GregP

Cowboy10uk, With my setup, each aircraft should 'just work', because nothing in your configuration is changing. Any buttons or switches that are clickable in the game are now accessible via the touchscreen. And yes, you would have to use SoftTH to get the touchscreen working, but I haven't found any downside to that yet, aside from its inability to use DX11. Gadroc, Good points about the comparative features between the two setups. I agree with your points, but found it confusing to see two sets of gauges and MFCDs when I used Helios. I suppose the views could be tweaked to only present the HUD and so on on the upper monitors though. Regarding the need to be careful when zooming in and pausing TrackIR, you're right about that, but I've created a fairly simple system whereby with a single HOTAS button I can pause TrackIR and also enter 'precision mode' that dampens your TrackIR movements, which taken together, make using TrackIR use with this setup perfect, in my opinion. Hope I didn't sound too dismissive of Helios etc. in my previous posts; in most cases I think it's an incredibly useful utility for sims like DCS. I just happen to feel that a T-shaped setup, where everything's rendered in 3D, feels more intuitive and realistic than having part of the pit in moveable 3D and part in static 2D. But obviously, it comes down to each individual's preferences.

Excellent guide for those new to JSGME, thanks for taking the time to put that together. With the introduction of the auto-update feature in DCS a few months ago, I did exactly as you've described here and now dealing with updates couldn't be easier: uninstall all mods, update, reinstall all mods. The pain of manually reinstalling mods is now a thing of the past!

Is it just me, or are the HUD indications of having AIM-120s or AIM-7s selected a bit off? According to the manual you should see, in the lower left corner, either "120C X" or "7M X" where 'X' is number remaining. But I'm seeing something more like "A8L" and "S4M" or something like that.

The real O'Grady ran for the Texas Senate last year so ... unlikely that he still lives in Brooklyn, where he was born. Thus, this ain't him. Oh and ... because Santa ain't real. :)

YOU, sir, have my deep gratitude! Your suggestion has, I believe, FIXED my problem. What you said got me thinking -- I *used* to use DisplayFusion, but don't anymore. Then I started thinking, do I use anything else that affects desktop composition? Anything at all? And suddenly I realized -- YES, I use ATI/AMD's "HydraVision" drivers in combination with my Eyefinity setup to allow window snapping to each individual monitor! When I realized that, I went into DCS a few times to see if I could access the escape menu, and it worked -- because I didn't currently have HydraVision installed, as I just recently updated my Catalyst drivers and hadn't yet reinstalled the HV drivers. I then installed HV, started up DCS -- and couldn't access the menu! Uninstalled HV, rebooted, started up DCS -- and I could access the menu! So, I believe this realization has fixed it. Of course I'll need to do further testing to completely verify that this is really what's causing it, but for now, it seems to be the case. THANK YOU, my friend! Very much appreciated.

Yeah, I too am at a loss for why people are so opposed to TARGET. I too came from Foxy and so learning TARGET was a fairly painless transition. Up until a few days ago every sim profile I created was in TARGET. It was only this past weekend when I decided to give a try to setting up my profiles entirely within DCS and not relying on TARGET at all, thus making switching between aircraft so much simpler. To my surprise, within DCS's UI I can recreate about 95% of what I had in TARGET. The big drawbacks, in my view, are the more complicated commands in TARGET that you simply cannot recreate within the DCS UI, things like CHAIN (chaining a bunch of commands to occur in a row with just one button press) and TEMPO (short press of a button generates one command, long press generates another). Anyway, back to the topic at hand -- I too didn't realize that those five white dots were LEDs! I was always wondering what in the heck people were talking about when they discussed turning LEDs on and off. :)

But what about the physical size of your monitors -- all the same? This is important because if they're different sizes, the images won't match up using the settings I've put above. Regarding SoftTH: it's the only way, that I know of, to force DCS to render a larger area than you intend to display, and then being able to choose portions of that area to send to each monitor. By default DCS, and all games, presume that whatever resolution you set in-game, this is how much display area you want to fit onto your monitors; and additionally, games can't make use of an irregular desktop shape like the T-shape we're creating here. But with SofTH, you render a 5760x2160 area, output the top 5760x1080 to the upper monitors, the middle third of the bottom, i.e. 1920x1080, to the touchscreen, and essentially just discard the rest.

At the top of the RP window there are a bunch of icons, one of which is for settings or preferences: in there is a tab for SweetFX. And yes you unzip SweetFX anywhere and then point RP to it.

Sorry, I must not be understanding what you're trying to do here ... I assume you meant BRT up instead of DSP up above. In that case, if you want to assign BRT up to activate Master Arm within DCS, why do you need to get key commands involved? You can just find the Master Arm row in the UI, scroll over to your F-16 MFD 1 controller, double-click on the field there, then push BRT up on your MFD, and that's it. No? As long as you're trying to assign commands to your MFD that already exist within DCS, you never need to get key commands involved; you can just directly map each MFD button to each command within the UI.

May I ask why you're working directly with the lua files? It sounds like for what you're trying to do, just going through the UI would be much simpler. In my experience, the only time you need to get into the lua files is if you have a controller that has a switch or rocker for which one of the directions doesn't get recognized in DCS. For example on the Warthog throttle, there is a 3-position LASTE switch, the middle position of which, ALT/HDG, is electrically 'zero' and thus does not get recognized as a discrete position or press within DCS. Actually DCS sets the Warthog up for you, but if you had to do this yourself, first you'd go into the UI and assign the LASTE 'up' and 'down' positions by pressing each of them; then you'd go into the lua file and for each of those two buttons that you just assigned, you'd have to add a "up = iCommand..." command that would represent the middle position. But it doesn't sound like you're doing anything this complex. I used to have the MFDs too and I'm pretty sure that both BRT up and down show up as discrete button presses in the DCS UI, don't they? In that case just double-click on the Master Arm function in the F-16 MFD 1 column, press BRT down or up, and you should be good to go.

OK, so here is how you'd setup your config files. For the sake of simplicity, I have neglected to use bezel compensation here, so your combined resolution is 5760x2160; hopefully from the way these files are set up, you can see how to change the relevant numbers based on whatever bezel compensation you eventually use. Also, if your touchscreen monitor is physically smaller than the upper three, there is a trick we can do to possibly save some FPS by running an overall lower resolution; so, let me know what your monitor sizes are. \DCS World\bin\config.SoftTHconfig [main] renderResolution=5760x2160 nonlocalFormat=RGB16D keepComposition=1 smoothing=1 debugD3D=0 zClear=1 vsync=0 tripleBuffer=0 screenshotFormat=bmp dllPathD3D9=auto dllPathDXGI=auto dllPathD3D11=auto [overrides] forceResolution=0 antialiasing=0 anisotropic=0 processAffinity=1 FOVForceHorizontal=0 FOVForceVertical=0 [head_primary] sourceRect=0,0,5760,1080 screenMode=5760x1080 [head_1] devID=1 sourceRect=1920,1080,1920,1080 transportResolution=1920x1080 transportMethod=local noSync=0 \DCS World\Config\MonitorSetup\FourScreens.lua _ = function(p) return p; end; name = _('FourScreens'); Description = 'Four Screen Configuration' Viewports = { Center = { x = 0; y = 0; width = screen.width; height = screen.height; viewDx = 0; viewDy = 0; aspect = screen.aspect; } } Gui = { x = 1920; y = 0; width = 1920; height = 1080; } UIMainView = Gui C:\Users\[name]\Saved Games\DCS\Config\options.lua Add these lines: ["multiMonitorSetup"] = "fourscreens", ["aspect"] = 2.6666666666, ["height"] = 2160, ["width"] = 5760, Hopefully that helps. Let me know how it goes.

Well, are you using a Radeon card or Nvidia? If you don't want to use Radeon Pro, or you have an Nvidia card, just install it the exact same way you do with any other game -- unzip all files into your \DCS World\bin\ folder. If you want to use Radeon Pro, download the latest version here, install it, go to the General Settings section and specify where you have SweetFX currently installed, create a profile for DCS and in that profile you'll see a SweetFX tab where you can select the values you want for each effect.

SweetFX on it's own doesn't work with 64-bit executables. However, when it is used as part of Radeon Pro, it does. So no, you won't be able to run the 64-bit DCS executable with SweetFX right now. However, it should work with the 32-bit executable.

Well, when you have two monitors that are that different in size, I'm not sure how well my method would work, because for example if you use 1080p resolution on both monitors, the image on the touchscreen is going to be much smaller than the image on the upper screen. Alternatively, you could scale the touchscreen's resolution such that it 'inflates' its picture so that its roughly the same scale as the upper monitor. When I get home tonight I'll post my config files that you can use as a base as well as some more instructions.

Treudd, You've come to the right place -- I have exactly the setup that you're looking to create. My suggestion would be: forget about exporting MFDs onto the touchscreen, or using Helios, or using Hawgtouch or anything else. These are all unnecessary middlemen if you have 4 screens. Instead, render a T-shaped cockpit view where your instrument panel is on the touchscreen. This way you can naturally pan around the cockpit and directly interact with all of the cockpit switches without having to go through an intermediate layer. I've got a short video showing this functionality . What it requires is SoftTH and some setup steps in your monitorsetup.lua file and your options.lua file. First off, is your touchscreen the same size as your other screens? And what is the combined resolution across your 3 upper displays when you add in bezel compensation? Knowing these details, I'll be able to easily create all the necessary config files for you.

It's definitely compatible, yes -- in fact it was recently integrated into Radeon Pro, and I've been playing with it a bit in DCS World. Haven't quite got the settings right yet though.

OK, and .... how exactly does 'Hot Rocks' in Russian sound appropriate for a combat flight simulator? :)

My understanding was that it was a Russian term that when literally translated worked out to 'Flaming Cliffs'. Although I recall asking a friend who'd been in the Peace Corps in Ukraine, and had learned Russian, and even the Russian term sounded like nonsense to him.

You might want to consider just having your touchscreen monitor act directly as your cockpit without using Helios. That way you're not looking at two instrument panels. If you place your touchscreen below your main monitor, you could create a render area of say 1920x2160, and then in your main default cockpit view you'd have the HUD and canopy frame on the upper monitor and the instrument panel on the bottom monitor. Check out showing this working with a 4-screen T-shaped setup. It's SO much more intuitive and flexible than something like Helios.

Have you tried using the 'nosync' and FPS limiter options on the side monitors in your SoftTH config file? Both of these are intended to help lag. You might also try lowering the effective resolution being rendered on the side monitors, again through SoftTH.

Bolt-1, how many DCS modules have you bought and have loaded into DCS World? c0ff (ED dev) on previous page suggested long load times are related to module loading. This makes sense to me because I too have ridiculously long load times despite the fact that I have DCS on a SSD; but I have FC3, CA, A-10C, P-51D and BS2.

So last night I tried every suggestion that I've come across, and none of them affected my problem. I tried: - choosing a Windows 7 Basic theme - choosing a Windows 7 Aero theme - right-clicking on DCS.exe and under the Compatibility tab, checking and unchecking 'disable desktop composition' - checking and unchecking 'disable aero interface' in DCS - unchecking 'allow themes to change mouse pointer' in my mouse's properties menu - setting SoftTH's keepComposition to both 0 and 1 And nothing helped. The absolute only way that I've found to avoid this problem is to run in windowed mode. But this has its own drawbacks: - Crossfire gets disabled (admittedly a non-issue in DCS since it doesn't utilize it) - My cockpit doesn't scale correctly ... sorta complicated but, since my upper monitors have a different physical pixel size compared to my lower monitor (because the uppers are 27" and the bottom 22"), displaying the same resolution on each monitor (say 1920x1080) means the images won't match up at the boundary between the two monitors, since one is bigger than the other. To overcome this, I have to 'squeeze' the upper image such that it 'fakes' the same pixel size as my 22"; I do this by running a resolution of 6400x2160, even though my upper monitors' combined resolution is really only 5940 horizontally. But if I set my resolution to 6400 and run fullscreen, that entire 6400 horizontal res gets compressed and displayed on the smaller 5940 pixels' worth of screen space on the top monitors, and this scale then nearly matches that of the lower monitor. Problem is, when I run windowed mode, that 6400 doesn't get compressed into 5940 and so the left and right edges of the render window are not displayed, meaning not only do no FPS meters or other OSDs show up, but also that the upper and lower monitors are no longer scale-matched. Admittedly, this is a very specific problem, but still -- the bottom line is that I don't want to run in windowed mode and thus there is no way I can avoid this unable-to-click-exit-menu bug.

As far as I know, there is no way to force DCS to start a mission with an FOV more appropriate to Eyefinity/Nvidia Surround setups, i.e. something like 110 degrees, without then losing the ability to zoom in further than that later. In other words, let's say the view.lua has the following angles: CameraViewAngleLimits[P_51D] = {85.0, 155.0} And you change it to {110.0, 155.0}. Although your initial view upon entering the cockpit will be better because it's not so zoomed in, now you're never going to be able to zoom in further. My solution to this problem has been to just give up trying to force a default FOV; when the mission starts, I just zoom way out to what I want. As for your TrackIR problem, what DCS module are you testing this with? If it's FC3 and you're trying an aircraft other than the F-15C, there is no 6DOF ability in these cockpits and therefore TrackIR will not move your virtual head forward and backward the way you expect it to.

Sarge55, do you have keepComposition=1 in your config file? kobac, thanks for the suggestion, will give that a try. Any of you other guys use SoftTH also?

If you want to get a little creative, you could cut out the Helios middleman and use a touchscreen monitor to render the entire cockpit directly. I run a T-shaped 4-monitor setup where the lower center monitor is a touchscreen, and as you can see in I made, it provides a really intuitive way of interacting with the cockpit. You could just as easily use only 2 monitors, one for the upper HUD view and the bottom touchscreen for the cockpit.