Cgjunk2

I have noticed from my observations at airshows, and from my own DSLR photography that the visibility of afterburners in real life varies depending on lighting conditions and the viewing angles. It’s hardest to see them midday when the airplane is backdropped by clear blue sky, but they are still visible (structure, shock cones, and all). I have not seen a tendency for AB flames to be exaggerated by a decent DSLR camera (which have IR filters over the sensor). Of course, you can juice up the AB in pictures through post-processing by playing with color, sharpness, contrast, etc, but even that is using visible-light photons that have been captured in the pic. The previous post from heatblur pretty much indicates that the loss of AB is a bug, and not purposefully done as a re-interpretation of realistic looking AB. I certainly hope that they would never do that, as it would take some really nice (and realistic) eye candy away. Us flight simmers really only have vision to play with in trying to simulate these birds, so taking AB away would be unnecessary and upsetting. In any case, the fly-by and orbit cameras, and our ability to zoom in are arguably much less realistic than having visible AB flames, so I would hope nobody has the idea to permanently ax AB flames in a quest for realism. The AB effects on the Flaming cliffs airplanes are beautiful, and in my eye do a very good job of being realistic in various lighting conditions. I’d love to see what my newly acquired mig-21 looks like with decent AB effects, rather than the dark tube I currently get to look at.

I hope the missing afterburners are fixed or adjusted. I don’t think removal of AB flames was done purposefully for a few reasons. One reason is the f-14 AB texture seems to be there under the right light conditions, but it is short and truncated (I don’t do texture modeling, but it seems as if layers are missing) Secondly, I recently bought the mig 21, and there is absolutely no AB texture. Mig21 videos IRL show prominent afterburner flame during daytime. Also, if you set an f-14 and a mig-21 flying as AI in single player mode, after burner flames are clearly visible on both planes.

Well, thanks to everyone for trying to help me out. I got it to work, but I found out the embarrassing reason why I had trouble....I wasn’t logging into the prompt given once you start the game. :doh: I had registered previously, and I tried to log in months ago but it didn’t work for some reason. The game worked fine offline, so I figured maybe the login was for non-steam DCS version. Well I gave it another try today with a new account (could not find any trace of my previous attempt). Logged in, and now it works fine. I joined several servers to spectate, and it looked like performance was good. I tried to join in the flying, however every one was playing with difficult settings that required cold-starts. Ugh, ill keep looking for servers for noobs. Everything looked good as far as connectivity though, so it’s just a matter of finding the right server. Looking forward to joining the fray! I guess now I have to figure out my comms options as well.

Thanks for the suggestions all. I will start trying them when I get home tonight.

Hello all, Fairly new to DCS, downloaded it last December (but I've played LOCK ON, and even the earliest versions from Eagle Dynamics when I was kid many many years ago, lol). I've gotten on few DLC's along the way, but mostly trying to fight the temptation of buying more than I can afford :P Anyway, my multiplayer on DCS has never worked. I've never been able to get any servers to populate. I can hit refresh a hundred times, and nothing has ever shown up, either in the stable release, or the public beta. Hasn't bothered me too much as I wasn't interested in public embarrassment...until now. Now I'm kinda feeling the itch to get out there online. I'm sure you guy's wouldn't mind another target out there to shoot at... I've reviewed some of the other "no servers in multiplayer" type threads, but the tips on there haven't seemed to help. Here is where I'm at: -I'm playing DCS through Steam -I'm using the latest open beta, on an auto-updated Windows 10 machine. I have also tried this on the latest stable release with no joy. -I'm running a prebuilt gaming rig from Ibuypower. Not much bloatware on this thing, if any. Hardware is not a problem in running the game proper using fairly high graphical settings. -All firewalls are off, but virus protection is on (I don't think Windows allows the option to turn off) -I switched from wireless to a direct ethernet connection for internet, with no success. -my internet is IPv4 -Multiplayer works just fine on other programs (Arma 3, Battlefield) I don't really know what to do! I'm discouraged, because this seems like it's a "permanent" problem, as I have not seen any threads where somebody in my situations (starting out with absolutely no servers showing up) somehow ends up fixing things. Some people reported occasionally getting a few servers up, but I have never seen any other servers, period. I even tried inputing an IP address from some servers listed on server threads, but the server could not be found (I think it said it was offline). On another thread, it was mentioned that it could be the region/IP I'm using. I'm in Wisconsin, anybody know of any issues in this area with locking out DCS from the internet? Any help is appreciated. Whether it be from other users or the developers. I know my way around a computer OK, but I'm no expert with Windows 10 (it seems like either this OS has gotten very professional about obfuscating the meaning of settings, or I'm losing IQ points with age). But, if someone is willing to help me out, I'm sure I can find my way to any settings necessary.

I just got the MIG-21 with the sale, and noticed the missing after burner as well. However, if you set the MIG as an AI, I noticed that they are visible. (The F-14 also has visible AB when flying as AI. So that makes me wonder if in fact the problem is with the graphics, or something else.