reece146

http://virtualairrace.com/

You'd probably love low flying the Vire river and the Carentan Canal in Normandy and staying under the bridges. It's one of the free flight things I do in the Yak and CE-2. Not sure the TF51 will fit... may have to try it. Looks like Syria has some amazing valleys to explore - nicer that the Caucasus map.

It's fine the way it is IMO. Between the TF51 and the Su-25 there is opportunity to see if the player is really interested enough to move forward. If you can manage the TF51 you can fly most of the warbirds and about a third of the way to being able to handle the Spitfire on the ground. Jets are simple to fly so the Su-25 basically tells you if you are interested or not. Nowadays there are four good, free modules as well between the A4, MB-339, Edge 540, AH-6J that someone that is still not certain can cut their teeth on. That's three fixed wings and the helicopter. Plenty. Buying a flyable module after that for between $40 and $80 is really no hardship or big deal if the player is truly interested. 2¢

Also, in the aircraft selection drop down there is a button to the right [Combat/All]. Make sure you select All (of course). I've used it to set up regional and international flights in my maps - based on "proper" country selections so it def works. HTH

I installed this mod a few nights ago - works fine on stable. Maybe verify you've placed the directory in the correct location. The mod's directory goes in: c:\Users\<YOURUSERNAME>\Saved Games\DCS\Mods\aircraft\

Just spent ~40 minutes beating on the Mustang doing totally mechanically unsympathetic, ham-fisted, monkey things to the engine. In auto she manages heat fine now. I guess that fix of the oil pressure in the this week's patch is what was needed. Fully automatic just works - will get hot when going too slow but not stoopid hot the way it was. Once conditions improve it cools off quickly also. Was WOT most of the 40 mins. About 5-6 minutes with the seal broken in the middle of the flight.

<did a quick search - don't think this has been discussed before> I've been doing a lot of back country flying on this map and one thing that I've always wondered about is the textures applied to rivers and streams. It appears as though there is only one texture for the surface of all streams and rivers and when that stream is coming down a hill or a cliff face it still has the same mildly rippled appearance. Does the map data define planes for for each part of the stream that is drawn? If you have the relative slope of the plane is it possible to apply a different texture map to the surface, say rippled, mild rapids, moderate rapids, whitewater or water fall depending on the slope value? Just flying over the water surfaces on the Syrian map today has made me all wistful for more realistic water in the Caucasus back country I guess. The Mediterranean in Syria looks awesome - the way I remember it. Caucasus is still on my short list of favourite maps though. :) $0.02

Yeah, I put some of SUNTSAGs FARPs and other support buildings and structures there and turned into a civilian airport for "background noise". It's home to the "Adjara Flying Club" in my DCS world. All the cool kids fly their Yaks, CE2s, TF51s, and Edge 540s in and out of there. :)

Yeah, there's something up with the lighting.

Really enjoying the map! Low and slow over Haifa and Beruit in the Yak I'm seeing mid-40s FPS. At altitude 50-60-70+. Over an hour of flying - zero stuttering. Set up is 4K, high most things, no anti-aliasing except anis, TrackIR on 10700K and 2070S. We'll see how it goes when I get more time to play and fly more complicated aircraft and missions but if this is the starting place I doubt it'll be an issue.

Search for Suntsag's FARPs mod. Basically lets you lay down runways that will allow reload and refuel. I use it to put refuel locations when bush flying in the Yak-52.

I wonder as an experiment one could walk the directory tree of all these files with ImageMagick and convert in place, see what kind of difference it makes in practice... Not sure if it'll handle DDS files.

Noticed that the new OB release notes mentions fixing oil pressure issues in the Mustang. I wonder if this could make a difference to the cooling since it seems to be oil cooling related. Not sure I'll get chance to test tonight.

Has anyone had any success getting SWAPR to work with SUNTSAG's Marston Mat / AM2 Farp Mod? I tried to set this up, set aircraft to start from ground, etc. and I can hop into the individual aircraft on the farp but I don't see the other farp'ed aircraft set up within the mission/site. As an experiment in the same mission I put a couple aircraft on the ground at a normal air strip (Batumi) and that works fine of course. Just the mod farps don't work. I realize it is outside of the bounds of expectation for this mod to work with other mods but in case I'm doing something wrong versus it working properly or maybe someone worked through this already I thought I would ask... SUNTSAG's mod relies on the configuration changes in this post (see C:/Program Files/Eagle Dynamics/DCS/MissionEditor/modules/me_route.lua specifically): https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=4328281&postcount=7 Anyone encountered this, worked around? I'm trying so set up some farps at the uncontrolled cross of airstrips just outside of the town of Kobuleti proper. Insights appreciated. :)

I have a different opinion on this (different strokes and all that). I tried IL-2, I tried X-Plane 11, I tried some other stuff - keep coming back to DCS. The level of simulation is really high in DCS and the aircraft library is stuff I actually like. I went from not knowing what a Yak-52 is to it being one of my favourites. I have like 95% of the aircraft available. The new gaming PC was built around DCS because I don't care about the other games other than Assetto Corsa (can probably run it on a phone in comparison). Anyway - I'll be downloading Syria tomorrow. I'll let you know how it compares to The Channel. Realistically... if each house you see in the Channel takes a certain amount of RAM to render, multiply by what - 500 houses in Dover I'll guess... yeah, it's going to be hungry. Unavoidable/inevitable as you said. Haifa in Wag's latest video was probably at least twice as busy as Dover. Good learning experience for ED to get ready for full implementation of London perhaps. All that said, if ED can do something to capitalise on modern hardware (threading!) and make stuff run faster that would be great.

Yeah, they did something to the engine in the last patch or two. Generally performance is higher but the stutter occurs sometimes. I've got 64GB in my machine and the pagefile.sys swap file is turned off. I still get stuttering (RAM sits around 24GB doing simple, self-created missions over the Channel in the Spit). The stutters are really subtle - but they are there. It's not a big deal - normal flying I might see a stutter every 10-15 minutes unless intentionally trying to stress the system (high speed horizontal figure eights over the town of Dover in the Spit at 150').

Agreed - if I was buying today I wouldn't buy a 2070 with the new stuff coming out in a few weeks. I wouldn't buy anything and wait it out. If the rumours are to be believed the 3070 will be ~30% uplift compared to the 2070... which makes it roughly the same as a 2080Ti. We'll see what the reality is on the ground... VRAM will be the big thing to watch. For me, watching Wag's latest Syria map videos and seeing the occasionally stutter and dropped frames (being anal - really watching the video for the slightest aberration) I'm probably going to try to do a 3080 or higher if the pricing is not stupid. With Covid the car racing season this year has been fubar and I haven't gotten on track once so maybe I'll pump some of that money into a larger than expected video card purchase.

I considered a 1080Ti but the used prices sent me to the 2070 Super instead. Likewise, couldn't see the point in spending that kind of money for a used card and entertaining the possibilities around dealing with someone else's used junk. FWIW, DCS totally pins the VRAM usage at 100% on maps like The Channel (4K, high everything, no anti-aliasing; similar at 1440p with high most things, MSAA+ on). Since the last OB update I see the occasional micro-stutter and this is on a "kick-ass" new 10700K build. Before the OB update it was silky smooth at all times. I'm pretty sure it is fully utilizing the VRAM. Other maps show a saw-tooth pattern to the VRAM usage and never quite reaching 100% utilization; Channel Map, not so much, it's pretty much a plateau at 99% IIRC. I looked at the Sapphire Nitro+ 5700XT - almost pulled the trigger but the good deal at Canada Computers vapourised (~$570CDN in January). The more I read after the fact and trying to overclock the existing RX580 and dealing with the drivers - bought the 2070S and haven't looked back. It's a Gigabyte Gaming OC (Factory OC). I overclocked it a bit (can't leave well enough alone) but ended up removing the OC because it didn't really help frames much. I should try it again with the new system maybe... Re: the new NVIDIA cards. Rumour has the 3080 at 12GB DDR6. I've seen 24Gb kicked around as well because 24 modules shown spanning both sides of the card - I figure they are 512MB modules. I fully expect NVIDIA will be gouging. I'm going to buy a new GPU at some point soon but will wait for the AMD stuff to see what it is about. The 2070S does fine for now - I'm having fun. I'll move that card to another system if/when I upgrade. Maybe I need a dedicated back seat/RIO computer. :) Anyway, long rambling post to say I don't regret the 2070 Super but I bought it in February before knowing what I was getting into (new to DCS) and have gotten reasonable value out of the card. I'll be upgrading at some point in the next 4-6 months (will wait for non-Founder cards with better features/prices) but no regrets. Would have liked to try that Sapphire card but at this point the ship has sailed and I'm not convinced it would perform as well as the 2070 Super at 4K if the benchmarks for other games truly show the trending correctly.

Before buying the Rift look at the HP Reverb 2 - it's about to come out and is the current darling on the VR review sites. Your list above looks decent enough. Get either 3200 CL14 or 3600 CL16 RAM. That's the only change I would make from that list if you are happy with the rest of the components. I don't see the motherboard called out. Get something that does overclock and supports XMP RAM profiles. You might not need the overclock features with a 10?00 CPU initially but it's nice to have and usually has other features worth having - future-proofing. If you can wait for the new NVIDIA cards then pick whatever has more than 8GB of VRAM that fits in your budget. I expect we'll see new AMD cards in Q4. DCS is resource hungry. It likes fast cores and lots of RAM & VRAM, and a top of the line GPU if you can swing it. Do some reading in this forum. There are a bunch of recent(ish) threads that discuss the latest AMD and Intel systems and have lots of good information on what to look for, what's need, what's cost effective. HTH

https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=96116

Has anyone tried the mod that gives your pilot a neck with respect to movement in the cockpit? Does it help in the 109? Worth the effort?

The three 1440p DP screens are direct connected DP <-> DP at both ends, correct? It sounds like the HDMI screen addition is not the problem. Were the Lilliput USB MFDs a recent addition? Did this issue coincide with adding them? If you are not using the USB MFDs any more did you ensure that the driver (if any) is not loaded? Still hanging around? <shot in the dark> Also, disable remote desktop if it is turned on. Come to think of it - RDP will probably go totally stupid trying to deal with four screens (and buffer/present them to a remote connection even if not connected) and might cause the window manager to crash. I've seen similar issues on really old versions of XDMCP<->VNC under UNIX/Linux. I don't expect that the Windows 10 window manager is structured like X-Window but then again IIRC Windows NT was a copy/rip of VMS architecturally so... who knows. Another shot in the dark. FWIW, I have Windows Pro on my DCS boxes and haven't had this problem but I'm typically only using one screen and when I had two screens I'd disable the second one to keep frame rates up.

Right - makes sense. If you hit LAlt-Enter again does it revert to the way it should be or does it get stuck all on one screen? 1440p is kind of a "non-standard" resolution - at least when dinosaurs roamed the earth and originally wrote the Windows GDI. As an experiment, try setting the screens to 1080p and see if you can get the window manager to crash by beating on it heavily with a bunch of DCS missions. Far from ideal but might lead to other clues. Another idea: HDMI might be the one with the issue. I wouldn't be surprised if you switched to three displays all on DisplayPort it was rock solid. HDMI and DP are handled differently at both the hardware and software level - might be some kind of a mismatch that is making it bork. You aren't using any adapters for DP <-> DVI or HDMI, right? Sometimes this makes a difference (Hackintosh'ing is a PITA this way). Are you running Windows 10 rev 2004? If you are not then consider upgrading. If you are on 2004 try switching HAGS on/off to see if it makes a difference (this one is a shot in the dark but maybe it re-plumbs the software<>hardware pipeline and makes a difference to catching edge cases that affect dwm.exe). Interesting problem.

I like the look of it in general - colours and widget design is good. I would lose the slanted windows/dialogs though. There is too much going on (GUI depth) to be wasting screen real estate with triangular shaped "dead zones". Also, this potentially has to work on smaller screens as well - screen real estate is at a premium. $0.02

If you are looking for "quick starts" on the systems, Chuck's Guides are invaluable: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B-uSpZROuEd3THNZeGZMYzF5M0E