rossmum

My biggest problem with switching to stable on a more permanent basis is that it's not uncommon for serious bugs to migrate into the 'stable' branch, and the much longer update cycle on that branch means a worse experience overall when you're affected by one of these issues. I'd rather deal with a week or two of stuff being broken than five months of waiting for ED to finally crush one or two severe problems - problems which ended up in the stable branch because they were in a hurry to push a new module to it, so brought stable up to the same build as OB all at once, rather than lagging 1-2 behind. The patch put out right after SC had virtually no time in OB (let alone internal testing) before it was pushed to stable, for instance. Right now there are two serious bugs I've had to deal with across all versions of 2.5.6 - one is performance related (game slows to a crawl and then crashes, it appears to be induced by certain global lighting conditions, so it's unavoidable in certain missions) and the other is the rubber-banding I'm sure a lot of people have noticed. The latter became even worse after SC released - which means that is now going to be a problem on stable as well. It might be fine for PvE or even BVR, but it's a nightmare in close combat, and it appears to have no relation to the quality of the player's connection - high ping, low ping, full server, empty server, it makes no difference. My only guess is that it's something to do with whatever band-aid ED applied to stop people sliding around the carrier deck. As for complaints about OB... I expect minor bugs, personally, but some of the things that slip through reveal little or no internal testing is being done - which makes the label 'beta' a bit rich. Unfortunately people are going to demand a patch every Wednesday, so I doubt that'll change as ED rushes them out the door with little to no testing. At the very least the high tempo of updates means things don't stay game-breakingly broken for as long.

The current stable branch split off after SC dropped, which means it still includes the exact same FPS-tanking/frequently game-crashing bug I've been experiencing in sunrise/sunset conditions since 2.5.6 originally released, which got significantly worse in the release that followed SC. It also means that the netcode problems which have caused people to randomly rubber-band around the sky regardless of how good their internet connection is has migrated to stable, and that bug makes the game almost unplayable when it comes to close combat - it's not consistent and doesn't affect every player, but when it does rear its ugly head it is excruciating. In the case of patches like this, sure OB is broken and rolling back might be the best course, but just permanently switching to stable isn't some cure-all - it just means whatever game-breaking bugs it includes take even longer to get fixed.

Yeah, a system like HL: Alyx uses when people press up against walls seems to be a good solution. The screen begins to black out from the side in contact with/clipping into the surface, so it 'pushes' you away.

Not sure if the following applies here or not, but there always seem to be things that work fine internally until the patch goes out, and mysteriously end up broken in the patch itself. It's a problem not unique to the 21, it happens to everyone, probably due to usual DCS spaghetti code interactions that can't be predicted internally or perhaps the process of assembling the patch on ED's end itself. Apparently ED had very little time (if any) testing the patch itself before release, so if things got broken 'in transit' so to speak, they wouldn't have caught it.

Worth note - I only see covers/ladder on other players' 21s on MP, when they eject. On both SP and MP my own aircraft never shows them following ejection. There's a new ejection bug which does affect own aircraft where the camera follows the seat rather than the pilot's first person view, then switches at seat separation - I've already told Hiro about this though. The English cockpit has some known issues at the moment, use Russian like Mikoyan intended :lol:

Second and third gen 21s had substantially larger wheels than the first gens. He would've been talking about the switch from F-13 to Bis.

That would probably have been the nosewheel rim scraping on the runway. The nosewheel currently clips through the ground a bit, it's a known issue, and it will cause scraping sounds and shimmy at certain speeds. As for landing behaviour - I do everything by the seat of my pants so I can't confirm changes against the numbers in the manual, but I haven't noticed a change in feel at all. It's still pretty much exactly as it has been for me, the only time I need to run the throttle past about 85% is if I come in way too flat and need a little extra juice to get over the threshold.

Schmal has been able to do a touch-and-go at constant attitude. I haven't tried yet, might give it a go later. I think the main problems with ground handling have all come from the suspension, though, which is actively being tweaked.

That would blow out filesize and loading times severely, I don't think we'll ever see that (and to be honest, I'm not sure I want to). Bugs accruing on the canopy from longer low-level flights is really the limit of what I'd ask, and that requires a bunch of coding the game doesn't include so I doubt we'll see it. I just use custom cockpit liveries if I want one that's newer or more weathered than what comes with the aircraft, honestly.

Time and experience is really the key. I've put hundreds of hours in and I still accidentally pull a little too hard sometimes, but you really do develop a feel for it - I need to look at my AoA less and less, and usually by the time it's getting close to critical, the enemy is in front of me and close enough that I can look at him and watch the needle out of the corner of my eye.

VVVVV Look at this post again VVVVV As Hiro says, the solution to this is just experience. You develop a feel for how much you can pull the stick at any given time, and if you feel the wings starting to rock, back off the pressure. I've noticed the aircraft now begins a much more subtle wing rock around 31-32 AoA and usually departs around 33 or 34, so there is a little subtle hint that it's coming now. I don't like sounding like a broken record or an RTFM guy (because I never RTFM myself, I learn by trial and error), but the 21 really isn't going to hold your hand for you and most of the problems people have with flying it come from either not understanding the aircraft's design considerations, or just not really having a lot of old fashioned stick and rudder experience in general. It's not a Hornet which can pull AoA all day, it's not even a 29, it doesn't have any kind of built-in AoA limiter. The only real assistance you have is the SAU (which is a liability in combat as it damps out your inputs too much) and the ARU preventing you from pulling 20G and shedding your wings and several vertebrae. This would be the case if there was a buffet to feel, but there isn't. Stick force and trim position are what I actually need to feel here, so I have a better sense of exactly what I'm pulling.

Virtually all Soviet fighters did. It was a required feature. The reason the MiG-23 has such insanely engineered landing gear was to fit wide-track, rugged gear into such a slim fighter, with no ability to fold it into the wings due to being variable geometry. Even Soviet airbases were extremely austere compared with Western ones - forget about FOD walks, the runway was often made of uneven pavers, unkempt grass and crap lying around everywhere, etc. DCS doesn't really do them justice.

It's still a bit experimental, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Once it's fully functional it should be nice - but still a big difference between a nice grass field, and a ploughed one! At least, in real life. Judging by the DCS Hornet's offroading ability there isn't ingame :(

The Warsaw Pact, particularly USSR and DDR, as a contingency in case airfields were hit... though not to the extent of the Swedes' routine roadside dispersal. I'm not sure Caucasus in particular has many roads suitable for the 21 or 23 but since I'm a lunatic and will attempt to land the thing on any relatively flat surface, it'd be neat to see in a future mission maybe.

Incredible run this morning on Battle Over Sukhumi (right up until DCS crashed on me, about 6 or 7 hours in)!

Looks like a custom livery that's still using the old format. Changes to filenames will cause it to load the default (Serbian) livery overall, with some parts of the mesh showing incorrect portions of the actual custom livery. The default ones all work on my end, but all my old custom ones look like that.

Watching the AoA gauge is your 'quick fix' for avoiding it. Keep it below about 33. I'd like some more 'feedback' as it were myself, as glacing away from a target can cause me to lose sight of them permanently, but without a FFB stick that's your best bet at the moment.

Likewise. Equipping SPRD pods also caused some strange repeating/stuck sound issues, but I've had similar with other modules (including FC3 aircraft and the F-16) at apparent random so I don't know if it's connected or not. I haven't checked to see if the sound aspect is reproducible yet.

Reproduced. Seat and pilot have missing texture, upon separation the pilot regains his texture (chute underside still transparent, top of chute looks almost metallic silver/grey). Seat remains with missing texture after separation.

Bingo - and loading a series of smaller textures is faster than a single large one.

Over the past 2-3 months of reviewing Tacview tracks from when I've been on, I've only seen one or two obvious instances of going back to spectator - I'm sure it happens, but I don't think it happens as often as people think. More often you see people either RTB as you'd expect, or sometimes run out of fuel and belly land (which I'll occasionally do if it means saving an objective or a teammate, or if my math brain is just a potato on a particular day and I misjudge it - but I always try to bring the aircraft down with as little damage as possible, in friendly territory). There are a few things I like as ideas, but I'm not sure of the practicality of (either due to the necessary scripting, or the realities of one person being able to muck things up for the whole team). Each airbase having a finite number of airframes of a certain type which are only replenished, say, every two hours would be one thing - but again, all it takes is one person wasting them to screw the whole team and hand total air superiority to the other. This could possibly be partly alleviated by considering crash-landed airframes as "recovered" if they're within friendly territory - but this in itself is probably a pain given DCS' lack of a true 'frontline' a la Il-2. I always try and recover an airframe out of habit no matter what state it's in, so maybe that's why I like that idea. Pilot death/capture locking out a slot until they're 'rescued' by a helicopter pilot or AI as per the version of CSAR being tried for the ATWG COIN experimental server is another option, maybe only requiring the CSAR deployment if they land within enemy territory (we can assume they just hitch-hike back if they land on friendly soil). This may cause people to jump slots, though, which results in the same problem as the above - and the more impatient ones might just leave. A straight up limited life system like Blue Flag doesn't work out very well with a game as crash- or desync-prone as DCS, IMO, and is the reason I almost never play there - I get sick of losing one, two, or all three of my lives due to connection loss, game crash, or someone rubber-banding into me on the parking area. If you set the lives limit higher (say somewhere between six and ten) or the renewal time lower (maybe an hour or two instead of six) it should get around this, though. Of course the other option is DDCS-style life points, e.g. starting out with 10, a MiG-21 costs 2 points on its own, R-60s and R-60Ms cost a point each, then set the life point gain rate to whatever. I'll be honest, even if you implement a lives system, I don't think it's going to get people on SRS who aren't there already - more likely it'll just see more of those of us who are on it flying as pairs or threes, which isn't a bad thing. Might serve to make the community a bit closer-knit if we're relying on each other a bit more directly :D The BF system isn't foolproof - on at least one occasion I lost lives to ground collisions, because it considered me 'airborne' for just long enough when I got hit (probably from the force of the initial hit, the other MiG was teleporting all over the place and contacted mine at warp speed). Spawning in craters also seems to count as a death.

A lifepoint system that limits available aircraft (or loadout) isn't too bad, IMO, like DDCS has - the problem with finite lives as per BF is that if you get killed by planes warping into you on the ground (as I did 3 times in a row a few weeks ago), or your game crashes, or your connection drops (which mine will at least once per day), you're unable to play for the next 6 hours. On a server with a more limited playerbase than GS or even BF this will kill population very quickly, while restricting players to older weapons might cause people to play a bit more carefully, e.g. restricting MiGs to R-3s and/or R-13s and F-5s to GAR-8s/9Ps.

The Chaparral was great... as a red pilot! They were super easy to bait into enemy aircraft. I haven't had to deal with Avengers so much, so we'll see how that goes :D Another awesome time earlier today. The server seems to be populating much more and staying active later than it used to, which is great.

Unfortunately the Hawk issue comes from the massive disparity in air defence, which was a real factor at the time anyway. With that said, Kub was typically attached to ground formations rather than used as a purely static defence - layered S-125/S-75 pairs for fixed defence at airbases, and then S-125s replacing Kub as the sling loaded option, could work maybe? I'm not sure which specific variants we have in DCS, but it should only outrange the Kub by 10 or so kilometres, and have about 10-20 less than the Hawk.

By the way, is it at all possible to put rearm/refuel facilities at the two small airstrips north of Kutaisi, or maybe sink a FARP partway into the floor so a plane could taxi onto it to rearm? I ask for entirely altruistic and not at all selfish reasons :D