DMarkwick

Right, I'll try that. Would you happen to know what a "naked" default export.lua should look like? I'll probably revert it right back to default.

Meh. My last change 2 posts up didn't alter anything.

OK, thanks for the reply I guess I will change it to local wwtlfs=require('lfs') dofile(wwtlfs.writedir()..'Scripts/wwt/wwtExport.lua') dofile(lfs.writedir()..[[Scripts\DCS-BIOS\BIOS.lua]]) local janjan = require('lfs') dofile(janjan.writedir()..[[Scripts\JanJan\JanJan_Export.lua]]) when I get back home, see if that fixes anything.

So I bought my WW ICP, got it set up, worked no problems. Later I bought 2x MFDs with displays, also got those working. For a while I had all 3 working correctly. (I have an unconnected issue with DCS resolution, but that's another post...) However at some point recently I have lost my ICP DED display, I just get a lit background. (It continues to work correctly in BMS btw.) As I was spending time trying to understand the F-16 AG radar, I wasn't paying attention to when exactly the DED stopped displaying. You know how it is sometimes. My Export.lua looks like this: local wwtlfs=require('lfs') dofile(wwtlfs.writedir()..'Scripts/wwt/wwtExport.lua') local janjan = require('lfs'); dofile(janjan.writedir()..[[Scripts\JanJan\JanJan_Export.lua]]) local wwtlfs=require('lfs') dofile(wwtlfs.writedir()..'Scripts/wwt/wwtExport.lua')dofile(lfs.writedir()..[[Scripts\DCS-BIOS\BIOS.lua]]) As you can see there is a janjan entry there too (which is something for VoiceAttack) - I don't know lua enough to know if that's the problem, or whether that's fine where it is, it seems OK to me. Anyway, I did change it a little to local wwtlfs=require('lfs') dofile(wwtlfs.writedir()..'Scripts/wwt/wwtExport.lua') local wwtlfs=require('lfs') dofile(wwtlfs.writedir()..'Scripts/wwt/wwtExport.lua')dofile(lfs.writedir()..[[Scripts\DCS-BIOS\BIOS.lua]]) local janjan = require('lfs') dofile(janjan.writedir()..[[Scripts\JanJan\JanJan_Export.lua]]) To no effect. The bottom two-thirds of the ICP works just fine, it's just a button-box down there after all, I think of it as a button box with a display attached to it, just like the MFDs are displays with button-boxes around them. Does anyone know why the DED would suddenly stop displaying in DCS? (As I said, it's fine in BMS.)

Does anyone know the purpose of the haze element in smoke effects? I removed it from my experimental smoke effect & didn't see any difference.

Hi guys. I'm after information on how to use DCS in a way that means I don't have to quit & reload DCS after every LUA file update, so the file is essentially live-loaded somehow. By way of a direct example: I'm currently trying to develop a fire & smoke change for my own uses, possibly will put it up somewhere for general download too. I did this a long time ago for Arma 2 and it was generally well received and appreciated. (JTD Fire & Smoke.) I'm fiddling with the file [path]\DCSWorld\Bazar\ParticleEffects\effects\FireVehicle.lua and as far as I can tell I need to quit DCS and restart before seeing any change in the visual results. My question: can I do something which means I don't have to quit & restart after every file edit?

I put this comment in the general forum rather than the CA forum because it's a general comment on the quality that I saw. I can't tell you how surprised & excited I was when I discovered that Rapier is modeled in CA, I saw the briefest screenshot in one of the ED promo videos & it looked pretty good so I plopped a few down in the editor & had a good look around. I was a Rapier technician in the RAF for ~10 years or so and I have to say the modelers absolutely nailed it. I mean it looks EXACTLY as I remember it. All the little handles, switches, cables & labels were immediately familiar. Even the generators for Christ's sake :D are just as I remember them. The shapes of those components are burned into my consciousness and it was just great to "see" them up close again :) Some of the details of the behaviour are not right, but overall the behaviour is OK, certainly good enough for flight sim use and the general ability of the system considering you don't really get to see it unless you're nerding out & watching it with the camera :) Just thought you guys ought to know when you nailed something I actually know something about :)

As an update and for anyone searching the same problem, I never did find the cause, or a fix. I had to clean install Win 10 & reinstall everything. It was a weird problem that, as far as I ever saw, only affected DCS both Steam and standalone. I believe it was definitely a My PC problem though, and unconnected with either Steam or ED.

It sounds like a great idea to me. "Real world" wave behaviours shouldn't be of concern because of course missions can use what existing maps we have as proxies for some other area.

I had to clean my entire PC & reinstall everything, the biggest single PITA right now is that I have to unassign and reassign all my HOTAS axis controls for each & every aircraft, is there a way to do one "master" assignment and have it propagate to all aircraft? All my aircraft start the same crazy way, pitch & roll assigned to toebrakes & rudder etc, I have to manually unassign them all and reassign them properly.

Yeah I'm currently re-downloading the entire Steam DCS install since last night, some ~170gb :) so it'll take some time. It will be done by the time I get home tonight though. I already did a couple of standalone re-installs (seeing as that's "only" ~60-70gb or so :) ) with no luck. I'll also uninstall AVG as that's probably a high contender - one of the things that regularly updates itself, and as I haven't done anything, and Win7 no longer updates, and this problem happened shortly before the DCS update I'm looking for auto-update components.

Hi BIGNEWY, thanks for the reply. No, I'm definitely not mixing them, Steam just fails to start, and standalone is a raw install no modules, no DLCs, no mods, just as it installs with nothing else going on. For standalone I use the shortcut generated on my desktop which links directly to DCS_updater.exe. I tried DCS.exe directly and I get the same error message. I tried to directly start from Steam's DCS.exe and I get the same error message, which I don't get when I try to start it from the Steam launcher. My feeling is that, as a Windows 7 Pro user, since very recently I probably need to update/change some other component but I don't know what that is, it seems the latest exe from DCS requires it whether it's standalone or Steam.

My Steam DCS install stopped working suddenly - click "Play", I get the usual radio button popup & choose normal Steam version, then the button turns blue and displays "Stop", and after a few seconds goes back to green "Play". No other clues, the DCS logs are all from tha last successful game load so nothing useful there. I've been running DCS successfully for several weeks now, have bought a whole bunch of DLCs, no problems running anything until 3 days ago when it just won't start. I downloaded the standalone DCS install & installed that, and when I try to start it I get a message box with: "DCS.exe - Entry Point Not Found" "The procedure entry point could not be located in the dynamic link library WorldGeneral.dll." So, my Steam has stopped working, and DCS standalone doesn't start. Probably the same cause. Can anyone tell me the problem and how I can fix it?

Well I can't tell you what makes Steeel Beasts so different, I would have suggested the same approach (particularly as Steel beasts has a rather more primitive rendering engine) and I haven't seen any footage or ingame images to try & assess. And I assume the LVC translation to be concerned with positional & rotational etc information rather than geometry & terrain etc. And also the DCS engine is not designed to handle the dense world of an ArmA map. So some compromise will be made somewhere along the line. The ArmA engine has the possibility of rendering terrain far beyond it's object rendering abilities, and also that objects can have different LoD levels and individual rendering distances, then some tweak of the settings can possibly be found that has a reasonable look. As mentioned I don't know the extent to which Steel beasts is integrated into VBS and don't have any knowledge of it :) I only post up my own thoughts on how the complexities of two systems can pass out the least amount of data to each other to be useful. As such, positional, ordnance & collision data seem to be the bulk.

Consider that as far as ArmA goes, all it needs is positional, orientation, and inertial information from DCS to display an in-ArmA representation of the DCS craft. That sounds quite simple to do (relatively) and aside from that, the only other item as far as ArmA goes that it needs is fired ordnance information. That also sounds easy to do. The difficult part would be the in-DCS gameview. It would need to somehow sync all the ArmA aspects into DCS representations, including the terrain. Anyone who has a DCS product will know that is definately the difficult part. My own suggestion would be a system where the DCS machine has to run not only DCS, but ArmA as well, and it replaces its outside view with one rendered with the ArmA engine. So it acts as a DCS simulator as far as the aircraft goes, including flight dynamics, but the outside view is rendered in the ArmA engine and displayed instead of the DCS outside view (which can be discarded for the session). The physical interactions like collision would need to be initiated in the ArmA engine and passed into the DCS engine. This would place a huge load on the DCS machine though, but it's the only way I can see it working properly. Otherwise we'd be talking about a DCS approximation of an ArmA map, which IMO would introduce far more problems than it would solve. The issue of how the DCS engine's various sensing equipment (radars & other sensors) picks up on ArmA entities is a little outside of my knowledge, as I don't know how DCS handles this aspect. Whether for example the entities have properties that the DCS engine requires, or whether the DCS engine can act on any entity that has geometry. Simply don't know about that aspect.