pieceofmind

Here's a short guide I wrote in the Steam forum a while ago, summarising Chippy's solution. Note this is for the non-Steam version of DCS. Hopefully it still works the same way.

With still no love for BS2 Upgrade owners re Steam keys, I've decided to hold onto my money for now. A support ticket nearly 4 weeks old still unacknowledged doesn't fill me with joy either. Otherwise, this is quite a nice sale, especially the large discount on the Huey!

In my opinion, it is because of the following that BS2 upgrade owners ought to be given some consideration regarding getting their copies on Steam: http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=1318335&postcount=3 11 March 2011 I had assumed all hope was lost with Steam and ED working together again so I stopped bothering with Steam's versions of the products and switched to using ED's store, for both BS2 Upgrade and the P51 (the latter I'm truly grateful that ED has made possible to activate on Steam). Now that Steam is in the picture again though, it feels a bit unfair to be asked to pay another $40 for BS2 again to be able to use it there. Maybe it's OCD but it doesn't seem right to use the Steam version when I have access to all my purchased modules except BS2. I know there's no obligation on ED to go that route but in my case and I'm sure I'm not alone it would go some way to creating more good will towards ED and in reality that translates to a willingness to put money down earlier for the next modules. Happy customers are a resource.

I sure hope so. Of course nothing can be known for certain re DCS:Next but there have been enough hints to put an F-18C as the most likely. I think an F18 HOTAS would sell really well in that scenario so there's a pretty decent chance at least one of those companies will make one. Maybe we'll even get one from both companies as they'll feel it's a large enough market to compete in.

I don't think there's any need for exclusivity to Steam, so I don't see why anyone can object to it being available there as well as through your current channels. As I said at the start Steam has an enormous userbase and to not be able to pitch these titles to them is a missed opportunity. It may be evident but I would argue Steam is more a marketing tool than a DRM service. Rightly or wrongly a lot of gamers rarely or never venture outside its limits. If ED are still looking at this issue and are aware of greenlight then that's all I wanted to hear. I'm sure they're capable to do what's best for them. It looks like you avoid mentioning the benefits to the consumer as well. Since you're a frequent user of Steam you'd be aware others find convenience in automatic patching, game downloads always being available and unlimited (temporary server issues aside), integrated community features and so on. Games are a luxury and there's really no need IMO to take a doom and gloom attitude to how they're delivered. I just do no accept the argument that consumers would gradually erode their rights away to a point where playing games is actually to their detriment rather than something they do for enjoyment. There's no evidence of that happening and it's an argument based on fear of what is possible rather than what is likely. Godwin's law is irrelevant because we're talking about access to games here, something that any willing agent in the market can provide - not the abuse of basic human rights by a government. There is just no comparison.

Just to add some context, I'm posting here two flight combat games I've seen listed, along with some comments they've attracted. (and yes I know these two games are at opposite sides of the sim/aracade spectrum, but consider them anyway as flight games) Molten Sky Some of the comments left for it: Vector Thrust Some of the comments left for it:

I used to hate it too, but I use it a lot of the time now. Agreed, there are people who jump to its defense at every opportunity and often in a pretty childish manner (especially on Steam's own forum) but I would rather talk about it with a level head and talk of the reality. There are those such as yourself who object to the terms of using Steam and I respect that. However understanding that most people don't hold those same objections (of if they do then not to the same extent) and the sheer size of the Steam audience I think it's foolish to ignore them. Whatever problems ED have with getting these titles on Steam I'm sure they have little if anything to do with the few customers who avoid Steam entirely. I doubt it's in ED's interest to take a stand against Steam (for acting like a monopoly etc.). On the contrary ED would probably love the opportunity to have a renewed arrangement that would see some of their recent and upcoming titles on Steam. From your post it seems it is mainly the Steam DRM you object to, and DRM like that is pretty much the norm now across other stores or download services, with exceptions including GOG, Desura and some indie devs. Actually I found the DRM in the retail copy of Black Shark to be one of the worst I've seen but that's another matter. With all due respect most people can make up their own mind whether or not it's good for them. It's important to remember that games are, in the end, only a luxury and that a lot of people would happily take more convenience at the cost of reduced consumer rights. Other people will have priorities on that scale that different to your own and neither you nor they are more right than the other. Thanks for posting your opinion though. I hope I haven't sounded too defensive - I certainly don't expect to change your mind on anything but I do hope the post gives some ideas to consider. Remember I come to this discussion as someone who used to fervently oppose the idea of any game requiring Steam but also as someone who now uses Steam on a regular basis - I've seen both sides of the argument and I have a lot of familiarity with Steam as a service.

Could you please say why?

I did do some searches, particularly for "greenlight" with nothing showing up. I've followed this topic for a while now, inside and outside of this forum, but there seems to be very little information about why there is no longer a relationship with Valve/Steam. From what I've read, Valve is basically giving them the silent treatment (based on a post by, I believe, Wags a couple months back). If there are more recent or more concrete announcements I'd appreciate a quick link to them. In any case, if Valve isn't listening, that's the point of this greenlight. Even if the sim doesn't achieve enough votes on greenlight to the point where it will get new consideration, it will help bring more peoples' attention to the sim, and that can only be a good thing can't it? As I glance through some of the titles on greenlight now, I keep discovering titles that I've never heard of before yet seem quite polished in their stage of development. Nothing really bad can come of taking advantage of it, unless someone from the team starts responding unprofessionally to negative comments or something similarly unwise. Yes the casual games market is significant now, I still wouldn't underestimate the number of people out there who still like depth in their games. "PC gamers" commonly lament the "consolization" of games and the "dumbing down" or simplification of sequels to successful games. I would point to strategy gamers in particular as a segment of the market who appreciate the games which the more casual players would steer clear of because the games seem like work. Anyway, one thing I want to say is that I don't agree with the attitude of giving up and generalising about what the market wants. If it's true that ED would rather retreat than keep pushing to spread the sim then that's their choice but I really doubt they have anything like that in their vision/plan. I am mainly interested in seeing a discussion about whether greenlight adds any opportunities to the table or whether it's hopeless given the messages that have been coming (or not coming) from Valve. It might be that it's more or less useless to developers and publishers who have (or had) an existing relationship with Valve.

http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight/ I know people tend to either love or hate Steam, but it can't be denied Steam has an enormous audience and the fact DCS World isn't on it means a lot of potential customers are missing out. I suggest getting DCS World up on greenlight so the case can (hopefully) be made stronger for Valve to start discussions with ED re putting the sim on their store. To those who are unfamiliar with greenlight, it's basically Valve outsourcing some of its assessment of incoming proposals for games to put on their store out to its userbase. Valve must receive a large volume of proposals (including a lot of garbage) so it's hoped that people "upvoting" titles on greenlight will make the cream rise to the top and those most voted titles will receive further attention from Valve, while those games that fail to gain any traction might not ever get a second look.

Nice work!:notworthy:

With DCS World 1.2, it is supposed to be that the BS2 upgrade will now work. Previously (in 1.1) it didn't. I haven't tested it myself though. Also as mentioned above you will need to have BS1 installed if going that route.

EDIT... Trying this out, I did see the needle moving and not the ball. When the engine was running neither would move.

G940 owner here and I'm not (quite) seeing the same issue as you describe. I have the K14 range mapped to R2 and I still tend to see the gunsight range jump around a bit as I move the right throttle forward or back, but this was happening before the patch too. However, the jumpiness on the range when moving R2 (i.e. the axis for the range) is not present in beta2 whereas it was before. The gunsight range is the only axis on which I've noticed any jumpiness before and after this patch.

I've noticed the same thing too. Even more noticeable is that while the canopy open/close sound plays the engine sound seems to vanish, with a definite silence of at least 1 second or so after the sound stops before you can hear the engine again. Such a bug with the sound really kills the immersion at that point. Something about the canopy open/close sound doesn't sound right either. Almost as if it's mono channel - only playing on one channel depending on the head position (EDIT - pretty sure that's not the issue). Maybe it's too loud. It's hard to say exactly.

Thanks for the update, ED! Btw, a typo in the list: "eight wheel" instead of "right wheel". From the changelog I got the impression the helmet style would change (automatically) depending on the skin chosen.

I had this problem when I had incorrectly (?) set the left and right throttle axes to "Throttle Left" and "Throttle Right" in the control settings, instead of "Throttle" and "Engine RPM". As far as I can tell, these functioned the same way for flying the plane - it was just the visual in the cockpit that was off. It was until I saw this thread I realised I was doing it wrong.:)

I just look for a nearby chimney. But I agree it would be nice to have a more convenient indication of the wind direction.

Yes, unfortunately. Now all I can do is warn others to steer clear.

I sent a support request to Logitech on the 4th of September last year (regarding the reversal bug). I got an email confirmation saying to expect a response within 48 hours. I've yet to receive a response from them, even with 'bumping' the question a couple weeks later. I can only conclude Logitech don't have any support at all.

I'm a bit of a lurker here but I thought I would chime in to say I'm looking forward to flying this bird at the DCS level of fidelity. Keep up the good work, ED, and please don't make us wait for too long to find out what the next jet will be! :thumbup:

Thanks for the critical feedback! Also thanks to everyone else who has joined in the discussion and mini-debate! TheHeretic, note in my post before your first that I said I'll no longer be buying a PSU, MB or case. The PSU I use now is a Corsair 450W one and works very quietly, which is part of the reason I don't want to buy a new one. The heatsink I have now is indeed very good. I don't recall my CPU temp ever going above 35C unless the actual ambient temperature did! As for the CPU, as someone noted earlier, the price difference is very small between it and the e8400 in Aus. However, the price jump from the e8500 to e8600 is huge. Even if the difference between the e8500 and the e8400 is very small, as long as the CPU is one of or the most limiting components when running this game, then I'm prepared to spend the approx 5% more on it. Regarding graphics, I don't know much about the card but I do know it will be one of the most silent. You said the ATi 4850 and 4770 are inaudible. Given that my VGA is fanless and I can still hear it (very slight buzzing sound when under load, similar to my keyboard when it's illuminated), I find it hard to accept any card with a fan will be considered inaudible. Or are you talking about fanless versions of those cards? I noticed this card is fanless - would it be included in the ones you recommended? I'll look into it but yeah, I don't run very graphics intensive games apart from DCS and FSX, and even those are barely graphics intensive (I get the impression DCS is more CPU intensive than anything else). By the way, the primary source of noise in this computer at the moment is the hard drives. The P182 places them near the front of the case which is good for airflow and fairly standard, but not good when they're noisy and everything else is nearly silent. I tried mounting one with elastic but it didn't appear to do much noise reduction. The noise appears to be from the air - not case vibrations. The ticks and click noises etc. are fairly quiet and don't actually bother me anyway. But when I build this new system, I'm probably going to have two separate bootable systems using a HDD switcher. When I run games I'll use the slightly noisy but high capacity hard drives, but when I run quiet mode I might opt for a 2.5" drive like a WD Scorpio Blue in a silicon enclosure (unless it overheats). I'm very interested in the discussion about RAM. To be honest, I don't know a lot about it and at the moment I'm using 2x1GB. I forget what speed it is though - is there any way of checking that in winxp? If upgrading to 4GB is not likely to help I won't do it, cos every bit of money I can save, the better. But I was expecting RAM to be one aspect where this game would likely benefit. There are also other occasions than running flight sims that I appreciate having the extra RAM available.

Just an update, I'm now looking at turning this into an upgrade to my existing system rather than a new build. The motherboard I have already (aBit IP35 Pro) already can handle 1066 DDR2 RAM, and I've had to cut back my budget a bit. This way I won't need a new powersupply, M/B and case. And I can probably continue to use my current Thermalright U120 extreme. I'm not sure the xigmatek would be a huge improvement over that cooler - certainly not enough to justify the cost.

Thanks for the replies everyone! Nice to hear a similar machine runs the game mostly smoothly! May I ask which graphics card you use, as in which brand of 9800GTS? Re the E8400, turns out it's only slightly cheaper in price (30AU) whereas the E8600 is 104AU more! Re the thermaltake heatsink, how is it? Do you run it with a fan on it, and if so what sort of volts or RPMs do you use it at when under load? Mind if I ask what case you use or what overall cooling system is employed? The case I have in mind has a mother of a fan (200cm) almost directly above where the heatsink will be so I'm wondering whether it might be unnecessary to have a fan mounted on the heatsink. After all, the S1283 has slightly larger fin spacing than similar sized heatsinks meaning it could run pretty well with no fan attached. The decision to do this or not will depend on if and how much overclocking is done on the CPU! I also run a 1920x1200 display at the moment so your mention of it has helped me get an idea what to expect. Thanks. Overkill much? :) That must've been an expensive machine! Similar components would be a little outside my budget unfortunately. Ignoring the fact it's probably not a very quiet system (but only you - not I - can judge that), I prefer to steer away from hardware that is leading edge because of the price spike. The 9600GT passive card I linked is actually very cheap by my standards. Since I will most likely use this machine for some other possibly more demanding games, it seems a safe minimum. But for what reason were you worried about the choice of 9600? From the context it sounded like you thought it was overkill, but if that's the reason then you needn't worry for the reason I mentioned above. Also, the Gigabyte 8600GTS passive card I already have has never let me down and stays very cool, giving me some faith in their newer cards with the same idea.

This is my first post here so I hope I'm starting this thread in the right place. Buying DCS has really fired up my interest in flight sims again and I'm finally going to get round to building a machine that can run this game well. I'm just looking for some general advice about what hardware components should receive the most attention. My main priority for this build, as the title may suggest, is performance in DCS Black Shark (and possibly the subsequent titles from DCS). I'll briefly list the proposed specs then I'll have a couple questions... (well, more than a couple:lol:) Motherboard: ASUS P5Q PRO Turbo CPU: Intel E8500 with Xigmatek HDT-S1283 attached. VGA: Gigabyte GeForce 9600GT SilentCell RAM: OCZ 2x2GB DDR PC8500 (1066MHz) HDD: One or two Samsung spinpoint drives I already own. 7200rpm. PSU: Vantec ION2 C Series 460W Case: Thermaltake Element S I intend to overclock the CPU and probably the graphics card as well. As such I'll be keeping a close eye on the thermal dynamics in the system and I'll be adding more fans than are provided by the case alone. First, a couple of points. I'm a fairly regular reader of the SPCR forums so you might be able to guess that low noise is a high priority for me. I've built one system before (in an Antec P182) and I was very pleased with how quiet it was. It convinced me to never buy a pre-built desktop PC again! i.e. A DIY'er was born.:) Anyway, the low noise is the reason I have toyed with the idea of the passive graphics card. However if DCS would benefit significantly more from a more powerful graphics card then I will be willing to sacrifice some of the peace and quiet! This is one of the things I am looking for advice on, as I know my current graphics card is probably well behind the average that you all probably have by now (a Gigabyte 8600GTS fanless card). I have read advice that a dual core CPU is best for DCS, so I have gone with the relatively good value (compared to the E8600) E8500. Is this overkill for DCS or not enough? The very low power consumption is one of the things that attracted me to this line of CPU. The other questions I have are mainly about the operating system. I will initially use Windows XP 32bit but I want to leave the Windows 7 upgrade option open as well. In that case I'd probably create a separate partition for the new OS and keep XP for the older games. I actually don't know much about the difference between 32bit and 64bit OS's or CPUs but I'm mainly interested in their effects on DCS performance. :D Any tips here? For the record, I'm hoping to use this machine for the other sims I've come to love (Jane's FA18, FSX, IL2 Sturmovik and a couple others). In particular, does my choice of RAM, CPU, and graphics card look reasonable? If one of the things is clearly going to bottleneck the whole system then please argue that! Is there some massive blunder I have made with these component choices? One final thing.. I'm assuming the hard drive performance is not a big priority so I am probably going to start off with a couple of the drives from my existing PC. Is there any gain to be hard from using a 10k RPM drive? I'm not even going to touch SSD! :lol: Assuming I use two drives where one is better than the other, would it be wise to place the OS and game install on separate disks, and if so, which of the OS or game should get the better performing drive? Thanks in advance! Piece EDIT.. Fixed a typo. The VGA was meant to be a 9600GT not a 8600!