your helicopters.

You’ve missed my point. I agree that the current situation is nothing like user/noob friendly and think that it would be a very good idea to overhaul it. However, there is a current workaround that isn’t that onerous, so my point was to: - advise of that workaround, which some may be unaware of - put some thought into the priority In short, my view is absolutely to update the KB creation. However, I’d see that as a pretty low priority when compared to other work underway

How does an update half way through the life of a product either: - suddenly mean that it’s EOL - mean that it’s got parts of it that don’t work If you’ve got some evidence, please do show us

I think that we can already do most of that, though it does need a little knowledge. - for interactive, I use the free mod scratchpad - aircraft specific, place in the saved games for the aircraft - global, just in the kneeboard folder - theatre specific, put them into the Mods/terrain folder in the DCS install - creating them. Personally I use Excel for my frequency KBs and PowerPoint for everything else, which for me makes editing pretty easy. Fot the PPT KBs, I use Portrait mode to ensure they’re in the right ratio. When ready, Sniptool them into the correct folder and save as a .png It’s really quite easy when you know how. More to the point, asking ED to use resources to make KBs more user friendly potentially delays more important things like fixes and Vulkan

Any reason for thinking that?

Interesting comment about the use of artillery. I think that there's a tendency in some DCS missions to focus on blowing up tanks. My guess is that it would be more likely and appropriate for aircraft to attack the logistics train (softer targets) and also groupings like artillery batteries.

Just aswell that ED now provides details on not just VRAM reserved, but also the amount used. I don't know about anyone else, but I've yet to see more than 12GB of VRAM used. Anyone seen more?

9800x3d, 64GB RAM (96GB if you're happy to pay a little extra), 5080, NVME drive(s) with at least 4TB of space.

Fascinating discussion chaps. Maybe one to war game in DCS.

Nice set of tests. Makes sense. The T4 settings are very similar to my current setting.

Is this dedicated server primarily single thread, or does it now use multiple cores?

Maybe it was just upselling the importance of that area? From a quick look, the northern plains route looks easier for massed armour: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_German_Plain In the above, it suggests that the Fulda route would give easier access to likely Soviet targets, but doesn’t specify what they might be. When I was setting up my Cold War scenario, the Fulda route appeared to have a number of choke points that would allow the defender to make life much more difficult for the attacker, eg severing the rail links, which would probably have been the obvious method to resupply the assault force.

I think a Foxbat would be an interesting addition. I also enjoyed the video, though I’m guessing that some of the claims might well have included a dose of “hype”. Eg near the start, it mentions a big combat radius (900km??), then towards the end comments on how little fuel it has post take off and landing for flight time. It can’t be both.

Just had three more thoughts: - Vulkan does typically reduce CPU loading, though clearly we have no control over that - I seem to remember Mbucchia suggesting that the use of Quad views will reduce GPU loading, but will add a little to CPU load. If you have GPU resource spare, disabling quad views might actually help - if you look at task manager when DCS is running, CPU load appears to be primarily spread over 4 cores. Makes me wonder if ED has deliberately done that to ensure that almost all players benefit, without the extra dev effort to have it auto scale to however many cores a player actually has. It would be a sensible approach. If that is the case, do we expect Windows to be smart enough to run the other Apps on cores no used by DCS? Is there a case for using Process Lasso to tell windows to run all Apps but DCS on say 4 cores, and DCS on the other 4 cores?

It’s pretty easy to install on the same PC. If the server uses different CPU cores to the game, and you have enough RAM, should be an easy win.

I don't know. I've just run up a server, with nothing else running, and no one logged in. There's not a huge amount going on automatically, maybe 6 planes flying, but there's a whole bunch of radars running. That was using 2-3% CPU and interestingly, 19GB of RAM. I couldn't tell if it was single or multi-threaded with the other background "noise" of what my CPU was doing. Last year, it was single threaded and I'd previously never seen the dedicated server use more than around 8GB of RAM. That's clearly changed, with a LOT more RAM in use. I'll have a fiddle tomorrow to see if I can pin down if it's single or multithreaded. It's use of RAM does mean that running it on the same PC as the game, is looking like maybe a bad idea, unless you have 96GB of RAM. So hosting on another PC might well be a good move. If it's multithreaded, maybe I could run it on a spare PC that I have downstairs. Last year, the saving in CPU did help performance.

Can I please suggest you take a scan at this, which might include some useful suggestions: