Exorcet

You may not necessarily want to preserve the mission (and even if you do, opening it causes no damage, only saving does), but instead want to get information out of it. In that case being preventing from opening the mission is a massive hindrance. Keeping the mission open also makes sharing a lot easier since the person you're sharing it with doesn't need to know what mods are required. You obviously can't share for the purpose of running the mission, but you might for troubleshooting. I don't disagree that it can protect the mission from damage, but it's still a bad way to do it since it also keeps you from accessing the mission at all. Yes it would be frustrating to accidentally save over a mission, but preventing that doesn't require locking the mission. There should be protection of some kind, but I'd rather it not be totally preventing the mission from being open as that just causes additional problems/work. If the functionality is reverted, there should be a checkbox to disable the file locking at the very least. I like having the name changed to prevent accidental saving if the mission cannot be fully loaded, there just needs to be a way to make that clearly visible to the user. Maybe forcing the save button to show a dialogue that explains the issue with the mission.

Having the ability to open any mission without needing to install additional files is very helpful. Locking the mission file completely isn't a great solution to preventing accidental changes, instead there could be a popup box warning about the missing mods as well as affixing a suffix to the mission file name so that if it's saved it can't overwrite the original file unless the user intentionally uses "Save As" (though if people don't notice the file name change, it could cause some confusion). A checkbox option like @Elphaba mention could also work.

This has nothing to do with the MiG-29. It's the conditions that change how the vortices look.

Since the hardcoded (assuming they actually are hardcoded) values were wrong in the past, the radio.lua is probably correct. You can report map issues here: https://forum.dcs.world/forum/520-bugs-and-problems/

Unfortunately I do not. The ME entries may be hardcoded. There was an issue on this map where the ME frequencies did not match the actual ones in the past.

This is correct. I was going to post this when I saw the thread earlier, but I didn't see any mention of the save changes warning in the original post so I thought it might have been a different issue. While it's unintuitive, I can see the mission zoom setting being a save feature. I think it also changes the default F10 map position when starting a mission. That said, it can also be annoying. I'm used to it so I don't find it a big deal but disabling the temp mission feature could be a useful option. Some time ago, the ME would auto open the last played mission in a session which was something I found helpful. It would even open the mission if you had not saved it. I think that would be a nice feature to have return as an option as well.

Going only by the video posted above, at sea level and clean, the F-16 should at least equal to the DCS aircraft currently ahead of it. What you say is true about A, though the C is no slouch and does have more thrust. In fact as far as I know, I think the Blk 30 C's are generally considered the best anecdotally.

It will depend on how deep you want to go. You can give a few groups a route that has them push toward each other, then copy and paste them, and you'll pretty quickly have a large battle. But the two sides will just be charging at each other until one side is dead (or gets stuck where the other side can't see them). A step up from that is to give the group multiple waypoints and then use the go to waypoint command to dynamically make them advance and retreat. The AI isn't going to do this intelligently, but it can increase their survival rate and prolong fighting. This isn't something I've spent much time on as I usually limit my ground units to smaller numbers. You can have large battles, but your PC hardware will have to be factored in.

This is absolutely true, but the process is a bit tedious and without a detection trigger, you can't truly tie SAM behavior to sensors without scripting. I know the IADS module fell through, but some simple solutions for improved SAM behavior would help a lot. Things like a waypoint/triggered action to make SAM's flash on/off, an option to have them turn off in response to attacks automatically, and an option to link a SAM to EWR or AWACS and use radar for "attack only" like planes.

Thanks for the confirmation. The F-16 model is quite good. This is not a massive error, and my flying wasn't perfect, so if it's deemed to be within tolerances I can understand.

The disperse under fire is a very important option for ground units, I'd recommend considering how to set it for every ground group placed on the map. Luckily you don't have to check and uncheck it every time you place a group. I like to place a few groups down when building a mission, set their settings, and then copy and paste them as needed to save some time. DML's spawning tools can probably do something similar.

A campaign built around exploring anti stealth tactics could be fun. I've had an idea for this using the F-117, but have not been able to devote time to creating the missions. AI F-35's wouldn't just have to serve as adversaries though, they could be interesting as allies as well. Fly with them deep into enemy territory and make use of their SA to survive beyond the range of friendly AWACS. Or you act as a supporting missile truck to offset their reduced weapons capacity when flying in a LO configuration. While there are a lot of AI assets that DCS could benefit from, I don't think the F-35 is that wild of a choice to add.

That is an ammunition explosion. Certain buildings will detonate that way, I believe all the ammunition warehouses in the static object list. I don't think you can generate that explosion arbitrarily, but you can place a warehouse nearby and force it to blow up.

This is still labeled as "PM Evidence" so I wanted to follow up. Do you need more source information?

Aiming and SA is a massive AI issue. Their awareness of things around is seemingly tied directly to object position. If they want to focus or attack something, they know exactly where to look. I would like to see some uncertainty added to this. For example if you fly into an enemy's blind spot the enemy should stop tracking your true position and instead track your last know position + velocity, but there should be random error added on that that increases with time, for example. The AI also needs to have react time. If you shoot a missile at it, flares shouldn't be deployed immediately. There should be a fixed human reaction speed delay (sub 1 second) and then an additional delay based on awareness or having to search the sky visually for a missile. This can get complicated very fast. For example when it comes to reactions, real pilots don't always wait for something to happen. They may try to anticipate an event, which could allow them to react to something much faster than they should. A universal AI delay might actually make them too sluggish in some situations because of this. Still, I think such a system can be setup in a reasonable way, but it might take a couple of iterations.

Very casual testing but: -AIM-9X appears to have high flare resistance when used by the AI. It was better than R-73 against straight and level player F-16. Flare used on reaction. -AI flare effectiveness may be better than player. AI was able to spoof the 9X multiple times in a row. This never happened when the AI fired on a player aircraft. AI uses preemptive flares sometimes. But I need to go back and make my testing more consistent since I was flying straight and level in mil power for the AI. The AI I was shooting at was maneuvering. I'll also note that the current state of AI has it deploy a large amount of flares rapidly unlike the very slow use of flares that it used to use. I wonder if this high amount of flares is the issue. Using a large number of flares is fine, but the AI might be using them more rapidly than their planes should be able to. In the F-16 for instance I can't match the rate of flare use that I typically see by the AI.

Those are questions for cfrag, who fortunately has joined the thread. You can tell units what to do with triggers. Specifically give them triggered actions and then use "AI Task Push" in the trigger menu. You may want to post your mission, then someone here can look at it and give more specific advice. Or I could try to make a sample mission later to show the process.

Troops on buildings should work. The ME just places the unit on the highest point under their position. So if infantry is placed on a building, it should end up on top of that building. This might only work for the prebuilt buildings on the map and not for ones you add. I'm less sure about that.

It sounds like most of what you want can be done with triggers. DML should work as well but I have no experience with it. Flying to a location can be checked with a trigger zone and a flag (ie Once unit in zone, Flag 1 is on). A little more advanced method is to write a short flag activation script at a particular waypoint, but you want to be careful about failure conditions. Example if the player misses the waypoint, the flag won't trigger. I like to combine different checks to make sure at least one succeeds. Though for what you want a simple trigger zone should be more than enough. You can check that the hostiles are destroy with Group dead/damaged triggers. Here the failure mode for the trigger is more complex. Do you want to require all the enemies to be destroyed? If you do, how easy is that? You probably don't want the mission to hang just because one hidden infantry is alive somewhere. Using Group Alive less than x% would give you some leeway. Smoke can be triggered on a trigger zone or unit Returning to base would be another unit in trigger zone

It might be a flare issue. I've had the thought pop up in my head that something is wrong with counter measure performance before, specifically for IR missiles. To really confirm it some testing would be needed. Another issue that might be a factor is that the AI will tend to see a missile launch from a wide range of angles, react to it instantly, and be ready to dump a lot of flares always. I've resorted to avoiding using AIM-9's unless the flight time is very short because they seem so likely to fly toward flares. It can't rule out that it's selective memory since I haven't recorded the success rate, but my experience deviates from what I would expect enough to make me suspicious.

DCS isn't a modern air combat sim. It's a flight simulation sandbox, though ED has kept the standards high for aircraft fidelity. Sufficient information on the F-35 is simply not available, and it would probably require new modeling techniques to simulate the technology it brings like stealth or AESA radar. It might be OK as an AI aircraft, but as a player aircraft it would at the very least be extremely challenging to model with the fidelity of the F-16 or other teen fighters.

I got a chance to look at the ME and there is no thickness setting for clouds, so I'm going to assume that the parameter is a hold over from the old cloud system:

I'm not 100% sure that it's broken, but it might have only applied to the old cloud settings. I can't check right now, but does the current weather tab have a thickness setting for clouds? If it doesn't then the thickness parameter probably doesn't apply to weather at the moment. As far as reporting the bug, there isn't much you can do beyond creating a thread and waiting for one of the moderators to read it. It can take some time.

The F-16 has a very clear click sound when you hit the AB detent and this can be very useful depending on your HOTAS or controls setup. Would it be possible to add an option to enable something similar to the Hornet?

I'm not actually very deep into DCS Lua scripting, from what I've seen you're generally using more complex scripts than I am more often and across a wider range of applications. I haven't looked into weather at all unfortunately. All I can think of besides the value or its reporting being bugged is that the thickness is somehow a depreciated parameter because of updates to the weather system. Is the value present in the miz file and does it change as expected? The hoggitwiki weather page was last updated 2 years before the volumetric clouds and weather update to DCS.