Druid_

+ support 39.99 , huh? explain please You have got to be kidding me ... as for the DCS software, watch this space (MS SDK release soon, see here ). Sounds like you have something invested in trackIr or maybe you work for them. TrackIr is old technology, admit it. If you'd prefer to stay with TIR fair enough while the rest of us move forward. Google Primsense, kinect, and face tracking and come back to the conversation when you are better informed. I suppose this guy copied TIR source code also as for the chicken & egg, don't really care but I like mine scambled or Roasted please. (NP didn't invent face tracking!)

TrackIr ....... $169.95 MS Kinect ... $139.53 Kinect tracks a little more than just your head and more accurately and without the backlight problems as well, not to mention inbuilt microphone etc. Other devices (possibly smaller) on the horizon.

Save your Money !!!! I wouldn't buy TrackIr now, not with some great webcam solutions out there to tide you over until the raft of head/body tracking hardware that is here now (e.g. Kinect) or arriving shortly. Personally I can't wait to get rid of the damn antlers!

Agreed, windows8 maybe? Anyway, the way I see it is that the next gen of tracking devices will provide some interesting changes to games and how we interact with our PCs in the future. About time something new and inovative came along!

When you consider that there are body tracking devices like Microsofts Kinect (here now) and Wavi Xtion (arriving soon) by the israeli company Primesense , NaturalPoint are going to have to up their game and quite possibly release an updated version of their head tracking software as a seperate product. One that will be compatible with aforementioned devices. At least I hope so! I can finally get rid of these damn antlers and headset.

Each group should have the fist aircraft as CLIENT and any additional aircraft grouped should be Good/Excellent etc. Good idea to make sure each group have different callsigns. When you run the mission using a MP host server then only the client names should show up. It was some time ago I did this, but it doid work for a 2 client plus 2 AI mission I had (edited one of DCSs campaign missions). Might have been a beta version even so don't know if this still works in 1.0.0.7 release version but should methinks.

trouble is, you need to run the sim to check on unit positions, trigger activations, logic, unit engagement profiles etc etc. Having said that, the ME is already a stand alone program, it calls DCS.exe when you click on FLY mission. Might be nice to be able to throw some stuff together on a standalone ME.exe and then test it on your PC later.

The one bug I'd like sorted is the lag you get when you ACTIVATE units. I know it was mentioned somewhere that ED were working on it. Hope it comes sooner rather than later!

More good news on the tanker! What else is not in the list? Maybe Wags can patch the list or publish the patch to the patch list?

Most of the games out there don't need to use multi-core, they are GPU ltd. Therefore even those games that are multi-core/multi-thread capable they don't need to use them efficiently. Parallel processing isn't something new, its been around a looong time and some software does a fantastic job of using multi-core processors (e.g. 3D studio), but only because they need to. Think of it like this, the threads might need information off each other and even though one thread might stall briefly waiting for another threads instruction to complete, these threads in question are operating without the overheads that a single thread has, even with the stall it will complete the instructions quicker ---> improving performance. Btw Graphics wont issue a call to physics, graphics gets its information when its ready. The main issue is how DCS is written, in C with lua calls and god knows what else. Having an assembler that can take it all and make it multi-thread is a huge task. Not an impossible one though.

Utilising the F10 Other menu effectively ---------------------------------------. For single player missions (F10 other menu only works for Host in ver 1.1.0.7) it is nice to involve the player in decision making and interactive communications. This is done by the mission builder through use of the F10 other menu in missions. (you can use this for Co-op MP missions, just remember Host does the radios) Using the current GUI in ME means that you have to select transmit and select F10 again to see a user created sub-menu. e.g 1. OPS MENU 2. TANKER MENU selecting 2. (F2) you might like to display another sub-menu. This means deleting all of the current menu, adding your sub-menu then the player has to hit F10 again to view this new sub-menu (i.e TANKER MENU). I didn't like this so reverted to lua for a solution and found it in the bottom 2 commands shown at the bottom of this post. However, I went a step further to tidy up and produce a more efficient and 'quicker' method by putting all of the menus in script. creating a menu is as easy as ftenMenuItems = {'Hawg task complete', 'Say again', 'OPERATIONS MENU', 'TANKER MENU'} then displaying the menu and setting appropriate flags (in this case 201 to 204) for i=1,#ftenMenuItems do RadioCommandDialogsPanel.addOtherMenuItemUserFlag(ftenMenuItems[i], 200+i) end then to remove the menu do for i=1,#ftenMenuItems do RadioCommandDialogsPanel.removeOtherMenuItem(ftenMenuItems[i]) end Once any single F10 menu item is selected use the following commands to instantly pop up the commands menu, display the F10 Other menu and your now added sub-menu. RadioCommandDialogsPanel.setShowMenu(true) RadioCommandDialogsPanel.selectMenuItem(10) Here is an example of this menu system (I tied it in with my texaco tanker relocate mission in post #2) F10 other menu popup lua.miz

If you are thinking of upgrading to Sandy Bridge then wait another month or two and get the new Z68 chipset motherboard. Here's a review Most interesting is the ability to use the Sandy Bridge on die graphics alongside your native VGA card using GPU virtualization (using Lucidlogix's Hydra software solution). You will be able to connect a display to the output of a H67 or Z68 based m'board alongside your own VGA card and use both. Otherwise use your dedicated cga card to run your main monitor and the intel on die graphics to run your smaller MFD screens. Nice solution methinks.

agreed, please make this an option. RL is frustrating enough for me, I don't need it in DCS too, thanks. Has the ME received any love and attention? +1 on multiplayer comms, would be most welcome, hopefully slated for a patch soon?

excellent link swift. However, how motion blur is implemented by the graphics engine is important to the end user experience. Over doing the periphery for instance gives you the feeling of riding in a tunnel. Distant object should have less motion blurring that close objects etc. The other problem for a developer is getting the effect to work close to real life on a 2D screen. Never played UT3 but I can imagine it being annoying in a first person perspective shooter, in a flight sim the effect could add to the experience. Might be better however when used in a 3 screen config as the 1 & 3rd screen are a little more in the periphery than a single screen. Oh the limitations of 2D and single screens! 10 years from now we'll all have high res pocket sized projectors with kinect ver3 and uber vga cards, only trouble is I'll be too old to appreciate it.

In a word, well two, "Motion Blur". Shake your your hand in front of your face and you get the idea. It is one of many effects that is starting to be introduced into games and the latest VGA cards and engines (e.g. Unreal, Crytek) can produce. If motion blur was introduced into the DCS engine it would allow smoother visuals at much lower fps. e.g Peripheral vision of trees/buildings etc when flying at low-level could be blurred. In fact wherever there is motion above a certain speed at a certain distance there will be an amount of blurring, this helps the fluidity of 1 frame blending into the next. In fact its possible from what I have read to produce smooth motion at as little as 18fps. 30 fps is fine when the fps does not vary. i.e. It stays fixed at 30. If the graphics are done correctly with AA, good texturing, detail, lighting etc etc then you'll not notice the difference between 30 and 60, or if you do it will be very small. Given the choice between 60 fps and low detail or 30 fps (fixed) and high detail, I will alwys take the latter. If done correctly of course. p.s. Its also a fact that many people dont think about setting their frame rate in sync with their monitor refresh rate. Having a 50hz monitor (just an example btw) with your game pushing out 60 fps is a waste of time as 50hz = 50fps. So if you have say a 60 Hz monitor you are better off setting the fps (in a config file or sometimes in a gui game menu) to a multiple e.g 30 or 60 fps. This has been hammered out in other threads so I shalln't go into any more detail other than to say that thinking High FPS is the answer to smooth viewing is incorrect.

This is INS accuracy, you still have your GPS providing your NAV data. If the GPS fails then position updates will revert to INS position.

Hmmn ok. Who said anything about rewriting the engine? I did say update. 30fps min, of course I'll take anything higher !

Well, you watch tv & films at 30 fps! If its a steady 30 fps then it will be fine. Given the fact that it will be at least a year until the next DCS release I really hope that they will take a serious look at updating their engine, and I don't just mean porting it to DX11.

^^ agree. I sometimes have 15+ versions of a final build, each time I add major content I save it as a diff version. Glad you found the problem though.

add my +1 for the 100th time. I find it hard to believe that the developer in charge of building the missions/campaigns for DCS hasn't hit the ME developer over the head or bribed him with beer & vodka? to do something like this by now. p.s. A horrible solution is to take screenshots and try tieing them up with the ME when placing units as well as the SP/MP exe's crappy solution.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216893 disable windows key. Very strange problem & not one I have heard of before. I know you are tech savy but after a format & re-install of vista (without doing any microsoft updates), it is obviously a hardware problem. When I first built PCs most of my problems were due to the VGA card but times have changed somewhat. I can only suggest what I think you have already done, which is to disconnect everything from the machine except for a USB keyboard (even the mouse) which is plugged directly to a motherboard USB slot. Even disconnect any non-OS extra drives you may have in the machine. Run a memory checker like memtest & check for bad sectors on the HDD. If it still doesn't work then it has to be the VGA card or a faulty power supply. Once you have replaced those and it still doesn't work then get off the grid, move to another country & buy an apple. (you are in the twilight zone).

Based on this article and speech by Nvidias Tony Tamasi I hope that ED takes note and consider an engine rebuild for the DCS series. i.e. offload the CPU and get the GPU doing what it was designed for. GPUs are advancing quicker than CPUs and if developers are reluctant to utilise multi core and/or multi-threaded processing then start looking ahead to the future GPUs coming our way. I know that there would be a huge amount of work involved in redesigning a graphics engine, but DCS would benefit immensely if it brought its current engine up-to-date with todays and possibly tomorrows technology. Maybe ED just don't have the resources to do so, but I for one would love to see DCS running at 30 fps min with levels of realism that just 5 years ago could only have been imagined.

“If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it.” W.C. Fields

A rough calc :- TAS = altitude/200 + IAS (e.g. IAS 240 kts at 20,000ft = 100+240 = 340 Kts TAS) I'm assuming the Vne pointer is based solely on TAS.

:lol: I really wish I knew. Given the length of the lag I'm guessing its all of the model data and the textures being loaded. In my experience ACTIVATING heli's are the worst culprits. I hammered this one out in a thread before and got no satisfactory answer from Ed in that particular thread. However, IIRC in another thread it was mentioned that they were working on a solution to Activate units without the ensuing lag, but also added 'no promises'. Currently, to avoid lag, MizBuilders are using group AI off/on but you can't use it on airborne units. Planes you can orbit for hrs (if you put a tanker in there) but Heli's you cannot. So there are some limitations as what you can do with heli's in a long mission. Its pretty frustrating as it limits an otherwise excellent Sim.