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ATTENTION: SPOILERS! - F-14B CAMPAIGN REFORGER PART I+II FEEDBACK THREAD - Read at your own discretion.


IronMike

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SPOILERS FOR MISSION #8 AHEAD!

 

@Gretsch_Man Yep, it comes out of nowhere, it's called spawn, but it is realistic in that it simulates an aircraft that sneak up on you so you have to react quickly - it's ACM 101 - if you do good you'll live. Don't forget you have a wingman. It got me the first time too 🙂

 

VR is not excuse for no visual or fps. I bet single pixels are harder to find on high res monitors. Fps is low because the mission is cpu heavy regardless of display device - it needs optimisation for some parts.

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Am 7.9.2021 um 17:37 schrieb IronMike:

 

Yes.

I still get the problem with the first mission trigger (the trigger that should fire near Waypoint 1, where you join Uzi 5 and get a mission briefing recap from Jester). I still don't get it at Waypoint 1, but when I'm entering the CASE I overhead pattern at the end of the mission. Trigger zone must have slipped into the wrong location. 

 

I am playing the campaign from the official F-14 campaigns folder, so I assume I have the latest version.

 

Edit: I launch, fly out to 7 DME at 500 ft and 300 KIAS, then fly to Waypoint 1. Dead silence until I reach my CAP area, then all triggers, err, get triggered almost at once in the following sequence: commence order to all units - arrival at CAP station - intercept SU-27's. After that it's back to "normal" mission pacing. On my return I get the "missing" trigger from waypoint 1.


Edited by Jayhawk1971
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3 hours ago, Jayhawk1971 said:

I still get the problem with the first mission trigger (the trigger that should fire near Waypoint 1, where you join Uzi 5 and get a mission briefing recap from Jester). I still don't get it at Waypoint 1, but when I'm entering the CASE I overhead pattern at the end of the mission. Trigger zone must have slipped into the wrong location. 

 

I am playing the campaign from the official F-14 campaigns folder, so I assume I have the latest version.

 

Edit: I launch, fly out to 7 DME at 500 ft and 300 KIAS, then fly to Waypoint 1. Dead silence until I reach my CAP area, then all triggers, err, get triggered almost at once in the following sequence: commence order to all units - arrival at CAP station - intercept SU-27's. After that it's back to "normal" mission pacing. On my return I get the "missing" trigger from waypoint 1.

 

 

 

Does Pontiac talk to you at all? Maybe you are missing to rejoin them?

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vor 1 Stunde schrieb IronMike:

 

 

Does Pontiac talk to you at all? Maybe you are missing to rejoin them?

I otherwise get every message (both scripted and generic) except the one where I'm greeted with "Ah, the MiG Magnets". I do join up and fly formation anyway until they turn perpendicular to the coast, then fly towards waypoint 2. I have visual on Uzi 5 after launch. On my last try I even tried to "manually" fly into the area where I assume the trigger zone may be located instead of going direct to WP1. Nothing.

 

Could the mission trigger zone have an altitude restriction of some sort? Do I need to climb more aggressively after passing 7 DME?

 

The mission did work for me pre-2.7 (I didn't even have the issues that others reported, either), that's how I am 90% certain I'm doing everything "by the book". 🤷‍♂️

 

Edit: Uzi or Pontiac? Now I'm confused....🤪


Edited by Jayhawk1971
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OK, I got it to work. After 7 DME I "lit the cans" and climbed very aggressively towards WP1. At around Angels 32 and 7 NM from WP1 the message triggered. And it was Pontiac 1, not Uzi 5.

 

So for anyone else who also might struggle with this (because he is as daft as I seem to be 😉)

- Launch and fly to 7 DME

- Turn towards waypoint 1, go to full burner and aggressively climb up to around 30k. 

- Join up wit Gorilla Group (all the Pontiac flights in the known universe 🙂 )

- Leave them at WP2 and fly to WP 3

- Rest of the mission will trigger as it should.


Edited by Jayhawk1971
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I was looking for a campaign for F14B. To be honest I usually ignore the campaigns included with the modules because usually they are always broken in some way. But I gave to this one a try.

Glad I did so!! Brilliant campaign. Glad to hear the "real" Jester. I cannot post yet a full feedback as I am progressing with Mission 8 only but so far I love it.

 

The mission 7 I needed to refly some time. Once the SA18 was not shot down by the hornet, I was waiting for a long time. (Actually the SA18 shot down the incoming maverick which I think is a little bit strange). Other time I shot down the Hind but nothing happened.

A real missile launch from the SA18 would be nice (trigger for launch). It should be survivable if flared properly.

At mission 7 I'm lagging quiet a lot, I see that there are hundreds of units moving and even my 8 core i7 cannot keep up.

 

BTW when you lock the hind Jester kept telling me that it is a friendly. It happened several times. At first I believed him and I broke the lock and continued. I did not check it with the camera, so later I had to turn on the labels because I was flying for an hour to find that damn Hind.

 

I could not read the full thread yet but do I understand well that a persian gulf campaign is coming too? Would be awesome. If there is anything I could help with I would love to.

 

 

Thanks!

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1 hour ago, tsgucci said:

I was looking for a campaign for F14B. To be honest I usually ignore the campaigns included with the modules because usually they are always broken in some way. But I gave to this one a try.

Glad I did so!! Brilliant campaign. Glad to hear the "real" Jester. I cannot post yet a full feedback as I am progressing with Mission 8 only but so far I love it.

 

The mission 7 I needed to refly some time. Once the SA18 was not shot down by the hornet, I was waiting for a long time. (Actually the SA18 shot down the incoming maverick which I think is a little bit strange). Other time I shot down the Hind but nothing happened.

A real missile launch from the SA18 would be nice (trigger for launch). It should be survivable if flared properly.

At mission 7 I'm lagging quiet a lot, I see that there are hundreds of units moving and even my 8 core i7 cannot keep up.

 

BTW when you lock the hind Jester kept telling me that it is a friendly. It happened several times. At first I believed him and I broke the lock and continued. I did not check it with the camera, so later I had to turn on the labels because I was flying for an hour to find that damn Hind.

 

I could not read the full thread yet but do I understand well that a persian gulf campaign is coming too? Would be awesome. If there is anything I could help with I would love to.

 

 

Thanks!

 

 

Very glad that you enjoyed it! Baffles me a bit that so many of you have issues with mission 7, since it runs fine on my potato pc, I am still having an i7 4770k, and 16GB of RAM only, 1080ti. (The card does luckily a lot of pulling). Are you playing in VR? I am thinking if the mission is straining VR users more than non VR users. Unfortunately I do not have VR myself yet (I kinda really love my 55" screen, heh), so it is tough for me to optimize it for VR. I will see if sometime this autumn I can find some time to tone it down a bit, less units, etc. The smoke fwiw should not impact the performance though (since someone else mentioned the smoke).

You are also the second one to report Jester calling the hind as friendly. We will have to take a look into that, so thank you for reporting it. Not sure why Jester is thinking a russian bird behind enemy lines would be friendly lolol, goddamn you Jester *shakes fist!*

Indeed, a PG campaign is almost complete, aaand - oh well, I will not spoil what else is coming. Once you are done with the campaign, you should know. 🙂

Happy flying!

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Yes, mission 7 is very taxing in VR. Also, Jester identifies the Hind as friendly for me as well (always did since day one), and the Tunguska is indeed shooting down the Mavericks now (and me, when I became impatient 🤦‍♂️), which is new for me on this playthrough for whatever reason (AI tweaks by ED?).

 

Hopefully ED is putting in some VR performance improvements into their next (apparently big) patch. The mission is pretty awesome because there's so much going on, really captures what I assume to be the atmosphere of an active battlefield very well. So here's hoping it won't be necessary to take units out.

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10 hours ago, IronMike said:

Baffles me a bit that so many of you have issues with mission 7, since it runs fine on my potato pc, I am still having an i7 4770k, and 16GB of RAM only, 1080ti. (The card does luckily a lot of pulling). Are you playing in VR? I am thinking if the mission is straining VR users more than non VR users.

Do you have "wake turbulence" off? When on, it is known to be performance taxing (CPU) with multiple aircraft (or missiles) in the air. There's nothing special going on for VR gfx versus say 4K monitor apart from double view point calculations - not something you would cause by mission design.


Edited by draconus

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5 minutes ago, tsgucci said:

The lagging appears when I fast forward the game.

I'd advice not to do it. It can cause inaccurate AI movement calculations up to a point of them crashing into the ground and spoiling the mission. The more AI the more hit on performance when increasing the time scale - that's normal.

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12 hours ago, tsgucci said:

 

I am not playing VR. I need to correct myself. The lagging appears when I fast forward the game. (compare to other missions the lagging at fast forwarding is much more extreme).

 

Ah, I see. Indeed as Draconus mentioned, I highly advise against time forwarding in campaigns - this can cause many issues beyond simply lagging, etc. If you do, do it at maximum 2x speed. It is a pitty we cannot have a proper save function, which ofc would help in such cases a lot. Unfortunately optimizing the campaign for fast forward is not something we can do, and also wouldnt want to do, since it would limit us severly in what we can and cannot depict. 🙂

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1 minute ago, IronMike said:

 

Ah, I see. Indeed as Draconus mentioned, I highly advise against time forwarding in campaigns - this can cause many issues beyond simply lagging, etc. If you do, do it at maximum 2x speed. It is a pitty we cannot have a proper save function, which ofc would help in such cases a lot. Unfortunately optimizing the campaign for fast forward is not something we can do, and also wouldnt want to do, since it would limit us severly in what we can and cannot depict. 🙂

Fair enough. Did not know it can break things.

Will do so. But when you have limited time IRL, and played the mission already several times it is very tempting to fast forward a little bit.

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21 hours ago, Jayhawk1971 said:

Yes, mission 7 is very taxing in VR. Also, Jester identifies the Hind as friendly for me as well (always did since day one), and the Tunguska is indeed shooting down the Mavericks now (and me, when I became impatient 🤦‍♂️), which is new for me on this playthrough for whatever reason (AI tweaks by ED?).

 

Hopefully ED is putting in some VR performance improvements into their next (apparently big) patch. The mission is pretty awesome because there's so much going on, really captures what I assume to be the atmosphere of an active battlefield very well. So here's hoping it won't be necessary to take units out.

 

I think I can do some magic to make that Tunguska go boom in any case. The hind issue is something much more obfuscated. Thank you for your input!

And I agree, in fact it was even bigger, and I had to tone it done lots to optimize it, else troop movements would have been to a much larger scale.

For example I had to take out almost entirely this battle, which to admit, broke my heart a little bit, hehe. It gave a really awesome atmosphere when overflying the battle, sound and visual wise.
 

 

2 minutes ago, tsgucci said:

Fair enough. Did not know it can break things.

Will do so. But when you have limited time IRL, and played the mission already several times it is very tempting to fast forward a little bit.

 

Absolutely. Try it with 2x max, it is still unadvised, but better than anything faster than that. 🙂

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1 minute ago, IronMike said:

 

I think I can do some magic to make that Tunguska go boom in any case. The hind issue is something much more obfuscated. Thank you for your input!

And I agree, in fact it was even bigger, and I had to tone it done lots to optimize it, else troop movements would have been to a much larger scale.

For example I had to take out almost entirely this battle, which to admit, broke my heart a little bit, hehe. It gave a really awesome atmosphere when overflying the battle, sound and visual wise.
 

 

 

The first time I flew over the AO low, seeing out the window the tanks moving forward and shooting gave me shivers. Do not tune it down! It looks awesome, never seen anything like that before.

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3 minutes ago, tsgucci said:

 

The first time I flew over the AO low, seeing out the window the tanks moving forward and shooting gave me shivers. Do not tune it down! It looks awesome, never seen anything like that before.

 

Glad to hear at least some of its intended effect has been preserved. Do not worry, I have no plans on changing the missions anymore (beyond occasional updating/bug fixing).

The good thing is, we constantly progress forward, in terms of both software and hardware, and in time, more and more of that will be possible. I like large scale operation, where the player is just a little clog in the big wheel. Mostly it was the arty that had to be removed, which is a pitty since it gives a really nice background sound, that constant battlefield rumble if you like. Personally I could go to sleep with it, hehe.

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vor 2 Stunden schrieb IronMike:

For example I had to take out almost entirely this battle, which to admit, broke my heart a little bit, hehe. It gave a really awesome atmosphere when overflying the battle, sound and visual wise.

Holy crap! 😲 That would have indeed been awesome. And tempting to bail out and watch the battle unfold while floating down on a parachute. 🙂 (Kinda like that pilot who got to watch the "main event" during the Battle of Midway while floating in the water.)

 

Maybe someday DCS will be optimized enough (or our hardware fast enough, think Quantum Computer 🙂 ) to have such large scale battles in a mission while still maintaining acceptable FPS.

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Well, I just finished the campaign, and I have to say I really enjoyed it. I loved the Late-Cold War gone hot scenario, and there were a lot of missions where you felt like you were part of a bigger action. I actually was putting together an F-14 campaign for the Caucasus that had a lot of similarities (but in a 1998 timeframe) but I never got around to finishing it. Maybe I will someday. 

 

The one piece of constructive feedback that I have though is inaccurate weapon loadouts sorta pulled me out of the time period you're aiming for. Considering that it took place in 1990, the AIM-54C should have been the primary Phoenix equipping F-14s. From what I've heard, the A variants were largely consigned to missile exercises at that point, while the Cs were the frontline missile. Additionally, supporting Hornets are sent up with JSOWs, AMRAAMS, laser guided bombs and targeting pods throughout the campaign, while at that time, the Hornet was pretty much just carrying GP bombs, Rockeyes, HARMs, and maybe Mavericks. Hornets didn't get a targeting pod until 1992 at least. The precision strike role at that time in the Navy was obviously with the A-6, so I can kind of get why you'd pass it over to the Hornet, but including stores like the AMRAAM and JSOW are really silly. 

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On 9/22/2021 at 7:51 PM, willkinton247 said:

Well, I just finished the campaign, and I have to say I really enjoyed it. I loved the Late-Cold War gone hot scenario, and there were a lot of missions where you felt like you were part of a bigger action. I actually was putting together an F-14 campaign for the Caucasus that had a lot of similarities (but in a 1998 timeframe) but I never got around to finishing it. Maybe I will someday. 

 

The one piece of constructive feedback that I have though is inaccurate weapon loadouts sorta pulled me out of the time period you're aiming for. Considering that it took place in 1990, the AIM-54C should have been the primary Phoenix equipping F-14s. From what I've heard, the A variants were largely consigned to missile exercises at that point, while the Cs were the frontline missile. Additionally, supporting Hornets are sent up with JSOWs, AMRAAMS, laser guided bombs and targeting pods throughout the campaign, while at that time, the Hornet was pretty much just carrying GP bombs, Rockeyes, HARMs, and maybe Mavericks. Hornets didn't get a targeting pod until 1992 at least. The precision strike role at that time in the Navy was obviously with the A-6, so I can kind of get why you'd pass it over to the Hornet, but including stores like the AMRAAM and JSOW are really silly. 

 

Thank you for your feedback, glad you enjoyed the campaign.

Not sure how the JSOWs made it in there (prolly forgot to remove them from mission testing, cant even remember using them), but in general the hornets and all their loadouts were selected for "that the misison works" and are simply place holders until our A6 is ready, which will replace them. Hence putting in the work to change all their loadouts is a bit unnecessary extra before the A6 is done. 🙂 

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I need help. 

 

I have no idea what I am doing wrong.  I'm on the mission where I am supposed to do a high altitude CAP but I get retasked to go for a hunt for an elusive Hind.  Reaching WP1 I follow the RIO's instructions, turn and fly behind Tank Hill, get spiked by the Tunguska, flee to the west back over Tank Hill, then again get the bearing and distance to the Hind.  Problem is I follow that lead and I find nothing.  Just cities and trees and snow and smoke plumes.  I then double back after reaching Kutuisi? and head back west.  Again, nothing but cities, roads, snow, trees, and smoke while flying at 4k feet.  I noticed the voice over at that point isn't really following the script a bit after the Tunguska being destroyed, but I'm sure that's not the problem.

 

Voice over says "Hind is spotted 15 miles east"

 

Text says "Hind is spotted 15 miles, heading 110 toward Kutuisi"

 

IDK, I'm confused.  Now that I think about it more, maybe I'm supposed to fly 090?  IDK.  I need help.


Edited by Eagle7907

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1 minute ago, Eagle7907 said:

I need help. 

 

I have no idea what I am doing wrong.  I'm on the mission where I am supposed to do a high altitude CAP but I get retasked to go for a hunt for an elusive Hind.  Reaching WP1 I follow the RIO's instructions, turn and fly behind Tank Hill, get spiked by the Tunguska, flee to the west back over Tank Hill, then again get the bearing and distance to the Hind.  Problem is I follow that lead and I find nothing.  Just cities and trees and snow and smoke plumes.  I then double back after reaching Kutuisi? and head back west.  Again, nothing but cities, roads, snow, trees, and smoke.  I noticed the voice over at that point isn't really following the script a bit, but I'm sure that's not the problem.

Search for the Hind with PAL. It is loitering around the Tunguska. Wait until the hornet is taking out the Tunguska.

Be careful when you lock the Hind, Jester will say it is a friendly. Look through the camera. It is flying on the deck.

Sometimes the triggers are not working, you have to wait sometimes a lot for the Hornet to take out the Tunguska. Sometimes the Tunguska is shooting down the incoming maverick. I had to try the mission also several times. Sometimes I flew in as a decoy when the Hornet came. Stay 3-4 away, perpendicular to it and drop some flare. Eventually you can use labels to better see.

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2 minutes ago, tsgucci said:

Search for the Hind with PAL. It is loitering around the Tunguska. Wait until the hornet is taking out the Tunguska.

Be careful when you lock the Hind, Jester will say it is a friendly. Look through the camera. It is flying on the deck.

Sometimes the triggers are not working, you have to wait sometimes a lot for the Hornet to take out the Tunguska. Sometimes the Tunguska is shooting down the incoming maverick. I had to try the mission also several times. Sometimes I flew in as a decoy when the Hornet came. Stay 3-4 away, perpendicular to it and drop some flare. Eventually you can use labels to better see.

Ah, no wonder.  I think the Tunguska was killed, all three attempts because I didn't get spiked afterwards.  I'll try again.  Thanks!

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