LanceCriminal86

Steam effects from the cat should change depending on weather and humidity no? In regards to real photos or clips people may be trying to reference you might get one day where it's light and whispy but a colder day might be more voluminous and hang around longer. Steam seems to me if it's not actively being changed by ED in the engine for weather effects, one could have a few versions of steam for light and wispy all the way up to thick and long lifetime. The latter might be nice for moody screenshots and videos.

@IronMike I think it's time for a pinned "THERE WILL NOT BE A -D THIS DECADE" post

The Leyte is the boat VF-32 was on in 1950. I did some historical "CONA" skins for VF-32 of ENS Jesse Brown and LtJG Hudner's Corsairs on the Tomcat.

It seems that historical and plausible skins probably stand the best chance here. I plan on submitting some separately for consideration of less well known Tomcat squadrons but I have a pretty neat idea for the competition, if you guys haven't done it already.

I use the Autopilot On with my X56 throttle on the row of no-off-on toggles. Works pretty well. The On else Off would have to be used with either a static switch or like the real ones that were magnetic or had solenoids or whatever that held them in position.

@IronMike have you guys looked at how ED have done the F-18's MODEX? I think there are a few different patterns/locations that can be switched in the liveries for different countries. But, I think I also heard it considered that would increase resource usage if it has to render all of those, even if they are masked or disabled in a skin. I think for the online crowd you could get away with the somewhat common MODEX of nose numbers, flaps on the inner edge of the middle flap panel, and then the tails up top above the rudder. Us nerds that don't mind having 20-30 gigs dedicated to just skins won't care if the dynamic MODEX are wrong because we are disabling them anyways. Squadrons that do their own events usually have custom squadron skins with MODEX and everything. Another thing, what about the BuNOs? I see folks bothered by MODEX all being the same but the BuNO won't be dynamic, if you're in close formation that's just as obvious to my eyes. Dynamic MODEX but all same BuNO seems just as silly to me.

As soon as OP can provide a full listing of all of the MFD functions in the PTID and added MFDs of the D and B Upgrade Tomcats, plus everything about the IRST, then maybe something could get done. But since those don't exist or are still classified, see the previous mountains of responses about why the D and B Upgrade with Sparrowhawk and JDAM capability aren't coming.

If anyone seems to be upset here it's you Gary. He's not wrong, a LOT of US fighter jocks over the years have responded exactly the same when asked minutea about their jets. They were too busy working the jet, looking for drips and things out of place on their preflights. Just like all the Special Forces guys I've been asking for the last 10 years who couldn't tell you much about the rifle they carried except they were smoking Taliban with it from 700 yards off in 2002. It's not actually that unusual to find military professionals at the highest levels who are not that interested in the minutea of their tools, only that they worked or didn't work. And you've been told by no less than 2-3 other people who have been keeping track of these visual issues here that it's on the list, and yet here you are. Am I bothered about the wrong NACA ducts and the misalignment of the engine nacelle textures? Sure. But I also know how much the model guy(s) have on their plate right now in terms of priorities, so I'm just going to skin around it and come back whenever it's fixed and update my skins.

At some point, would you be willing to put together some bullet points for fighting in the A ? With the B's extra thrust I believe that the vertical fight was often an option but I'm wondering how the A's differs in terms of tactics. I take it preserving energy will be more important? Would also love to see some of those best practices!

There's a few model corrections that have been put in through the year, they've been acknowledged and I suspect that as some of the continuing model work happens they will be added to the workflow to be corrected. Right now the big fish is get stuff in, then corrections to tailerons, NACA ducts, engine vents on the B, the textures on the engine nacelles where the landing gear locks in, and some UVWs that are assigned the wrong textures will come as they're working through the list. Remember they're also in there doing new pilot models and all of the additions to the A model for early/late like the alternate TCS options, GPS antenna, and RWR/ECM antennas along the wing gloves. I'm fairly certain their model guy hasn't just been sitting around waiting for random model corrections to come in here or there for the last year. Oh, don't forget the same guys is probably working on the A-6 and Forrestal which we are also all clamoring for. I'm fairly sure we're going to see the corrections and changes, they'll just need to come when at the right stage in the workflow.

And how convenient, I should have all this school wrapped up this weekend, so I'll actually be able to sit down, enjoy it, and finish painting some proper Hunters and Superheats with all the wear, tear, and corrosion control paint a guy could ask for!

^^ I'm pretty sure the above was taken from this video of the 2003 Nellis air show. Sound quality wise I think this is a really good benchmark of my expectations for ultimate F-14B sound. I know the challenge here is DCS and how it handles sound, having to synthesize or digitally recreate some of it etc. All kinds of things like distance and angle of the plane are going to translate into time delay of the sound and doppler effect and stuff like that. But really, this video has so much more bass and depth to it. I'd really like to see the sound for the A and B have more *oomph* and base to them.

I've been strongly considering trying to make a faux ejection seat using an aluminum drag racing seat, something like a Kirkey 55 or similar. At least something that with a pad setup like the link would give a similar feel. May have to chop the bottom side bolsters off but keep the ones along the back

I'd really like for them to shoot for the moon with Jester and have a toned back version for online if that's possible. I'd rather Jester be like riding with "Bio" or "Goose" than an AI that's purposely held back to be "fair" online and encourage multicrew.

Not a fan of the new helmet UVW maps but apparently you just need to git guud at the warp tool.

Added Jester functionality, even if it's not voiced, would be nice. Having at least popups of the various NATOPS procedures for emergencies for example, like hydraulic loss, engine loss, flameouts, etc. where Jester can either pop it up for you to read, or have each item come up and you can "acknowledge" it as you do it. Like I said even if it's not voiced having some kind of interactive emergency checklists is realistic to what a RIO does during emergencies, while the pilot tries to fly the jet. And I'd still like a few more Jester options like "leave canopy up" for startup. Frankly I'd also like the Offline Jester to be beefed up, I understand they didn't want him too superman to encourage online real human RIOs to be needed, but for offline, I want a Jester that acts like a real RIO, even if that means having his code "cheat" a bit to make it happen.

To get them working you need the original model files, not the converted DCS files. They have to be re-exported with some of the many changes made over the last major patches past 2.5.4 or 2.5.5 or so. That's why they weren't simply updated

Dibs on VF-201 and VF-202! I've been gathering photos and references since around the paint kit dropped for the B. Once the A hits and the revised models/paint kits happen I'll push to finish them. And yeah, there are a few changes that are eventually going to have to happen whenever the NACA duct on the right engine is removed and the textures for the main her locking points get shifted so they align properly.

That is true, it's a preferred way by some as I believe you don't have to worry about where the textures are being split etc. But I'm not sure if it lets you use layers like photoshop to separate details, so that you can make a "template". Templates are always appreciated as that means we can do all kinds of things with the textures to enhance them, represent different ships of the class, make ships be stand-ins for ones that are missing, weathered vs just painted, target ships like you seen in missile tests or SINKEX. What texture sizes are you using for different areas? Naturally you don't want it to be an FPS hog but as an example, the Tomcat dedicates about 7 large texture files to cover the main body of the aircraft, versus the Hornet cramming everything into two main textures. In order to have the same level of detail as the Tomcat you basically have to bump the Hornet's texture files up to 8k in order to get the same general resolution as the Cat across the jet. There's a Discord for skinning and liveries, lots of folks in there could probably point you towards some resources, might even get some volunteers to help create the base textures and templates.

On the texturing, are you tiling a general metal texture across the hull of the ship, or are you actually exporting the whole side of the ship's UVW map and creating a texture for it? If you compare to how different DCS aircraft modules do it you may be able to improve certain portions as it would give you some more ability to specifically texture certain areas with wear and weathering.

To go past that: Can we bypass Jester closing the canopy at startup? Tons of footage of startups with the canopies open, would be nice to have the option at that stage to tell him to leave the canopy up.

Yeah, but the new JFK coming in the future will never have Intruders and Tomcats flying off of it. It'd be cool to see a CV-67 mod that can somehow use the Supercarrier deck crew and animations but I suspect not going to happen. Having the boat is better than no boat though right?

There's not really a tutorial per-se for the F-14. It's a template you have to jump in and learn, the hard way, all of its quirks. You're going to want a LOT of ram and Photoshop. GIMP has issues with the template. You're going to need a lot of patience. The EXT 1 and 3 textures are "backwards" as is the right wing. So any text will need to flipped horizontally. The tails have a significant shift from where it goes from the VSTAB to the actual rudder, that you have to shift any designs to make the transition seamless. One of these days I was thinking about trying to stream or records some of the tough parts of the Tomcat and some tips but school and work take priority right now.

You know you want to add Big John, CV-67 in. I found an okayish model out there but not sure how much work would be needed to bring it up to DCS standards. It looked at least as decent as the old Vinson.

I think these data points would be great for integration into a dynamic campaign where you have X amount of airframes available, and downtime is tracked. I believe "the other sim" out there has something like that modeled, or maybe one of the 3rd party campaign generators does. If ED's new dynamic campaign can track the status of an aircraft at the end of the mission and create down time that would be pretty cool. Maybe HB can create values for various component damages for how long a jet is unavailable. Keep breaking jets, can't sortie as many jets and missions get harder.