Feedback Thread - F-14 Tomcat patch 28th Oct 2022

[IronMike]

52 minutes ago, XCNuse said:

Yeah working to figure it out myself; it seems to be..... inconsistent at best, unfortunately. (fortunately?)

 

I should clarify this seems to be tied specifically to multiplayer and that new code for carrier jitteriness.... which, if anyone's trying, might see the jitters now happens to the carrier deck crew hah! They're phasing all over the place it seems.

 

Cold start on deck... didn't have any issues; plane had no jitters.

Air start, then landing on deck; upon landing I immediately noticed the jitters. This was landing on the Harry Truman SC.

 

Sometimes I would get the "hey what are you doing" but, sometimes they seem capable of still loading the jet up, and othertimes, jitters or not, they seem to load it up just fine.

But I've had a squadmate said he tried last night and was unable to be refuel/rearmed entirely.

 

I'm going to make a huge assumption here with this; but I'm thinking the inability is going to come down to how much wind is set in the mission and thus how pitchy the deck is. I just tried it with 8kts ground speed (carrier going into wind), but that isn't really enough to make the deck pitch; but was still encountering jitters.

 

More testing definitely will be needed, but, should be brought up; there is something weird going on here.

 

If you would be so kind, it would be great if you could report that in the Supercarrier bug section, unfortunately this is out of our hands. We will add wheelchocks (for now functionally, not visually) hopefully with the next patch which might help mitigate it, but it ofc should be fixed on SC/ ED side.

[Top Jockey]

35 minutes ago, JupiterJoe said:

This is an older video but exactly the same thing happens now, with zero Deadzone.  Perhaps you can explain? 

 

 

Not sure if I got your question right, but :

- if we are talking about the bank angle slowly changing / and difficulty to keep the F-14 perfectly leveled ;

In my case it was a dented and severely worn out rubber o-ring, inside my HOTAS Magnetic Base.

 

The dented rubber o-ring, caused the gimbals to (slightly) not allign perfectly, allowing the grip a slight right side tilt in neutral position.

And therefore the HALL sensors detected that misalignment - as they are supposed to do.

 

Have you tried adding a small dead zone in Axis Tune options ?

Edited October 29, 2022 by Top Jockey

[lunaticfringe]

20 minutes ago, Top Jockey said:

Have you tried adding a small dead zone in Axis Tune options ?

That's what he's saying, as least as far as I can understand- that a deadzone is required for him to get an AP lock. 

Looking at the footage, the aircraft begins with Attitude Hold on, 1000' climb rate at roughly 2 degrees of pitch with a bank angle of somewhere around 5-7 degrees.  Heading Hold doesn't capture when engaged, so points towards above 5 degrees of bank.  Ground Track engaged, AP Ref light comes on, NWS pressed, it locks.  

What this boils down to in the viewing is an analog system running right on the border of where it's noted to capture, and there's enough variance just in the normal motion of flight to push it to 5.001 or such and make it a fail. This close to the line, it's important to note that while the on screen control display is very accurate, its granularity as such (how much "push" there has to be to register): I can deflect a stick gently with two fingers two to three millimeters before it registers in the box- but the airplane registers input and you can see the stick offset a fraction.  So as suggested- it may be useful to go into your stick's software to confirm sensitivity around the middle and calibration. 

Turn on the info bar (CTRL-Y); I can't get it to fail on a capture when it's below the 5 degree limit in Heading, and pushing NWS in Ground Track.  

[Indianajon]

1 hour ago, XCNuse said:

Yeah working to figure it out myself; it seems to be..... inconsistent at best, unfortunately. (fortunately?)

 

I should clarify this seems to be tied specifically to multiplayer and that new code for carrier jitteriness.... which, if anyone's trying, might see the jitters now happens to the carrier deck crew hah! They're phasing all over the place it seems.

 

Cold start on deck... didn't have any issues; plane had no jitters.

Air start, then landing on deck; upon landing I immediately noticed the jitters. This was landing on the Harry Truman SC.

 

Sometimes I would get the "hey what are you doing" but, sometimes they seem capable of still loading the jet up, and othertimes, jitters or not, they seem to load it up just fine.

But I've had a squadmate said he tried last night and was unable to be refuel/rearmed entirely.

 

I'm going to make a huge assumption here with this; but I'm thinking the inability is going to come down to how much wind is set in the mission and thus how pitchy the deck is. I just tried it with 8kts ground speed (carrier going into wind), but that isn't really enough to make the deck pitch; but was still encountering jitters.

 

More testing definitely will be needed, but, should be brought up; there is something weird going on here.

 

I had this also where we had downloaded a multiplayer mission with lots of different aircaft, targets etc. Worked out that there was a 'feature' conflict in the server settings. So the model of the carrier was pushing but clipping making it shudder.  The fix is to have the person leading the server to remove that object and it fixes it.

[Pasquale1986]

3 hours ago, IronMike said:

Just gave it a quick try, worked as intended here. "Hey what are you doing" is an indication that the plane is moving during ground crew ops, like air, elec power, refuel or rearm. Are you sure the carrier is not turning maybe?

On what map did you try? Mind you that even overcast presets can have very bright, almost sunny spots. The shadows projecting onto the aircraft seems to be a DCS wide issue, at least I remember seeing some reports of that in general.

I just tried it quickly, and the screenshots below is the difference I see between overcast and sunshine weather. I also tried the hornet quickly, and the difference is very similar, albeit the hornet pit looks a bit darker in general in both weather conditions, except when illuminated directly by the sun.

 

Hey @IronMike i think i got this. When you have terrain shadows disabled and "normal" shadows on, then the shadow of the F-14 is always projected on everything. If the aircraft is on the ground the shadow is projected on everything you look at. E.G if the aircraft is placed under a roof and you use the external view, the shadow of the  aircraft is projected on the roof. Should be pretty easy to replicate. If shadows and terrain shadows are turned on, the problem doesn't occur.

[IronMike]

1 hour ago, Pasquale1986 said:

Hey @IronMike i think i got this. When you have terrain shadows disabled and "normal" shadows on, then the shadow of the F-14 is always projected on everything. If the aircraft is on the ground the shadow is projected on everything you look at. E.G if the aircraft is placed under a roof and you use the external view, the shadow of the  aircraft is projected on the roof. Should be pretty easy to replicate. If shadows and terrain shadows are turned on, the problem doesn't occur.

Thanks, could you check if this is the case as well in other modules, please? Just by first impression it sounds more like an ED issue. Thank you.

EDIT: definitely seems like an overall DCS issue. If you like you can add your findings to this thread here.
 

 

Edited October 29, 2022 by IronMike

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

5 hours ago, IronMike said:

Unfortunately the extra animations, like hand signals, etc were not really doable without IK

What's "IK"?

Edited October 29, 2022 by Raven (Elysian Angel)

[IronMike]

7 minutes ago, Raven (Elysian Angel) said:

What's "IK"?

 

Inverse Kinematics. Instead of animating the bones in some 3d software, the engine adjusts the bones transformation to some fixed point, for example the hand snaps to a point in space where you want it to be. Without this all the animations we tried simply did not look great, or way less satisfying as we wanted them to be. This is why you see the hands fixed for example to the stick, as is. Hopefully at some point ED can add that.

[CheckGear]

6 hours ago, IronMike said:

are you sure that the wingsweep handle is in the spider detent and down? if it is not, the cover will not close. Tried on my side as well and works as intended.

Attempted - looks like the handle must either be fully back or fully forward to be pushed down. This must've been changed, because in the past, I could push it down regardless of the handle's position.

Thanks for the help!

[IronMike]

7 minutes ago, CheckGear said:

Attempted - looks like the handle must either be fully back or fully forward to be pushed down. This must've been changed, because in the past, I could push it down regardless of the handle's position.

Thanks for the help!

Glad you were able to figure it out!

[WWSmith]

I just had my first chance to try out 2.8 since its release, and I tried Mission 6 of Operation Reforger. Unfortunately, it froze at more or less the same point as always. As much as I love flying the Tomcat, it's starting to feel like an old Alfa Romeo: brilliant fun... when it runs.

[IronMike]

3 minutes ago, WWSmith said:

I just had my first chance to try out 2.8 since its release, and I tried Mission 6 of Operation Reforger. Unfortunately, it froze at more or less the same point as always. As much as I love flying the Tomcat, it's starting to feel like an old Alfa Romeo: brilliant fun... when it runs.

can you share your system specs please? we're currently asking ourselves why some are affected, while others are not at all. For example in 2 months of dedicated trying, we could not reproduce a single freeze, and we want to know what you guys are running, so we can try to reproduce your settings, specs, etc as closely as we can. Thank you!

[Pasquale1986]

6 hours ago, Supmua said:

You can still get good framerate with the Varjo Aero.

PC: Ryzen 5800x3D, RTX 4090.

Aero: Very High setting, SteamVR 74%SS, final res 3104x2660 pixels per screen.

DCS settings: VR preset plus High textures, High visibility, Low shadow, MSSAx2, Ans filtering X4

Mission:  F/A-18C PG free flight.

Add around 1-1.5ms to both captured CPU and GPU frametimes at that instant as the numbers dropped when I switched to fpsVR window for snapshot, so the actual numbers are slightly higher.  But you can see that 90 fps is possible in those light flying still.  I flew for 18 min, and the avg fps as you can see below (and 9 dropped frames in 18 min is pretty good).  At this fps there is zero cockpit tearing/stuttering which is very nice as the Aero still lacks motion smoothing.  Pardon my 16GB RAM, lol, these are my old sticks as my good ones are not compatible with the Ryzen.

More observation:

F-16 is a little less forgiving so I didn't quite get 90 fps in PG free flight, but mid 80s still.  Flying low in Dubai dropped the fps into 70s, however CPU frametime stayed green (<11ms) all the way.  So apparently Ryzen 5800X3D is a very strong CPU for flightsim, and in these free flight missions at above settings my 4090 is actually the bottleneck.  And this is even with not-so-great RAM, although I did overclock it to 3000Mhz CL15.  I left my GPU at stock settings due to recent fiasco with the melted connector, can probably get better GPU frametime with overlocking the GPU.

 

 

 

5 hours ago, IronMike said:

can you share your system specs please? we're currently asking ourselves why some are affected, while others are not at all. For example in 2 months of dedicated trying, we could not reproduce a single freeze, and we want to know what you guys are running, so we can try to reproduce your settings, specs, etc as closely as we can. Thank you!

@IronMike you may want to look at the VR performance thread regarding the FPS loss in 2.8 we see some significant changes in ressource usage with the update that also affects RAM usage. Maybe a cause for crashes and freezes

[WWSmith]

I'm running an AMD Ryzen 7 3700 X processor at 3.6 GHz, 32GB 3600 MHz DDR4 RAM, an AMD RX 5700 XT GPU with driver 22.5.1, Windows 10.

[Pekki]

11 hours ago, IronMike said:

can you share your system specs please? we're currently asking ourselves why some are affected, while others are not at all. For example in 2 months of dedicated trying, we could not reproduce a single freeze, and we want to know what you guys are running, so we can try to reproduce your settings, specs, etc as closely as we can. Thank you!

AMD 5800x3d, 6900xt, 32GB DDR4, m2  1TB, hp Reverb G2 VR, Win10

 

 

[kotor633]

Something like that actually belongs in the manual of the F-14...

 

[martinistripes]

14 hours ago, IronMike said:

For example in 2 months of dedicated trying, we could not reproduce a single freeze, and we want to know what you guys are running, so we can try to reproduce your settings, specs, etc as closely as we can. Thank you!

I also just had a freeze in the F-14 and had to alt-tab out, then close with task manager. Task manager reported not responding.

I was coming in to land in the Case III instant action mission in Caucasus. I'd just had a wave off and had gone around for another approach when it happened.

First one I can remember in the F-14 (and not had one in DCS for a very long time).

My specs.
MSI Vector GP76
i7-12700H
RTX 3070 Ti (Driver 526.47)
32GB RAM
Windows 11 (21H2)

Edited October 30, 2022 by martinistripes

[IronMike]

Thank you all for sharing your specs. FWIW @Super Groverhad a freeze earlier when fixing the Lantirn crash (which btw is also DCS side, but he found a workaround fix), and it was terrain related, not F14. So it could be that our fix helped, but now it freezes due to other issues introduced in 2.8. OTOH when folks say the mission freezes for them in the same spot, that speaks against it, but even so, we dont know if it is within DCS or the F14 yet, because I just can't put my finger on some commonality yet. A rather confined group (though by all means not marginal), experiences the freezes, the rest does not. So something must connect those who experience them, and just from a first glance at the spec provided, this does not seem to be it either. We will continue looking and we will continue working on it until we found the culprit and a fix though, I can promise you that.

[WWSmith]

21 hours ago, IronMike said:

Thank you all for sharing your specs. FWIW @Super Groverhad a freeze earlier when fixing the Lantirn crash (which btw is also DCS side, but he found a workaround fix), and it was terrain related, not F14. So it could be that our fix helped, but now it freezes due to other issues introduced in 2.8. OTOH when folks say the mission freezes for them in the same spot, that speaks against it, but even so, we dont know if it is within DCS or the F14 yet, because I just can't put my finger on some commonality yet. A rather confined group (though by all means not marginal), experiences the freezes, the rest does not. So something must connect those who experience them, and just from a first glance at the spec provided, this does not seem to be it either. We will continue looking and we will continue working on it until we found the culprit and a fix though, I can promise you that.

I didn't think to mention it along with my system specs, but I've excluded both the main DCS folder and the DCS Saved Games folder from Windows Security, just in case that was the culprit, but without success. Based on some other posts claiming that the freezes are related to camera movement/changing views, etc, I also tried flying the F-14 without head tracking, staying in-cockpit, and keeping the view straight ahead, all without success. (Obviously I can't actually play the sim that way, but I thought I'd give it a shot with the Bone Strike mission to see if it cured the problem.) I've monitored performance leading up to a freeze, and none of my hardware is anywhere near full usage when it happens. My GPU had the highest load of anything, at around 70% last time, and the temp was hovering around 85C. The weird thing is that it never freezes when my system really is being heavily loaded, such as when I'm following along behind a huge wave of cruise missiles--in those situations, I can't compress time very much without getting heavy stutters, yet it never freezes. Instead, it always freezes when there's very little happening in-game. I can't even say that it's related to RTB calls, because Operation Reforger--MIGCAP and Cage the Bear--Cargo sometimes freeze before getting the RTB call. I've had it freeze when I'm trying to rendezvous with a tanker, and once when I was plugged in to a tanker, but I've also refueled the Tomcat 104 times without a freeze, so I can't say that it's tanker-related either. There are missions in which the tanker TACAN doesn't seem to work. I don't know if that could possibly be related. Just throwing all this out there in the hope that it somehow helps your troubleshooting efforts. Thanks for trying.

[IronMike]

5 minutes ago, WWSmith said:

I didn't think to mention it along with my system specs, but I've excluded both the main DCS folder and the DCS Saved Games folder from Windows Security, just in case that was the culprit, but without success. Based on some other posts claiming that the freezes are related to camera movement/changing views, etc, I also tried flying the F-14 without head tracking, staying in-cockpit, and keeping the view straight ahead, all without success. (Obviously I can't actually play the sim that way, but I thought I'd give it a shot with the Bone Strike mission to see if it cured the problem.) I've monitored performance leading up to a freeze, and none of my hardware is anywhere near full usage when it happens. My GPU had the highest load of anything, at around 70% last time, and the temp was hovering around 85C. The weird thing is that it never freezes when my system really is being heavily loaded, such as when I'm following along behind a huge wave of cruise missiles--in those situations, I can't compress time very much without getting heavy stutters, yet it never freezes. Instead, it always freezes when there's very little happening in-game. I can't even say that it's related to RTB calls, because Operation Reforger--MIGCAP and Cage the Bear--Cargo sometimes freeze before getting the RTB call. I've had it freeze when I'm trying to rendezvous with a tanker, and once when I was plugged in to a tanker, but I've also refueled the Tomcat 104 times without a freeze, so I can't say that it's tanker-related either. There are missions in which the tanker TACAN doesn't seem to work. I don't know if that could possibly be related. Just throwing all this out there in the hope that it somehow helps your troubleshooting efforts. Thanks for trying.

Thanks you for the insights!

[ChariotOfFLAME]

Hi @IronMike,
I am having consistent crashes when trying to join the backseat of a multiplayer F-14B on the carrier in the South Atlantic.

Logs are attacheddcs.log-20221101-033251.zipdcs.log-20221101-033750.zipdcs.log-20221101-032349.zipdcs.log-20221101-032633.zip

[IronMike]

16 minutes ago, ChariotOfFLAME said:

Hi @IronMike,
I am having consistent crashes when trying to join the backseat of a multiplayer F-14B on the carrier in the South Atlantic.

Logs are attacheddcs.log-20221101-033251.zipdcs.log-20221101-033750.zipdcs.log-20221101-032349.zipdcs.log-20221101-032633.zip

Thank you, we fixed this and the lantirn crash already internally.

Edited November 1, 2022 by IronMike

[4H_Ccrashh]

When selecting load outs I cannot move the sliders to adjust the number of chaff and flares.

[roobarbjapan]

4 hours ago, 4H_Ccrashh said:

When selecting load outs I cannot move the sliders to adjust the number of chaff and flares.

I have the same issue online. The boxes are greyed out. 

[IronMike]

6 hours ago, 4H_Ccrashh said:

When selecting load outs I cannot move the sliders to adjust the number of chaff and flares.

Chaff and flare in the Tomcat must be selected through the ground crew comms menu, due to the nature of the cartridges. This has been like that since release, and while sometimes one can get away with it to do it with the sliders, it usually creates issues.

Edited November 1, 2022 by IronMike