Squiffy

The camera controls are vital for gunnery in high g maneuvers. I ALWAYS push my camera up several clicks so I can see over the nose. This helps a bunch in deflection shooting in turns and in the vertical. In fact, I usually ignore the reticle and use tracers arc (rope a dope) and hit sprites to track my target. I have the index finger stick on my old TM Cougar throttle set to move the camera up and down. It works great. You will find that MiGs will climb away as soon as you get in the saddle behind them in recent AI. I have not fully updated because I want to keep my shell mods for muzzle velocity, bullet life and effective range. These mods help a bunch to and give a little more realism back to the historical reach and accuracy advantage the Sabre had with 50 cals instead of cannons. Especially in high g turns. Incidentally, check on your g suit settings in the Luas for Sabres and Migs. Should not exist in Mig 15s or be significantly less than 1.0 . Interesting finds there too. Case in point, old Mig 19 lua, since been fixed. It was outrageous.

Yes, great info. The 15 and 17 had massive fences and the airfoils were much thicker than the 86. I think this lent to the climb rate of the 15. But they look very agricultural and tractor like. Kind of a less than ideal solution for their high speed swept wings. But that's probably just my Amerikanski bias showing through. And remember, North American also had a winner with the laminar flow wing on the 51.

That makes me curious. I also saw a radar gunsight update in Big Newy's "newsletter" recently. I am tempted to try it but I don't want to nuke my finely tuned muzzle velocity mods in my old Beta module I've been hanging on to for so very long. The "Sputnik climb, scaredy cat" tactics of the AI are another reason why I don't update.

How do you like it? I just won one in a raffle, but I find it a little restrictive. I need to test with my new highspeed cable. Wifi was like a slide show. I also have a 48 inch monitor with TrackIR 5. Aside for the 3D gauges, I'm not sure the Quest 2 will be worth it. I have a well worn HOTAS Cougar set up so maybe VR stick and throttle could improve upon that, but I kind of doubt it. What do you think?

RIP. Selig sind...

After many hours fighting the Ai MiG-15 in the Sabre, I can say that knife fight, dash and reverse, style fights are the way to go. Even in the Sabre, you want to be more the 2 miles from the Mig before you try and reverse turn and remerge with him. That's how long it can take to turn around. keep your speed up and energy fight as usual. If you scissor and slow and force him to overtake, he will just stand on his tail and climb away from you. Firing early in a head on merge from 1 mile plus usually wounds him enough to close in. Also, a separation more like 4 to 5 miles is good to turn and remerge.

texture2 zipped F-86F_Cockpit_Texture2.rar Spec file was too big even zipped. I just blanked out the reflection zone for the lamp.

OK, trying to tint the ILS back went a bit too far. I didn't screen shot it but it was pretty dark even going to a 240,240,240 gray. I guess I went the wrong direction. Stock works fine and my clear edit works too. 240 gray was like regular sun glasses. I didn't get close enough to anything to see much but I could also tell the the lamp reflection got worse somehow, maybe because it was reflecting from somewhere else. My texture2 fie is already blank and i can show you, but the lamp still shows on the cockpit hood from outside. Not sure whats happening there. need a few days to look into it. crazy busy at work and short handed since january. lots of doctors appointments and i need to chill out. feeling better thank god but another test on the way. getting old sucks. here are some screenies. lamp on hood

Hmm, interesting. I just edited the lamp file to remove the gray circle below the lamp texture on the norm file. I edited the alfa to fully mask the reflection (rather than dither the reflection with the gray filtering on the alfa layer) and it works for me but is not completely gone. That's why I think the gray circle below the lamp on the norm may be another level of filtering. Maybe low light level or something? I will load and test now. The dive lines are somewhere else. The cockpit texture 2 was the first one I edited. I completely blanked it out, norm and alfa and it still showed on the external view of the cockpit dash. It may still reflect off the gunsight glass and that is another reason to remove that last gray circle on the lamp norm. i will load and test now and post back.

Thanks again. I can edit the channels with DXTBmp. That's what I've been using. I realize there may be another mask and filter on the same texture, just below the portion I blacked out. If you look carefully, you can see a dark gray circle below where the main reflection texture is placed/filtered on the alfa layer. This may be allowing the reflection to persist depending on how the texture is used and mapped. I can re-tint the ILS file with a lighter gray - off white and see how that goes. usually 128-128-128 gray is the transparent color used in masks. That is how it worked in CFS3 and is standard in DDS afaik. Shades lighter and darker allow more and less transparency. I'll check on it tomorrow.

Thanks!

Well that was fun. The F-5 was not mapped but the F-16 was. And sure enough, air show Eddie was flying on the numbers though massive stall turns at Angels 35. So I goofed a few times in the Viper but eventually remembered my corner speed and gave him a taste of his own medicine. Then I switched the AI to trained plus random v Sabre. Well what do you know! A little more aggression from the AI and I was able to knife fight them and bait them into high speed dives. After some damage from slashing attacks you can rip the wings off pretty nicely if you can stay out of the range of their cannons. No running for the mountains either. Gunsight glass seems OK. It's hard to tell. The pipper is much lighter, maybe that's the ILS file? Wait, isn't there a knob for that?

Haha, you know it! Yes it's the cpt_L.dds Time to reset my F-16 controls Can't wait for the F-100 F-86F_cpt_L.dds And you need to change the description line for the cpt_L file. Just follow the code and set it to FALSE so it uses the new one and does not mirror.

OK I cleaned out all of the extra files, folders and zips. The new file I made does work and reduces the lens reflection a lot. You have to be pointed almost straight up in to the wild blue to really see it like stock. I think the texture of the cockpit hood, which includes the lens in a top down view might actually be reflecting off the glass as well. But the specific "greasy" file is much reduced. Keep all files in the early black folder and the description.lua should read FALSE. This means to use the extra file and NOT mirror it from the zip. You can see that some files are not used at all and they are all TRUE or don't appear (covered by the first line which I think mirrors all except those that are cited.) Let me also say that fighting the dang AI on rookie level 1v2 is @#$%^ BORING! But by this I mean, it flies like an airshow ace PR officer hand picked to meet and greet at airshows. I mean the damn stall turns and run for the mountains are just dumb and supremely frustrating. Maybe I should fight with wing men or even 2 or 3 so tactics can be more varied? What is the point of 4 levels of difficulty if rookie is a dang airshow ace? And yes my stick is shot but a good carpenters never blames his tools. And going for some payback with a newer ship means reprogramming the damn shortcuts. More BORING! OK I am sick and this was a lot of work. Read it how you like.

Thanks Taipan! I will look into it. Been busy the last week and now out sick all week. Just checking this now. I'll be out again tomorrow and will have time to check and test. I think I still have files doubled up which is complicating things.

Thanks! I can't believe I forgot where I put it for 2 years!

I was able to break it yesterday by removing the F-86 entry in the Cockpit folder rather than in the Liveries folder. What appeared in game was a grey kind of hyperspace with star streaks, like in the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. The grey was dirty and kinda green with heavy pixilations in it like Minecraft. So I replaced that, including some early edits on other textures. I also had the unzipped folder in there so I would have files to look at and find which ones had the texture I wanted. Now I also did this in the Liveries folder so you can imagine how confusing it would get. I really need a guide here on how livery mods work because the early Black is supposed to install without any "higher" cockpit mods above or equal to Liveries. I also deleted my F-86 folder in the saved games mods folder. What I have left now is a fairly light lens reflection, maybe the same as stock Early Black, but the files I modded that are in there, should have no translucency at all. I found that sometimes the files would be written over with stock Early Black and I think that is due to the "description.lua" and the logic in whether the file "mirroring" is true or false. I got the textures set one last time, with my mods showing in DXTbmp, but still no change in game. Working properly with no gray hyperspace, but no invisible either, which is what I was striving for. I will think about it a while. I did add my textures to the zip file too and sometimes they didn't save or would be overwritten, or never saved in the first place due to write protections or other file management in the code. I tried setting them to read only after my changes but it didn't seem to make a difference. Any clues or help would be welcome. Computer projects seem to be the best task right now in this heat wave on the east coast. Driving, yard work, working on my cars is just crazy right now with inflation and the heat wave.

OK, no black disc UFO but still no go on the crystal clear glass. I also looked at the description.lua file and tried my hand at the true/false statements in the code there. Didn't work, but didn't kill it either. I'll keep at it. I am not sure what "mirroring" actually means in the code. I have a feeling it's related to the stock file folder (not all files are listed) but what does mirror mean and then what does true/false mean relative to that?

The cpt_L file was NOT in the Early Black install. This is part of why my earlier efforts had no effect. Now that I know the Early Black is unzipped AND was lacking the cpt_L file, I will try again tonight and see what happens. If I end up with a Black Circle UFO stuck in my gunsight, I'll know I went the wrong direction with the alpha. At least this would show it's having an effect. "L" is for "Lens."

You know, this might be the one that actually makes it happen. F-86F_cpt_L.dds I edited the alpha channel to all black, making the ghost image completely masked out. The alpha allowed the other parts of the skin to display normally and was only unmasked(filtered) around the gunsight lens reflection, pretty much creating the translucent reflection of the lens. I still have to test where the right install is. I tried the test first in the cockpit folder and it didn't work, but the early black install should be in liveries only as shown here in the screenshot. I also wonder if it needs to be rezipped to work. I don't think so in the liveries folder. Had some good dogfights too. You need to force the AI into knife fights and stay away from the hammerhead climb fights.

Holy Crap! Why didn't I think of that. Of course the trick is to get it to load. I'll work on it, thanks.

Hi guys, I've been messing around with the cockpit textures after installing the Early Black cockpit mod yesterday. Out of the box, the glass in the black mod looks better to me than stock, since it doesn't reflect as much of the lens and greasy glare that makes sniping bandits in vertical, near zero g, AI hammer head defensive climbs more difficult. So far I have found several textures and one in particular may have the most impact. But getting them to load in game is still a challenge since I'm not very experienced with creating texture mods in DCS. Here are the texture files I think are involved: C:\Program Files\Eagle Dynamics\DCS World OpenBeta\Mods\aircraft\F-86\Liveries\Cockpit_F-86F Sabre F-86F_Cockpit_ILS.dds F-86F_Cockpit_Texture2.dds F-86F_Cockpit_Texture2_SPEC.dds F-86F_cpt_L.dds F-86F_cpt_L_SPEC.dds This last one, cpt_L_SPEC is an alpha channel in one layer (specular). The one before it, cpt_L may be the primary one creating the reflection. It has a base texture AND and alpha, filtering the projector lens image however is designed in the model. I think this is the main method of creating the reflection visible to the pilot. This I would like to minimize as much as possible. I have tried several places to get my modded files to load: 1. In the Early Black mod folder by swapping filenames with stock to tell them apart. 2. In the Early Black mod, in the cockpit folder instead of liveries 3. In my save game folder under the mods/aircraft with a new cockpit folder, in folder or in a zip. I am pretty sure I would need to change some other files like luas and such. Can anyone help or suggest the best place to start? I used to paint and mod a lot in the CFS3, Roman BOB-MiG Alley days and have just gotten back into it. DXTbmp still works! Thanks!

Yeah, the sweep on the 100 is a good bit more pronounced, and the relative area of the vertical stabilizer is less than that of the 86. This and roll/inertia coupling contributed to the dance. Very scary and happens at low speeds like landing! https://www.historynet.com/deadly-sabre-dance/#:~:text=First produced in 1953%2C the,pilot's throttle hand—an afterburner.

For what it's worth, after some fantastic research by Curly, here is an epic gun harmonization photo I found a couple years back. I left it on my computer at work and wanted to be sure we all got to see it. It's a night time shot and the ricochet is pretty cool too. This is at 1 g, but you can see the almost laser like trajectory at convergence distance on the gun range. Cheers!

While high g leading may not have been the norm for the Sabre, it was an established defensive effect for avoiding the slower Mv cannons of the MiG. This was the main point of Boots advice. In a 4g turn or higher, it was impossible for the MiG to lead the Sabre enough to hit it. I did not mean to say the Sabre COULD make hits vice versa. The higher Mv of the bullets meant the Sabre could make more effective leading shots, especially at longer ranges, and lower g. Remember, the 6 50 cals are grouped close together, just like on the P-38, Mosquito, and B-25 gunships of WWII. In no way am I saying they on par with cannon, but grouped 50 cals did do damage and were a step up from the dispersed 303s of the early Spits. We have all heard the quotes of surviving LW pilots on how the Spits 303s sounded like gravel on a tin roof when getting hit. The 8 50s of the P-47 Jug are legendary. And on another tac, one of the most annoying things I find about trying to land hits on the MiG is the difference in roll center between the two planes. The MiG wing is shoulder mounted, the Sabre is belly mounted. So when at low speed, say at the top of a standard climb defense from the AI, rolling or yawing to get your pipper on the bandit can be really annoying because the gunsight moves in an arc around the wing spar below the cockpit, while the MiG pivots closer to the the center of the cockpit if not the gunsight itself. Maybe it's my old clunky HOTAS Cougar but I have flow the Sabre enough to see this.