Mr_Blastman

In 1991 there was a little game called Gunship 2000 by Microprose, where the front seater in the Apache or co-pilot in any other helo would call out targets and threats, vocally with digitized speech. Petrovich should do this, too. My flares in the Mi-24 are lonely and would love to be used more. See here what the co-pilot would do: Yes, he would even call out inbound missiles.

Not possible until after I move sometime in the next year. No hardware purchases until then. Everything must be replaced after move.

Helmet mode doesn't work--I have it on all the time, anyways, because otherwise the jet engines would cause me to go deaf. We desperately need this feature.

I like to fly DCS with my surround sound cranked up. I don't want to play with headphones. When flying online, however, this becomes a problem with the microphone and talking to GCI. Often, the sim noises drown out the microphone reception, making me either have to sound like a total douche on the radio, loud and slow, or constantly repeating calls. It would be nice if there was an option in DCS to have the sim sound automatically lowered in volume whenever activating push to talk.

I want a verbal co-pilot similar to what we had in Janes Longbow 2 or Gunship 2000 or EECH.

WTF! I thought this was just me! Keeps happening when flying the Mi-24, sometimes part of the screen, sometimes all of it. The black will flicker on and off. What's odd is I can still hit escape and go to the menu, but the cockpit and the game world remain black until the flicker stops. I am using full windowed mode.

I did not have to map my dogfight switch on my Cougar with the Viper. It worked right out of the box. In fact, there were only two buttons I had to fix after installing the Viper module. I think DCS automatically detects if you have a Cougar. Otherwise, post #2 is correct.

That's a bummer. On the bright side I actually found a use for the pop out auxiliary compass.

So yesterday I was farting around and decided to go for a Chuck Yeager "The Right Stuff" moment, so I became a dot and when I was around Mach 1.5 at 42k feet I nosed up and headed for stars. Up I went, and the needle kept spinning, 50, 60, 65k, the spinning slowed and my nose began to wobble. Just before I hit angels 72 I mused to myself, "Wouldn't that be nice if I had a compressor stall?" Funny how musings go. Sometimes they actually happen. And my engine went out. My nose careened groundward and the distant Earth began to grow past my canopy glass. Calm as I could be, I re-lit my engine and powered the generators back on by Angels 50 and regained control of my airframe. My INS, however, was porked. Gone was my velocity vector and I knew not how to align in flight. I managed to land at a nearby friendly airfield without these modern HUD accoutrements, safely. Still, I wonder, what does a Mirage pilot do when their engines go dead in flight, thus stalling their generators, too? Is there a way to align in flight? I know in the Viper one can, and have done this in that other Sim. It would be neat if we could here, too, as I was pleasantly surprised that the compressor stall happened. I also think I can blow past angels 72 sometime, as well, when I really try.

I was up against Gepards when I do not have perfect control in the MI-24 yet. I have come to find out that Gepards are top of the heap in AAA nastiness in DCS. I wish there was a feature similar to F4 where we can pull up the unit database while on the map to quick check the specs on whatever target we're looking at--of course, this feature only works when not in the jet. I then hopped in the KA-50 after failing eight times without a single kill and completely wiped the entire airbase on my first try.

20 shots 20 misses online this weekend. He can't hit for crap. I almost always fire at a hover outside AA range. This isn't working. Flying towards a combined AA+SAM emplacement while launching seems like suicide.

I like how there's an option to have translations on the labels inside the Hind cockpit, which is nice because as an english speaker I would be hopelessly lost without. In the KA-50 module, the voice messages from the chopper are also translated to english, as well. Are there any plans to translate these voice messages in the Mi-24?

In modded EECH one can lean into the optical tubes in the Apache to look through the periscope in that aircraft and it is pretty darned cool! We don't press a key to do this, we simply lean to look through it using our Track IR degrees of freedom and the display appears as we get close. When I first sat in the gunner seat of the Hind I instinctively tried to do this but nothing happened. Are there plans of adding this feature into DCS?

The thing I have noticed is in my experience elevation rarely solves my detection issues. As long as a target within the in hi/low value of the scan box then that should solve this issue, and they are and still can't be detected until really close. What's odd is sometimes I'll be locked by a 29 or 33 when they are at 80 - 90 nm and I can't even see them on the scope, even in a Viper.

I thought I was going insane with poor detection until I read this thread. I come from BMS where radar felt like it worked a bit differently and targets I clearly could have detected at long ranges I cannot in DCS at all. That I was not able to see a red AWACS target such as a Su-33, Mig-25 or Mig-21 turn into a detected blip at 40 NM in Hornet was driving me insane. I have noticed though that I have much better luck detecting things in RWS versus TWS. TWS feels very sketchy and was often the go-to in the Viper.

Found this on Youtube today. FLIR, Iglas, Vikhr and Ataka, RWR, EO jamming. Badass upgrades.

For those who don't know, Wags was interviewed in PC Pilot this month by C3PO, aka former Lead Pursuit member and they got into details on a number of topics, one of which was the dynamic campaign... Needless to say ED has a fantastic vision for what they want to accomplish. One item that caught my attention was their desire to not just have theaters, but expand the dynamic campaign so it is global, i.e. the entire planet, where a pilot could fly from one region to the next, and logistics throughout the world would be simulated and one could even interfere or disrupt entire supply chains or industries. Of course, the entire premise behind this sounded huge and maybe decades away--that's a lot to model! This got me thinking... Is ED planning on using their existing engine and mapping/terrain, etc. to do this? Wags explained he wanted Vulkan implemented as a necessary first step for improving performance to make these sorts of things happen. But how is it possible for them to model the entire globe? They could use something such as Google Earth like the latest MS Flight Sim uses... or... They could go procedural. Some here may have played Star Citizen. If you have, then you'll agree that the terrain detail up close is stunning. The amount of bits one can discern from little rocks and pebbles and broken bits of dirt and crags in slopes and cliffs is jaw-dropping. Thing is, this technology isn't anything new. There's another project I have followed for over a decade almost called Outerra Anteworld. They have basically simulated the entire planet Earth using procedural generation. I've glided through the Grand Canyon, for instance, and it looks pretty darned good--far better than DCS does up close. Absent are simple texture shader tricks to simulate nooks in mountain ranges--the nooks are rendered in extreme detail down to almost the grains of dirt. They have progressed considerably over the years and are now putting in rivers and even roads. The trees, however, are flat and crummy--nothing as gorgeous as ED trees. From a hundred feet in DCS in the Caucus mountain range at times I'm convinced that I'm no longer in a game. They look wonderful. Are ED considering marrying their technology/shaders/trees/objects with procedural terrain generation to take this to the next level? Perhaps using a global GPS database with a procgen engine to fill in the fine details to pull this off? I don't think it would be feasible to handcraft an entire planet. I'd love to know more on how they might go about this, as a built-in Dynamic Campaign is at the very top of my list of things I want to see in DCS. Liberation is awesome, don't get me wrong, but I want to see a fully integrated system that works both offline and online and is persistent.

This worked, thanks!

Yes, I realize you can assign shift buttons, but what I cannot do is have a button serve as a shift button but also as a separate, discrete function in the jet as well. If I set S3 to be a shift modifier and also to do EXP/Zoom, it will only shift modify while in the jet and EXP/Zoom ceases to function on that button. How do you set detents?

First, looking good ED! I went up in the jet first time today and felt at home. I have I have no idea how many thousand hours in the simulated jet, and once in DCS there wasn't anything to learn, the jet just worked as I'm used to for the most part, minus missing functions here or there that will be added over time. Early access, still in development, cool. I was pretty impressed that DCS recognized my modded TM HOTAS Cougar and mapped the buttons without me having to do pretty much anything from the start. It was already ready, minus two mis-mappings: Microstick X-axis was swapped with Ant Elev rotary. I swapped those axes and was golden, although I did have to invert Ant Elev. Couple things: 1) S3 Pinky Button is used for EXP/Zoom, but also often used as a "shift" function. I would love for DCS to allow for a shift button to also be used for a single context sensitive function as well when no other buttons are being held. This way I can shift some other items such as the top china hat for zoom in/zoom out slow. 2) Throttle detent - able to manually set the detents within DCS per their appropriate locations would be welcome. I'm used to this in BMS, and the Cougar comes with detents stock. Sure, there's not a lever to release, etc. but being able to go through the GUI and specify position of Mil detent and AB detent as I'm moving the throttle--where they are and kick in would be fantasic. I spent a short while but what's there so far works great. The jet feels pretty solid, handles close to what I'm used to with weight on wings, loaded out, empty, etc., landings and takeoffs felt natural. I really love the dynamic glass reflections and wing deformations, and all the other shiny that comes with DCS. Thanks guys for you hard work.

KA-50 for weapons deployment without a RWR.

I have been flying on the blue flag servers which encourage invading FARPs/Airbases and capturing territory and helos are essential to re-supply and reinforce captured FARPs. Some of these simply cannot be cleared out easily with fixed wing aircraft given the terrain limitations. I think in the last couple of weeks players have started hiding manpads in the woods with their re-supplies. They are showing up in devious spots you cannot spot them at. I noticed how poor the S13s are at killing infantry, which is counter-intuitive because they were designed for killing them. Perhaps ED will fix the splash problem? Even with splash, spotting them is still a nightmare when in trees.

I started flying the KA-50 again a month ago after many, many years of not touching DCS. The flying part came back quickly, as well as weapon employment. I went straight to online servers--primarily PVP oriented ones as I prefer a dynamic environment that is always changing. This is when I discovered hidden MANPADs. Solo MANPADs hiding in forests... among the trees. Yes, as if they are hard enough to find out in the open, somehow they're trekking through the woods to shoot me down as I rain fire down upon a remote FARP in the mountains. I get no warning, I see not their presence, only the curling cloud of smoke as it emerges from the leaves, blasting my engines out and then I spiral into the ground. What's the best way to find these bastards? Do I even bother? If they're in the trees I do not have FLIR to see them. Do I load up on parachute bombs and carpet annihilate woods in a manner that would have environmentalist calling Geneva and demanding my execution for my vicious deforestation? What's irritating is since I can't spot them while trying to take out bigger targets such as HAWK and various stinger/sidewinder armored carriers and Vulcan swiss cheese graters, I'm a sitting duck in my hover in the valley. These little buggers are free to crawl up beneath me and boom, time to respawn.

Yes black shark 3 please. A proper RWR and IR jammer would be really nice and useful.

This isn't a BMS level campaign system... yet. I have found that if I fragged a AWACS flight to take off prior to my own package on a carrier none of the flights may ever take off, so the solution is to have the annoying offenders start airborne--which makes them non-targetable but at least planes leave the deck or runway. My biggest issue with Liberation is that unlike BMS where we have the background sim running constantly and when we enter the pit there will be plenty of planes mid-flight at various stages of their missions, in Liberation everything starts once you hit start in order that they're fragged to take off, and there is no way to instantly skip ahead to your own take off time. In order to get that full "BMS live environment" feeling, one has to sit around with time acceleration on for a spell and frag their flight to occur minutes or an hour into the future. Still, regardless of this, the Liberation missions I have run have been among the closest to BMS/Falcon even when starting at 0:00:00 of anything I've ever experienced with DCS. The canned missions don't give me heebie jeebies and sweat like these can. I think the issue is Liberation isn't built into DCS, nor is there a true background sim. ED says they're working on something, let's hope this is so... I long for that real time dynamic environment we've had for decades. Closest alternative is some of the online dynamic environment PvP servers with ground objectives.