Doc. Caliban

Hello, Why is it that I keep running into enemy that I cannot kill? We're talking about 6 missile hits on a soft vehicle without so much as scratching it's paint. This happens a LOT and I have to just give up on the mission. Ideas? -Doc

I haven't reinstalled yet, but I think I may have to. (to fix the invisible textures) I haven't tried disabling SLI either, as if that fixes it, that's not a reasonable workaround IMO, know what I mean? So I'm stubbornly not going to try that. :-)

That is my understanding of the patch as well. Both times this has happened to me, I was flying low, slow recon in the hills and valleys, so he was right there with me. All of the sudden he's fully lit up and pivoting around well above me and doing the 'rejoin' thing. I've never flow up to him because I was low and slow for a reason. Sure, he's not being shot at, but that could be a bug too... I'm not going up there to find out. EDIT: Is that a clue at all? The fact that he mimics your light settings, and before this happens we are both flying blacked out, and when it happens he has everything on but the searchlight. So something is clearly out of sync between him and what I'm doing. -Doc

I've tried just about every Wingman radio command available and never had any luck other than perhaps a few seconds of a pause in the repetitive 'rejoin' blathering. This was happening with 1.0.1, but I don't know if I've tried it since the 'a' patch. -Doc

I didn't know what else to do. I wasn't exactly broken up about it though.

I haven't played many missions yet, however in the 'pirates' mission this has happened to me twice. In both instances I am flying low and slow, and may suddenly reverse course, when all of the sudden I get the repeating 'rejoin' messages. In both cases he was directly over me, but much higher, and more or less spinning around in a circle. Also, all of his lights were on again yet before we were flying blacked out. In both instances I finally shot him down as I was not able to get him to respond to any commands. -Doc

I can live with that. If anything, the second opinion on a reinstall is reassuring. I'll post my results back here once I get a chance to do the reinstall. -Doc

Hello, First of all, I'm sure this is something with my machine and not the game, but I wanted to ask about it here just in case someone has some input. Secondly, I've mentioned it in a mission thread but want it to have more exposure so I'm creating a post about it specifically. The issue is that some ground vehicles flicker in and out of visibility due to the skins not rendering. In some cases I see traffic on the road and an occasional vehicle will only be partially skinned, or nearly invisible. Where this became a real problem is during the Courier mission when I couldn't find the broken down vehicle because it was invisible until I got within 20-30m of it, and even then this is all I got: The obvious problem is if this had been an enemy unit. I'm worried about being shot down in combat missions by enemy ground forces that I can't see. Literally can't see. It may be coincidence, but I didn't notice the flickering skins on vehicles until patching to 1.0.1. (I'm now at 1.0.1a) Updating vid drives has not fixed this. Next stop: Reinstall the game. Any ideas before I do that? Thanks all, -Doc

You have to fly to the airbase you pass on your way from the Jeep to the ship, not back to your home base. Land on the north end where the little building and a few vehicles are at.

I didn't mean to imply that you didn't appreciate it. :-) But yes, the CPU limitation is a bit of an anachronism these days. I had no intention of over-clocking my CPU, but BS changed that.

Practice keeping both eyes open and working with your dominate eye, as Hunt3r said. You can determine your dominate eye by holding your thumb up at arm's length and blot out an object with it without thinking about it. One eye will still see the object with your thumb superimposed over it: the eye that actually covered the object with your thumb is dominate. After a while you'll just use the other eye as peripheral vision. This is the correct way to use firearm sights in combat. Closing an eye is too limiting under such circumstances. -Doc

That's the first thing I noticed! It's beautiful. I'll twiddle a bit more with the settings later, but I'm happy with it in general. The Shooting Range mission is much lower FPS in comparison to something like the Instant Action (realistic mode). Is there a standard benchmark out there for the game? I would think that a specific track played back from cockpit view and zoom set to neutral would be a fair baseline... does FRAPS record an average frame rate? If so, that could be the measuring tool. Just a thought. -Doc

A lot depends on the resolution being used, but yeah, most games would do fine on those specs. This thing is CPU intensive for a lot of non-graphics reasons, plus the odd bit about the graphics portion of the load not being more, or ideally, entirely offloaded to the GPU side of the house. I don't know if they can ever change that without an engine rewrite. It's a great sim, but man, CPU's have been marginalized in gaming since 1996 when the Voodoo cards came out and Quake was the title of the day. What a bummer to run up against a 13-year-old hardware limitation. Still, I'm happy to have the thing... non-arcade heli combat sims dried up back in the late 90's. Blackshark is a welcome arrival to say the least! -Doc

Thanks for the feedback, guys. I've left vsync off because I figured hight FPS is better, and Triple Buffering supposedly counters the tearing, though that did not seem to be the case. I've enabled vsync and wow, what a nice, smooth experience! Much better than the higher FPS. The game reports a pretty constant 60FPS with a few dips depending on what is going on. I had looked for the game after unticking the "show only programs found on this computer" option, but I'd looked for 'DCS' and 'Blackshark', not 'Digital Combat....' so that's why I didn't find it. Thanks for the tip. Oddly, it seems like there really isn't a profile for it because everything is set to either 'Use global settings' or it defers to the application... does that imply that even though there is a 'profile' for the game, it doesn't really do anything unless you change things yourself? If so, why bother having a profile since you can just browse to the exe and end up with the same nothingness of a profile? :-) I've set the following in the profile: AF: 16x AA Mode: Enhance application setting AA: SLI 16x AA Transparency: Supersampling Texture Filtering: High Quality Threaded optimization: On Triple Buffering: On Vsync: On I still get 60FPS most all of the time, but sometimes it dips down into the 30's (near lots of buildings, etc) so I'll still have to play around with it. Just out of time for now. Thoughts or opinions on any of the above? Thanks again, -Doc

Hello, I've installed the latest EVGA SLI enhancement kit, and am using DCSMax. I'm getting between 60-100 FPS with all of the graphics settings maxed out @ 2560x1600 (specs in sig), but one thing that bugs me is the 'tearing': I have triple-buffering enable, which is supposed to eliminate this, but I still see it. Also, I leave DCSMax at it's default, with all 8 cores checked, yet the game only seems to use cores 0, 2, and 3. Does that sound right? Another issue is that I can't find a Blackshark or DCS profile in the Nvidia control panel, even after applying the EVGA patch. I see an icon for the game in the list of 'programs found on this computer' but the title for the app is "Mechants of Brooklyn". Any thoughts on any of this? Thanks! -Doc

Looking forward to the updated version. Any ETA?

Found it, and yes, it looks like a graphics glitch with my system. I had to fly the road at <50m and the only reason I saw the Jeep is my anti-collision beacon shined on it's skinless model. As I came around again and got closer, part of the jeep showed up. The same thing happened at the end of the mission. I wonder how many times I've found it nearly impossible to find enemy in a mission because they are invisible! I'll see if there are any newer vid drivers available, but I usually keep it all up to date. UPDATE: I did a minor vid driver update but the problem is the same: The jeep on the road and the one at the airbase don't show up until I'm right on top of them... the skins don't render or whatever, so they are actually invisible. I'm very worried about this when it comes to enemy assets... are they going to be occasionally 'cloaked' like this? That would, in a word, SUCK. What to do?

Mission bug? Hello all, I've flown this mission 4 times and I have never seen the car. I've crawled the entire road from the airbase, scoured the 'car zone' over and over, and checked the road well past the zone. Could I be having a graphical glitch? I'm running 1.0.1a Thanks for any feedback, -Doc