Kevin509

*** Suggesting the Mods move this to the dedicated Mi24 wish list Forum at this time *** Bumping this old thread now that the Hind's been out and the CH47 is upcoming. This seems like the time to address helicopter logistics in a big way for DCS and part of that should be that Helicopters with internal storage should be able to carry additional ammunition and/or fuel in the internal compartments, just like they do in real life. I know there's a lot of talk about the "Fat Cow" FARP with the CH47, but there's no reason that redfor shouldn't be able to do something similar with the Mi8 and Mi24. Heck while we're at it let the Huey or UH60 mod carry reloads for the Apache. What a cool combo that could be online. Have a Huey with 24x hellfires on board follow the Apaches out... Force a 60 or 120 second delay for reloading this way vs at a normal FARP to simulate the crew having to do the work themselves. Seems like that would be a fun new high risk/high reward gameplay mechanic online; as well as being a realistic feature to add.

As an aside, I'm curious why there's so much desire overall for the flexible gun on the Hind? Are there really that many of you out there who are CPG mains who want to play from the front seat? Because as someone who plays solo from the back seat and owns both the Apache and the Hind, I can hit a target at longer ranges with the fixed gun in the Hind and overall find it a more useful weapon on the Hind than the Apache. It's fun to squirt at the bad guys with the helmet tracking sight from the back, but ultimately if you're doing that you're 'doing in wrong' as far as employing the Apache goes, and I don't believe any version of the Hind has that sort of capability for the turret mounted gun, so it would be solely the CPG's weapon. I personally like shooting the gun while I'm flying, so I'm glad ED gave us the P. I'm not sure everyone is really considering that they'd be losing the gun as the pilot with a Hind V or whatever.

Did some playing around just now and the key thing I was missing is the throttle twist grip. I do not know why but DCS does not recognize engines off unless the throttle is fully off. To to answer my own question for anyone else curious, if you're landing at a Farp or airbase to repair I find the easiest way to accomplish it in the Hind now is to pull both the fuel shutoff levers, rotor brake on, throttle twist grip off. Leave APU off until time to restart after repairs. Thanks to others who answered as well!

Landing at a FARP that has the necessary ground units to provide rearm/refuel/repair services, I have no problem rearming or 'fueling the Hind 'hot' by selecting the intercom mode on the radio control panel and contacting the ground crew. However, when I want ask to repair I get "unable, shut down your engines" or something like that. My first thought was just to shut the engines down by pulling the two big red fuel levers, and turn on the APU to provide power because that seemed like the "realistic" thing to do... but still I get "unable" so I guessed maybe APU was the issue and turned that off. Still "unable" so ultimately I just ran the auto-shutdown hotkey and then I was able to repair. So I know for next time, what exactly does the game want turned off in order to repair? Does it really have to be a 'cold and dark' aircraft?

Bumping an older thread but you seem to be the leading SME on the Hind on the forum so I thought I'd ask out of curiosity- I watched a walkaround video of an Mi24(V, I think?) and they showed a location in the left wingtip above the outermost ATGM station on the left wing that had a lens and they said this was the gun camera location. I always assumed the camera switch in the Hind turned on that wingtip camera. But you're saying our Hind in DCS should have a cockpit camera? I always turned that switch on as part of my cold start just for fun, but maybe I'll skip it if our Hind doesn't actually have the camera.

As stated in the title, is there a way in the Hind that I can display the control helper (red box showing control axis positions) but not the autopilot helper boxes in the upper right hand corner? In the Apache RCtrl+Enter once brings up just the control helper, and pressing it again brings up the autopilot helper in addition. Third press turns them off. In the Hind it appears the only option is all on or all off. There are times where I use the control helper, but once I developed an understanding of the autopilot systems I never need to look at that overlay to see what they're doing. It would be nice if this worked the same as the Apache.

It's there, but the keybind in the menu doesn't match what the button says in the cockpit if I remember correctly which makes it really hard to find in the control bindings. The physical button in the pilot cockpit is on the left wall sort of between the fire suppression system and the fuel system controls. I believe if you hover mouse on it the in game description is "Pilot launch SNARS" or something like that. In the control binding menu I believe it's just "launch countermeasures" that you're looking for. *edit to say I might be misunderstanding you now that I've reread your question. I assumed you didn't know how to launch the flares yourself. But if you're asking if there is a way to disable Petrovich launching flares when he feels threatened, I don't think that option exists yet. And yes I agree it would be nice if Petrie had some common sense IFF and didn't call out "missile launch!" every time a wingman fires an ATGM. As an idea for the devs, maybe Petrovich auto flare launch should be tied to his ROE setting? IE if he's free fire he's also 'free fire' on the flares but otherwise he just informs you of the launch?

I think I've fixed all the incorrect skins in this version of the file. Nevada Full fixed .stm

Ha! I've seen some of your work, I'm nowhere near as talented! I attached the file, it does require four mods: Civil Aircraft Mod - https://cam.em-key.de/ Military Aircraft Mod - https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/3307071/ Special Mission Aircraft Operators Mod - https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/3321706/ Bell 206 - https://forum.dcs.world/topic/313394-bell-206-l3-longranger-mod-ai-only/ *Edit to say I just tested this myself and some of my skins are still changed, so I'll need to work on that some more Nevada full.stm

Any update to shadows and performance with today's open beta patch? I didn't see anything about it in the changelog

Thanks for doing a test for me! It looks like this must be what is happening to me. Do you have a link to the ME bug you're referring to so I can better understand what to do/not do? I'm working on a template for populating the airfields around Las Vegas with static objects based on some real life photos and after placing about 250 static objects I realized that all of my UH1's (and about half of my Mi8's and Yak 40's) are suffering this issue where the skins aren't 'sticking,' but the vast majority of my units are fine. I just want to be confident before I offer to share my template with others that the skins will come through as intended for other players.

I'm having an issue where certain static object aircraft/helicopters placed in the ME revert to their default skin if I exit the game and re-enter. This does not happen exiting the mission and reloading without restarting the game. I haven't tested every object of course but as of right now I'm experiencing this with the UH1 and the Yak 40. I'll upload my .miz file later today but can someone do a quick test for me to confirm if this is repeatable: Open up the ME and place a static UH1 assigned to CJTF Blue with skin Civil VIP. save and play the mission and confirm that you see the correct skin. Exit DCS and restart the game. Now open that mission in the ME again. For me the skin resets to the default italian SAR skin for CJTF Blue.

See, this is sort of my fear too, and I'm hoping that my ask gives ED a chance to prove us both wrong in good faith? I am concerned that my top end PC, which runs IL2/MSFS/insert other similar title here at max settings in the ~200 FPS area in 4k cannot achieve half of that performance or a quarter of the smoothness in DCS. I'm starting to wonder if ED's beautiful "2023 and beyond" videos and others are heavily edited in some way or somehow are not reflective of actual in game performance...

*not sure if this is the right spot in the forums for this so I apologize if I've got it wrong We all know that DCS is a complex simulation to run even on modern hardware, but I think it's also fair to say that this is a hobby quite a few of us (myself included) are willing to invest serious amounts of money into enjoying. I personally have perhaps ~$6000 invested in a PC, software and other peripherals almost exclusively to play DCS and I know I'm not alone in saying that. However, even with absolutely top tier hardware I still struggle to get the experience I want out of DCS. I'm not able to run max graphics settings, my experience does not look like ED's youtube videos or say Growling Sidewinder or other high end content creator and it can be so frustrating trying to chase down performance issues when it seems like performance can be so different from one user to the next even with similar systems. So, I think it would be great if ED made a benchmark mission of some kind, preferably on caucus with the TF51 or SU25T so that it would be applicable to every DCS user and then made a video (with the FPS monitor open) that went something like this: "Hey guys, Wags here with Eagle Dynamics. I'm flying our graphics benchmark mission in the TF51 today. My hardware specs are X and my DCS settings are Y, this is the performance I'm getting in terms of FPS and frametime." In other words, ED, you guys must know how your product should perform or what is 'normal performance' in a given scenario. Please share that information with the rest of us so that the community has a repeatable way to test our own performance. As one example, when I open the in game FPS monitor (Rcntrl+pause) I'm almost constantly getting a "heartbeat" sort of pattern in frametime that results in a steady stutter of FPS, but I have no idea how to diagnose it. Is it something inside DCS, a result of my mission design or some setting? Or is it something else with my PC? There are forum posts about this going back years, but it's impossible to tell what fixes that worked 5 years ago still apply today and vice versa. If we could all test from the same mission/settings I feel like the community could resolve some of these graphics/performance issues that have plagued us forever. I'd even volunteer to build the mission and more or less script the video for y'all if there's any interest in doing this from the ED team.

I fly the KA50, the Apache and the Hind. Against soft targets and especially scattered infantry I find the 30mm cannon in the Hind to be weaker that either of the other 30mm helicopter cannons and it seems like you need to land basically direct hits to kill infantry. But I've also only used the default "combat mix" ammo choice. Do you guys find the all HE belt to be a better choice? Fyi my computer is out of commission at the moment or I'd test myself... Bored and waiting for a new CPU to arrive in the mail

I'll see if I can come up with some tracks or examples but in my experience letting George go free fire simply makes the missile wasting worse because he will immediately follow up a shot that missed with another that often misses for the exact same reason (perhaps hitting tree canopy for example) without giving you time to reposition for a better shot. I've also randomly had him take shots wayyy outside of proper range. Had him take a ~25 mile shot at a FAC Combattante ship the other day... Either way I'd still like to be able to ask George for a range. Didn't know the big box indicated range tho, I thought that was just indicating you were facing the right azimuth more or less, appreciate that tip!

It's tough to say, I guess. Subjectively I'd say it still "feels" rougher, more jittery than prior to the latest patches. But objectively my FPS is back to normal. Fingers crossed Multithreading puts a lot of these type of threads to bed on the forum (pun intended)

I prefer to play with the camera feed off on the displays as much as possible because it hits FPS / frametime. Because of this I often don't have a good way to judge range to my targets. I find that I end up wasting hellfires because George will sometimes allow a shot outside of realistic range. This could be easily rectified if George would either call out a range to the target when you select it "Lasing, target at ____ meters" and/or we had a keybind to ask George for a range to a selected target. Ideally I'd like both, so I know the range as soon as I've selected a target, but can also easily get an updated range if I have to abort and reengage from a new position. Thanks!

Of the game, I didn't mess with anything in windows because my performance outside of DCS hadn't changed at all. After more experimentation I do think something in the latest patch has made DCS heavier or less optimized somehow because my performance isn't quite as smooth in AI heavy missions as it used to be, but I'm definitely not getting the crazy constant frametime variations I had before the reinstall.

Update - after running repairs and trying anything else I could think of ultimately I went with a clean reinstall and my performance is back to normal. No idea what the issue was but glad it seems to be resolved.

I have two PC's side by side, my new computer is a 3090ti / 5800X3d and my old computer is a 2080 / 2700x. My new computer is updated to the most recent open beta, 2.8.1.34437. Since update the game is literally unplayable at low altitude around large cities or near any significant number of objects. Before the update the game was beautifully smooth. This gave me the idea to fire up my old PC which is still on 2.8.0.33006 and do a side by side comparison. I created a basic take off from runway mission in the Marianas with no other AI or static objects, flying the Hind. As of right now my ~5 year old PC has a much more playable experience than my brand new hardware. I'm confident I don't have a system issue with my new PC. Other games run upwards of 200 FPS at max settings with no stuttering, benchmarks are all right on target, both systems are on max performance power plan. Screenshots showing I have the same settings on both systems (other than monitor resolution) - 2080 system: 3090 system: Version 2.8.1.34437 track file: Post update performance.trk Version 2.8.0.33006 track file: pre update track.trk Mission file: Performance test.miz Youtube video of post update: Youtube video of pre-update: (excuse two of the world's worst takeoffs in the Hind, had to use a crappy old HOTAS on my old PC) Is there a way I can go back to the last open beta version on my new system to make the game playable again (and to 100% confirm that it's a DCS issue, not my PC) ?

As far as I understand it currently, the only way to toggle the instrument panel red backlighting (which is beautiful, btw) is with a right mouse click or left mouse click for right or left rotation of the switches respectively. As such, the Hind requires literally 50 right mouse button presses to go from instrument panel lighting off to all on. (10 clicks per switch x 5 rotary switches) Many other rotary type controls in DCS modules allow either mouse scroll wheel input or click-hold and drag input, but the lighting switches do not. I would request that these switches be changed so that they can be rotated with mouse scroll wheel and click-drag inputs as well; as 50 mouse clicks is just not a pleasant way to interact with these controls. Thanks!

Thanks! Literally did try to search this so I don't know how I missed basically the most recent newsletter haha. Glad to hear Petro is getting some improvements.

Did some searching both here on the forums and online in general about this and didn't find anything. Has ED Officially announced any additional features coming to Petrovich in the future or should we assume 'he' is basically feature complete at this time? Specifically I was thinking about this yesterday as I tried to manage a tricky landing in the Hind... the visibility forwards and down is so much better from the front seat I have to think that in real life the CPG in the Hind must be a help in landings by being able to provide some feedback to the pilot who is practically blind to what is directly in front of you by comparison. It would be cool to have the option to have Petrovich provide some helpful callouts during landing, maybe a 10m, 5m, 1m, and 'down' announcements or something like that, and maybe even start shouting "watch your side slip" or "add power!" or whatever if you start to mess it up. Kinda like Jester in the tomcat. Also, it would also be nice to have Petrovich announce spotted targets even when he's not using the missile sight, or at least announce if you're taking fire or if he spots a manpads launch.