MartinCo

Strategic DCS is a relatively new (under 1 year old, built from the ground up) server that has spent our time with little advertising as we continued to test theories, trying various mechanics (removing and tweaking many that didn't work out as envisioned!) and ultimately polishing the product to a place we were happy with to invite more users to experience it. Our focus has been to find that balance between fun and rewarding without resorting to having too many chore tasks impacting those with limited time to play and our focus on personal impact over coalition wide punishments. Find Us: Server Name: SDCS | strategic-dcs.com | Persistent Dynamic CA Campaign Server IP: dcs.strategic-dcs.com / 46.4.114.80 Unique Features, What makes us different: Real Time, dynamic FARP placement Obtain a base crate from an existing Airbase / FARP with shelter and load into your Plane, utility chopper, or even truck Place this in a suitable location (green filled triangle on F10 map) and unpack! Immediately be able select the location from the slot list, and spawn at the exact location! Exclusive Player JTAC Capabilities Help your buddies out; By flying a mi8, huey, or gazelle you can spot enemy units, and automatically update nearby helicopters for highly effective hunter-killer sorties Anti Tree Technology We know how frustrating finding player controlled units deep in the forests, especially on caucasus can be. We have developed a solution to prevent this by automatically notifying and de-spawning units that head too deep into forests - you won't need to spend hours trying to bomb impenetrable trees! Take a look at our Caucasus deep forest map: (red = deep, orange = shallow, purple = road, allowing us to place mobile units in the treeline along roads, but static objects like shelters not in the trees, and never too deep they're unstoppable and tedious to find!) Even more detailed option (still scaled down from 29,000x16,000px) : https://strategic-dcs.com/storage/caucasus_overlay.jpg AutoGCI Not every module has decent Data Link, not everyone is on comm (Discord / SRS Primarily). Our AutoGCI updates you every 30s (or as requested) known threats collected from E2, Radars, and even line of sight from ground units, with all calculations occurring outside of DCS so we can ensure we maintain optimal performance within the game environment Don't Panic! We care about our rotary pilots, and you have opportunity to remain hidden! (see our wiki) Chat Commands / Discord We love looking at ways to enhance collaboration, discord based Situation Reports channel to provide players with the current objectives when they spawn along with in game chat commands to create map markers, and push the targets to coalition-locked discord channels - no more searching for the target your TPod has on the F10 map, just use the coordinates! -target N 26 46.104 E 055 51.798 -- MBT This will place the marker on the map on the correct location and dispatch to discord! General Features Player controlled ground war! We grant full TacCom access to all players. The majority of units player ordered from factories using Map Markers and flown by AI flights, or loaded and flown by players themselves. Every unit life matters, and the ability of ground force commanders to control the sings of combat offer significant advantages - do you push from the ground? focus on clearing from the air with reduced ground force ? Your coalition has full control over your strategy. We have a global Resource Point cap, but the freedom to chose how to spend those resource points to focus on any particular asset type and the risks that come with should they die (A large battle may see your strength reduced for some time as resource points regenerate) Live Map and detailed stats We collect a lot of stats, every flight, how far you traveled, how many shots you took during each leg of a flight etc. are almost out your fingertips. Whilst the stats website is new, the front end, API, and even a database dump with real data is available to allow our community to update and submit pull requests to increase coverage and get access to anything you want (or request we add to the DB!) Splash Damage We make use of FrozenDroid/Grimm's fantastic Splash Damage script to ensure dumb bombs remain practical Tacview Whilst we do not run Tacview on the server, we do generate tacview compatible ACMI files from our engine outside of DCS. This allows us to have even more information in our tacview files without incurring the high lua CPU usage that an embedded tacview generator causes. This includes player markers, JTAC markers, if you were detected by AutoGCI or not and player chat and even which player was driving a specific vehicle at any time! Ultimately, this allows us to use tacview as an interactive log for both to help assist players. At the end of each campaign these are made available to download (Soon the stats kills/deaths page will have a link to the download the tacview associated with the kill/death without you having to navigate to it yourself) Checkout last campaigns data here: https://strategic-dcs.com/tacview/2024-03-25-1638-Syria2/ Map Rotation: Currently we operate: Caucasus -> PG -> Syria -> Caucasus Inverted -> PG Inverted -> Syria Inverted Our Inverted campaigns are where the starting locations are swapped, ensuring another source of variation every campaign. Module Layout We understand module layout is a contentious subject, and we have to try and find a compromise to avoid one side stacks that push us into a PvE server. Our community so far has been keen on each side having it's own identity and strengths and weaknesses. From the ground war, it's mostly west (Patriot, Hawk. etc) vs east (SA10, SA11) but on the air side this is not really possible. For more information please see: https://wiki.strategic-dcs.com/en/home Community Driven We are strong believers of taking a community driven approach; whilst we will never be the one and only for everyone, we do try our best to encourage discussion, take criticism (particularly when constructive!) about things that are working well, more so what doesn't work so well, and most of all feedback as to how we can improve, and develop in the direction the community wishes to go. Documentation An up to date wiki with all features and capabilities can be found: https://wiki.strategic-dcs.com Credits Like all projects, we build upon the knowledge and products of many others that should be acknowledged; In particular, we make extensive use of DCS gRPC for all communication between DCS and our "engine" that handles all our mission logic outside DCS. This, coupled with PyDCS ensures we save a huge amount of time in maintaining our mission files themselves that clients download to manage our aircraft spawn positions, skins, options, laser codes and more all from a config file. Contact Us Please, feel free to join our discord: https://wiki.strategic-dcs.com/discord or feel free to reach out via PM here or on discord (martin.co) for any specific questions you may have

Thanks flappie for the confirmation of 5 degrees for launchers

Hey @Flappie Sorry that wasn't in my file with them on the Caucasus one as I noticed it after changing to Tin Shield and added it as a note. The launchers aren't a sensitive as the Big Bird, but if you put them on any slight incline that sometimes causes them to relocate upon spawn, or sometimes just sit there on mission start; even straight from the ME they will not erect and whilst the tin shield may be active, people can just fly right over getting tracked the entire way, but never launched on Please find attached an examples / tracks The major pain point for me is that it impacts dynamic environments significantly as player spawned compositions most of all as we don't quite know what constitutes flat enough and have to wait and see and it's a marked change from earlier behavior. S300-TER.trk s300-TER.miz

Star, thank you @Flappie! Edit: The launchers also don't erect (both versions), which means they don't fire - so even just switching out to the Tin Shield leaves this system quite delicate to place

@Flappie sorry for this - would you be able to report this? Please find attached a caucasus based mission with a number of Big Birds in it bigbird.miz the one in the open shows in the ME as 1036ft at every point around it refuses to deploy. I can do a track but since it's just jump into game master and f7 view them there seems little point Thank you!

This has reared it's head again in a similar location. Track attached, and once again, seems 100% reproducible DCS 2.9.0.47168 This occurs both Single player (as shown here) and on dedicated servers when a player issues a waypoint to the units. This is causing some disruption, but intermittent as it seems to depend on origin and destination, but once it happens, we have to jump in first person to move them, or re spawn them somewhere else but this is all reactionary. It does occur on other maps as it seems to be path evaluation based, but i had to wait for a player to specifically identify which unit they moved when the server crashed (I do a full DB backup when the server exits unexpectedly to be able to get the exact unit position to place the unit in the miz file for attached recreations) Simple miz file with a single unit and a taccom slot attached. No scripts, fully repaired, non modded DCS open beta install with clean profile Steps: - Load Miz - Select Gepard - Set route to the grassy area NW of Bassal Runway (z: 42150 x: +5530 - pretty much anywhere in that area causes the crash) - Crash Crash dump, including track attached Video: waypoint-crash.miz dcs.log-20231107-200016.zip

That's awesome, Thank you!

Sorry for adding to this - we find one is unable to join from spectators (but not always) No mods / scripts, same steps as yours but the player remains in spectators and showing in the CPG, but unable to slot. same in F14,15,AH64,Mi24 Workaround: - Select another slot (no need to birth) - Select the multi-crew slot you wished to use

Hey @Flappie, Since the recent introduction of the mixed hellfire pylons on the Apache in the last couple of OB releases (1K + 3L, 2K + 2L etc) we have seen an expansion of this issue. Taking a mixed pylon of 1K+3L getAmmo reports as a 4 Kilos We thought about using the newly available warehouse API to manage what munitions are available, and unfortunately this case persists as the warehouse reduces by K only. Please see attached trackgetAmmo_114K.trk - Batumi has 8K in stock (no other weapons) - I load two pylons of 1K + 3L, we can see that the L-only pylons are unavailable - I run getAmmo() and it reports 8K taken - WPN page shows 1K + 3L on each pylon - I head back to rearm/refuel to show the warehouse reports no stock available (I.e. considers it all K) Thanks! Martin

After - removing all peripherals except keyboard mouse - unplugged any additional monitors / VR headset (none of this was running under VR) - disabled streamdeck - shutdown trackir software The issue remained. However, launching DCS-MT - the issue is no longer present! (can't believe I hadn't tried that earlier)

Hey @Flappie - Nope, your video looks perfect! thanks for that I replayed your track and the issue remains for me! I did a full dcs profile wipe again, so i guess it must be hardware / drivers / etc. I also tried using the options.lua from the track as well to see if any my settings were causing it - but no joy. I'm curious if it's graphics card / driver related - would you mind sharing what you're running there ? I'm running a 3090 with 531.41 will try later drivers to see if that's it - and also remove all non-kbd/mouse peripherals just to see if I can get the replay to work and track this down further. I know it's certainly not just me as it's been a problem for quite a number of players Thank you Martin

Hey @Flappie, just checking in to see if you had managed to review the video / had any luck reproducing it from that.

Please find attached log bundle Video of series of events: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq3mw9sVI4c Running DCS 2.8.7.42583, No Mods, did a repair + cleanup, also deleted DCS profile directory prior to starting DCS Issue also presents running server locally, accessing via ED website (as per this example video) or local webgui, or when using net.request_screenshot 2023-07-25 18:31:38.838 INFO EDCORE (11624): C:\DCS\DCS World\bin\edCore.dll 2023-07-25 18:31:38.841 INFO EDCORE (11624): # C0000005 ACCESS_VIOLATION at 00007ffb7bdc3dea 00:00000000 2023-07-25 18:31:38.844 INFO EDCORE (11624): SymInit: Symbol-SearchPath: 'C:\DCS\DCS World\bin;', symOptions: 532, UserName: 'Martin' 2023-07-25 18:31:38.850 INFO EDCORE (11624): OS-Version: 10.0.22621 () 0x100-0x1 2023-07-25 18:31:38.853 INFO EDCORE (11624): 0x0000000000013dea (edCore): VFS_path_split + 0x9A 2023-07-25 18:31:38.856 INFO EDCORE (11624): 0x00000000000043e8 (AVIMaker): AVIMaker::operator= + 0x25B8 2023-07-25 18:31:38.859 INFO EDCORE (11624): 0x0000000000033c48 (edCore): ed::this_thread::yield + 0xB48 2023-07-25 18:31:38.862 INFO EDCORE (11624): 0x0000000000049148 (edCore): ed::this_thread::yield + 0x16048 2023-07-25 18:31:38.862 INFO EDCORE (11624): 0x00000000000326d1 (edCore): ed::thread::_get_current_thread_id + 0x71 2023-07-25 18:31:38.862 INFO EDCORE (11624): 0x0000000000029363 (ucrtbase): _recalloc + 0xA3 2023-07-25 18:31:38.862 INFO EDCORE (11624): 0x00000000000126ad (KERNEL32): BaseThreadInitThunk + 0x1D dcs.log-20230725-182536.zip

This unit / route no longer seems to cause the crash under 2.8.7.42583 (nor the other locations that caused a crash under the previous release). I'll wait for another unit / location to exhibit the issue and hopefully recreate the issue again should it recur.

Checked under 2.8.7.42583 - issue remains Edit: also nuked my entire DCS profile directory + repair with issue persisting