took em long enough. this was one of the potential uses hinted at back when dcs went all lua. Anyway. Hooraay! need to get my hands dirty with this :)
the viggen… last week i took the family to the avoation museum. to my surprise they have a viggen sitting outside. i could crawl all over it, even sat in its cockpit. roomy compared to the MiG 21s.
i want it but am afraid i wont get my 60 bucks worth out of it. so much to learn so little time. i mean i havent even gotten used to the mirage either.
The Viggen is a unique beast in DCS at present—the only radar-equipped ground-attack plane at the moment, and the MiG-21’s A-G counterpart in that its mission profile is highly preplanned. The upshot is that sorties are short and focused. It isn’t a terribly hard plane to learn, although the HUD symbology is different from everything else. That said, I’m all for one thing at a time in DCS.
My dynamic campaign hasn’t been going too hot. My first mission saw me sent a short-range SAM site. I took rockets, given that the weather was terrible and I didn’t think I’d have the time to line up a Maverick shot. The weather was worse than I thought, though. As soon as my wheels left the runway, I was into the cloud layer. While flailing around in the clouds trying to aim rockets at the waypoint dot without crashing, the SA-8 plugged me with a pair of missiles.
Next up, I was assigned the SEAD role: jammer pod, chaff pod, and Mavericks. As I was leaving the airfield, on my way from it to the point where I was supposed to meet my escorts, I got nailed by a passing Su-25, who, rather ironically, had just finished blowing up the local SAM battery. (Thanks, guys.)
Tonight (potentially): a night attack on fuel tanks at a harbor. I can hardly wait to see what new modes of failure I get to experience.
I forgot that switching to ANF (the attack master mode) suppresses automatic waypoint changing. I made the switch to ANF mode too early, so I didn’t have the right waypoint selected for my attack. I didn’t get it selected in time, so I ran out to sea, turned back, and the now-alerted SAM pegged me on the run in.
learning switchology in vr is not practical i found. the labels on the instrument panel just arent clear enough and you cant consult the manual while flying. once you know what switch to hit to what effect, vr is fine.
dreading going back to 2d tho. the shturmovik beckons…
For the Viggen, at least, it also helps to know Swedish, clear labels or not. That’s actually one of the things I’m semi-dreading about VR, and one of the reasons why I backed CastAR instead of one of the other players. (That turned out to be a bad choice in the end, given that they still haven’t delivered anything and haven’t talked much about 3D games for a long time, but c’est la vie.) I need my cheat sheets for flying, and there’s not, at present, a good way to bring them into the game with me.
In other news, I did finally have a successful mission! I let my wingman Maverick the SA-8 we were tasked with hitting, while I busied myself knocking down some tanks and APCs with my Mavericks. The drinking-straw sighting unit means it’s pretty much still a visually-aimed weapon, and the lack of ground stabilization or HUD indication of where the missile is pointing makes it more like a guided rocket than anything, but it’s nice to be able to make precision shots.
The landing was a bit hairy—the controller had to wave me off because he cleared me onto final at the same time as a pair of F-16s, and the ILS didn’t work quite right—but happily, it was a nice day at the airfield, and I was able to switch to a visual approach.
I’m now 1/4 on mission successes, with three Viggens lost and three ground vehicles killed.
anyway, I went fuck it at the (lovely accented!) navigation and startup switchology tutorials and went for the bombing turotial. The weapons panel on the Mirage is big enough to easily manipulate in VR and I was laying eggs like a pro on the first run. Oh yeah.
In the nevada map, there’s Las Vegas. In Vegas, there’s these big gaudy casino’s. Of course the gaudiest is a Trump tower. I have bombed it. Bombed it again. It will not crumble :(
The side footage of that (or a similar) ground resonance test is pretty crazy.
I took a crack at a night mission, and to my surprise, survived! I did, unfortunately, miss my target a bit to the left, and take a few hits from AAA, but I made it back to the field, which is a surprise.
(Edit: watching this myself, I notice I was hunting around for the radar brightness knob, and one of the things I hovered over was ‘canopy jettison’. Good thing I didn’t hit that one by mistake. “Why did it suddenly get so loud in here?”)
Ok so i have IL-2 again but i can’t get it to run correctly; i set it to 1920x1080 and now the window is zoomed in and i can’t select any menu buttons (for some reason certain games want to default to using Full Screen (windowed) view and changing this makes the game very unhappy). Once i overcome this though…
huh. weird. why not have it run full screen? perhaps you might want to hunt down its config file and murder it mercilessly, allowing the game to rebuild a more sensible one. you are not running VR are you?
No that’s what i’m saying, trying to run it full screen breaks it. I can only run it in full screen windowed mode. Yea, some ini murdering will help. Or at the least be cathartic.
What il2 are you running by the way? old ‘1946’ style or the new Battle of X(whatever)? what os? what make of gpu? did you update all the things? time to put that big blonde PC masterrace wig on mang!
Yea that was some weaksauce complaining. I used to fly online organized battles in 1946; but it’s been years. Dusted off the Saitek and need to start flying again! TBH I probably just need to reinstall which isn’t a huge issue.
Do you have SaveAspect=0 in the config file? That’ll make the menu render at 1080 pixels high 4:3, while leaving the rendering engine correctly scaled/aspect-ratioed at 1080p.
I’m so torn… Soviet Monsters: Ekranoplans is under $5 on sale right now. The flight sim completionist in me figures I only need an hour of entertainment to justify $5. But every review is negative…
