winz

You don't want the pilot to use intuition when flying an airplane worth milions using live ordnance. The pilot has to know that airspeed indicator is important because it's an airspeed indicator, not because it's displayed in bold. The text should be kept simple to not disctract the pilot. Look at your car dashboard...is the icon on the headlights controls bigger then the radio controls? It isn't on my car. Why it isn't bigger? because you know that lights are important... you don't step in a car untrained thinking 'well, this is big, it looks important, better turn that on'. You don't see anything step out, unless it's a warning or indication. You don't jump in the real deal as a noob. You don't take guesses 'well, this is bold, it looks to be important'...i mean, that's a perfect way to disaster :) The gui isn't there to help you learn the aircraft, it's there to present you information in as less distracting form as possible. No part of the gui should battle for your focus by using bolds and italics unless it's something that require attention. Like airspeed indicator turning red when approaching stall speed in modern glass cockpits. Also what part of the gui are you talking about? Because I have yet to meet that wall of text you are talking about :)

There is a huge difference between showing 10km in detail as Arma does, and showing 10km in detail + 100+km without such detail. And you cannot render 10km in huge detail and then cut it to low detail, that transition has to be smooth. Also the amount of detail in Arma is missleading, most vilages consist of one street and few building... Even Chernarus biggest city, chernogorsk, is small compared to real villages/cities we got in dcs. Go figure why Zargabad in OA has it's own 'island' and is not part of the Takistan map ;) Can you imagine Arma handling Tbilisi in that detail? I certainly can't. And you base this opinion on what? Just because product A can do this, and product B can do that ? Well, that doesn't mean that a product C can do both. Graphical engine shares computer resource. If the graphical engine requires 80% of CPU power for scene preparation (newsflash...you need cpu to prepare the scene you want to render on the GPU), then you only got 20% left for the rest. And that is not enough for any serious simulation of anything. DCS needs CPU for tons of things, not just for scene preparation...and some of them are CPU intesive (flight model, AI, pathfinding)... Sure, it would be great if DCS had full multi-core support, but that's just one the things that require serious engine overhaul and cannot be done overnight/week/month(s)

Have you tried Arma 2 with 80km draw distance? :) Btw, you have a very strange definition of 'little more'. Just proves you know nothing about the technical stuff that's behind the things you're talking about. One of the reasons you need huge draw distance on terrain in DCS and other flight sims is because you fly high, with smaller draw distance the air would appear hazy all the time. You can easily try this yourself by tweaking the DCS cfg files. Arma 2 looks terrible up-high and the amount of fog is just unbearable. And every 'performance boost' you mention is already implemented in DCS. Object are not drawn at full view distance, objects use various LODs, the terrain uses various LODs depending on distance, the same for textures and terrain complexity. It's just the flat terrain that's eating all the FPS. Try to fly over the ocen, near the coast and over land..notice the huge FPS difference? Also, don't compare FSX to DCS, because scene preparation is about the only thing the CPU has to handle in FSX. The flight model is terrible, the AI is non-existing, it has no real avionics modeling, no ballistics, no damage modelling, ground troops pathfinding etc... Once you plug in some addons like PDMGs 737 your FPS will suffer heavily just because of the added flight and avionics model. And you're still missing tons of things DCS has to do. I want! I want to see smokes rising to the skies from the battlefield I'm approaching. I think that with the increase of HW power we should move forward, not backwards. The main hog in the DCS graphical engine for me is the stuff beeing carried from the lomac days. Lot's of the things DCS does can certainly be done better and more efficient with the newer apis. But as a SW developer I assure there is no magical wand that will replace these parts of engine with newer, modern counter parts. It's usually a painfull and tedious job, as all parts of engine are interconnected and replacing one part can break another. But ED is moving forward, slowly but steady..and I can see alot of the under-the-hood improvemets done to the engine since Black Shark 1.0. BTW, this also a 'problem' of the Arma series, you can still see things in the engine that comes from the Operation Flashpoint days (i.e. the horrible physics)...there's just no way around it, the technologies evolve so fast, that you would need to rewrite almost the whole engine for each product you release, and that's just not possible.

These livestreams looks like good way to promote the DCS series, and sims in general :) GJ :)

Holy ***.. that's awesome. Best PC tunning I've seen.

Like "something went FUBAR, and you're using the last resort to save your butt and you're well aware that it can kill/cripple you...it's likely that you're using it at the last possible moment and your survival depends on every second......sooo, let's wait 5 seconds because of a 'my airforce lets dumb people fly' precaution"? My wild uneducated quess would be no...it doesn't work like that in real life. ;)

"Turn the britain back to america" :D Hillarious :D

Awesome :D

Don't think of the throttle as the regular throttle where you set the power for the engines in 0-100% range. Instead, throttles in the BS, the yellow levers on the left-back of the cockpit, have few preset positions like IDLE, AUTO, FULL. That sets the regime you want the engine to operate in. So, there is really no point in mapping the HOTAS throttle to the Ka50 Throttle. The big lever you push up and down is the collective and it controls the angle of the rotor blades. The bigger the angle, the bigger the lift. The RPM of the rotor changes very little during flight, it's the angle that controls how much lift is produced.

Also make sure that your HOTAS throttle is mapped to the collective, not throttle.

Between HTTP and FTP allways use FTP for file transfer, it's the thing that protocol was designed for. HTTP is less efficient in file transfer.

Are you sure you're not assigning the axis for game mode while playing in sim mode, or vice-versa?

I'm missing AT-802U in the pool...

The main rules for such manouvers are - be smooth, be gentle, and drop your collective.

No, they are not. BS models the model in active service, and the one doesn't have chaff dispenser... There is no use for them..if you need them, then you are flying somewhere where a helo shouldn't be flying (either your, or the mission designer fault).

@primus_TR Your average airliner can fly a preprogrammed route and land itself with minimal pilot input. And they could for some time. In-fact some ILS landings require NO pilot input untill touchdown. Why do you think a high-tech drone would not be able to fly and land itself?

Noooo :( First stalker (+expansions) despite the insane amount of bugs and glitches at release was one of a kind game.

You can download the other campaigns from the user files section on the DCS homepage.

You forgot the AI wingman upgrade...that one thing made my BS experience 1000% more enjoyable....

I prefer to use the Saitek external configuration utility, because it's much easier to backup your x-52 profile than the Sim key-configuration file, that may get changed/be reseted with patching.. You can also configure it on-fly, and you can also create more complex stuff- like openning speedbrakes with slider. Also, assigning names to keystrokes that get displayed on the x52 display is helpfull when learning the keys.

The biggest catch for me would the power supply, as that is where most cost-cutting is made, despite it beeing one of the most important components.

I'll join the crowd. I'm currently playing through the deployment campaign again, and the new AI is superb so-far. No more 'unable to attack'. No more suicide overfly. Smart target picking. On the last mission the AI made a huge circle around the target area to find a safe spot to destroy the AA emplacement he detected. Was really impressed. The ability to just order and not baby-sit is a huge thing for immersion. I'm also loving the new russian voiceovers... Excelent, excelent job Nate and ED :)

You can't compare modern FPS with a simulation. FPS use tons of cheap tricks to maximize FPS, including reduced FOV, smart placed object that limits visibility and pre-compiled draw-maps. You cannot use these tricks in a sim. Also the draw distance is pathetic when compared to dcs.

Crank up Arma 2 visibility to 150km - that's the visibility range in DCS, then try to compare ;)

It would be great, but can your computer handle recording hi-res video in real-time without sacrificing FPS? ;)