zamboni

I've figured it out. I have wheel brakes on an axis of my VKB stick. I also have toe brakes configured on the rudder. I brought up the control overlay and watched things. On landing, I hit the wheel brakes on the VKB. When slowing enough I hit NWS (but still have the wheel brake going). I drifted to the left a little and hit the right toe brake. That straightened me up. The problem is that if you hit the toe brake and the wheel brake axis at the same time.....when you release the toe brake it also releases the brake on that side. Net effect in the end is full left toe brake and me sliding off the runway cuz I couldn't figure it out. Lesson learned, don't use toe brakes + full wheelbrake at the same time, you may not like the end result. Also, you are right about the caster effect on the nosewheel. It will turn even if the plane is moving only slightly. Its almost like the nosewheel turns more than it should for the movement. At least I figured out what not to do

Ya, I do have it as a slider. When I was testing. I was basically standing still when turning NWS on and off and checking things., that Is why I don't think the caster wheel thing fits. Its almost like pressing the wheel brake is turning the nosewheel by itself. Will have to play around with it some more. Also should mess with the plane in the air, gear down, NWS off and see if the toe brakes also cause the nose wheel to move (that is how I think I ended up off the runway to begin with.....i.e. nosewheel was pointed to the left on touchdown).

I'm a bit unsure on how things are supposed to work, but after doing a search on forums and elsewhere I haven't seen this addressed anywhere. After landing on a couple of missions, I have had the plane start to pull off the side of the runway. Trying to correct with rudder didn't help. I slid off the runway and after hitting NWS I was able to get back on and taxi back to parking. After I got out of the way I went to the external view and started messing around. This is what I found: 1) with NWS on, rudder left/right seems to work right with the nosewheel steering 2) with NWS off. If I press the right toebrake, the nose wheel turns right. If I release the toe brake the nose wheel remaisn right and I can only turn it back to the left using the left toe brake. Should the toebrake be causing the nose wheel to turn at all? I'm guessing my problem with skidding off to the side of the runway was a result of hitting the toebrake with NWS off before landing. and when I landed it caused it to slide off. This doesn't seem to be right. But not seeing it show up as a problem for others, I am wondering if it only happens to me, or if it is a "feature" and I am not careful with my toe brakes.

This mission can be a frustrating one if you want to contact JTAC, mainly because, once the enemy armor gets into range of the allied tanks, they just get tore up. JTAC may give you the target, but by the time you do a run in, they may be totally obliterated. I usually just look at where the smoke is coming from then point the TGP to the road leading back to see if there is anything else coming and then target that. If you try to fly over where the tanks are, the SAMs and MANPADS will just tear you apart. It is best to just hit them with Mavs or if you want to bomb. Hit with clusterbombs via CCRP at 15K and above. As for the "extended info" on the radio menus, that is probably just the frequencies that are added when you use the Easy Radio option. I still haven't weaned myself off of it :).

I had already uploaded them. You can find the link for the mission files at the end of this post.

The mission is a bit screwed up in the JTAC target assignments if I recall correctly. The Mission editor has targets assigned that never spawn. When you contact JTAC it gets stuck because it is waiting for a unit that isn't there. I went in and changed things in the mission. I should post it, but it is on my other computer. I'll post it a little bit later.

Nice list of changes there. I haven't been flying much recently, got the itch to take my telescope out and so some astrophotography and has cut into my stick time. That will have to change sometime soon though :). I would suspect that if they are included in an "official release" then end users would expect that ED would have to support bugs and problems with the 3rd party campaigns. Remove them from the "official in game" campaigns and put them on the website for download, then it would be on the onus of the 3rd party to fix and update their missions instead of ED. Also it may lead some of the end users to hep fix bugs in the campaign themselves and post them to the site if it didn't seem it was an official part of the sim. Some people (me included) might have felt they were stepping on toes by uploading fixes. Also, frees up more time for ED to quash bugs and release more features in the sim :)

^^ This For those missions in that campaign, I always thought that the JTAC(s) included were for other flights. You have your objective, and if the briefing didn't specifically tell you to check in with JTAC....frag the enemy target and then check in with JTAC if you have left over weapons and want to help out a bit. There are some campaign missions with two or three different JTAC units, they cant ALL be meant for you, right?

I'm pretty sure it is up to the mission writer. JTAC may not have any targets for you, but he usually only deals with armor/vehicle threats. If your mission has you to take out a bridge for instance, JTAC can't help ya out there. Some missions have a score based on 100, you can bring up the debrief screen with the ' key and it may have your score there. But it is all up to the mission designer if you end up getting a message saying "mission complete" or not.

I was playing one of the campaign missions a couple of days ago and in addition to the target bearing missing, a lot of the radio calls were not being put up on the top left in text. Its like two, two, two bugs in one!

I had listed something about this in this post. Unfortunately it got moved to the Missions and Campaign Forum Purgatory where it will never be read. In that mission I had something like 10+ failures that didn't have details. In the debrief.log there are about 15 failures, they have the details. Several of the failures are listed multiple times. I included the .trk file and the debrief.log in the linked post above.

not sure why this got moved to the campaign/missions section. The problems I address here are not really campaign/mission specific (maybe one or two). I'm pretty sure that with the post moved it will get kinda ignored down here at the bottom of the forum list.

I ran through the first Devil's Cross campaign mission last night and ran into various problems/bugs. Since they all can be shown in one .trk file, I'll lump them all together in this post. A couple are old problems, but may need to be pointed out again to see if they can get fixed :) Big thumbs up with the improved .trk replay since it is a heck of a lot more accurate and I can just post the .trk so ppl can see what is going on (I replayed the .trk and the problems listed below ARE in the .trk...i.e. I dont crash on takeoff or anything :) ) 1) JTAC doesn't initially respond. When I hit the CP I called to JTAC and he never responded. When I called the second time, he did respond. 2) JTAC abort not quite fixed. I know there was a previous problem where you had to check out and back in when JTAC gave you an abort if the target assigned was destroyed before finishing the nine line readback but this is a little different. I had finished off my Mavs and CBU, I called in to JTAC to say "Attack Complete". If you are down to only guns, JTAC gives you an abort message if you are attacking heavy armor, and usually will assign you some softer targets to get with your guns. This time JTAC gave me the Abort, but I was still stuck in the Engagement menu. Had to check out with JTAC and check back in to get things sorted. I am not sure though if this had to do with the JTAC not responding in #1 above. Previously JTAC logic would get real wonky if you tried to check in a second time if he didn't respond the first time. 3) Wingman call outs do not include directionals. Wingman will call out "contact armor", when previously he would call "contact armor three o'clock". 4) Noticed that a lot of the wingman or calls on the guard channel are not showing up on the top left list where they usually are. When I was getting a lot of the "contact armor" calls from the wingman they weren't on the radio call list. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. 5) C-17 refused to land - At the end of the mission, when returning to base, there was a C-17 that just circled the airport. Didn't look in the ME if it was a assignment problems with his waypoints, but he just circled and never tried to land. Other AI planes could land though. 6) Debrief menu failure spam - I got shot up a little bit in the mission, I never got a warning light or anything, but I lost my guns. On RTB and mission quit, I had a list of about 10 items with "failure", but no detail on what the failure was. In the debrief log (that I included), it only seems that I had one failure listed (lost ILS or something), but no other failures listed (not sure if the guns that I lost would have shown in the debrief log or not). Something seems screwy here anyways. The rest in this list are kinda niggles that have occurred in the past and didn't get fixed or never really were called out as problems/bugs. 7) If you have radio on and set to the flight's frequency. When you call for engine startup the wingmen will call out "Rolling". Not sure why it is "rolling", maybe something like "starting engines" would be more appropriate. This has always annoyed me for some reason. 8) Still is a typo in the JTAC radio menus that reads "Ready to copy remakrs" 9) This one bothers me quite a bit. If you order a wingman to "attack with mavericks" and he DOESN'T have mavericks, he will "copy" will start his roll in and when about ready to attack realizes he doesnt have mavs, and then will rejoin. This is majorly annoying because unless you cheat and use "F2" to look at his weapons load you have no idea what weapons he has left. If you tell him to attack with mavs and he doesn't have mavs he should reply "negative".....then you will know he is out and he won't fly into danger and then rejoin without doing anything. 10) Ive noticed this especially with the DC first mission. It seems that wingman fuel burn is a lot greater than lead's fuel burn. In this mission, it seems all of the A-10 flights are loaded out with about 50% fuel. If you get into the battle area at a height of around 15K, your wingman will burn almost all of his fuel and will call out bingo and will RTB very quickly. I remedy this with my wingman by loading out around 75% fuel. This still happens with other AI flights though. In the first DC mission there is already a A-10 flight in the air that holds at WP3 (I usually check this with TacView). Right when they are about ready to push, that flight's wingman ALWAYS RTB right at push because he is out of fuel. Lead usually goes on and does some damage, but there seems to be quite a bit if difference in fuel burn between lead and wingman. OK, that is all I have for now :) Attached is the .trk file and log file all zipped up for your perusal. failure.zip

Coolio, no big thing, Ive gotten to a habit to check to see if DTS is selected, if not it is only a quick couple of button presses.

I haven't seen anyone mention it, so I am not sure if it got fixed or if I am not doing something right. I thought meant we no longer would need to change it to DTS when doing a cold start, but I am not getting DTS on the hud after everything is set. I still have to change it myself. Something I am doing wrong?

Devil's Cross 05B Video Sorry for the delay in this thread. I had actually put the video up on my YT page, but didn't post here because I wanted to add some comments here and didn't have the time to sit through and do it...but here it goes! When does an apparent sign of strength become unmasked as a sign of desperation or a Hail Mary pass? When you push all of your remaining assets towards a choke-point with a formidable opposing force in a vastly superior defensive position. Yes, the Russian forces are protected from above by tons of SA-8 and SA-11 units, but what good are they when your units are going to be torn up by the enemy defensive positions? If the tanks don't get ya those pesky A-10s can pick you off with their Mavs while firing just outside of SAM range. If you can hold off this attack the Russians will have to go home with their tails between their legs (or in a pine box). The Russian assault will come from two directions, but they have to funnel through a well defended choke-point. You are tasked to help take out the advancing troops, but because of a scheduling quirk or ineffective SEAD, the Russians have some SA-8s West of the chokepoint and SA-11 and SA-8 to the North. There are expected to be some MANPADS closer to the chokepoint as the enemy columns advance. IF YOU WANDER TOO FAR and go past the chokepoint....make sure you have a functional jammer and plenty of countermeasures! I'll skip the startup and takeoff stuff, that should all be kinda standard by now....just want to point out something that I do after takeoff. I level off at around 3K and 200knots and start a slow left turn. I do this to allow the rest of the flight to takeoff and rejoin before heading towards fence, and the control point. Also, again in this mission I loaded out a bit more fuel, 4 Mav-Ds and 4 CBU-97s for the flight. After the flight joins, I power up the TGP, Mavs, and arm weapons, CM to semi-auto. The CP and IP are pretty close to the airport so get them ready as soon as you can. Because of the SAM and MANPAD threats, it is best to get some altitude before getting near the IP. I originally level out at 10K, but 15K may be a bit better. When I get to the CP and try to contact JTAC, they have no targets for me. This is actually a "bug" in the mission. JTAC is set to assign a target that never spawns, and it just tells you there is no targets and you can go home. DON'T. The troops are still there and are easy to find. Just slew your TGP over the IP and look for the smoke. By the time you get to the CP, some of the troops get into range of the defending tanks and start to get slaughtered. Just go ahead and choose your own targets to take out. I first slew to the advancing columns and tell second flight to take out air defenses. Hopefully they will fire their Mavs off far enough out they won't wander into SAM range...but you never know with their AI! After they start to go in, I decide to go in and plink some tanks with my CBUs at high altitude. I climb to 12K and drop one CBU in CCRP mode. Some of the SA-8's light me up but dont fire. You are just at their edge of their range, so if they fire on you you can probably just turn tail and out run of the SAMs. Make sure to either egress to the south or SE....do not wander too far north or West! I then send in #2 to take out armor with Mavs. After he shoots his wad, I spot a couple of groups of tanks in the ditch and go back in with CBUs. Ripple 2, 150ft apart in CCRP mode. On my run in #2 gets taken out by a SAM...oh well. On egress I tell second flight to take out armor with any Mavs they have left.....It is going to be a suicide mission if I send them in to take out armor with CBUs. Before #4 could engage, I pull them back out and decide to find some stragglers to take out with my Mavs. I find one tank inbetween the smoke, but I turn back when I get painted by SAMS. I then tell second element to go back in to engage again. #3 takes out a couple of tanks and I maneuver and find some targets at a different angle and take them out with two mavs. I then search and find a BMP-1 with some MANPADS around them and take them out. I search around a little more and find another BMP-1 and take it out with my last Mav. After that, I spend some time taking a look around the area to see if there are any last armor in the area...then I play a little bit with the SAMs :). I check the mission status and I see I have a 99% and then head home. To get 100% in this mission you need to keep the armor away from the chokepoint (around the limit of your tank's defensive position). You get 50% for taking off, 25% for keeping them away for 40 minutes, and another 24 for keeping them away for 50 min. Another 1 for landing back at base :). The wind was kicking it on landing....although ATC said wind was like 4m/s it was probably a bit higher...I was hitting the rudder pretty hard to keep the flight path indicator on the runway...The landing sucked and I kinda slammed the front gear down on the tarmac, but I didn't completely kill the tires :). I finish the mission, I am credited with 13 kills, but it didn't give mthe kills of the MANPADS I took out along with the BMP-1s though. YAY! Campaign Success! ended up with an 81 mission success rate and credited with 66 kills in the 5 missions. Whelp, that is it for the Devil's Cross campaign. I hope you all enjoyed the videos. I just wanted to show ya all how I ended up flying the missions. If I was going to fly them, why not record them right? All it took was some hard drive space for the videos and some minimal video editing. They weren't supposed to be videos to show how to fly the missions "by the book" but more along the lines of a regular Joe and how he thought he should fly them, hopefully getting something right along the way and surviving the flight :) I'll probably do some more on the other campaigns, but I am going to at least wait till the patch is out to see how things go with the AI and other things before I do some vids.

^^ Should be fixed in the upcoming patch that *crosses his fingers* that hopefully will be available later this week.

Track replay is way too hit and miss....mostly miss. Many here say that their track files have them wandering off the runway and crashing in the fields. For me, they usually are OK at the beginning, but when it gets to a point where I should lock something up in my TGP, the plane is not in the spot where it should be and I lock onto some random point on the ground. This means that weapons are off target and if it was supposed to be a Mav firing, it never does fire because there is no lock. Usually sometime after this point, the plane takes a weird turn and crashes into the ground. The track recording and replay is supposed to be better in the upcoming patch. Hopefully it is and then maybe we will be seeing some more tracks floating around.

I know it may look a bit daunting to jump into a campaign mission and try to complete it, but I think the easiest way to do things is to learn things piece by piece. One little thing at a time and get those little things down pat and then link those things together. Each time you do some of the practice things become easier. Read through the manual, do the training missions, and then supplement them by making some of your own simple missions in the mission editor to help repeat some of the stuff shown in the training missions. Don't try too much stuff at once, you can easily get frustrated that way :). Make sure to get your joystick, trackir, throttle, rudders set up to your liking because if you aren't comfortable flying/looking around, it only complicates things. If you have programmable buttons, settle on a profile and stick with it. It can be tough to fire off a Mav if you cant remember which button or hat switch to use in locking it up or firing it off :). Play with the sensitivity for your joystick axes. I am sure most ppl here use some sort of axis curves to help keep things under control without stalling the plane. You'll have to experiment to find out which values work the best for yourself. As for the my TrackIR use, I spend a while tweaking my profile to get something that I liked and was smooth. The main thing I did was to set my resolution a bit lower than my monitor max and go with the windowed mode. This way I could switch from the Sim and the TrackIR program to tweak a bit here and there to get things down. I have an old TrackIR 3 Pro and I have the track hat clip + Vector expansion. The biggest things for me is to have a kinda deadzone in the middle so any small movements of my head doesn't get things off whack that much. For settings, I am sure they will all vary with how far away from the camera you sit, but I use a speed of 1 and a smoothness of 50 (the lower resolution of the TIR3 I had to push the smoothness a bit). I've attached a .jpg of my settings, they may look a little weird, but they work for me :). My pitch setting may look a bit weird, but I always had some trouble looking up so I had to set some of those settings high, and went way down with the settings for looking down because I got tired of looking at my seat all the time. That doesnt help out all of the time because in my videos you do get a bunch of shots of my seat when I usually look down to use some of keys on my keyboard. One last thing. Keep your head still! I remember when I first got my TIR for use in IL-2. I would move my head into turns, the deadzones I have set helps on that regard though :)

I had a couple of times forgetting to hit the NWS button after disconnecting trying to figure why it wouldn't reconnect....doh. Tonight I decided to try refueling again....it has been a couple of months since I had tried refueling, and the best I could refuel had tons of disconnects. For some reason tonight things clicked. Only tried it once and I was able to get a full tank with only one disconnect. My previous times trying was with the tanker at 10K and it was traveling at 240 on the HUD. This time I was refueling at 15K and speed was about 210 on the hud. Dunno why but I was able to keep speed constant and had no problems keeping it hooked up. Did a video of the attempt. It may be helpful to someone out there :) I did a split screen showing my HUD on the right side and on the left an exterior shot of the boom and plane so you can get an idea on just where the boom is in relation to what it looks like in the HUD. After connecting I just concentrate on the spot where the boom comes out of the flying arm. For reference, here is the last time I tried refueling... Click on the inline vid above to see the full size version... 720p for teh win!

I flew and recorded the 5th mission in the campaign and I came here to post some things abut the mission and it seems that Frostiken has posted some of the same things I was going to :). 1) Yup JTAC is broke. I had never gotten JTAC to give me a target in flying this mission. Opened it up in the ME and figured out what is wrong. The mission designer for some reason assigned the first two targets to be targets that never spawn in the mission. JTAC gets stuck because it is waiting for these targets to show up, and never moves on to targets that are already there. I edited the mission files and got rid of these two nonexistant targets, I have attached them below. THIS IS THE ONLY THING I CHANGED IN THIS MISSION! Make sure to back up the missions before you drop them into your campaign folder. 2) Yup like one of the earlier missions, Blue has great defensive positions and chew up the russians as they go straight for the checkpoint. Russians need someone to come in and help clear the way for the charging troops! Their artillery and rockets are able to take some of the blue tanks out, but not enough to avoid a massacre. 3) I think the winds are kinda fun, I was scratching my head with the tower saying 2m/s when I was about to land with me pushing about 3/4 rudder to keep the plane pointed down the runway! 4) Go high or go home (in a box) :). I don't think I have had a problem with the manpads, mainly because I am usually around 10K in this mission, and I learned with all of the SAMs painting me that It is best to stay within the limits of the Blue defensive line. A Mav on the BMP will take the BMP out and usually will also take out the manpads with the resulting blast. 5) Not sure about the trigger zone, mainly because the NME never reaches it :) 6) That one SEAD flight is only set to land, so I just play this mission as if there was no SEAD and you are all alone. There is an Apache that will spawn, attack and then get shot down by all the SAMS, I use them as a SAM sink while I am attacking. I cant say I have ever had a problem with the MiGs. I've got all of the vids for this mission, (I flew it without the JTAC working). Hopefully I will get it all together and have it posted sometime later today. dc05.zip

Yea, in the videos, I use the hook the triangle and then china hat forward long to make it my SPI. I probablay should also creae a markpoint when I hook the triangle but usually don't either. WarriorX is correct in putting it in the CDU (which I usually don't), because if you forget to hit the "wilco" button to accept the data, that triangle will eventually disappear, and then you would have to go back to the CDU and enter the data to get that point again!

For me at least, I have gotten enough out of the sim in the current state that the upcoming patch is just gravy. From the changelog the patch seems to fix alot of things, but for many of the things there were kinda work arounds available and werent necessarily "quit playing until the patch comes out" bad. Hopefully when things are sorted with this one, everything will be set for a while so the team can be in the position to finetune and maybe add features instead of bug quashing, and we won't be anticipating further patches because we are too busy flying with 1.1.0.8 :)

I highly suggest TACVIEW also. I mainly use it to get a grip overall what happened on the battlefield. It helps in trying to figure out just who took out that tank I was about to fire a Mav off of, and it also lets you see SEAD and CAP and just what they are doing, just how close those MiGs were that you were ignoring, etc.

Here are the missions, 4A and 4B that I edited to add the FAC target to JTAC and changed the size of the trigger zone. I have a feeling that it isn't going to be fixed in the upcoming patch because I don't think this had been reported before. Back up your old files first and then drop them in the campaign folder and you should be all set. dcmission4.zip