lockon2015 Posted February 11, 2016 Posted February 11, 2016 Hi all, One thing I think would be useful on this forum would be a global spreadsheet to summarize all the parts relevant to DCS and their supporting information to help players decide which parts to buy. A reoccurring theme through the threads is “what should I buy for DCS?” Indeed, I am in the same position. A gamer could click on such a spreadsheet, scroll to their ability, and decide what parts best suit them for their DCS experience. I attach the beginning of such a spreadsheet with this post: “DCSrequirements.xlxs” in the attached zipfile. Such a document would make life easier for all gamers who are in transition of parts as DCS upgrades; otherwise, figuring out what parts a person needs by gleaming through all the hundreds of threads is lots of hard work and very time-consuming. Such a spreadsheet would be easy to maintain--I did this all the research presented in the attached spreadsheet in about 10 hours or so with very basic knowledge—how much easier for the whole community to maintain such a list. I went through all the “What should I buy?” threads and pulled out each part I could find where there is discussion over using the part of DCS. In the attached spreadsheet are some very basic columns: Part Notes “ballpark New Price” (general cost to buy the part New off amazon or best buy); Thread Reference (many of these are blank because I got tired of typing in references) Date Expected Outdated for DCS (Blank because I don’t know having no experience here) This last column “Date Expected Outdated for DCS” would be based on how long monitors, motherboards, cards, coolers, RAM, etc typically last before a DCS upgrade renders them completely obsolete. One question I didn’t see anywhere on the threads was: “if I buy such and such, how many DCS upgrades would most likely take place before I have to replace the part in question with its next generation part.” Will a monitor work for DCS for 10 years? Will a video card only be good for 3 years? Such predictions would be ballpark, of course, and based on how long older generations of parts remained usable for DCS. For example, not related to gaming, but I could probably say that in 6 months, a USB drive will hold twice as much and cost half as much, based on how USB drives generally advance. I could say with some experience that USB drives double in their capacity about every 6 months to a year. It’d be great if people gaming on DCS who have gone through much parts swapping through many previous upgrades could help out in predicting—ballpark--how long current parts are expected to work with DCS. The above longevity column could simply be “date expected to be totally obsolete for DCS” or be split into additional, more detailed columns like “expected lifetime it will work great” next to another column “expected lifetime to where the part will be slowing down but still can be used”, etc. Also included in such a spreadsheet would be some examples of standard kits depending on the gamer’s ability. I put examples of two such kits at the bottom of the spreadsheet. The first kit comes from the DCS recommendations off the website with a couple extra parts people seemed to think necessary from all the threads. Indeed, this is where I am right now, and put in this kit parts I have and am considering buying. Its easy to see from such a spreadsheet how much the initial, total cost for obtaining DCS-compatible computer parts for a beginner would be. Not surprisingly, a beginner would probably start with the cheapest parts. I also tried to imagine what a kit would be for someone who’d been playing a long time and made a quick list of what that kind of DCS player would be interested in. Of course, not being an advanced player, I did the best I could off all the threads but a more expert gamer could complete such a kit. Then, other DCS players who are ready for more expensive parts could just open the proposed spreadsheet and quickly see what the next advanced parts they should buy are. I began the spreadsheet, but it is by no means complete, certainly has lots of mistakes, but is the best I could do gleaming through all the threads. There could be additional columns for parameters (speed, memory, power usage, etc) deemed necessary to understand whether a person should buy one part or another and which parameters would be irrelevant. For example, from many of the threads, it seemed a general consensus that the i7 operating system is considered too expensive to be hardly any better than the much cheaper but just as usable i5 for playing DCS. On the other hand, most people felt that 8 GB RAM works adequately for the current DCS but will soon be obsolete in pending upgrades and people should transition soon to 16 GB RAM. I also saw a thread where, a higher “fs” video card was certainly more expensive, but after a certain point, increasing the “fs” did not enhance the DCS experience in any way, and thus a gamer would not need to buy any more expensive video cards beyond a certain “fs”. Such a spreadsheet would be dynamic as new parts come in and old parts go out of date for DCS. One other column might also be where players evaluate the quality of a part. 10 stars would be that a part works great and one star would be the part works poorly for DCS and you can enter your vote on the spreadsheet in such a way that your vote is automatically updated. There were a lot of questions in the threads about the quality of parts so such a feature in such a spreadsheet would be widely used. I didn’t include this column in this attachment because I haven’t tried all the parts other gamers have gone through. In the thread “ “, he came close to such a column, but I’d rather skip all the graphs and numbers to get to the recommendations as succinctly as possible. Brand names could also be in these columns. Finally, it would be easy to maintain if each person at some point (or, at least, a lot of people) typed in their kits and how much the constituents of their kit cost. Kits could be arranged from cheapest to most expensive. If a gamer has been using the kit for awhile, they can also rate the parts (and brand names) from experience. Anyway, I think such a spreadsheet would be helpful. DCSrequirements.zip
159th_Falcon Posted February 12, 2016 Posted February 12, 2016 Lets make that wall of text a bit more readable; Hi all, One thing I think would be useful on this forum would be a global spreadsheet to summarize all the parts relevant to DCS, and their supporting information to help players decide which parts to buy. A reoccurring theme through the threads is “what should I buy for DCS?” Indeed, I am in the same position. A gamer could click on such a spreadsheet, scroll to their ability, and decide what parts best suit them for their DCS experience. I attach the beginning of such a spreadsheet with this post: “DCSrequirements.xlxs” in the attached zipfile. Such a document would make life easier for all gamers who are in transition of parts as DCS upgrades; otherwise, figuring out what parts a person needs by gleaming through all the hundreds of threads is lots of hard work and very time-consuming. Such a spreadsheet would be easy to maintain. I did this all the research presented in the attached spreadsheet in about 10 hours or so with very basic knowledge, how much easier for the whole community to maintain such a list. I went through all the “What should I buy?” threads and pulled out each part I could find, where there is discussion over using the part of DCS. In the attached spreadsheet are some very basic columns: Part Notes “ballpark New Price” (general cost to buy the part New off amazon or best buy); Thread Reference (many of these are blank because I got tired of typing in references) Date Expected Outdated for DCS (Blank because I don’t know having no experience here) This last column “Date Expected Outdated for DCS” would be based on how long monitors, motherboards, cards, coolers, RAM, etc, typically last before a DCS upgrade renders them completely obsolete. One question I didn’t see anywhere on the threads was: “if I buy such and such, how many DCS upgrades would most likely take place, before I have to replace the part in question with its next generation part?” Will a monitor work for DCS for 10 years? Will a video card only be good for 3 years? Such predictions would be ballpark, of course, and based on how long older generations of parts remained usable for DCS. For example, not related to gaming, but I could probably say that in 6 months, a USB drive will hold twice as much and cost half as much, based on how USB drives generally advance. I could say with some experience that USB drives double in their capacity about every 6 months to a year. It’d be great if people gaming on DCS who have gone through much parts swapping through many previous upgrades could help out in predicting—ballpark--how long current parts are expected to work with DCS. The above longevity column could simply be “date expected to be totally obsolete for DCS” or be split into additional, more detailed columns like “expected lifetime it will work great” next to another column “expected lifetime to where the part will be slowing down but still can be used”, etc. Also included in such a spreadsheet would be some examples of standard kits depending on the gamer’s ability. I put examples of two such kits at the bottom of the spreadsheet. The first kit comes from the DCS recommendations off the website with a couple extra parts people seemed to think necessary from all the threads. Indeed, this is where I am right now, and put in this kit parts I have and am considering buying. Its easy to see from such a spreadsheet how much the initial, total cost for obtaining DCS-compatible computer parts for a beginner would be. Not surprisingly, a beginner would probably start with the cheapest parts. I also tried to imagine what a kit would be for someone who’d been playing a long time and made a quick list of what that kind of DCS player would be interested in. Of course, not being an advanced player, I did the best I could off all the threads, but a more expert gamer could complete such a kit. Then, other DCS players who are ready for more expensive parts could just open the proposed spreadsheet and quickly see what the next advanced parts they should buy are. I began the spreadsheet, but it is by no means complete, certainly has lots of mistakes, but is the best I could do, gleaming through all the threads. There could be additional columns for parameters (speed, memory, power usage, etc) deemed necessary to understand whether a person should buy one part or another and which parameters would be irrelevant. For example, from many of the threads, it seemed a general consensus that the i7 operating system is considered too expensive, to be hardly any better than the much cheaper but just as usable i5 for playing DCS. On the other hand, most people felt that 8 GB RAM works adequately for the current DCS but will soon be obsolete in pending upgrades and people should transition soon to 16 GB RAM. I also saw a thread where, a higher “fs” video card was certainly more expensive, but after a certain point, increasing the “fs” did not enhance the DCS experience in any way, and thus a gamer would not need to buy any more expensive video cards beyond a certain “fs”. Such a spreadsheet would be dynamic as new parts come in and old parts go out of date for DCS. One other column might also be where players evaluate the quality of a part. 10 stars would be that a part works great and one star would be the part works poorly for DCS and you can enter your vote on the spreadsheet in such a way that your vote is automatically updated. There were a lot of questions in the threads about the quality of parts so such a feature in such a spreadsheet would be widely used. I didn’t include this column in this attachment because I haven’t tried all the parts other gamers have gone through. In the thread “ “, he came close to such a column, but I’d rather skip all the graphs and numbers to get to the recommendations as succinctly as possible. Brand names could also be in these columns. Finally, it would be easy to maintain if each person at some point (or, at least, a lot of people) typed in their kits and how much the constituents of their kit cost. Kits could be arranged from cheapest to most expensive. If a gamer has been using the kit for awhile, they can also rate the parts (and brand names) from experience. Anyway, I think such a spreadsheet would be helpful. Like the idea, but not sure how practical it is. [sIGPIC][/sIGPIC] The keeper of all mathematical knowledge and the oracle of flight modeling.:)
lockon2015 Posted February 12, 2016 Author Posted February 12, 2016 It could be really basic computer programming to start. A gamer would go to a place on the webpage and type information about their kit into the appropriate fields. The computer code would compute the total cost of the kit. A "For" loop would organize each kit by cost, from cheapest to most expensive, and output everything in a text file or spreadsheet that could be accessed from the website. There’d be a block of text for each kit and corresponding parameters for the individual parts. A tally could keep track of how many people use which parts.
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