dogfighting now

[Tycoon]

I was on this server yesterday, got to fight the 109 in my mustang for the first time lol, thanks gavagai!

[javelina1]

Same here, flew for the first time on this server. Had fun in my K-4. Thanks Gavagai!

[Anatoli-Kagari9]

Hi guys! Indeed, the best time of Combat Simmer life at Gavagai's Server and another one ( was it gavagai ? ) I entered last night where air combat between p51d ( with beautiful skins ) and fw190 was going...

 

Although it's been a long time since I last vlew the p51d, because I've been only vlying the German fighters, I joined first in the p51d, and had a great time - it certainly feels different in every aspects, and while I latter changed to the Fw190 D9, I got, for the very first time, the impression that against p51ds I would actually prefer to pick the ponies :)

 

One aspect that made the experience unique was the challenge presented by the other human pilots, and even some of the AI which was also present ( ? ) and the superior quality / accuracy of the DCS flight dynamics - one really has to manage ENERGY!!! not quite like in other games I've been playing....

 

Flying a dofight in DCS is really a unique experience. I believe I had the same sensation only when I tried il-2 CloD a month ago ( but no time to keep more than one, at most two sims at the same time ... ), but not to the level DCS provided !

 

At this last night's server ( I may sound like Cinderela, because I had to leave only too soon when midnight came... ) there were icons, storm of war and F5 !!! They helped for the initial contact, but as soon as I entered the digfight area I only used F5 a couple of times, and actually more from a voyeuristic PoV :)

[gavagai]

Not so much a dogfight, but I'm going to put up a mission that I want to test. It involves a bit of flying through the pretty mountains between Tblisi and Beslan. Red has to search and destroy vehicles, and blue protects them.

[gavagai]

The holidays are over and many of us are back at work now. I learned more about the ME and now I know how to auto-rotate a mission and not to have it paused when the map loads. So, I'm going to leave the dogfighting maps up more often now, please feel free to drop in and make use of them.

 

It often only takes one or two human players to attract other pilots, so if you don't mind clobbering the AI for a few minutes, it can help to attract other human opponents.

 

Settings:

 

F5 view on (use for spotting close aircraft that disappear in the ground clutter or sky)

F10 fog of war (use for navigation and finding the fight)

 

Airstarts are available

Runway starts are available (on the ground, engine running)

Cold starts are available

 

So, you can basically do what you want. All I ask is that you join the side with players if you can, only respawn after death/bail/ditch/landing, and not to shoot people using the runways to takeoff or land.

:)

[Anatoli-Kagari9]

 

Settings:

 

F5 view on (use for spotting close aircraft that disappear in the ground clutter or sky)

F10 fog of war (use for navigation and finding the fight)

 

Airstarts are available

Runway starts are available (on the ground, engine running)

Cold starts are available

 

So, you can basically do what you want. All I ask is that you join the side with players if you can, only respawn after death/bail/ditch/landing, and not to shoot people using the runways to takeoff or land.

:)

 

Thank you SO MUCH gavagai!

 

I look forward to test it tonight ( from 19:00 UTC on ... ) :thumbup:

[Buzpilot]

Best tip for fighting a 109 1vs1 with the P-51 is not to engage at all, but that is no fun. Unless I break a wingtip it's the same scenario when I fly the 109 against the P-51. We're in a scenario right now where there is really no point in duelling allied vs axis because axis should win every time given two equal pilots.

 

Anyway, I agree that the icons get in the way of seeing the enemy aircraft. Maybe I'll just go back to allowing f5 view... DCS is just so much worse than other sims for seeing aircraft, but so much better in other ways.

 

I think iirc the DCS map is scaled 1:3 , and maybe planes are smaller from inside cockpit too, because from F2 or F5 view they look larger, or maybe it's the external view that has too large planes?.

Edited January 7, 2015 by Buzpilot

[Solty]

I think iirc the DCS map is scaled 1:3 , and maybe planes are smaller from inside cockpit too, because from F2 or F5 view they look larger, or maybe it's the external view that has too large planes?.

 

Either way something is wrong. I should be able to see easily a plane 1km from my on complete zoom out position. Right now it is hard to even find anyone when there is no flak in the area and that is super bad.

[cichlidfan]

I think iirc the DCS map is scaled 1:3 , ...

 

I would be interested in your source for that info. You do realize that if that were the case, the clock in the cockpit would have to turn three times faster than reality. Along those same lines, navigation with map, compass and RL stopwatch would be impossible without taking that into account.

 

EDIT: Not to mention that the moon would be zipping through the sky at a noticeable pace.

Edited January 7, 2015 by cichlidfan

[Echo38]

maybe planes are smaller from inside cockpit too, because from F2 or F5 view they look larger, or maybe it's the external view that has too large planes?.

 

They look larger from default-FoV external view than from the default-FoV cockpit view because the default FoV is different between external and internal. Neither is "wrong;" there is no single true-to-life zoom level which the simulator could enforce for greater accuracy, because the real-life image size depends on your monitor size and the distance from your (real) eye to your monitor. Hence variable zoom/FoV in any P.C. flight simulator worth its salt.

 

Last time I did the calculation, with my old monitor and chair setup, ~90% zoomed-in resulted in the real-life apparent image size. However, because of the small size of my monitor (relative to my real-life FoV), this meant that the FoV in the sim had to be ridiculously low, since being 90% zoomed-in is being 9/10s of the way to being at the minimum FoV. Again, not the sim's fault, but rather the fault of our small monitors. Moreover, ~90% zoomed-in would not be the real life apparent image size if I moved my chair further from (or closer to) my monitor.

Edited January 12, 2015 by Echo38

[Solty]

They look larger from default-FoV external view than from the default-ispit view because the default FoV is different between external and internal. Neither is "wrong;" there is no single true-to-life zoom level which the simulator could enforce for greater accuracy, because the real-life image size depends on your monitor size and the distance from your (real) eye to your monitor. Hence variable zoom/FoV in any simulator worth its salt.

 

Last time I did the calculation, with my monitor and chair setup, ~90% zoomed-in resulted in the real-life apparent image size. However, because of the small size of my monitor (relative to my real-life FoV), this mean that the FoV in the sim was ridiculously low. Again, not the sim's fault, but rather the fault of our small monitors. Moreover, ~90% zoomed-in would not be the real life apparent image size if I moved my chair further from my monitor.

 

What the hell are you talking about. If all our monitors are too small for the game then it is obvious that the game has bad Los and mipmapping. That was never an issue in IL2 a 10 year old game. So I demand more from DCS. They have to scale the models so that it should be possible to see a fighter plane from 5km at max zoom-out at least.

[Echo38]

Our monitors are too small for any realistic flight simulator. Our real-life FoV is roughly 170 degrees, including peripheral. Assuming you've got a "normal"-size monitor, and sit with your head two or three feet away from it (the normal situation for such a monitor and P.C. gaming), then your monitor is only occupying about 20 to 30 degrees of that 170-degree FoV.

 

Therefore, if the zoom level of the sim is such that an object (for example, an aircraft) is displayed on your monitor at the same apparent size to your eye, as would match it if it were sitting outside your window in real life, then your FoV in the sim is, mathematically, only ~1/7 of your real-life FoV, and you'd be flying nearly blind. Try it; zoom in until your virtual hand on the stick in the virtual cockpit looks about the same size as your real-life hand on your desktop joystick, and try flying around that way without changing the zoom level.

 

So, in order to cram the ~170 degrees of FoV that we have in real life, into the ~25 degrees that we have between our eye and the corners of our monitor, a simulator has to make the total image size smaller than reality. You can't have real-life image size and real-life FoV at the same time, when your eye-to-monitor angle is smaller than your real-life FoV. It's physically impossible. One must understand at least some of the real-life physics of cameras & lenses (zoom & FoV, in particular), in order to understand why any ultra-realistic flight simulator on the P.C. (i.e. with normal-size monitors and user-to-monitor distance) will be harder to see things in than real life.

 

Games like IL-2 and War Thunder, which are less pure of simulators, make dots unrealistically large relative to things around them, in order to make them easier to spot (older games like IL-2 also had blander terrain, against which dots are easier to spot due to their being less background clutter); the objective is to use an unrealistic method (dot scaling) to "make up for" an unrealistic handicap (small monitors), but two wrongs don't exactly equal a right. Which doesn't mean that I believe that DCS's method is necessarily the best way to do it, by the way ... but in terms of simulation purity, it's the most accurate depiction, and our little monitors are to blame for the not-lifelike results. You can't blame the sim for modelling things accurately, when the actual problem is a result of our inadequate hardware. I do think that it would be good if we had an option for scaled-up dots, to keep both camps happy.

 

In the end, any of the methods are going to have significant drawbacks, and the end result can never be entirely realistic. From the point of view of a gamer, it's better to have aircraft-dots larger than they should be (compared to the tree-dots around them), like in War Thunder, but from the point of view of a purist simmer, it's less inaccurate to have the aircraft rendered at their true size within the game world, like in DCS even if that means that they are (like everything else in the game world) too small on the monitor, when the FoV is set to higher than the eye-to-monitor-edges angle. The former makes distant aircraft unrealistically easy to see under some circumstances, and the latter makes things unrealistically difficult to see under some circumstances. Such is the trouble of trying to put a large picture onto a small monitor!

Edited January 12, 2015 by Echo38

[gavagai]

Testing out a new map. The basic scenario is a ground war between two close-proximity airfields.

 

If you can occupy the central zone between the two airfields with no enemy aircraft present, i.e. air superiority, a massive column of APCs will be triggered to cross the battlefield and occupy the enemy base.

 

I'm going to leave it up tonight and tomorrow while I'm at work. Let me know what you think.:)

[gavagai]

Happy Friday. I will be running the dogfight missions today if you want to stop in for some action.

:thumbup:

[Demon_]

The server is back, no icons and a lot of action! :gun_smilie:

[gavagai]

Glad you enjoyed it.

 

The point of that last map is that both sides need to pay attention to the ground war (as described in the briefing). Ground attack is important to practice, too.:thumbup:

[TAGERT]

That was fun, saved a P51 from a Dora.. Dora pilot was a little upset.. Seem to have a 'thing' against team work! ;)

[gavagai]

Testing out a new dogfight map if anyone is interested. Nothing special, except I'm trying to set up the triggers so that AI do not spawn if humans are in the combat area.

[ctguy1955]

I mostly fly alone as well

 

I just flew around for 1.5 hours looking for dots, not firing my guns and not being shot at except for flak.

 

If anyone wants some quicker paced combat I am hosting right now.:thumbup:

 

 

The only places I see are DOW ( 2 servers ) and Korea

 

There may be a few others, but they are flying modern aircraft.

 

I have read some posts about other WWII servers

but they never seem to be up.

 

Ive been told its not good to run a server from

the same computer that You are playing on ???

 

I hope things improve soon as its not much fun to

always fly alone or no enemies.

 

 

I also have a question....... Are the flight charistics of a plane

the same on a server as when doing single missions ?

 

If I have take off assist on 100 and rudder help checked, will

that all be gone on a multiplayer server ???

 

I can take the dora up on my home puter with assists on

but never in multiplayer....That is why I ask.

[gavagai]

Ive been told its not good to run a server from

the same computer that You are playing on ???

 

Perhaps, if you're hosting over a dozen pilots. I've had 8 or 9 pilots flying together without trouble. Sometimes one individual doesn't have a good connection even though he is the only person there besides me. The net gods can be fickle!

 

I'll run the dogfight maps later today (Friday). Settings are the same as before: aircraft on the F10 map and F5 view enabled, so do not fear the DCS spotting problems.

Edited March 27, 2015 by gavagai

[Merlin-27]

The only places I see are DOW ( 2 servers ) and Korea

 

There may be a few others, but they are flying modern aircraft.

 

I have read some posts about other WWII servers

but they never seem to be up.

 

Ive been told its not good to run a server from

the same computer that You are playing on ???

 

I hope things improve soon as its not much fun to

always fly alone or no enemies.

 

 

I also have a question....... Are the flight charistics of a plane

the same on a server as when doing single missions ?

 

If I have take off assist on 100 and rudder help checked, will

that all be gone on a multiplayer server ???

 

I can take the dora up on my home puter with assists on

but never in multiplayer....That is why I ask.

 

CT, I've heard people say that they also have trouble with the autorudder in multiplayer and I suspect is uses the settings of the person building the mission. Most of us DoW guys have pedals so we have turned off the rudder assist but I can see it making life very difficult with the taildraggers if you do not. Sorry man.

 

Also, feel free to come by our website and post up times you know you will be flying. I think you've seen first hand we find ways to stir up trouble, have a blast on TS and get ourselves involved in many good fights along the way. As we all know, as soon as you get a decent number of people flying... more are sure to join.

Edited March 27, 2015 by Merlin-27

[Crumpp]

Most of us DoW guys have pedals so we have turned off the rudder assist but I can see it making life very difficult with the taildraggers if you do not.

 

Trying to fly a realistic taildragger with a twisty stick or a keyboard....Sadistic.

 

It just wrong....very, very, wrong. :no_sad:

[DieHard]

The only places I see are DOW ( 2 servers ) and Korea

 

There may be a few others, but they are flying modern aircraft.

 

I have read some posts about other WWII servers

but they never seem to be up.

 

Ive been told its not good to run a server from

the same computer that You are playing on ???

 

I hope things improve soon as its not much fun to

always fly alone or no enemies.

 

 

I also have a question....... Are the flight charistics of a plane

the same on a server as when doing single missions ?

 

If I have take off assist on 100 and rudder help checked, will

that all be gone on a multiplayer server ???

 

I can take the dora up on my home puter with assists on

but never in multiplayer....That is why I ask.

 

The ACG server is in England, so for me in NY State I usually am on with them in the afternoon or early evening. I can see their aircraft easier than on other servers, but either wait for somebody to fire guns or fire a few bursts of your own---they will quickly find you! Of course that works on the other servers, too. I am usually in the grass searching, looking up, that is dangerous for me, though, because I have virtually no E (potential energy state).

 

I have CH Pro Pedals, Fighterstick, and Pro Throttle. Gotta have them for the tail-draggers. I used to have a Saitek twisty stick. I only use auto-anything on the Su-25T and the Huey, everything else I don't use the cheats, but the learning curve takes longer.

[gavagai]

This is great chit chat, but I'm going to run the dogfight missions now.:thumbup:

[Solty]

Trying to fly a realistic taildragger with a twisty stick or a keyboard....Sadistic.

 

It just wrong....very, very, wrong. :no_sad:

 

Or easy and cheap. I always fly with twist and have no problems.