nomdeplume

It might be worthwhile doing a survey of missions to see how often the 'player can drive' option is used... I reckon a strong case could be built for making it default to off. So many times I've created a group, added units, selected unit types and then... d'oh! Forgot to disable that option at the start. Now I have to turn it off for each individual unit. :(

Even if all the 'hardcore' players are buying FC3 just to support ED, they're also buying other modules to actually play, so they wouldn't be seeing a noticeable difference in sales figures if Flaming Cliffs wasn't popular outside of the existing 'hardcore' market. In some respect, you could consider that the low fidelity (more popular) products may be being used to somewhat subsidise the development of the high fidelity products, which are obviously more expensive to develop and don't sell as well.

Wags' update made it sound to me like the AFM versions will be available within FC3, but they'll also be selling the individual aircraft separately at a lower price point. I could be wrong there, but it would make sense if this is an initiative to try to get more people to try the product out -- a fairly cheap F-15C with a good flight model and simplified (easy to learn) avionics could be very appealing to a wide range of folks who are a bit intimidated by the detail in the core DCS products. And the Su-27 is of course a natural counterpart for those who prefer Russian fighters. The downside of course is that people who buy these might be less inclined to get FC3, but maybe they could somehow offer a discount since they already own two of the included aircraft? Keeping the FC3 aircraft with the simplified flight model might make sense from this perspective, but adds a lot of ugliness to the actual game (two different aircraft? different flight models depending on what you've bought? etc.).

The best way to see this would be to compare the flight modelling of the Su-25T you get for free with DCS World with the FC3 aircraft, if you have those. The Su-25T uses the advanced flight model, to give more realistic and enjoyable flight dynamics. The simple flight model is, well, simpler. It doesn't give as good a feeling of flight, and I think most noticeably the transition between ground and air dynamics (e.g. when landing) is a lot nicer with the AFM.

I'd guess User is referring to the cold start option -- the flaps are extended if you do a cold start. Possibly also static aircraft, but haven't checked that.

I think they need to improve the ground AI behaviour before an AC-130 FCO would be really interesting. Shooting at infantry (or even vehicles) that are moving in a straight line at a constant speed and that don't react to being fired at just isn't that engaging, IMO. (And if they do react, it's just to stop moving, making them even easier targets.) The current ground AI is okay when you're in control of an aircraft, but the simplicity of the ground AI becomes painfully apparent if you're just staring at the same area.

Are the sound files you've added actually loud? It's usually best to use a sound editor to normalize the volume levels as high as possible without clipping.

Never used it in the Ka-50, wouldn't use it in the A-10, so I voted don't care. :)

Could you post a track of your startup procedure, takeoff, and subsequently having AP/PAC not working? I think tracks for multiplayer flights should be automatically saved under Saved Games\DCS\Tracks\Multiplayer. Edit: which means you hopefully already have one saved from an earlier session!

Not all squadrons require a large commitment of time, so you'd still be able to find people to fly with even if you can only fly once every week or two. Also, most public servers will advertise a Teamspeak server you can use. Hop in there and you might find at least one other person who's flying on your side, and having that direct communication channel will make a big difference. Simply being able to ask someone else if the thing you've found is likely to be friendly or not will help. Basically they're solving different problems. IFF is intended to make monitoring/controlling large amounts of airspace more achievable. If the vast majority of friendly contacts can be automatically identified and tagged as such, you can focus your attention on the ones that aren't. This is why only AWACS and fighters tend to have IFF interrogators, because controlling airspace is their job. It's also why attack aircraft don't have it -- it's not their job, so it's just weight and complexity that won't assist them in their actual task. The datalink on the other hand is used for sharing data between flight members. Since flights never contain more than four ships, it doesn't need to support more than four. That's basically it. Datalink is there to support the flight in achieving its mission objective, not to be a "god mode" view of all friendly forces etc. This information is undoubtedly useful, but it's not necessary to the task, and Russian designs do seem to favour simplicity more than their US counterparts. The attack helicopter pilot really shouldn't be doing much in the way of target ID anyway, especially of aircraft. They should know where the friendly forces are in the area they're operating in, and have a decent idea of where enemy ground forces are likely to be. When they make contact, the location and posture of the target should be enough to identify it as a friend or a foe. And if they're not sure, they can always ask someone who can provide greater clarity. In the unlikely event they're operating where enemy gunships might be and they spot a helicopter they can't immediately identify as friendly, they can ask for help to identify it from people who have a better picture of the situation, and whose job it is to keep track of where friendly and enemy forces are across the theatre. Those people will be in platforms that are equipped for carrying out that role. Much of this is, of course, missing from a random public server. If air forces were in the habit of having pilots show up to war whenever they felt like it, and then taking off with a set of waypoints that probably steer them toward points of interest and a vague idea of where friendly and enemy forces may have been a few hours ago, then the aircraft they flew would probably be much better equipped for dealing with that kind of situation. But since DCS tries to simulate real existing aircraft, they don't really have much capacity for operating effectively as a lone wolf without contact with the rest of the force. My view is that modern platforms are very poorly suited to public servers, because their operation is so heavily dependent on integration with the rest of their side's assets. You can still have a lot of fun on public servers, but it's not the same kind of fun you can have in an organised mission. Finally, don't forget that friendly fire is still not exactly unheard of on the modern battlefield, even with communication between forces and professional soldiers who do it for a living and whose training draws upon decades of experience. There's no infallible method for easily determining friend from foe in real life, so there shouldn't be one in the sim. (Actually there is -- labels -- but nearly every server has those disabled, for a reason.)

If you stay within the multiplayer browser (when it's working and showing servers) and hit refresh, does that work? It's definitely not a common problem, I can restart it multiple times in a row and always get the server list after logging in. Does the login work fine for you? I'd suspect a firewall or antivirus program is interfering somehow - having to wait 5-10 minutes suggests some stateful connection monitoring that's getting confused and needs the old entry to time out before it permits additional traffic. See if you can add an exception to allow DCS to do whatever it wants (executable is ...\bin\DCS.exe) or temporarily disable any firewall or a/v you might have to see if it is causing the problem (and then re-enable it and work out how to actually fix it).

Is the download site broken for anyone else at the moment? Fatal error: Cannot redeclare formatBytes() (previously declared in ...)

Be aware that track files often contain small errors which become magnified into a completely alternative-reality version of events. If you want to review your flights, I'd strongly recommend checking out Tacview, which not only records a more consistent interpretation of events, but has really nice tools for jumping through the recording and checking things out from a variety of angles.

Doesn't sound promising. I'd check it out in the Windows' game controllers calibration screen. Control Panel -> Devices & Printers -> right click on a game controller and select "Game controller settings". Then select "Throttle - HOTAS Warthog" from the list and press the Properties button. You'll get a dialog up that shows all the buttons and axis on the throttle. Try moving them and pressing them and see which ones light up. If I recall correctly, the X/Y axis is the cursor slew mini-stick, the "Z axis" is the left throttle, "Z rotation" is the right throttle. If the left throttle isn't working there, then I'd say you probably have a broken unit. :(

Are you using a profile of any kind for your controller, that might be incorrectly sending keystrokes? The weapon views are F6 and LCtrl+F6 so that's probably the main thing to look out for. Edit: actually it sounds more like the option Corrigan found (next post below), "Toggle tracking fire weapon" - default binding seems to be RShift + Num+ (i.e. the numpad + key plus right-shift). Are you interacting with TrackIR at all? I think F7 is one of its default hotkeys so maybe if trying to hit that you might hit F6 by accident, or a profile invoking it might be misconfigured.

Targeting pod, maybe?

Not that long ago people were playing full-blown flight simulators on computers with much less processing power than a modern smartphone. If you can't get a mission editor to run with a gig of RAM and 1GHz+ dual-core CPU, then you're doing something seriously wrong. :D The mission editor is mostly Lua, and you can certainly use that on Android, so it's possible even a straight port would be possible (legal issues notwithstanding). The user interface would be more or less unusable of course. Even a straight port would be a massive amount of work though. 100% agreed. The same amount of time invested in creating a "mobile editor" could be used to greatly increase the efficiency of the existing one.

Do they work in single-player? By not showing do you mean you get broken textures, or is it defaulting to one of the stock skins? If the latter, try to make sure it's installed properly, probably the best way would be to have the players who aren't seeing them use the mission editor or mission planner in SP and make sure it's available for selection. Also while I'm not certain, I would hope that if it's a problem with the files themselves (too big or whatever) it would be recorded in the dcs.log file when the game is trying to access the textures, so that might be worth a look, too.

Around 130 megabytes if you use the updater, but it is dependent on which modules you have installed and if you've modified any other files. They will be adding download size (and rate) to the updater at some point, hopefully in the next update.

Except you can't play multiplayer without purchasing a module... :)

Shilkas can easily be destroyed with the cannon - in fact, killing them was one of the design goals of the A-10 (that, and popping tanks :D). The Shilka is only effective within about 1.5 miles, while your gun is reasonably accurate up to 2 miles. The trick therefore is to engage from maximum range - open fire with a short burst from about 1.7 to 1.8 miles, and make sure you break before you get any closer than 1.5-1.6. A high dive angle (around 30 degrees) should help your accuracy - and also give you a speed for making a high-G turn away to get yourself out of range of return fire. If you can afford the ammo, you can start firing earlier and give it a good long burst to increase the probability of a kill. Fortunately Shilka aren't well armored, so it doesn't take much to take them out. With a bit of practice you should be able to smoke them reliably without putting yourself in danger (so long as you know what's in the area and have a safe egress route already planned, of course!).

+1! Even if there was just a way to provide some text that would be inserted into the top of the mission briefing when the server sends its status information, that would be very helpful. Also if the amount of text that's sent could be increased a bit, if possible.

You might find the database at portforward.com useful for configuring the forwarding on your router.

It sounds like you're running the executables directly. This won't work, as the game binaries need the working directory to be set to the main install location, rather than the "bin" subdirectory in which they live. If you use the shortcuts the installer creates, it should be fine. If you can't use them you'll need to create a shortcut yourself which has the correct working directory. Attached screenshot might make it a bit clearer if the above didn't make sense.

It's been like this since forever, I think the issue is that it automatically adds some time to allow for startup but this isn't communicated via the mission editor UI. You can work around it by working out what the offset is and then decreasing the desired TOT by the appropriate amount. Alternatively, instruct the player to check and correct the TOT for any waypoint for which it's important, which will give them something to do during startup and ingress.