LaLa

As various optional modules (type of missile for example) gets completed, the missile module could be added to the base plane at an elevated cost, creating a stepped pricing model for the plane depending what options were selected. Users could request module fixes or new additions, so ED could prioritize their efforts. If ED were up front about what they were offering simmers realizing the problems with the existing model would accept it. They might not like it, but thats where the pricing is critical to success. Its unrealistic to expect ED to do enormous amounts of work for no additional money, just as it is unrealistic to expect users to wait years for some functionality or bug fix. This is an attempt to create a win win situation.

I see the problem with the ED business model, they need to adjust it! Maybe as a pre-release version it should be very cheap, and if you want bug fixes you pay a bit more. In that way there is incentive to continue development by the developer, the user gets a cheap but albeit frustrating version (which the dev lets users know the limitations prior to purchase) allow user to pay for more functionality, BUT that functionality should be well tested not a buggy pre-release. Prices of additional functionality should be a fraction of original purchase. This could be win-win if they got the pricing right. Give ED problem with releasing buggy software frustrates and angers many users.....be up front about it, let users pay for the bug fixes........I wouldnt mind, IF the price was appropriate, and saved me wasting untold hours. This way users could upgrade when they had reached a point beyond which they could stand or only modules they wanted, put the burden of play-ability on the user providing he was willing to spend a little more. The Grim Reapers interview with Simon on future dev, precipitated this in my mind.

I came across this old article on X-Plane http://https://developer.x-plane.com/2007/04/cpu-or-gpu/ and wondered if there was a corresponding article for DCS. If your X-Plane is framerate low, or you want to increase your rendering quality, you might think “time for a new graphcis card But is it? Some rendering settings actually tax the CPU more than the GPU (graphics card). Here’s a simple rule of thumb: if you increase the setting (and restart X-Plane) and your frame-rate does not go down, a new graphics card isn’t going to make it go up! For example, if you have one of those new-fangled GeForce 8800s, you may have noticed that when you turn on FSAA the framerate doesn’t dip at all. That’s because the 8800 is insanely overpowered for X-Plane (at normal monitor resolutions) and has plenty of extra capacity that will be sitting idle on an older PC. When you turn up FSAA, you are simply wasting less of the card’s excess capacity. It goes without saying that if there were a card faster than the 8800, it wouldn’t improve your fps any more than the 8800, it would simply be even more bored. Here’s a rough guide to which features tax the CPU vs GPU: CPU-Intensive World Level of Detail Number of Objects Draw Cars On Roads Draw Birds (not that expensive for modern machines) Draw Hi Detail World World Field Of View (wider view means more CPU work!) GPU-Intensive Texture Resolution (requires more VRAM) Screen Resolution Full Screen Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) Anisotropic Filtering (most cards can do at least 4x) Draw Hi-Res Planet Textures From Orbit Cloud Shadows and Reflections (not that expensive) Draw Hi Detailed World A few specific framerate-optimization warnings: FSAA is equivalent to a higher screen resolution – that is, running at 2048×2048 and no FSA is similar to running at 1024×1024 and 4x FSAA. Both of these tax the video card with virtually no CPU increase. This is probably the only setting that can be helped only with a video-card upgrade. Texture resolution: do not worry if the total size of all textures loaded is larger than the VRAM of your card. To find out if more VRAM would help, measure frame-rate with your normal settings, with texture resolution down a notch, and with anisotropic filtering down a notch. If turning texture resolution down increases fps more than turning down anisotropic filtering, more VRAM may help. Machines with faster graphics busses (like PCIe x16) will be less sensitive to VRAM. Most Important: do not ever turn “World Detail Distance” beyond the default setting – you will simply destroy your fps and chew up your CPU for no benefit. I strongly recommend trying “low” for this setting – if you like a lot of objects, this setting can make a big difference in performance. The number of objects is virtually always a factor of how fast your CPU is, not your GPU — that is, most GPUs can draw about a gajillion objects if the CPU could only get through them fast enough. If you are unhappy with the number of objects you can draw, do not expect a new graphics card to help – it probably won’t. Cars on roads hurt fps on machines that don’t have the fastest CPU. Draw Hi detail World is doubly dangerous – it uses both the CPU and GPU. Quite literally this is where we stash “luxurious” options. Everything this checkbox does chews up framerate. (If these options didn’t, we’d leave them on all the time!) So you should not use this option if you aren’t happy with fps, if you don’t have a fast CPU, or if your graphics card isn’t that modern. (HINT: if your nVidia card has “FX” in the title, don’t use this!) Start with the default settings and experiment – turn a setting up one notch, then restart, then turn it down and try another. Different machines will be faster for some things and slower for others. EDIT: one user correctly determined (by observing CPU utilization relative to settings) that puff-style 3-d clouds bottleneck the GPU, not the CPU! This was not what I expected – when Austin originally wrote that code, our measurement indicating that sorting the puffs from far to near taxed the CPU a lot, making this CPU-intesive. At the time the old Rage 128s would also get bogged down by filling in translucent puffs as you flew right into the thick of the cloud. Times have changed and neither the sorting nor the alpha-drawing is even remotely expensive on a modern machine. So I was surprised to see the CPU not being used. After some investigation, it turns out that while the CPU and GPU have gotten a lot faster over time, the communciations channel between them has not. The result is that they both do their jobs really quickly, and as a result clog up the communications channel…the CPU simply can’t talk to the GPU fast enough to get the clouds out.

I understand the desire to simulate reality as much as possible with regard to Hotas controls, but some people are more limited by their hardware. Having to move the view, with the mouse is not the same as vr nor same as using multiple monitors, and moving your head, in other words the computer experience comes in many levels some more realistic than others. and is a far cry from the real thing. In a competitive situation, the faster one can accomplish a task may determine the winner, hence reason the hotas was invented. If you could go heads down in a microsecond and activate a control and return heads up no need for hotas. Sure there are a multitude of other factors.

Kengou seems to be correct, I am a noob to the hornet, and so far havent found a lot of functionality I can assign to the hotas. I want to minimize heads down. The hog had the ufc right under the hud, minimizing heads down for waypoints, and markpoints, cdu functionality etc. What functionality can be added to the hotas outside of those functions that most people map to the hotas eg radar, sensor, the tdc, cms are all commonly mapped on hotas. Things like ufc functionalities: cdu divert, waypoint or mark point incrementation, turning off auto incrementation of waypoints et al It appears that so much functionality is soft encoded in the mfds which make it difficult to access without going heads down.

Thanx Kengou, I’m a bit surprized, so it one display is non-functional it could be quite problematic.

In the Warthog, it was possible using the coolie hat to swap the left mfd display for the right and visa versa, is this possible in the hornet? If so how?

Helios itseft C:\Program Files\Gadrocs Workshop\Helios\Control Center.exe C:\Program Files\Gadrocs Workshop\Helios\Profile Editor.exe Helios vanilla user data info C:\Users\Terminator\Documents\Helios\ All the profiles displayed in Control Center C:\Users\Terminator\Documents\Helios\Profiles All the images required for the profiles, may include subdirectories C:\Users\Terminator\Documents\Helios\Images Where DCS looks for Export.lua C:\Users\Terminator\Saved Games\DCS\Scripts\Helios Where DCS looks for lua files for specific modules eg.for the F18 specific C:\Users\Terminator\Saved Games\DCS\Scripts\Helios\Mods\Helios_F18C.lua Contains all the subfolders for speciifi modules C:\Users\Terminator\Saved Games\DCS\Scripts\Helios\Mods Where DCS looks for monitor config files C:\Program Files\Eagle Dynamics\DCS World\Config\MonitorSetup Is this correct? Are there other paths required? Maybe path to DCS aircraft mods perhaps?

In order for Helios to run properly it needs to access files from various locations, some in the DCS folder and some in user profile folder. et al. Some files include Helios profile Images Export lua monitor configuration there may be others,but you get the idea Given a vanilla install, could someone provide a listing of the various folder paths. I see multiple locations of where these files may be placed, if necessary including the user/appdata Could someone give a current list. Thanx

Prolly is the operative word. ,but never mind,I should be community manager here! I'd straighten it out in a jiffy, before it throws a wobbly

Sorry, sorry I understand why you might be a we bit confused! What I meant to say was "Its hot enough to boil a monkeys bum in here!" Now, that should clear up any misunderstandings of my intentions.

:music_whistling: I'm sweatin here gotta change my shirt, this forum is pretty intense, Huh! Crack two Bruce!, Its hotter than a monkeys bum in here!

, but but ....this cant be! How could it be!?, there is no crater in the DCS World 2.5 subforum, a mere sign in the shape of the very hand of GOD, shining a light to the Chit Chat forum! Hallelujah! My prayers have been answered!

There was a eeerie silence then from the heavens the clouds abruptly parted BOOOOM, bits and bytes went flying everywhere, like an EMP blast from GOD himself, "I HAVE SPOKEN" When the electrons cleared a post had moved from the DCS World 2.5 subforum to the Stygian gloomy depths of the trivial chit chat page! "Well done GOD"

Exactly, when electronics hit the cockpit, the complexity hit a hysteresis point.

If ED would assess, endorse and promote user created missions that reach an acceptable standard as determine by ED, that may relieve some pressure on ED to create there own. Yes I know they already publish user created files. Perhaps contests to create great missions maybe a cost effective way of generating support material. Just dreamin!

Devs are animals that thrive in a new development environment, support is boring, I feel that having a small team, support is the phase of a product that is commonly neglected or minimized, but is critical for widespread acceptance of a product. Sure hardcore enthusiasts will battle through and lighten the way for others. ED is battling with these two, mutually antagonistic phases of product development. Fortunately the community is assisting with their support issues as they should if they want the product to survive to everyones benefit.

Reading reviews and forums across the web regarding DSC there are criticisms of many aspects of the products. If you consider how many competitors ED has in this niche by my count it is none! Why is that? I appreciate the size and complexity of this undertaking, and while I dont always agree with how they handle bugs and complaints, they remain head and shoulders above others in this gendre. What others!? I certainly look forward to the continued development of this product. This kind of work is a labor of love, and deserves user support, but with that said, its not without issues, but no product is.

Thanks. You can do that too, and then I will delete my useless posts.

Interesting to note that the AV8BNA (62 File(s) 819,787,177 bytes) missions use the most space. Dont know why? Any significance?

For me when I consider purchasing a module, I would like to know how comprehensive is the training! or How many pre-built missions are there!? Is this module merely a flight simulator with little support or extended play availability? Flying around with no mission is pointless, yes you can build your own but good missions require an experienced builder, that increases the learning curve and delays the enjoyment of flying. When I consider buying a module, and I read the reviews, one of the consistent critical comments was, lack of additional content, with regard to training and missions. I'm attempting to shed some light on this

OK Thank you! As you know this is a moving target, I'm simply a user trying to provide the community with some useful info. While a forum might not be the best place to provide this info, I have no other place to publish this information, sorry best I can do! I dont get paid for my efforts. This is exactly the reason they DONT add this info to the E-shop page, that would mean they would have to constantly maintain and alter the description of available content. ED dont want to be making constant changes to product description in their E-Shop, me ditto! Yes I agree

I considered buying a module, and I read the reviews, one of the consistent critical comments was, lack of additional content, with regard to training and missions. I'm attempting to shed some light on this.

For me when I consider purchasing a module, I would like to know how comprehensive is the training! or How many pre-built missions are there!? Is this module merely a flight simulator with little support or extended play availability? Flying around with no mission is pointless, yes you can build your own but good missions require an experienced builder, that increases the learning curve and delays the enjoyment of flying. My listing is only miz files, so additional files associated with the campaign are excluded.

Did I? The thread limit is 50,000 char, and the listing is >50,000 so for completeness it was split into 3 parts so the complete listing was displayed. I didnt notice, but its possible when I broke the listing into 3 parts there was some duplication. Yes, you are right that might have been a better way!