slug88

There were a few threads, some with benchmarks, in the DCS forum. I'm sure a cursory search will provide plenty of information. For what it's worth I noticed an FPS gain on the order of 30%-50% when moving from XP-32 to W7-64 with Black Shark. Given that BS and FC2 now use the same engine, I expect that the results for FC2 would be the same.

I believe so.

Everything works. That's why it's called 6dof. It's just that the range of motion for the lateral movements is lower.

I wonder if there's a way to disable the head roll, but keep all other effects of the natural head movement (namely turbulence.) Perhaps an edit to some .cfg or .lua somewhere...

Wrong forum.

This isn't a bug. It's intentional. There are many accounts, both modern and from previous eras, of pilots returning home from sorties to find their aircraft with bullets holes and other damage, without ever having heard or felt the incoming fire. The cockpits of these aircraft are pretty well insulated, and the pilots' ears are further insulated by the helmet and earphones.

Black Shark is part of a new and different game series that is separate from Lock On. It is not built on the Lock On engine, though it now shares an engine with FC2 (which looks similar to, but uses a different engine than Lock On and FC1). The sims that will make up the DCS series, of which Black Shark is the first, are intended to be hard core study sims, modelling one aircraft at a time to painstaking and generally unsurpassed detail. See this page to get an idea of the depth to which the Ka-50 is modeled: https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/index.php?end_pos=950&scr=default&lang=en The Lock On series, including FC2, is in contrast a survey sim, which models many aircraft but with less detail and realism. So yes, they are separate products, and AFAIK future ED endeavors will focus on filling out the DCS series, while FC2 may be the last iteration of Lock On. Having said all that, FC2 and DCS:Black Shark now share a game engine, which means missions and campaigns built for one should more-or-less work with the other. Furthermore, they will soon be online compatible, pending the release of a second patch for Black Shark.

It's wrong. I installed the English d/l version with only LO1.0 installed, no FC1.

AFAIK It can all be adjusted with the 'Headphone' slider in the Audio Options screen. You can make the cockpit as loud or as quiet as you want. Personally I find the default values to be perfect; you can still hear the roar of the engine, and the bass of nearby explosions is barely muted at all, but higher frequency sounds are completed attenuated. I really can't wait for the new engine to make its way over to BS.

I believe the soundbug is fixed, and if experience with Black Shark is any indicator, you'll have better FPS in Vista.

Shift-F1

Using the torrent, I just completed the entire download in 1h45. I suggest using that above all else. As of now there are 95 seeders, and 400+ peers.

This is my thought as well. It seems bizarre however that the pilot isn't able to input TP elevation data on the fly. I guess that's 1980's tech for you. Ah, now that makes sense. Thanks much! Interesting thought, but my limited tests don't corroborate this. I set up a test in which I hovered about 200m over the floor of a high mountain valley, and entered coordinates for a new TP over the mountain wall about 2km in front of me. If I understand your idea correctly, then you suggest it might have assigned the elevation of the new TP to the same elevation as the valley floor. When uncaging my ShkVal, however, I found that it again seemed to point at sea level, with the angle of inclincation being greater than 45 degrees from what I could tell (indicating that the TP was more than 2km beneath my current aaltitude). This is confirmed by the ABRIS; if you use the INFO button to select the flashing TP, it will read out an elevation of 0m. The interesting thing is, you can enter a new TP to the PVI-800 with the correct altitude; you simply can't do it with the lat/long coordinates method. Instead, if you use your Shkval and LRF, as you would when performing an INU fix, the TP will clearly have the correct elevation assigned to it. I verified this in the same test described above, and the TP created with the Shkval properly rested at the correct mountain peak. So it's absolutely clear to me that the PVI-800 stores elevation data for TP's and can be updated in flight with new elevation data, its just that for some reason we don't have the ability to key it in manually.

Well, I've just returned from about a seven week long forced hiatus from Black Shark, and I've just completed the second to last mission. I very much hope that this project is still alive, because as good as it is already, I believe it's potential is higher still! So, here are my comments on the mission. As usual, stop reading unless you've played already, as spoilers follow! 1. Overall I liked this mission. Not too complicated, not really difficult at all, but good atmosphere, good set up, and decent execution. 2. I don't know if this is realistic or not, but I think it would be nice if the flight leader called out speed, heading, and altitude for each leg of the journey, like in mission 1 of Deployment. This goes for every other mission where you're following someone else. Not a huge deal, however. 3. I think Voskhod's dialog is again overly explanatory, and takes away from the immersion of the mission. Especially the line that goes something like "It will be a huge impact on Georgian military structure if this target is destroyed," etc. Having read Ed Macy's Apache, the concept of this mission does seem very realistic, and in fact Ed Macy describes a scenario exactly like this, where he is tasked in the air to take out a high value target that's been identified by intelligence. But, as I recall of Ed Macy's account, his new orders were very short and to the point, and he was left very much in the dark as to the specific nature of the new target(s). In this mission, however, ground control does much more than that, even going into a needless statement about the importance of the target to the war effort. So, in short, my suggestion is that the Voskhod dialog should be shortened so that all you know is that you're being tasked to a new high value target that's taking priority over the current mission. In fact you could even add a little mystery by hinting at high-level intelligence ops, without ever confirming it (in Ed Macy's account, he speculated about CIA involvement in his mission, and it added a fun sense of spookiness to it all). 4. I really enjoyed the flight leader's (200) dialog, and was a bit sad that it stopped as soon as my element was retasked! I was hoping to get to hear him calling out targets and interacting with the other helicopters. It's hard to state how much this would raise immersion. I know it's a huge effort to record new dialog and add it, but I really like the idea behind this mission, and I think it deserves this special treatment :D. Also, I ran into an issue with the sim during this mission, which you can read about here: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=51274

I've not seen this discussed before, and a search turned up nothing, so this might just be a new one. We all know that, given a predefined TP (target point) loaded into the PVI-800, we can get the Shkval to automatically point directly to the TP simply by selecting it and uncaging. Now, my question is, how does the Shkval know where to point? We know that the PVI-800 stores the TP's lat and long coordinates, and it also knows the helicopter's lat and long coordinates, and presumably it's altitude (I'm going to guess that the PVI-800 only know about or cares about the baro altitude). However, to get the path from the helicopter to the TP, the PVI-800 also needs to know the TP's altitude. This is very simple trig; you need both the helicopter's height above the target, as well as it's horizontal distance away from the target, to get the angle of inclination to the target. I thought perhaps the PVI-800 assumes all targets to be at sea level (or altitude 0 on the baro alt, depending on your air pressure adjustment), but this is clearly false, since it still accurately points to predefined TP's on high mountain tops. This is important, because it implies that the PVI-800 must store elevation data for each predefined TP. So, given those assumptions, my question is this: when creating a new TP in-mission, how can we assign it's elevation? Recently I was playing the second-to-last mission of IgorMK's excellent Georgian Havoc campaign. In this mission, you're given the coordinates of a building that you need to destroy, which sits at an altitude of 1.8km ASL in a high mountain town. I created a new TP with the provided coordinates, and, to my surprise, when I selected the new TP and uncaged the Shkval, it pointed far short of the actual target. It seemed clear that the PVI-800 assumed that the new target was at sea level. Now, I didn't like the idea of acquiring the target by constantly lasing the ground and lining up the Shkval sight with the TP icon in the ABRIS, so I came up with what I thought at the time was a rather clever solution. Using the "Info" function on the ABRIS, I found that the elevation at the target's coordinates was about 1800m ASL. I then noted that, again according to the ABRIS, my GPS altitude was something like 2100m ASL, which meant that I was 300m above the target. So I thought, if the PVI-800 thinks my TP is at sea level, I'll just adjust my baro altimeter so that it reads 300m, and that way the PVI-800 will know the proper height difference and will correctly aim the Shkval! Alas, I was disappointed to find that adjusting my baro altimeter seemingly had no effect whatsoever on the Shkval's inclination when uncaging on the TP. That leads then to my second question: how does the PVI-800 know the helicopter's altitude? Clearly, it's not paying attention to the baro altimeter.

http://en.wiki.eagle.ru/wiki/Main_Page

That's pretty spectacular to me :D.

If anything, the upgrade to DX9 is one of the least exciting new features of FC2. I agree, this is far more than "only a patch", and imho easily worth the $30.

Time and money? Creating all new models, FM's, and cockpits for 7 planes is a huge effort. Probably not something that could be cranked out in 9 months, like FC2.0 was.

That would be my guess. Something like ED's agreement with Ubi means that they aren't allowed to release any of the content made for LO as a stand-alone product, as this content still belongs to Ubi.

Could you post a screenshot of your cockpit? AFAIK that texture setting is the only thing that affects the detail of the cockpit (except for the frame resolution settings that affect the look of the Shkval and ABRIS).

I'm afraid you're quite misinformed. DCS:BS and FC compatibility is perhaps the biggest new feature of FC2.0: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=47144

In the in-game options screen, Textures are set to High?

It's not that. You can only launch two Vikhrs when the laser cool-down timer has reached 0. You can see the cool down timer on the HUD next to the reticle.

You aren't asking too much, and in fact the exact thing you want is available in the sim. On the other hand, perhaps it's too much to ask of you to read through the replies to your own thread, which is a shame since some of those replies tell you exactly how to get what you want. HINT: A mission called 'Shooting Range' is one option that will give you precisely what you ask.