Speed_2

Why does nearly everyone assume it's a bug when something goes wrong in the chopper and they have no clue what caused it? I have been guilty of it myself from time to time. That said, there STILL are quite a few bugs, especially in multiplayer... about a fifth of my flights end in freezes or crashes (of the computer kind). :( This is still alot better than before I figured out that I can only play missions created after 1.0.1!

I doubt it, maybe the option exists in some data file, but would that data file be transfered in the .miz file? Probably not...

I will try going to medium if I ever see low frame rates again. However, with shadows and water down, and everythign else maxed, the lowest FPS I have seen is about 18, and that was in a very busy mission. Now, my FPS is usually around 50-70!!!!! I'm telling everyone in my virtual Falcon 4 squad that is flying BS to use these settings now :)

Yes, there is. Again, like I just said, why not try out the "Explode WP Marker" trigger. That's supposed to be a smoke bomb. I have not tried out this trigger for myself yet, though. Did you mis-read my post and think I said "illumination" instead of actually saying "smoke"?

I've got a question. Would there ever be any harm just telling EVERYONE to disable the force feedback system, just to ensure no problems? Absolutely no one I know has a force feedback stick- we all use either a HOTAS Cougar or Saitek X52/X52 Pro.

I donno, but the way I would try to do that mission would be to make them pop a smoke bomb instead of a signal flare. Smoke bombs are the WP (white phosphorous) thingies.

Ok finally. Here's two tracks. In both tracks, I take artillery damage. However, on only one track does it damage my engines/rotors/whatever it is. In that track, notice that I have to go to emergency to get airborne, but after that, I am perfectly fine, and in fact, can put the throttle back down to normal. Most of the time, when I get this engine damage, I get no warnings at all. This time, however, I got a CMD FAILURE warning- nothing relating to the engines. In fact, in the "Engine damage" track, that's rather light damage, half the time I get engine damage before takeoff I have to both increase throttles to emergency AND ask maintenance to decrease fuel load to 25%, and, of course, get no EKRAN warnings about any of it. Engine Damage.trk No Engine Damage.trk

Not if it's multiplayer. BTW, is there anyway to enable a debrief screen in multiplayer?! No debrief for multiplayer really, really sucks. IMO, debrief is even more important in multiplayer than single player. Anyway, I'm just going to have to mod for single player it and replicate the problem in single player.

Here, try this mission, tell me what frame rates you are getting. This is the mission I have been talking about, the one that brought my computer to its knees. BTW, this is NOT a finished mission. During normal gameplay, I WAS getting 20-50 FPS. Now much higher. Scramble!_single.miz

What? I thought DCSmax was obsolete now.

Sorry, but it is clearly battle damage. Every time I cannot take off, it's after I took an arty hit. You can see a little piece missing out of the tail. Both engines will be reading what appears to be normal RPM and normal temperature, but they will develop insufficient lift to take off without putting the throttle on emergency and/or reducing the fuel load. Every time I do NOT take a hit, I have no problem getting off the ground. The only reason I have yet to provide a track is that truthfully, it is NOT SAVING my last track in that LastMissionTrack.trk file. The date on the file will be correct, but the track itself will be a completely different mission.

Holy crap! That was a HUGE difference Just confirming, I got about 8-11 frames/sec with the full settings. With those settings, my FPS jumped to 12-18, usually being around 15!!!!!! But why should I mess with water settings? I'm not anywhere near water.

Both my friend and I have the game on its maximum settings.

Well, I donno about that. Messing with my video card settings have only resulted in negligable increases and decreases in FPS. Meanwhile, overclocking it gave me a significant boost. AND my friend who has an i7 at an identical speed with LESS RAM than I do gets 4X the frame rates. Does really sound like the processor to me!

Oh on another note, I wish the devs would enable the deactivation of dead groups. One way I tried to fix the bad frame rates in this mission was to deactivate infantry groups after they were all dead, but it doesn't work. Instead, the bodies lie around seemingly forever, hogging CPU, RAM and GPU resources. Do they ever despawn? I don't think they do- I never once saw a body dissappear. Hey, you know there's a reason why games usually make dead folks dissappear after they die :mad: While burning tank hulks are nice, and definately need to have very, very long despawn times if any despawn time at all, infantry, which attack in much higher numbers than tanks, should despawn ALOT faster than they do, if they even despawn at all.

Well, it wasn't just in that very busy mission I mentioned above where the frame rate becomes very slow and annoying. I will get choppy over big cities, or even in some of the stock missions when things get busy. However, this one mission I created was the only time I've had where it become down-right unflyable at times.

Thanks for all the help people! You guys are incredible. First things first. The reason that this came up was I made a mission where you have to take off and defend your base from attack. Artillery is hitting all around (see my "takeoff mystery" thread), tanks are inbound, and about 200 AK-47 infantry guys are attacking. The weirdest thing was I seemed to run the mission just fine the first couple times, but the next day I fired it up I got nearly unplayable frame rates after making (seemingly) only minor modifications. That was frustrating enough, but when my friend got four times better frame rates than me with hardware that was similar but, admittedly better, BUT NOT FOUR TIMES BETTER, I figured something was wrong with my setup. In response to people saying that DCS is CPU dependent, I went into bios and overclocked to see what would happen. Keep in mind I am a complete noob at overclocking. What I did was increase the CPU overvoltage 50mV (available settings are 50mV, 100mV, and 150mV) and then increased the speed from 2.8GHz to 3.2GHz, which was the highest speed I could go without getting blue screens in windows. Now normally, I get decent frame rates in BS unless over a big city. I have all the graphics options set to high. However, using this very busy mission I created, here was my frame rates when starting up the aircraft: 2.8 GHz (standard)- 6-9 frames per second 3.2 GHz (overclocked)- 8-11 frames per second This was a SIGNIFICANT improvement. There is a threshould around 9 or 10 frames per second where below that, the game becomes difficult to fly. Now, in response to other suggestions, I tried reducing my resolution. My monitor is a widescreen 1680X1050. Reducing the resolution to 1280x800 these were my results: 2.8GHz 1680x1050: 6-9 FPS 2.8GHz 1280x800: 5-7 FPS Incredibly, it seemed that reducing my resolution actually DECREASED my frame rate! Does that have to do with my monitor's native resolution somehow being prefered? I have yet to try to benchmark reducing the res of cockpit displays or view distance, but I did try that, and it seemed to make a slight positive difference. As far as the nHancer settings Dr_Watson provided. I had previously had my Antialiasing turned off. With AA back on, NO DIFFERENCE was seen! So indeed, graphics card doesn't seem to be the bottleneck. I also tried installing the new nVidia drivers. However, once I did that, nHancer stopped working, even the latest version of nHancer. Furthermore, I saw no increase in graphics performance. I rolled back my drivers. My next step would be to clean out all the dust from my CPU fan, make sure all fans are at their highest setting, and leaving the 3.2 GHz overclock more or less permenent. Me being a overclocking noob, should there have been any other settings I should have adjusted other than CPU speed and CPU voltage? I absolutely needed to increase the voltage, right? As previously mentioned, I experienced blue screens while windows was trying to start with CPU speeds higher than 3.2GHz. Does that mean I might need to increase the CPU overvoltage to 100mV to go at speeds above 3.2GHz? I know that overclocking is very motherboard specific, but are there general rules about it? Anyway, thanks again, Speed

Ok, I have an AMD Phenom II Quad core 2.8 GHz processor, with 8 gigs of RAM. My friend, who gets frame rates about four times what mine are, is running an Intel i7 920 (quad core of course) at 2.8 GHz with only 6 gigs of RAM. You're telling me that the intel i7 920 is four times better for this game than this AMD Phenom? If so, that sucks :(

Vista 64 bit I don't care what MS says, I've had Vista for 6 months now and I still hate it with a passion. Sorry for going off topic, but I really do.

JDAMs work very well from 10k feet I am sure, and that's certainly not high altitude. Besides, the A-10, like all aircraft, is gonna fly pretty high to and from the target area, and even at the target area, it's much safer to deploy weapons from high altitude than to expose yourself to all kinds of threats by going low. It's risky to strafe, even in an A-10, so you should avoid it as much as possible. Besides, JDAMs reason for existance isn't simply that they can be deployed at high altitudes (30k feet+). JDAMs also have the following advantages over LGBs: 1) All weather 2) More reliable 3) Less risky to deploy (an aircraft guiding a LGB has to fly in a straight line or a slow turn). 4) Easier to use in general- just enter a set of coordinates 5) Doesn't require support hardware (I.E., a targetting pod)

Hey, I thought my graphics performance was pretty good in BS until my friend and I were playing and compared frame rates. With a similar computer and some ATI 1GB card, he get something like 4 times the FPS that I do than I do with my nVidia GTX 260. My question is if there is anything I can do to optimize performance? I downloaded nHancer, but when I went to update my nVidia drivers to the latest version, I got no improvement in performance in BS AND nHancer no longer worked, so I rolled back. Anyway, I was curious if anyone had any nHancer profiles for BS? I'm kinda worried that maybe nVidia is just crap and I should have gone with ATI. I've noticed that some other games that have issues with nVidia, kinda worried that BS may be among those. Thanks for any help I can get!

Well, exactly how good current fielded generations of IR missiles are- I don't know exactly. But it is very easy to do better CM rejection than to "just let the little ones go". For example, when to flares ever fire forward? The IR seeker can be trained to track the LEADING target. I know that, for example, while the AIM-9M has only one detector (it is a scanning IR system), it can do pseudo-imaging with that one detector. It should be easy to then make it find the leading target in a line of flares, and go after that. New generations of AAMs such as the AIM-9X actually has an imaging IR focal plane array, so it should have MUCH better CCM than the 9M. I donno where you are getting your info that countermeasures work well against current generations. Generally, to evade missiles, you have to combine clever manuvering WITH liberal use of countermeasures (or outrun them, or make the launching platform lose lock (SARH)...)

Oh yes, it exists, though I don't think it is fielded technology, yet. I worked for the US Army doing work on IR sensors, and I can tell you, ATR is all the rage right now in the software side of IR systems. I worked more on the hardware side, so I did not have any direct exposure to the technology. Here's a little blurb from Dynetics, a defense contractor company with whom I did a little work with, on ATR and ATD: http://www.dynetics.com/techsandapps/discrimatrda.html Basically, the way it works is that the ATR algorithm has a list of 3D models in its library with movable parts, and it tries to match what the IR sensor is seeing with some specific configuration and orientation of known hardware in its library.

Again, http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2008/q2/080416c_nr.html Also: http://www.defense-update.com/newscast/0808/270808laserguidedjdamdebutsiniraq.html I don't know if the A-10C carries the laser JDAM or not yet. I would be surprised too. I had no idea they had released more info on DCS A-10C than just the screenshots!