Toumal

An F16 throttle would be amazing - but it would have to have a few of the adjacent panel switches as well, like the Warthog and Winwing F18 throttle.

I ordered FSSB R3 + F16SGRH on Sunday, they arrived this morning. I had zero issues getting this up and running. The software is functional and easy enough to understand. The stick is super light compared to the warthog, but feels very solid. Nothing rattles, nothing squeaks. The stick is plastic but it's the good and grippy kind, much like on a new Glock (minus the rifling/stippling of course). I was relieved to find this was NOT the kind of velvety plastic surface that usually turns into sticky goo after a year or two. The fact that weapon release and a few other pushbuttons are now also 8 way directional controls did worry me at first, but it's not at all a problem and if you don't want to use them that way, you'll hardly ever notice. Oh and DMS and TMS now have a push down function as well. Everything is clicky, which may not be to everyone's liking, but I don't mind. The base of the stick is really sturdy, I love the beefy screw and the guide lugs that make certain that you're not going to break your connector pins while inserting. The lack of physical movement makes it feel like your brain is wired directly to the jet, a little bit like mind control. It can be a bit tempting to overcontrol during tense moments, but other than that I don't feel like I have to "relearn how to fly" or anything like that. I was honestly expecting much more of a transition time. But after flying just a few times... I really like this. And of course there's no comparison to the warthog base. Landings, air refueling... fine maneuvers feel a lot more precise. I don't overshoot simply because the stiffness of the spring mechanism in the WH base anymore. Conrary to what @Supmua recommended I did lower the input force to around 3 lbs, with no negative side effects. I found you could go even lower to 2lbs or less. Negatives... for one, the trim hat feels a bit more loose. The good thing is that it's clicky so any trim action is deliberate, but it's not as firm as on the WH. The 8 way function on the pinky is a bit pointless, who'll ever use that? The paddle is made out of plastic. It's very sturdy and doesn't feel like it's going to break, but still, the WH stick's metal paddle is more reassuring. To be fair, I mostly ordered the F16 stick because I wanted to keep my WH stick on a virpil stick base for F14, F18 and A-10 flying. But wow, I love that thing for the F16. It just feels right. In terms of force it's perfectly suited for monstertech table mounts. I did lower the required force a bit but that was not out of fear for mount stability, just a matter of personal taste. Should you get this over other high-quality joystick bases if you fly a lot of warbirds or helicopters or other center stick jets? I'd say no. It's just my personal opinion but to me it just feels wrong to use this for a P51, just as it feels wrong to use a virpil stick with 20mm extension for the F16. *CAN* you use it for everything? Absolutely. In terms of precision, I feel the same amount of fine control as on a virpil base with extension, maybe even more. YMMV of course. All I can say is that I'm really happy with this, I'll most likely use it for the F16 and space games, while using the virpil + extension for the classic stuff.

Just wanted to chime in that this did not help with the lack of contrast on clouds for me. I also tried the various quality presets and there was no improvement. I don't have screenshots for all those tests because, frankly, my original screenshot shows it well enough. The lack of dark spots in clouds is really problematic because it removes any sort of depth. It's almost like the blend mode of some of the voxels doesn't allow for clouds to get *darker*, only for them to get brighter white. It would be fun if someone who feels like deleting your save folder helped could post some VR screenshots.

+1. Can't wait for the bumpy ride when you fly into the soup.

I really hope the cloud contrast in VR can be improved. They already look a LOT better than 2.5 don't get me wrong, but comparing them with 2D the difference is staggering. They're just flat white/gray. In 2D they have much darker centers and a lot more variance of brightness.

I see this really disturbing trend among some of the DCS userbase that they think they know stuff, when they are literally clueless. And don't get me wrong, there's a LOT I don't know. There's a few aspects that I'm professionally involved in, and I've found myself in the situation that people whose only experience was DCS and hearsay explained to me how systems I deploy in real life work, and that I don't know jack schmitt about said systems. This is sometimes coupled with another disturbing trend I sometimes encounter: People who are looking to establish themselves as some kind of authority. You know, if you have a question about the lantirn pod he/she can't just answer you, they want you to follow them on facebook and "book" a training session. They're essentially looking for padawans. So no, being a good pilot in DCS does not make you a pilot in real life, especially not a jet pilot. Even for civil aviation the fidelity in DCS regarding ATC and procedures is simply not there, as it's a combat sim first and foremost. A really good one, don't get me wrong. And heck, if you end up in a cockpit of a jet all of a sudden you might be able to get the thing down in one piece, as flying ain't that hard. Carrier landing? Maybe, maybe not. But are you a trained pilot? Just... no. There was a fun comparison between RC pilots and manned aviation pilots years ago, with the RC pilot getting into a cessna and basically having very little problem flying, while the real pilot really struggled with orientation and the process of flying a plane that he only sees from the outside. It's entertaining anecdotal evidence, but probably not enough to claim that flying RC planes is more difficult than sitting in the pilot's seat. You might have a head start on people who don't fly DCS if you get into a real jet, but that's not guaranteed. In the end, the best thing IMHO is to accept that these are all different things. If you're good at flying jets in DCS, then that means you're good at flying jets in DCS. End of story.

Unfortunately I have the same issue. Here's a comparison screenshot:

I get these weird crashes too. Very annoying. dcs.log-20210417-111900.zip

Please keep the darkness for being inside very thick cloud layers though. I love how in a severe thunderstorm cell your cockpit gets dark and depending on the light situations you can get some very impressive moods.

Update is live for me, and downloading

Hi there, I have a large number of target zones and want to assign those to players dynamically, i.e. via script. However I can't seem to find a way to do that. I've read thought the code of several missions that do something similar, but I found that they always seem to use some kind of workaround, i.e. radio messages or the likes, instead of actually setting waypoints. Does anyone know whether this is possible at all?

Seconded, VR performance is much improved, and the constant reloading of textures when switching to other follow cams is gone for me too. I used to fly with low shadows and textures on a 2090ti, now I'm on high shadows, high textures, and things are running quite smooth. Very nice!

Righty-o Suddenly the F16 is a lot more fun.

Works in the latest beta release that just dropped. I don't know when "last night" was for you, but if it was on the previous version, it most definitely did not work - at least, not most of the time.

Aaand the bug is marked as fixed in the latest beta changelog! Can't wait to give this a try!

I've created a track in singleplayer. First thing I did was switch to CCRP. You'll notice that the bomb fall line and the SPI on the HUD remains unchanged regardless of TPOD designation. I also tried switching to AUTO but that did nothing. ccrpspibug.trk

To me it reads more like it's not something they believe is broken at all... Don't get me wrong, maybe I am doing something wrong, though I'm kinda suspecting it's a bug.

Hi, I've been having issues with the CCRP bomb fall line for quite some time. It correctly moves to steerpoints, and when I have the HUD as SOI I can slew the box + line around as expected. But when I make the TPOD SOI it will not follow my designation, no matter whether I designate something in point or track mode. Matt replied to me on YT saying that the TPOD works fine so it must be something I'm doing wrong, or am I? Trackfile here due to size: http://hoxdna.org/dcs/Caucasus_Pendulum_Supercarrier_v1.8.5-20201213-174511.trk Thanks in advance for any help!

Regarding SSD vs. Harddrive: I run the game off of a Samsung Evo 970 NVME SSD, and the system disk is an Evo 850. The framerate has nothing to do with unzipping files, the disk is close to idle when this happens. Well I went ahead and spent a few hours digging into what DCS is doing using the nvidia profiler. What happens is that it's trying its best to maximize VRAM usage which is of course desirable. I found that at high texture settings when switching airplanes there's a point when it keeps unloading and re-loading textures for each single frame. There is a literal torrent of DtoH and HtoD memcpy operations going on, which goes away just as the framerate returns to normal. This is definitely a bug in the game, as it apparently keeps textures on on the graphics card that are long since unused. It simply holds on to them for way too long even though that object is not even rendered anymore. Having more VRAM simply makes this less likely to occur, same with lowering the texture setting. It also matters which map you're running - syria is definitely one of the more resource intensive maps. There's definitely something wonky with the memory management here. There's no need to hold on to the textures for an F14 that's not in view anymore.

Hi, I have some AI redfor planes I spawn via script and have respawn when they're dead, and they're exhibiting a weird behavior: They cause RWR lock warnings on bluefor players that are super far away, often well beyond 100nm. Does anyone know what can cause this? Any setting in particular that I should avoid?

Hi, I'm having an issue with performance in DCS and I wanted to see if maybe others had the same experience or if I'm missing an optimization step: I play with the Index on a Ryzen 3900X and a 2080Ti. When my object textures are set to high, I can fly without issue for quite some time. But at some point, very suddenly, the framerate drops from around 100fps to 2-3fps (yes, that's essentially a slideshow), and *stays that way* for a significant amount of time, usually 4-5 minutes. And then, just as suddenly as it started, it goes away again and the game is perfectly smooth. I found that I can trigger this by switching rapidly between external views of other aircraft, but it can also be triggered by landing near densely populated areas of the Syria map. I tried everything, and then I discovered that switching the textures setting to medium or low makes this problem go away completely. I tried using the VR optimization shaders and they work well (with the known caveats like of flood lights only rendering in one eye), but they have no effect on this phenomenon. Does anyone know if there's a way to get high-res textures and NOT have this problem? Anyone experience something like this at all? Please note that this has nothing to do with lots of objects on the screen. Just toggling between multiple high flying aircraft triggers it too for me, and then the low fps stays consistent regardless of what is on the screen. Is the game running out of texture memory? Is there some weird memory swapping going on maybe? Or is there some setting I can tweak (aside from texture resolution...) EDIT: Errrgh, intended to post this in the problems forum... maybe a mod could move this please?

This mod no longer works for me on the latest beta, after recompiling no air or ground vehicles are rendered, and cockpits are gone. I did try to delete the shader cache just in case, no change.

You're right! Thanks for the pointer. Sorry for the distraction.

Yeah 50GB on the full client (34GB download size), but the dedicated server is only 8GB - or is that an incomplete download due to the recent fix?

Thanks, and no worries!