DeltaMike

The SA feature is really helping. It basically puts your radar contacts in the hsi. If a contact has been identified as hostile by awacs it'll have a caret under it. You can interrogate contacts your own self now, without locking them up. Not as good as automatic interrogation -- that's coming -- but it's very handy. Still a little buggy but a great improvement. Wags put out a video, you kinda have to try it out and work with it but it's pretty slick

I kind of get the feeling you get out of a GPU what the developers put into it. I'm flying radeon right now because the Vega was perfect for the mining task I gave it (hard to argue with free I guess) and before that the 290x was a beast for certain tasks. But I get the feeling nvidia is favored by people developing flight sims; for example xplane doesn't even support radeon last time I checked. Hard to know what the future holds, right now I think radeon is investing more (behind the scenes) in VR and multi-GPU computing. If we continue to brute-force VR, that strikes me as a good strategy. But in the end it all depends on what the developers implement. DCS as a matter of policy doesn't support one brand over the other so right this second I suspect it all boils down to compute units, maybe I'm wrong but I figure the more of those the better. If so it's a matter of that, the quality of components and architecture. To the extent nvidia is banking on advanced instruction sets, I don't think that's gonna help us much in DCS but who knows.

They should have a "missions wanted" section. An open source mission project.

Interesting. Campaign builder seems to do much the same thing, I guess you can pass point values from one mission to another if you're willing to make several copies of the next mission. Which is probably enough for my purposes.

I'm presently working on a VR-friendly campaign set in Nevada. I'm targeting people like me, who want to learn the aircraft systems in context. Here's a mission I did this weekend that I had fun with, thought I'd share an advance peek. The back story came from a book I wrote last year, imagining a United States divided by economic collapse and war. A nationalist Mexican government sets out to re-fight, and this time win the Mexican-American war. They have Vegas surrounded basically and it's up to US forces and their allies -- including Mexican Republican resistance fighters (terminology borrowed from the Spanish civil war) -- to hold out until help arrives. This particular mission is a deep strike at a supply convoy coming in from the south, way down at the nether end of the map. You do a cold start from the ramp at Nellis and meet up with the tanker near waypoint 1. It's kind of hard to finish the mission without getting at least some fuel, even a little bit helps. You are routed west to avoid SAM and fighter coverage over Laughlin for most of your route. You are looking for a convoy snaking its way up 95 toward waypoint 3. Take it out with rockets and snakeyes. It's a little hard to spot so I had some Republican commandos set up a roadblock at waypoint 3. They will set off an IED when the convoy gets there; you should be able to spot that easy enough. You should see a dust trail as the commandos skeedaddle to the east; don't shoot em. You'll have time for a hand full of passes before a pair of Nationalist F5's show up. The mission plan calls for a low level exit to the west while a pair of F15's fly over to take care of business, although if you want to mix it up with the F5's, have at it. I'd draw them out over the desert; if you take off after them over Needles you're going to have SAM problems. Skills - Navigation (TACAN, waypoint, and eyeball) - Fuel management - Low level bombing - A/C and ground unit spotting - Situational awareness convoy.miz

I was terrible at spotting a/c in real life so Oculus seems about right. Personally I think it's kinda handy to keep a zoom button mapped on the throttle. We are the same age. We should form a squadron. Specializing in hitting really big targets

Is there a way to pass the final conditions of a mission into the initial conditions for a new mission? Example: Mission 1, fly over enemy airfield and try to destroy three MIG29's on the ground. Mission 2, fly past that airfield on the way to a different target. If you missed all three MIGs, then three are scrambled. If you hit two and one survived, then you'll be facing one MIG. If you got all three, they send up a guy with a bad attitude in a Cessna or something. The Cessna is optional. Main thing is, I have a couple of missions where the player files two sorties, he has to RTB to rearm mid-mission. Nothing wrong with that except some people I imagine would like to break that up for the sake of time, by either saving the game state or by passing parameters to the next mission

There are things you do by sight and things you do by feel. Brief time I was flying irl I never looked at the yoke and seldom looked at the throttle or flaps switch. For the th ings you actually look at (radios, nav system) a VR pointing device is fine and I find that the natural finger movements of the oculus controllers works for me. Personally I think it would be helpful to have one panel where I can find a landing gear lever and a flaps switch by feel. I don't think it has to be in the exact position -- you aren't looking -- so an Arduino box on a RAM mount would work. For the F18 for example I think the answer would be to get a 3D printer file for the left hand panel, and some switch handles that'll feel right enough, rest should be over-the-counter

Framerates aren't really valid for oculus, it's pretty much going to lock you into a frame rate of 45 for any render time between 11 and 22ms which is what you want. You'll probably want to dial up your graphics settings to get you right at 22. Recognizing that depending on what you're cranking up (shadows for example) you might start stressing your CPU. The game is definitely playable on a Vega so I imagine a 2070 will handle it easily. You want to be asking around to see what MSAA and PD a 2080 will support; 4xMSAA is worth paying extra for imo. Dunno if a 2080 will support that; kinda doubt it. Should be able to turn on shadows with a 2080, if that suits your fancy

Yeah but he should have better fps with that rig, gotta sort that out before moving to a higher resolution unit. Wonder about memory timing but I didn't see that mem overclock did anything for me and question how dependent dcs is on vram speed/timing. I'd be looking at steam and Nvidia drivers, anti-aliasing adds up quickly

I'm working on a Nevada based f18 campaign for ya.

Get that GPU render time under 22.2ms. PD and MSAA primarily affect GPU render time, take a look at them. Remember, PD is supersampling, don't make two or three passes at that. Between PD, SS in the oculus tray tool, and say steam supersampling, pick ONE. WIth your GPU, I would suggest -- vis range medium -- trees medium -- shadows off -- PD 1.2 Clear your fxo and metashaders folders, fire it up and see how it runs. You should have enough room to add in a little MSAA if you want, or nudge the PD higher if you prefer that. Or maybe some shadows. Doubt you can do all three though.

I remember my buddy went out and bought a computer with a ten megabyte hard drive. I laughed at him. You'll never fill that up, I said. Waste of money. Floppies are cheap, brother! Someday our grandkids will laugh at us when we tell them we used to watch movies on a "screen." What, like flat? How do you walk around in something flat? How did you interact with the characters? You DIDN'T? Wow grandpa... I can't imagine that... It's not just a question of why wouldn't you want to play Minecraft in VR if you could. It's that I remember when people read magazines on planes. Then they brought laptops. Now they are all fiddling with smartphones. Doesn't take much imagination to figure in a couple years they will all be wearing VR glasses, waving their hands around in the air. It's coming, folks. I mean, cmon. How can it not?

I think it's a great joystick combo. The throttle can be a little sticky. There's a tension screw on the slider, you can see it if you flip the throttle upside down (with the throttle all the way forward). Back off on that so it just barely holds the throttle where you put it, you want that as loose as possible. And lube the rails, I use dry lube. As for axis tuning 1. TDC slew: flatten it out with reduced Y axis 2. Rudder: flatten it out with full Y axis 3. Stick: maybe a teenie amount of curve, doesn't need much 4. Give everything a dead zone of about 4 As for the Hornet, you can work your way through the training missions while you are learning how to fly it. It's really easy to fly -- it'll spoil you. The only tricky part is landing, there's a trick to flying on-speed AOA. That'll take a little practice, but once you have that down, landing is easy. There are a lot of weapons, but tasks basically fall into a couple of categories. I'd start with three things: 1. Flying the thing. 2. Finding and locking something up on radar beyond visual range. There are some great youtube videos explaining how radar works, what the beam of energy would look like if you could see it, those are well worth watching and understanding. (Put some thought into how you want to adjust your radar elevation, the pinky wheel doesn't work worth a darn for that. I map it to the paddle switch, or you could map it to the rocker switch under your middle finger, like in the real Hornet) 3. Dropping a bomb of some sort. Spend a little time on the F5 and F86 sides of the forum to get some advise on lining up for your bombing run. I wouldn't spend a ton of time on countermeasures, figure out how to turn on your radar warning system, and how to manually dispense chaff and flares, that'll get you started. Once you have that done, check out the Serpent's Head campaign. That'll get you into carrier landings and laser guided munitions. Dodging SAMs. It's a lot of fun and you'll be pretty sharp when you're done with that. After that, the sky's the limit. You can study ACM and within-visual-range weapons (that gets complicated). You can learn comms and navigation, that'll get you ready to start easing into multiplayer. You can learn how to make your own missions in the mission editor, which will let you practice various weapons systems. The F18 is the gift that keeps on giving, but the entry barrier is low. It's really easy to get started, and really hard to get bored with it.

From my reading, I was under the impression the developer has to support multi-gpu implementation. Vulkan recently announced they plan to integrate multi GPU support so we may get it eventually. Apparently it's not totally clear how much of an effect it will have on VR, GPU render time is only part of the latency equation, although the idea of one GPU per eye kinda makes sense to me. But, I suspect removing the CPU bottleneck is the bigger priority

It has its advantages. You don't have to spend a ton of money to get a decent B450 mobo, a 5-2600 will hold a place in there until 3rd gen comes out. I'm liking what Radeon is doing with their drivers recently and they seem invested in VR, in particular it seems like they are embracing multi-GPU where nvidia is pulling back from that, perhaps maybe? OTOH I don't think other flight sims will even run on AMD GPU's, if that matters

Pull up oculus tray tool, choose "application render time" in the visual hud, hop into your plane and see what your GPU and CPU render times are running. ASW auto.

Haha have you guys checked your fps on a monitor? I'm pushing like 168 lol. Struggle constantly to maintain 45 in VR. I dunno. More I read about this, more I respect Oculus engineering, the happier I am it'll run on a 1070 or Vega, and the more skeptical I am that VR will ever approach monitor resolution without dcs going multi-thread, multi-gpu. Which I guess they are moving that direction. Meanwhile, maybe it's just me, but I can't get myself excited about the 2080ti. Seems like a lot of money to still be looking at fuzzy ddi's Looking forward to the day when a twin Vega setup is considered the shiznit. It could happen!

Thought it was just me. I can't find it either. Kinda hard to set up in mission editor unless you use scripts. Check out the georgia at war practice server, they can hook you up with some good practice missions

Nice campaign, you gotta be tight. Photos of the target area would be cool in mission 5. Great work.

I'm not sure that the % means. Back when I was mining, my GPU would be at 100% relative to the core clock speed. I could go in and tweak my memory timings and the GPU would work faster but it would still be 100%. What makes it even more complicated is the relationship between the CPU and the GPU, certain graphics settings like shadows or visible range seem to affect both. You have to keep your render times below a certain level for both CPU and GPU to hit a target FPS. Finally, I've found that my GPU render times don't vary by much, maybe 10% either direction. CPU times are all over the place, 40% variance even on an empty map. I think the key to the whole thing is to back off on graphics settings enough to give the CPU enough room not to choke on busy maps that have lots of units, lots of terrain objects, lots of AI.

Also worth checking out some of the MSI B450's. I got the b450m gaming plus which has good enough specs, lots of fan headers and it was on sale. I was only putting a Ryzen 5 in there and my plan was to OC to 4.2 if I could, otherwise leave it alone, so it didn't have to be excellent, just good enough If you haven't bought your RAM yet, might be worth making sure your RAM works optimally with the MB you have in mind. b450 was way better than b350 in this regard, for me anyway, but I think it's still worth checking. https://www.anandtech.com/show/13091/analyzing-b450-for-amd-ryzen-a-quick-look-at-all-the-motherboards/14

I don't think look-click is gonna work in a busy cockpit. Trying to hold your head still enough... Guess you could snap-to but that'll make ya puke. I'd rathe use Oculus controllers until the finger-mouse comes out. Even captoglove is gonna have a hard time beating that.

Do you have a power connector for that 580? If not, maybe a 1050ti? ETA sometimes you can find PSU adapters for hp mobos

GPU quality is all over the place, you have to read the reviews. Depends on the quality of components -- cheap cards are slower -- and the quality of vram, which doesn't (in my experience) always correlate with price. techpowerup is a good place to start Prices are all over the place too, make sure you keep your eye on the price of 2070 vs 1070. newegg is a good reflection of the market I think Didn't mean to slam your CPU too hard, I went from a 1st gen Ryzen 7 to a second gen Ryzen 5 and didn't notice a measurable difference. Granted I was able to squeeze 3.8ghz out of the former, and only 4.0 out of the latter, so it depends on the chip. You can definitely make the Ryzen 7 work, but in order to do so, you might have to back off on your settings (and I'm running pretty low settings)