GregP

Hmm, OK, thanks for the suggestions guys, will try out tonight. One other odd thing is that even when using cypher1312's exact settings, with my 1920x1080 center resolution replacing his 1680x1050 res, I get this "both screens shifted to the right" problem, i.e. I can't even reproduce what he sees when I use exactly the same options.lua and modified.lua settings that he lists in the first post.

Can somebody help me figure out what I'm doing wrong here? I'm using a 17" touchscreen with Touch-buddy on the left along with my main 37" in the center. I'm running 1024x768 on the 17" and 1920x1080 on the 37". Using the following settings, I can get Black Shark and Touch-buddy (using Dick Dastardly's 2-monitor profile) to work together, but with a horrible framerate hit caused by the insane required resolution of 3968x1080 (note this is before trying to use the Phantom Monitor Fix). options.lua: ["graphics"] = { ["multiMonitorSetup"] = "dd_shkabr+cam+phantom", ["color"] = "32", ["heatBlr"] = 1, ["scenes"] = "high", ["water"] = 2, ["fullScreen"] = false, ["visibRange"] = "High", ["aspect"] = 1.777777, ["textures"] = 2, ["shadows"] = 3, ["display_mode"] = { ["avi"] = { ["bpp"] = 32, ["resolution"] = "640x480", ["full_screen"] = false, ["aspect"] = 1.333333333, ["height"] = 480, ["width"] = 640, }, -- end of ["avi"] }, -- end of ["display_mode"] ["effects"] = 2, ["haze"] = 1, ["lights"] = 2, ["height"] = 1080, ["resolution"] = "3968x1080", ["civTraffic"] = 0, ["width"] = 3968, }, -- end of ["graphics"] DD_ShkABR+Cam+Phantom.lua: Description = 'Shkval & ABRIS on the left, camera on the center' Viewports = { Center = { x = 1024; --(the width of your leftmost monitor) y = 0; width = 1920; --(the width of your primary monitor) height = 1080; --(the height of your primary monitor) viewDx = 0; viewDy = 0; aspect = screen.aspect; } } Shkval = { x = 13; y = 13; width = 486; height = 306; } ABRIS = { x = 585; y = 157; width = 366; height = 447; } My understanding of the Phantom Monitor Fix is that I can just run the exe in the background, change my 'width' in options.lua to reflect the actual two screens I want to render rather than the 3 it renders by default (i.e. 2944 instead of 3968 since I'm not rendering the rightmost 1024 screen anymore), and I should be good to go. But when I do this, the center image and Touch-buddy screen shift to the right by about a third of the 1024's width, and the underlying ABRIS and Shkval no longer line up under the Touch-buddy overlay. And it seems that no matter what I change, both of my screens just refuse to center properly. Can anybody see what I'm doing wrong here? Has anybody else got DD's Touch-buddy profile working with the Phantom Monitor Fix?

I've got a 17" LCD arriving today and a touchscreen kit coming sometime soon, so I'll be sure to report my experience putting it together.

Yeah, LtFransky, just as confirmation, that is definitely an issue with your video settings and not the fault of the game. You're right, it absolutely shouldn't be such an unreadable, fuzzy mess. It should be closer to this:

Great video, and I actually liked the music. I only know these two groups by name - which tracks and albums did you use, specifically?

Seems this question continues to come up on a regular basis ... The simple answer is, $50 USD is what PC games cost these days in the US. The price is set by what people are willing to pay and how much the publisher wants to charge. In Russia, presumably there just is no (or little) market for PC games at the $50 price point; while in the US, they all cost that much, with console games usually $10-20 higher. Unlike many other games I've bought and then been disappointed with, I feel that for $50, I'm getting more than my money's worth with DCS: Black Shark. That's also why I had no problem buying the Russian version too: I think supporting a unique developer like ED is worth it. If we don't buy their games, there won't be any more of them - it's as simple as that.

Corrections for Chapters 1 and 2 ii: CONTERMEASURES SYSTEMS iii: Wall panel, Forward Section: 'p' in panel should be capitalized for consistency iv: MENU/OPTION Sub-Mode: 'm' in mode should be lower case for consistency 1-3: 1st paragraph: kgf/sq.cm.. : extra period 1-6: Advanced Map Moving System (AMMS): should be Advanced Moving Map System 1-7: 5th bullet "Rubicon" should be Rubikon for consistency 1-8: CONTERMEASURES SYSTEMS 2-6: paragraph under 1 thru 9: "input control manger" 2-16: third paragraph in HSI section: "and the either the" 2-17: Figure 2-12 label: "HSI Indicator" is redundant 2-20: 5: QFE pressure scale in millimeters of mercury: should be "tens of millimeters" 2-35: Running engines shouldn't be hotter than 150 C but stopped engines shouldn't be hotter than 800 C? Is this backwards? 2-40: 2. "This four position switch and three speeds and off positions)." ? 2-42: bottom center box in table: WAEPON 2-47: 3rd paragraph: "how may flares" 2-58: 4. "can store up to the six waypoints" 2-62: 18. "coordinates will [be] similar." 2-71: note under table: "Aidroms list" 2nd paragraph: "switch is set it to the" 2-81: "monitoring of oil pressure, transmission oil pressure, and engine oil pressure" - redundant - third item should be "oil temperature"? 2-90 and 2-91: items 1 and 2 have exact same description 2-92: UBM-U is not shown on picture of panel on previous page, and there's no description of BCP and BPN in the figure Paragraph starting "Before a second" says "the rocket type of gun pod", "of" should be "or"? 2-98: Maikop / Maykop inconsistency "you will here broadcasts" 2-100: NNY "Moving canon" 2-101: second bullet: "postion" 4-4: 1. "Target Bearning Scale"

Having not caught any of the previous VFATs, I saw probably a quarter of the flying this weekend and was really impressed. This is quite a show you guys have put together here, very professional and organized. Thanks!

LOVE IT! Having jumped from 24 to 37 inches, I can never go back ... freakin' incredible!

Nice job, very handy, thanks!

Speedbrake, It's really quite simple - there's no such thing as a "Vista/DX10-only" video card. They all work perfectly fine with both XP/DX9 and Vista/DX10 if they support the latter.

Man! I just wasted an hour and an activation to answer this?!? :) OK, so I've been flying the Shark under XP only but just installed under Vista32 (dual-boot), and I find that toggling between 1 and 2 core affinity has absolutely no impact on framerate whatsoever. I do see about a 10% drop in performance compared to XP though. I have all in-game graphics options maxed, 1920x1080 resolution, Nvidia Control Panel forcing 16xAF, 4xAA, and Vsync.

How about the 'maximum pre-rendered frames' option I talked about above? That seemed to smooth it out for me.

Peter22, have you downloaded the GUI manual? These settings are described on pages 16 and 17. http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/index.php?end_pos=2199&scr=products&lang=en Basically 1024 cockpit display and full shadows will give you lower framerates but more detail.

Have you tried toggling your core affinity between 1 and 2 cores?

OK, so I gave this a try tonight. Set up a simple flight from inland starting from a hover to over a coastal town; I benchmarked the flight using FRAPS. My graphics settings are 1920x1080, water high, vis distance high, 16xAF, 4xAA. The 'maximum pre-rendered frames' was at the default 3 before I changed it to 1 and then 5. You can see that once the '5 frames' case smooths out (around 85 on the x-axis), with '1 frame' I was getting spikes but to higher framerates. Although at the end, the min, max, and average framerates were almost exactly the same between the 1 frame and 5 frame case. I guess the spikes to higher rates makes sense based on the description of what this option does in the Nvidia control panel: "Increasing this value can result in smoother gameplay at lower framerates." So it seems that for my system, at least, setting it lower will help smooth things out.

While in the cockpit, there are a series of snap views that can be used, among the most useful to me being snap view 2 and snap view 5 (zoom in on Shkval and ABRIS, and zoom in on HUD, respectively). Anybody know if there's any way to make these sticky? Problem is, if you program them into a HOTAS, the buttons need to be held down (inherent in being a snap view) which means that other key presses (like pushing ABRIS buttons) get screwed up since other keys are simultaneously being held down. Anyone know if there's a way to make these view sticky, or toggleable, to get around this problem? Also, anybody really understand the 'save cockpit angles' function (Num 0 - RAlt)? It seems if you press this key, wherever your view is at now gets set to the 'cockpit panel view', which can now be snapped to or toggled to (Num0 and Num0 - RCtrl, respectively). Is there any way to 'reset' this panel view to default? Also, after setting it, for some reason my snap view 2 and 5 views no longer work - why?

I did some tests last night to determine the effect of Visibility Distance and Water detail on framerate. All these tests used 2xAA, 8xAF and Vsync forced on via the Nvidia Control Panel. Vis High, Water High: 30 FPS Vis Med, Water Normal: 47 FPS Vis High, Water Normal: 40 FPS Vis High, Water 0 (via options.lua file): 47 FPS The only difference I noticed when changing Visibility Distance from High to Normal was that trees didn't render as far away, but the difference is minimal. Lowering water quality from High to 0 makes the water look significantly less detailed when flying over it (although oddly makes it look better, to my eyes, at long distances due to the boundary between land and water looking 'hazier' for some reason), but isn't very noticeable when over land. So for me, dropping Vis range to Medium and Water to Normal is worth grabbing an extra 50% in framerate.

Even on my system I'm seeing hiccups, so I'm not sure that CPU speed or RAM amount really has anything to do with it. I'm still trying to figure out what's causing it.

On my Core2Duo E6700 (o/c'ed to 3.5GHz) under WinXP SP3, I see no performance change when alt-tabbing out and changing affinity from 1 to 2 cores.

That's what I said in my original reply! :)

Still not seeing what I'm doing wrong here ... Koriel used 3728x1050 resolution, you're using 4480x1752, so following that logic (total width = width of main monitor + 2*width of second monitor) with my 37" (1920 width) and 22" (1680 width) = 5280. Right?

Are you running SLI or something like that?

Did you select the 'update game profiles' button after installing 4.1 build 36? That seems to be required for Black Shark to be recognized.

Possibly - so BlackSharkAce and Maddog01, are you guys using more than one video card?