Exorcet

I think a better solution is asking ED for a livery manager. The idea has been floating around for a while now and there are posts about it in the wishlist section. Add to them and let's see if we can ED to add this since it would help everyone.

I work with professional simulations and we simulate things that don't exist all the time. Something that does not exist, but is plausible, is completely reasonable for the simulation genre. I do understand that there are cases where you'd want them separated though. Fortunately DCS gives us that ability.

It had a couple of size options originally, but yeah more control like a slider would be a nice improvement. With so many resolutions, monitor sizes, etc, I think just having 2-3 size options wasn't enough.

OK, and the concept was good enough that it or something similar is being requested again.

I can see beyond 20 degrees, so not really, and you're not even taking monitor size into account. Enlarged models are a perfectly acceptable tradeoff for more realistic spotting, so I don't really care if the model sizes aren't technically correct.

I don't disagree with your points, but as universal and important as zoom is in a flight sim, I'd rather ditch it in favor of something else. Ideally I would want a realistic FoV at all times while also being able to see objects at the correct distance and in realistic detail. I think we have room for options besides zoom. We can, and should, also ask for additional or better tools if they come along, or if people think of them. In fact I'd consider that part of accepting hardware shortcomings - that a sim may not work totally 1:1 with reality, as long as the resulting experience tries to emulate 1:1 reality, when technical limitations are present. Yes, somethings can be difficult to simulate. People may come up with many approaches on how to overcome the difficulty, but they probably all have their own strengths and flaws. Asking which is best or trying to force only one solution can be counterproductive in this situation as the answer may even be massively subjective.

This topic was a little derailed with VR discussion, which is fine since a VR equivalent is probably needed, however I wanted to highlight one of the reason why I think this revamped menu is important. The screenshot below is from a test of a mission today and shows how my AI responded to an "attack bandits" command. As you can see, control over them is limited and they don't really act logically. The plan here was to engage the group to the west with 2 and then turn around and let the second element attack as we extended. However 4 commits to attacking something way to far away that no one else is focusing on, which is a good way to get shot down or waste fuel chasing something in AB for many miles. I could have tried ordering attack my target and designating with my radar, but this is incredibly slow and clunky and there is currently no way to directly issue orders to wingman 4 or the second element (at least in the F-16). With my menu, designating targets would be much easier and faster, and it would work even better with a wingman overhaul that is desperately needed.

I now figured out why the F-14's vanish in the original mission. For the test mission attached I used start hot to speed things up. The original mission has the F-14's set to uncontrolled so they can start later. This makes them swing their wings forward on start up. The result is that as soon as they move, they explode.

I noticed in a recent mission that a flight of F-14's was disappearing from the map without a trace. Even log says they would start their engines, but then would never mention again. They were supposed to takeoff from Shiraz on the PG map from the four isolated C parking spaces on the west side of the base. I was not able to figure out why they disappeared, but I set up a test mission and found out why they would never takeoff. The lead plane has to cross the second flight member to taxi, but the AI thinks there isn't enough room to do this and stops. This can be fixed by just making sure the lead is parked closer to the main taxiway, but it took a while to figure out what was happening and the AI should have enough room to taxi no matter what order they are parked in. Track attached F-14 Shiraz Taxi Bug.trk

Fox 3 can go for chaff, have the chaff expire, and then relock the plane. Fox 1 will typically give up after falling for chaff. In DCS chaff is a dice roll chance of breaking lock and the aircraft radar doesn't really matter (except the Mirage 2000 radar, which is the highest fidelity right now). No, chaff in DCS works at all aspects.

That's a rather pointless question. Narnia and Lord of the Rings don't obey the laws of physics, don't have flight manuals, and don't have major engineering firms that you can contact for information. How are you going to model them to the accuracy of the F-20 which actually exists? I get that you prefer historical aircraft and that's completely fine. A plane having seen service is not required for simulation though.

Yes, chaff works. In general Fox 1 is more vulnerable to chaff than Fox 3.

Definitely needed.

Sure, but the intent of scaling isn't to make every insect visible. The math for sizing pixels is straight forward enough, but it's not sufficient to make image quality the same as reality. Human eyes don't see in pixels, and while the size of objects relative to monitor FoV might be correct in DCS we're still probably losing visual information that we would have in reality because of the distortion caused by low resolution (compared to the eye) screens. I do agree that more visual effects and better rendering would help though and I do want to see these added as well.

But these two things go hand in hand. Simulation =/= historical recreations only. We'd lose the entire user files section if that was the case. Historical mode would have to be enforced in the ME if that was the case. Etc.

I'd like to see the return of the enlarged visual model as well (it existed briefly during the 2.0 Alpha days). It had some issues with the implementation that ultimately got it removed, but I feel like this was more about not wanting to go through the effort of optimizing the engine rather than being an insurmountable technical problem (correct me if I'm wrong). Something else they might try is a slightly better labels system that only places labels on objects that you can see (ie the labels vanish for objects behind terrain or hidden behind your plane's cockpit). Screen resolution poses realism problems. Scaling is just a method to counter this. I'd say it's more realistic if done properly.

The F-20 was essentially production ready, which differentiates it from planes like the XB-70, which still had much more engineering work to be done. That said, I would not mind having the X-plane series in DCS. Taking on the role of a test pilot would be as fun as flying a combat campaign in my opinion.

What is wrong? DCS is a simulator. The F-20 is perfect. Simulate test/sales flights, simulate weapon certification, simulate the hypothetical simulation where the F-20 was sold and went to war. This is completely typical of DCS, and in my opinion preferable in some ways to historical conflict. Re-enacting history is fun, but you know how things will end, there is less to be surprised about. CFD should provide a fairly reasonable flight model, we also have manuals for the plane. Then there is the fact that it's heavily F-5 based, which gives a reference airframe to help fill in some gaps. Not to mention that Northrop is still around and may be able to help. Honestly, whether a plane has seen combat or not isn't a make or break deal for me. It's just not that important, and I don't see why people care so much about that (but I accept their opinions). As far as DCS goes, we lack details/features to recreate historical conflicts exactly, so while you can have Jaguars and Sea Harriers, that doesn't mean they will end up in recreations of their historical battles. Secondly, DCS has many developers involved. One plane doesn't have to cost us another.

Jester wheel definitely isn't for everyone. That's a hardpass from me. Optional sure, but if it was mandatory it would be a huge downgrade in my opinion.

I sort of merged your posts together when replying, so I guess my answer wasn't super clear and I didn't see the "not" in your original post before, so I thought you had issues with Hot targets too. Anyway, Med is supposed to be better for Cold/Flanking targets, although keep in mind the Hornet INT PRF doesn't work like FC3. It actually swaps between HI and MED instead of creating some kind of average inbetween PRF. So every 1st scan will be HI, giving you range and every second scan will be MED giving you off aspect detection.

Med PRF isn't going to see very far. I usually stay Interleaved.

I've always felt like these are the kind of binds you don't want on your HOTAS (unless you have extra button space left over I guess). It's partly why I like having a pop up kind of menu. I also think making is more mouse friendly is good thing because there are a lot of wingman commands and you sometimes needs to give multiple commands at once. This isn't great with the current system because it can involve jumping through lots of F10 menu levels or having to remember a bunch of keyboard shortcuts, which there aren't enough of to cover every situation. I specifically added an orbit with altitude in my example picture because there is no such option currently, and if there was it would potentially be a nightmare to quickly command because you'd need many F10 options for different altitudes or many shortcut keys for different altitudes. In my opinion, a drop down menu is just so much better here. This would be a good addition for DCS, but I don't think a UI based menu should ever go away. For one thing voice commands require getting additional hardware, it also has to work for multiple languages, and it's not always interpreted correctly. A menu can also give more feedback depending on how verbose the AI is in responding to commands. For example, I imagine it's easier to have a popup for flight fuel and weapon states than creating voice lines to cover every situation.

Not that I know of, but better CM modeling has been asked for and I think they are aware of the demand. I strongly suggest posting critiques on the AI in order to help ED tune it. They are currently spending resources on this area, but I'm not sure if they're aiming to make the AI more fallible. I think it absolutely needs to be. As you say they currently have too much SA. Even ancient planes like the MiG-21 can tell exactly where a missile is coming from and take perfect evasion action. I made a thread to provide feedback on the new AI, but it was eventually moved to wishlist: Still, if more people respond, maybe ED will focus more on AI fallibility.

It is true that I did not consider VR as I am not a user of this feature. Do you think the menu could be modified for VR use? Perhaps it would need to expand to full screen and the drop down menus would need to be replaced with sliders so that it takes less effort to change the settings? Or this could just be one of two menu options. We have one for screens and a totally different one for VR.

I'd like to propose a new menu for wingman coordination. I think most people would like something faster and more powerful than the current F10 menu. I propose a popup window where we can set options for wingmen similar to what is available in the mission editor for tasking: null The above image is a rough concept and in no way inclusive of everything needed for this menu, but I think it gets the idea across. Instead of scrolling through layers to find the right command and issuing commands one at a time, everything is displayed at once. Options are drop down format, click the down arrow icon next to an option to change it. Then of course there are checkboxes for things that need no input, like join formation, or attack target. I think there is also room for new functions like requesting wingman fuel and weapons states. While I do have a drop down for target select, I don't think this would work very well in a crowded mission, so I think this option should also be available on the F10 map. If something appears on the F10 map, you can click it and assign a wingman or your entire flight to attack it. This may require new F10 map options however. For example in a mission where the F10 map is intended to be disabled, we could represent potential targets in a ring around the player position instead of at their true locations, or perhaps the units will only be displayed at their true locations if they are detected (sort of like Fog of War).