This wasn’t in DCS already? boggles I mean, dodging flying telephone poles is flight-sim PB&J. Then again, there’s no Phantom II to go with that MiG-21, so yeah I guess.
Oh there’s so much about DCS that boggles the mind. But it’s the only game in town.
There’s huge gaps in the AI unit lineup. It’s closed as a clam for modding in AI units. Over half the AI units look ancient, like they’re ported over from some ancient dead game. The other half are freaking gorgeous. Take a close look at a Su-24.
Holy fuck you fucks, if any of y’all are still on the fence on DCS hornet or the persian gulf map, they are doing a free weekend! Get your hornet on bitches!
The irony is it would take the whole weekend to be able to learn how to look at the Hornet’s cockpit without crying. Or maybe not! I sure intend to find out if I get time, great move by ED here in anticipation of the bundle they’ll be selling soon.
If you take a hot start from the carrier you can be flying around with zero effort. Shooting stuff is only a very tiny bit harder. Finding stuff yet another bit. Landing that thing back on the boat… in one weekend? yeah good luck with that :D
I highly recommend taking advantage of the free hornet weekend, especially if you have VR. Just sitting in that cockpit and looking around justifies the download. Persian Gulf is also an amazing map and worth the bandwidth. I recommend opening a mission in the editor and changing the time of day to sunrise/early morning or sunset/late afternoon. The shadow work on the dunes and mountains (and in the cockpit) is beautiful.
Speaking of Mission Editor, I’ve been plugging away at Time Pilot. The whole campaign is sketched out and I’m working on mission 5. Schurem can attest to it’s suckiness as he has been kind enough to test each mission.
I’ve been doing most of this work through steam streaming to a Mac where I do not have a Hotas (or VR) hooked up. You can definitely fly this thing with mouse and keyboard. Don’t let the lack of a fancy stick discourage you from downloading for the free weekend.
Like the picture - domestic bliss and tolerance of our niche hobby. My wife is similarly long suffering. In fact, when we started dating many, many years ago she was working and had cash and I wasn’t - I was a poor ass PhD student. She bought me Jane’s F-18! That was when I realised she was a keeper. We been married ten years ago this December!
Yes I must confess I have had too many distractions of late and my good intentions to get stuck into time pilot have been derailed. This weekend I hope to get back in the saddle.
I’ve started hitting up tutorials on Viggen and am really starting to fall in love with this bird. It was probably mentioned upthread, but the damn thing has a radio controlled missile which allows you to steer it to your target while in flight. The motor remains glowing bright red so you can see it at distance to guide. lolz.
It also has a standoff guided cluster munition and a ground radar that’s all glowy green in your cockpit. It has the ability to shoot exhaust backwards for super short landings (and the ability to back up). The HUD is smart and beautifully minimal. Recommend taking a look at this video review if you are curious. Is of an older version of DCS World (the outside graphics are now much better), but the cockpit is about the same. Really impressed with the quality of the review, which goes over the unique stuff mentioned.
One thing that is missing on all these videos are the propor starting and landing procedures in wartime. The Swedish Airforce planned to abandon the regular airbases and disperse the aircrafts to roadbases all around Sweden. Those roadbases consisted of a 500 m roadstrip and a wooded area and normally 2 aircraft were deployed at one base.This is the reason for the STOL performance of the Viggen. If you want more of challenge when you fly this aircraft, start landing and taking off from the actual roads on the map. Here is a video that shows them in action. The grey aircrafts looks like the fighter version JA37 that has a different set of avionics than the AJ and AJS version.
Actually you can do road ops with the viggen in DCS. Especially landing is quite the challenge. Sadly the mobile ILS landing aid emitter is not built into the sim AFAIK.
I believe they added some functionality to allow for road-based rearming and refueling, but no mobile ILS yet. I like to use the map to measure my landings when I get the chance, to see if I’m down to a small enough distance to make the road landings work.
I’m not sure why I dismissed the DCS free weekend a few days ago. Now I kind of wish I had tried the new map. Apparently it’s a 50GB download so I don’t think I’ll bother at this point.
I believe it goes until October 2nd now.
These games are really hard to love with VR, at least on my computer… With both DCS and IL-2, there’s regular random failed starts or endless loads, really bad and inconsistent fps using settings that worked fine last time (1080 GPU here), control issues, and finally the fact that both games NEED mods to give VR even a chance to work well.
The worst part is I downloaded the Hornet during the free weekend and the fps just sux. Using settings that are fine with the other modules, even reduced settings to try and help it along, it can’t even get enough fps for reprojection to switch on.
huh. you need to do some of that pilot nerd shit and get that shit sorted man. On my box, with only a 1070 i run an unmodded DCS just fine, and il2 ran ok without the prop disc mod, but is better with it.
but yeah, i get your pain. these games are hard to love. they rarely are plug and play. They rarely just work. there’s always something janky or being fixed ‘in two more weeks, be sure’.
worth it imo. everytime i run the MiG-15 Nevada instant action thing, blast off, fight the sabre and land i end up with a huge dumb grin on my face. accept no substitute.
You’re right, of course. That post was just the end result of me having a couple of hours of precious free time and wasting them trying to get these games to work well in VR. I think the first step is to focus on one or the other.
What DCS VR settings do you use? Do you mean you don’t use the VR performance mod? Can you get decent fps with the Hornet? Maybe something is wrong with my machine or graphics drivers.
For DCS I do not use the performance mod. It makes the game look like arse imo. One thing that makes the load times worse at first but helps a lot for subsequent loads and stability is to delete the /user/saved games/DCS/FXO and …/Metashaders folders. These are precompiled shader programs, and the game does not know to recompile them after you update your graphics drivers or a game patch. So delete them, making the game recompile them. It is good and necessary.
I run most things at medium/high but have MSAA OFF because it kills my framerate. I used to have it at 1.2 pixel density but these days i just run 1.0 Guess I’ve gotten used to what is where in the cockpit. F/A-18 has nice clear and big fonts and buttons so its quite OK.
Of course its not perfect. Nothing ever is.
Die you bastard fokker, DIE!
I feel like I ask this every few years, but is there a good, accessible combat flight sim with decent graphics now available for a semi-reasonable price (i.e. I don’t want to spend $60+)?
Era doesn’t really matter (though I’d probably prefer WWII or modern). Dynamic campaign would be a huge plus.
It’s okay if there isn’t. I’m not trying to be cheap - just more I want to dabble, so it isn’t worth it for me at a AAA price.
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