GregP

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?

Try two things: 1) This new input dll file provided by Chizh in the Russian forum: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=32366&page=2 2) Manually setting the axis in the axis commands screen, i.e. instead of letting it detect the movement of the axis, just set it manually; I think it's JOYZ.

Well, if somebody gets really enterprising and tries to do it through Touch-Buddy, I guess - previous Lock On profiles had the TEWS working.

BlackSharkAce and Maddog01, What kind of framerates are you guys seeing after enabling this dual-monitor setup? I just got it working on my 37" HDTV (1920x1080) and 22" (1680x1050), with the 22" showing ABRIS and Shkval, and my framerates are atrocious ... I dropped from, I'd say, 25-30 FPS down to about 5. I've got 2MonitorTest.lua set as follows: Description = '2MonitorTest' Viewports = { Center = { x = 1680; y = 0; width = 1920; height = 1080; viewDx = 0; viewDy = 0; aspect = 16/9; } } Shkval = { x = 3600; y = 220; width = 840; height = 620; } ABRIS = { x = 4440; y = 0; width = 840; height = 1050; }

Hey, that's great news, MAThrasher! Just be sure to use a download manager now. :)

Page II: PERFORMANCE CHERACTERISTIICS Page II: CYCLICK CONTROL STICK Page II: CONTERMEASURES SYSTEMS Page VI: SPECIAL HARDWERE CONSIDERATIONS FOR CONTROLLING A HELICOPTER

Ah - I see. :) Sorry to hear it cost that much, though. But hey, flying the Black Shark months early is worth it, eh?

MAThrasher, sorry to hear you never got any answer to what happened. With so many steps to the process, and so much of it via websites and applications that were new to most of us, it's I guess actually surprising that more of us didn't have results like yours. For potential buyers from the US, though, I think it's worth pointing out that as far as I've seen, this has been the only case where the money didn't transfer correctly. Judging by the number of people in the US in this thread who've had no problem, I'd still say this is a very safe and reliable process, overall. In other words, I wouldn't want to dissuade anyone from buying based on this one case, but it's good to know about and keep in the back of our minds.