gyrovague

In theory yes, but in practice the chaff objects seem to disappear really quickly (within 2 seconds or so). I have not followed up on this further yet, but it's on my radar list. I'm not sure whether they simply cease existing in the engine along with the 3D object manifestation, or whether something else is going on. IRL chaff is supposed to hang around for a very very long time (many minutes or hours, from what I've been told, and even multiple minutes at sea level when launched from a ship), I would have hoped in DCS it would at the very least live for 30 or 60 seconds. The Viggen radar code also shows chaff objects in theory.

Just another endorsement: I received the ALPS-based slew upgrade kit from Deltaalphalima1, installation was pretty straightforward, and it works really nicely! This truly is what should have been on the warthog throttle to begin with, that original slew sensor was a real letdown. Highly recommended upgrade! :thumbup:

Order placed!

The LANTIRN Targeting System (LTS) used on the F-14 got rid of the original LANTIRN two pod system, and didn't use the terrain avoidance/following navigation pod. Instead, the LTS itself got GPS and IMU integrated, but the LTS as a whole was not tightly integrated into the F-14 systems at all, basically just a control panel was installed in the RIO cockpit left panel (joystick and some hats and a few switches) and the LTS video output could be viewed on the RIO's TID TV selection and the pilot's VDI TV repeat selection (essentially both of those are just aux video input selections). The LTS video could show own GPS coordinates, as well as calculated ground point (or tracked target) coordinates (calculated from laser range together with azimuth+elevation), so the RIO would be able to manually use that to enter coordinates on the CAP+TID to do a nav fix. I don't think the LTS and F-14A/B were able to directly use GPS/INS weapons (e.g. JDAM, JSOW, WCMD), but they were able to generate accurate enough coordinates for other aircraft to deploy these weapons on target. Of course, LTS was used with laser guided bombs on the F-14 itself.

I think Naquaii more or less just answered a similar question asked by another person. We basically take human eye resolving power and binocular field of view into account to come up with realistic spotting distances, as well as things like amount of ambient light, target afterburner and nav lights, whether looking into the sun, or with terrain background, fog, rain etc. etc., basically more stuff than I can remember offhand right now :) The idea is to get it to be quite realistic, this might be like a Heatblur theme or tagline :)

:thumbup: :book: Nice idea!

Such sad news. Rest in peace Igor Tishin.

Tragic news, my condolences to Eric's wife and family. He will be sorely missed, genuinely nice and clever person.

These lines are the mask avoidance curve AFAIK, shows where the aircraft will be masking the laser or IR video. They're not accurately positioned yet, just placeholder currently from video footage. If our model of LANTIRN Targeting System and pylon and F-14 external is all correct, "in theory" our mask avoidance curve will look the same.

> Community A-4E: December 2017 Update Great work!

Based on info from our RIO SME, the radar antenna gimbal could indeed go from +60 to -80 degrees, i.e the full extent of the indicator gauge. The TCS can go +15 to -15 degrees.

The GSS mode is basically just an enhancement to RTGS, from the pilot perspective it works about the same on the HUD. In GSS, the computer (by comparing TCS and radar) can score hits and misses. I think this could be useful too when master arm is in TNG (training) mode. GSS is not implemented yet in DCS F-14. Yes, VSL (vertical scan lockon) is one of the so-called transitional modes of the AWG-9 system, which lead to an STT lock if their pattern finds something. These are all short-range dog fight modes essentially. IIRC, the DCS F-15C has similar modes, which they call auto acquisition (AACQ) modes.

AFAIK, MMGS (multiple mode gun sight) is just the collective name for the RTGS (with and without STT) and GSS modes.

Absolutely! There is a manual mode, where pilot can adjust the pipper (movable reticle) depression on HUD manually with a knob. The RTGS mode can also operate without radar STT, in which case it displays a 1000ft and 2000ft solution on the HUD using the movable reticle and the target diamond. There is also a quite nifty Gun Scoring System (GSS) mode, where the TCS is slaved to the RTGS solution and once trigger is squeezed it waits for BATR (bullets at target range) and then compares TCS direction to radar STT direction. If they match closely enough, a hit is scored, else it is counted as a miss. The GSS will probably only be added after early access release.

Part of it is different sensor update and computation rates, but another part is this: the HUD is a vector (a.k.a. calligraphic) display, like 1980s Asteroids and Battlezone arcade games. These displays have a unique property that raster (pixel grid) displays do not have: the more elements that are shown (i.e. more vectors in the display buffer), the slower the overall refresh rate, since it cycles through all the vectors to draw them. Conversely, when showing fewer elements, the update is much more frequent and appears smoother. The upside of a vector display is that it in effect has much better resolution than a raster display (of the era). The VDI (loosely known as the "heads *down* display") in the F-14 is also interesting in that it is a hybrid of vector and raster, some elements are displayed as vectors and others as (pretty low resolution) raster images. These days (well, for the past 25-30 years probably) raster display resolution is good enough that vector displays have gone completely out of fashion, I don't think anything modern uses them anymore. Most people now don't even know such a thing ever existed :)

I'm working on the F-14 HUD (i.a.) for Heatblur DCS F-14A/B. I've watched and re-watched this video a bunch of times in the past (among many others of course). There is an interesting little detail going on in this video which I think is worth pointing out: if you look from 3m58 or so onwards, the target diamond seems to be off the target, and then at 4m07 he seems to get a sidewinder lock and the target diamond is suddenly on target. At first glance it looks weird, almost like the target diamond is inaccurate or something. The explanation is as follows: he has a radar STT lock while in guns mode, but he is in RTGS (real time gunsight) mode. In this mode the target diamond shows a 1000foot gun solution instead of the radar STT track... The movable reticle (big plus symbol) shows a solution at target range if below 4000 feet, or 4000 feet if target range is greater. Then at 4m07 he switches to sidewinder (with the weapon selector on the stick, not shown in the video here), and because he already has an STT lock, the sidewinder seeker immediately slaves to the STT direction and thus immediately has lock. In sidewinder mode, as in most other modes aside from RTGS guns, the target diamond shows the radar STT location, and therefore suddenly jumps to the target.

It has been a great pleasure to be part of the A-4E team, and I'm quite sad that I cannot see it through to completion. We achieved some cool things over the past year, and I look forward to the new highs the team will undoubtedly still achieve. "Heinemann's Hot-Rod" is a really fun aircraft, and with its amazing variety of weapons and aircraft carrier capabilities, this is sure to be a massive hit in the DCS community.

Also not sure what this does, but every single other module either sets it false, or has a commented out line setting it true (therefore not setting it at all).

Brief video showing the cockpit sounds we mentioned in the last update:

Here are some tips&tricks I've developed over the past year to help figure out functionality that is available to Lua aircraft mods in DCS (but not commonly available in internet/forum searches or Beginners Guide to DCS Aircraft Modules), maybe this will help others on this path. Please share your tips&tricks too! search all DCS DLLs for strings (using e.g. strings utility), especially cockpitbase.dll. This can give many false leads, but also some good ones. DLL Export Viewer on DCS DLLs, especially cockpitbase.dll. Learn to see what the Lua functions typically look like, so you can find others you didn't know about. inputenum.txt (but numerically sorted by value instead) Look at all Lua files of all other modules. Can install modules with these instructions. Can often find useful info w.r.t. gauges, switches, HUD drawing in these files, and also their default.lua files (inputs for keyb/joystick) sometimes give interesting clues (related to inputenum above). Their device_init.lua files can also give some useful info. print_message_to_user() and log.info()/log.alert() etc. functions (latter makes entries in Users/username/Saved Games/DCS/Logs/DCS.log) Dumping Lua global (_G) and metatables (see code further down) DCS modelviewer.exe in bin directory EDM arg extractor, handy together with modelviewer for figuring out how other modules do certain animation effects The Mods How To section (where this post lives) has lots of useful things, can often be found on google too though Some basic common recursive table dumping code that you can include in other Lua files: --[[ Function to recursively dump a table to a string: Usage (e.g. to gain introspection into _G table): str=dump("_G",_G) local lines=strsplit("\n",str) for k,v in ipairs(lines) do log.alert(v) end --]] function basic_dump (o) if type(o) == "number" then return tostring(o) elseif type(o) == "string" then return string.format("%q", o) else -- nil, boolean, function, userdata, thread; assume it can be converted to a string return tostring(o) end end function dump (name, value, saved, result) seen = seen or {} -- initial value result = result or "" result=result..name.." = " if type(value) ~= "table" then result=result..basic_dump(value).."\n" elseif type(value) == "table" then if seen[value] then -- value already saved? result=result.."->"..seen[value].."\n" -- use its previous name else seen[value] = name -- save name for next time result=result.."{}\n" -- create a new table for k,v in pairs(value) do -- save its fields local fieldname = string.format("%s[%s]", name, basic_dump(k)) if fieldname~="_G[\"seen\"]" then result=dump(fieldname, v, seen, result) end end end end return result end function strsplit(delimiter, text) local list = {} local pos = 1 if string.find("", delimiter, 1) then return {} end while 1 do local first, last = string.find(text, delimiter, pos) if first then -- found? table.insert(list, string.sub(text, pos, first-1)) pos = last+1 else table.insert(list, string.sub(text, pos)) break end end return list end Dumping _G with above, was able to find get_clickable_element_reference() and a bunch of other very useful directly or indirectly. Can also dump metatable of any Lua device from inside to find functions that device exposes, e.g. local dev = GetSelf() m=getmetatable(dev) str=dump("GetSelf meta",m) local lines=strsplit("\n",str) for k,v in ipairs(lines) do log.alert(v) end Finding new interesting sounding function names is only half the battle, you need to often guess the parameters, that can often be quite time consuming and frustrating.

We plan on eventually making info like this available as HOWTOs on the forums, or addendum doc to "Beginners Guide to DCS Aircraft Modules", or a wiki, or something like that, but priorities are with making actual A-4E progress right now rather than documenting our findings publicly. Suffice to say for now, everything we've found is discoverable within DCS Lua and DLLs, we don't have access to anything more than anybody else. If you dig deep enough, you can find it. Often it requires hours/days of experimentation and trying to get into the minds of the DCS developers to guess how certain things work, but that journey is fun and challenging in itself too. Read up on Lua metatables for a start, the rabbit hole gets deeper from there onwards.

Good luck, and thanks for all the hard work!

Watch this space... :music_whistling: ;)

This doesn't really answer your question, but you may want to check out http://jsbsim.sourceforge.net/ if you haven't already done so.

Here is a short demo of the Mk 4 gunpods: