CBStu

I finally completed Mission 3. Got on the boat, was told I could close the mission now, got to the statistics screen and both results were 100 or >. Cool, this was my 3rd or 4th try so I am happy. I go to the usual upper right corner X and click it. I get a popup saying something about do I want to do this because I will lose my progress if I do. So I go to lower right nice color button 'End Mission' and click it. Same popup. WTF? I don't know any other way to end a mission. So I click it. And failed the mission. What am I doing wrong?

I wanted to come back to say that now, after quite a few more flights ,DCS is back to the way it used to be. I have flown several missions w/ 16 to 20 planes flying at the same time and got a tiny stutter twice when I moved my head real fast. So all of the planes kept flying and it was just my TIR5 view that had a slight hiccup. This is wonderful. I can't thank all of you enough. I made some changes recommended in this thread but the video from Hartsblade posted by Silverdevil on Feb20 is the fix for me. It does make me wonder though. All the testing done by ED prior to releasing 2.9 and no one was running a PC w/ Win Defender on it? That is kind of hard to believe. OH well, I am a happy guy loving DCS again.

One other note. Maybe 1-2 years ago DCS set it up so you can skip a mission in a campaign and go on to the next mission. I have a couple of campaigns that have 2-3 slipped missions. I usually go back later and try to do the skipped ones. Sometimes I have learned something somewhere else and now I can complete the mission. Sometimes I still can't complete it. Oh well, moving on.

An alternative to campaigns is single missions from the user files. I fly a lot of these. Some kind of suck so I delete them. Flew one the other day that was fine until I tried to get back on the carrier and the ICLS was not set up. I made it but it was ugly. User Files (digitalcombatsimulator.com) One thing that has helped me is I keep my web browser button visible while flying. When I get to something I don't know how to do I pause DCS and go learn. Chucks Guide is invaluable. There are also a lot of youtube videos available. When setting up a new to me weapon I often go back and forth DCS to guide or youtube. Pausing one, then pausing the other, so I can follow steps one at a time until the weapon is ready. Also, if you get frustrated, get out of the mission and fly one you have figured out and enjoy. I like to learn but this is also supposed to be fun. I have two user misions now that I have flow each 2-3-4 times and still have not succeeded. I will keep trying. Oh a second thing that helps is fast forward. Once I fly a mission and basically see how it goes, when there is a spot that needs 50nm of flying (maybe to the next waypoint) w/ nothing happening, I often fast forward until I am 5-10nm away and then go back to normal speed.

Good job. I see nothing wrong w/ adjusting an axxis at all. It's not like you can't readjust it.

Cool, glad you got it fixed. We can all learn a bit from your situation.

Yes they had the svc tag for both purchases and I double checked that the part number on the first one I bought matches the one I just now ordered.

Thanks guys. I ordered another grossly overpriced Dell ram stick. So I will check the old one to see if they match the new ones. Supposedly what I bought is compatible w/ my PC but I am not sure that means they exactly match the original ones.

Silverdevil, you da MAN! Setting all the exclusions in Defender per that video did the trick. I flew the single player mission Battle for the Docks where I used to get stutters just taxiing and it is now perfect. Then I flew Shootin Putin where there are 4 flights of 4 friendlies and about 20 red planes. It ran PERFECTLY. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you. A general question though. I understand that, while DCS is loading it must go online as it checks for updates, but is something going on online while I am playing in single player? I ask because I think I understand that Defender is looking at protecting the PC from crap coming in from the web. So why were all the exclusions affecting how it flys if I am playing within my PC? Lange 666, I will order another 16 stick from Dell. It is too expensive but, at my PC skill level, I think that is my safest way to go. I have 4 ram slots and the existing ones are in the 2 white slots so I will place the new 16s in the whites. Would there be any way to use the old 8s by placing them in the black slots? I will also look into the ST/MT thing. Not sure I need to but will try ST just to see. BTW I am not sure what I did in Alienware Command Center but I had been manually setting it to performance which cranked up the cpu fan constantly until I changed it back. But the other day I changed something so now the fan cranks up automatically when I launch DCS. That is a nice function so I will figure out how I did that.

Silverdevil thx so much. I had dropped McAffee and started using Defender a month or so ago. I did exclude dcs but now I realize just part of it. OS c user, name ,saved games, dcs. So I followed the video rec exactly and changed that to all of saved games vs just dcs. Also added all his other exclusions except simple radio which I don't have. Unfortunately I will have to wait until tonight to try flying. BTW, my PC = Aurora R9, Core I7-9700k @ 3.6Ghz, Geforce RTX 2080Super, 16 ram. running an Alienware 27 monitor at 1920x1080. I have learned a bit about Alienware Command Center how to crank up the CPU cooler fan before starting dcs. Haven't learned about overclocking yet though. I will keep working through this and thank you again for all your help.

6-8 months ago I thought my 4 yr old Alienware was needing some upgrades. I used to notice in a few missions w/ a lot of planes moving around on carrier or airfield or w/ a bunch flying, I'd get some lags/stutters. But it usually went away a few minutes after takeoff. Then 2.9 stable effed dang near everything. I have a mission Battle for the Docks where the only thing moving other than my plane is a few cars on the airfield perimeter road. And I get stutters and actual 2-3-4 second pauses taxiing to the runway. I have done a few of the fixes, turned down or off some graphics settings recommended in a thread by BigNewey, dropped max fps to 120. Dropped from the medium to the low graphics setting. DCS is somewhat better now but sure wish I hadn't gone to 2.9. So a few Qs to try to see if some internal desktop upgrade might help. 1- I see mentions of flying in either MT or ST. I guess MT is multi threading? IDK. Several posters say MT sucks while all is well in ST but I have no idea where I can choose one or the other. 2- No way to spend $2500 on a new PC and I have seen some comments indicating that newer higher performance PCs than mine are having similar problems anyway so.... 3- How do I get real time #s on graphics and main processor (and whatever else is important) performance? Maybe I need to upgrade one or the other or? 4- A couple of weeks ago I saw my PC has 16 of ram so bought another 16 stick only to find out my 16 is actually two 8s so I need to buy another 16 stick. Due to my lack of experience I bought Dell guaranteed to be compatible ram at $130 for the 16 and of course now I see I could have gotten two 16s from Crucial for <$100. Should I buy another Dell 16 or shelve the one I have and buy Crucial? I have seen quite a few people mention their PC specs in a thread and now I am thinking maybe extra ram won't really do me much good? 5- I have seen threads about turning off a processor core and then turning it back on? In the bios? That is way beyond my ability and I don't think I should have to do things like that to play DCS when my PC works just fine for everything else. I think DCS should fix whatever is causing so many people to have the same problem. I understand DCS could have a tough time making something work on 1000s of different PCs but mine is a pretty run of the mill standard machine from a mainstream manufacturer so whatever testing they did certainly seems nowhere near enough to me. I understand that like all electronics, things need to upgrade periodically so I understand and am willing to do some things. If I saw some big improvements w/ 2.9 but my PC is old enough to not be able to take advantage of some of them fine. But I see NOTHING OTHER THAN PROBLEMS and I am far from the only one experiencing these problems. I hope they will figure out a fix. Thanks in advance for any help you provide and now that it is typed out I realize #5 is a rant. Sorry for that but dang I used to love DCS.

I guess Microsoft is forced to let companies like McAffee to coexist. Sure made my life he11. I kept trying to get Defender set up completely and many times it told me to do something in McAffee. I don't understand since I bought this PC in 12/2019 and set up McAffee immediately. Apparently they did a major update 1.5 years ago and no problem. Then a couple months ago I started noticing problems, and they kept slowly getting worse. Oh well, I finally deleted McAffee completely. And Baam, I can do what I want in Defender no problem. Set my entire DCS folder as an exclusion in Defender last night. This Am I flew as a wingman in 10 ship mission to bomb Shiraz. DCS is fantastic. Then I flew a mission defending the CV w/ maybe 6 others and maybe 25 Migs approaching the boat. Used up all 12 missiles, landed to rearm, but all Migs shot down by others by the time I was ready again. DCS works flawlessly. Thank you to every one who helped me out. McAffee was the problem

I shut of McAffee and things seem a lot better. Have only had time for 3 missions but back to normal so far. I will need to set the exclusion in Defender as I have not done that yet. Thanks guys, I was afraid I was going to need to replace or upgrade this 4 yr old PC and that would be pretty much impossible right now. No flying DCS as it was = uuuggghhh. Maybe in 6 months???? But I have hope finally. Thanks for staying w/ me. Dang I love forums. I am on maybe 8 others in the car and gun worlds and they are all like this one. A great place to hang out and helpful when needed. I will get the Defender exclusion done this weekend and report back.

I agree on the hud. There are times when a color change is all that would help but that isn't possible. I have also noticed that the three screens are not real bright either. IDK but I wonder if this is normal. Afterall we are flying an old plane that started life in 85 or so. Not sure about dates on C version or Block 20 but it is OLD.

I will try shutting off McAffee completely. Each time I shut off the scans, a window pops up about enabling Defender. So I will.

I don't remember #s but my upgrade to 2.9 took longer by far than previous upgrades. Always stable to stable. And it was so large that 2 days later I got an email from Viasat that I have used up our high speed data and still 9 days to go. And I am now having stutters and pauses that I haven't had previously. Not sure the cause yet but.....

Yes, it still sucks. I sure wish Ed would concentrate on fixing all these niggling problems before they spend time on the next update. Fix what we have then worry about the next version please.

So I called McAffee this AM. The guy said that since an update 1-2yrs ago you can't manually enter exclusions. I pointed out that going to the help section the first thing they ask is are you on the old or the new version so I followed the new version instructions. That didn't phase him. He proceeded to help me shut down the instantaneous scans so I could run DCS w/o McAffee. Tried that and it seemed to help. TIR panning my view was fine but then I had a bunch of 1/2second stops on the takeoff. I always do 'Automatic Start' and I usually speed it up to 3x fast forward to get started more quickly and in this mission I rearmed and added a flir. So I shut DCS down and restarted and I thought let's try auto start at normal speed and waited until it was done to rearm. Better but not perfect. Shut down DCS and restart, and fly the mission w/ normal speed autostart and w/o rearming. All seemed well so shut down DCS, turn McAffee back on, restart DCS and fly the mission again. No problems. So IDK, I guess I will see how DCS works over the next week and hope for the best. Getting frustrated. Over the last 6 years I have had to learn more about PCs than I want to and 90% of it is to make DCS work.

Silverdevil, thank you. I went through the steps but the final popup window where you go through a file tree to choose the file that you want to exclude has as it's only action "Open file". I will get on the phone to the McAffee peeps tomorrow. I know there are times when that works but, in this case, all it does is show a list of all the folders within DCS.

I almost always change 120C to small and small during my initial bomb and missile setup. Figure if I need to hit a bomber I 'usually' have more time than w/ a fighter so I can change back.

I searched the web for something like warning sounds in FA-18. Came up w/ a website that would play the sounds for you. Had to click a name or description to get the sound playing so kind of backwards but worked out in the end. BTW some sounds volumes can be adjusted on a panel under your left elbow. Scroll to pg19 of Chuck's guide. The low altitude warning can be adjusted to come on at a lower altitude w/ a small knob on the radar altitude indicator. See page 44.

Over the last few weeks I have to salute twice to get launched. A bug in the new stable version?

Art-J I followed your path and came up w/ this; Are the ones at the top 'DCS' or 'dcs.log.old' the ones you want to look at? They are not compressed so are huge Doubt I can put them here. The newest of the compressed files is from 2022. Silverdevil this is McAffee start page rob10, do you think I should shut down McAffee and rely on windows defender at least as a test? Guys, another problem has been cropping up lately, maybe after going to the latest stable version 4-5 weeks ago. Huge stutters, 1-3 second stops. I thought I was just getting it in missions w/ a lot of other plains, ships etc but yesterday I flew an old mission 'Battle for the Docks'. Ground start, just my plane, no others, not even stationary eye candy. Only other thing moving is a couple of cars on a road around the airbase. Just sitting in the cockpit and looking left or right, my pan stutters. Flew through stutters and on way back to base still stutters. Pi$$ed me off. Paused mission mid flight and did a control,alt, delete to look at task manager and see this. This is actually an old one that I modified because I had screwed up and did not save my screen shot. They key is the 95-99% CPU number. Remember this is a one plane mission on pause. I had been thinking my 3 yr old mid range Alienware PC might need some upgrades but this tells me something else is wrong. DCS? or McAffee? IDK.

I searched dcs.log on my PC and maybe 10 showed up and newest was from 2022. I tried to ad an AV exception but I am running McAffee and had no luck finding a place to ad exceptions there.

This isn't new but may be getting worse. I load TIR5 and then click on DCS. It has always been slow, and I have sometimes double loaded because I think I didn't hold mouse button long enough. Today I wait and wait (60 seconds maybe) and see nothing. So to avoid a double load I minimize TIR5, and minimize my email, and see nothing else going on so hit DCS again. Then after 20-30 seconds I get a different message indicating a double load compared to what I have seen in the past. If it takes a while to completely load DCS, I can understand that. I am used to seeing the couple of different blue bars slowly proceeding left to right. But can something be done so a logo screen or something pops up w/in 10 seconds so at least I know something is happening.