3202

Maybe, but I haven’t found one yet.

3203

lol soon as I get some highly annoying bugs worked out I’ll send you one in PG and Hornet.

3204

@Anklebiter I bet M1 will make his rig cry for mercy as well, it did mine!

3205

I still don’t have the F-5 or Normandy, but I look forward to flailing uselessly in the Hornet, whose controls I have not yet mapped beyond axes and trim.

3206

I’ve learned a bunch since then and think I can optimize #1. Number 6 though is a good benchmark. Mass Su-25 kamikaze attack on a carrier group while you try to land. AI behavior is not working reliably and I’ve been beating my head against it. One way or the other, I should have something solid in a few days and I’ll shoot it over.

3207

Pretty game is pretty.

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3208

Like.

It was a productive evening for me. I got a mapped my Hornet controls and got a startup cheat sheet written. (I do my own cheat sheets/checklists because I have a little shorthand for where switches are in the cockpit, to help transitioning back into a type when I’ve been away for a while.) That done, I did a cold start/takeoff/return to carrier, flying a pattern which for the first time resulted in a called ball, then flew down the coast and landed in Dubai, playing with the radar along the way.

Much as I love the Harrier, I’m increasingly concerned about Razbam’s ability to finish it. It’s been nearly a year, and bomb interval spacing still isn’t working, among a number of other issues. I have no such worries about the Hornet.

3209

Yesterdays openbeta patch broke many custom control configs. Dont panic, a hotfix is being worked on.

For those of us not patient enough to wait for that the fix is in: In your DCS install directory/mods/aircraft/plane/input there are new default input files. Delete the ones that pertain to your hardware. So /mods/aircraft/A-10C/input/joystick/joystick HOTAS Warthog.diff.lua needs to go. and all its little brothers and sisters in the other aircrafts’ folders. I used a mass renaming utility to seek out *Warthog.diff.lua and move them to /dev/null.

It works.

In other news, the MiG-29 got a snazzy new flight model and it. Is. Glorious. Havent managed to land it in one piece so far.

3210

Well FUCK. ED investigated the controls thing and their official stance on this is: fuck it, new way is the best way, so bend over and take it.

I am not happy with that and the way it was handled.

3211

I don’t envy NineLine’s job. I’m pretty sure flight sim community manager is one of the circles of hell.

DCS is a particularly tough one, given that it’s still very much a spitballs-and-duct-tape project from all appearances.

3212

Does this mean they improve their control scheme and offer defaults that make sense, or make control assignments better?

If so, @schurem I’m not sure how they should do it different. With a two week update schedule, beta release pretty much is their announcement. Their spokesperson isn’t being a dick about it.

I suppose they could have put a blurb in their patch notes…

3213

I think what’s going on is that they added a bunch of default mappings for commonly-used controllers, and there’s some issue with the way they merge the default mappings and existing user mappings doesn’t play well.

Happily, I managed to dodge this one—as far as DCS knows, my joysticks are named CH Control Manager 1-4.

3214

Heh, I dodged this one too. Since I’ve spent so much time in the Mission Editor, I haven’t bothered to map the majority of planes I own (all the FC3 ones).

I just checked. Instead of the horrific mapping from before, where the throttle mini-stick defaulted to flight control, all these planes now have a nice usable default scheme. Cool!

Easy equation for ED. They need to think about all those potential new customers who will buy Modern Air Combat, and nothing says boring ass flight simulator like having to map a gillion controls (although I’m special because I think it’s fun).

3215

Today: Hornet AA workup!

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Loaded for a fight.

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The motion blur is really well done. I also noticed it flying low in the Harrier the other day.

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Lofting a Sparrow at an Il-76.

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Not exactly fair.

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In close with a Sidewinder, getting used to the ACM radar modes and switching between them.

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Splash one L-39!

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Odd that the radar didn’t auto-lock, but I hardly need the help at this range.

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An off-center, 4-wire landing caps off the night.

3216

you’re right and of course i aint blaming Nineline. He wasn’t warned about this. First they conduct a poll showing the massive majority of users use TM Warthogs. Then they push out a patch that breaks those. And they do not warn their community manager person about it. Yup, that’s soviet communication skills right there. (ED mostly are from Moskva)

[ruffles hair on @anklebiter head] yeah who’s a special boy? you are a special boy!

The HUD scan mode guns default to takes a second or two to lock. I prefer boresight to get a quick lock. And soon we’ll have a helmet tracking device just like the MiG drivers have.

Did you guys catch Jell-O getting his ass handed to him by an AI MiG-21? It was glorious. He’s also going to be our LSO!

3217

Great, now I’ll have to contend with someone yelling at me about waving off while I’m trying to land. :P

It is good to hear that a dynamic campaign engine is still very much on their radar. Once they get that out there, I’m suddenly willing to forgive a lot more jank.

3218

I’m not holding my breath for the dynamic campaign being a game changer, at least for most. Here’s why.

My theory on video games. They key into two head systems to make them “fun”, adrenaline (which DCS has in spades) and dopamine. Of the two, dopamine is far more powerful and keeps em coming back. WoW, Candy Crush, X-Com, you name it.

A good dynamic campaign should handle both. Keeps adrenaline flowing with the unexpected, and allowing some sort of “progress”, “achievement”, “like” etc., for the heroin.

Where I see DCS dynamic campaign falling down is on the second part. Hooking the user (er… player) requires a positive consequence that is easy to achieve, at least at first, a freebie… (this is why games can be dangerous for kids… real life is rarely like that).

The easy part is really counter intuitive to the “realism” on the table and complexity of the jets. Blowing up a bridge is way harder in a Hornet than say a WW2 bird where “war” progression can come easier.

Without it, progression doesn’t hook, and the campaign becomes pretty much a soul-less random mission generator, kinda like the Falcon 4 campaign ;P Well regarded academically, but how many people actually got anywhere in it?

I suppose it could be done with the right AI and balance, but that is so hard.

A simpler solution is creating a “character” and a story. Key progression off that, and let the AI be dumb. I dunno, I just don’t see them going there. It isn’t who they are. I bet they are going to tackle the AI route and angsty posts will ensue. Would be happy to be surprised though…

Edit: Sorry for all the edits. Sparked lots of extra thoughts that related.

3219

Me! I loved the Falcon 4 dynamic campaign engine, and I think it makes Falcon 4 a better overall sim package than DCS, even today, even with the fidelity edge and airframe advantage DCS has. I might even go so far as to call it the crowning achievement of the genre.

Sure, it might not have the same dopamine rush of easy incremental accomplishment, but the way I see it, it hooks into an even deeper psychological mechanism: the craving for narrative. Not the narrative of a pilot or a squadron so much as the narrative of an entire war, where every single element of the game is aimed at immersing you in that narrative. There’s a certain verisimilitude to that: games tend to tell stories where we’re the main characters, but life is more stories we get to be a part of. So also is a good dynamic campaign.

Still, very vividly, I remember sitting on the ramp at Kwangju, watching other flights taxi while waiting my turn, and dialing in the guard frequency or other flights’ frequencies to overhear other little snippets—AWACS calls, missile launch warnings, eject calls, and more. I remember running SEAD to knock down a SAM site so that a strike package twenty miles behind me can bomb a bridge. I remember one time, deeper into the war, where an AAA battery around Hwangju in the North shot me down, so after gliding as far back to the south as I could, I set up a strike mission to knock out the guns and flew it myself.

It’s similar with Battle of Britain 2 for me, at least on the occasions when it works, and that’s why I’m looking forward to a DCS dynamic campaign. Once you get above a certain threshold of simulation, a dynamic campaign stops being just a random mission generator and starts being a world you’re a part of. I kind of flip your construction around, to tell you the truth: a proper dynamic campaign flight sim has more soul than any other kind of game I’ve played.

3220

Excellent points. The idea to examine games on a chemical level is genius. Dopamine and Adrenaline. New tools for thought when it comes to this. Might these be the only two factors? Perhaps social factors also play into it, not just “my friends are playing it” but also some sort of fashion sense, belonging to a certain in-crowd.

Anyway, here’s some of the things flight games have done to keep the dompamine going:

  • In Falcon4.0, mission success gave an exaggerated effect on war progress. Get your targets and the blue divisions start rolling forward. That’s on the strategic level. On the operational level, bombing a runway or shooting a MiG would make the sky less red. That was real, tangible reward.

  • In Falcon3.0 your squad was 30 names, portraits and small amounts of stats. They had a skill at flying, at A2A and at A2G. They also had a fatigue rating and IIRC a morale one. Getting them through tough missions would improve those stats. Keeping a good pilot alive was worth something, especially if you trained those dudes through red flag and such.

  • The old dynamix Aces games (and the more modern Ace Combat games) had great styling. The music, the menu’s, the bits of video cutscene, it all came together to paint a picture of aviation cool. You could also “earn” a better plane by doing well.

That’s my two cents, but if they look closely at what made those games great, its gonna rock.

p.s. Completely and correctly starting up a machine like the F/A-18 or Ka-50 gives me a nice shot of dopamine too, almost for free :P

3221

Good point. Looking at it from that perspective, it’s probably why I transition to cold starts as soon as possible in the learning process. No matter what else goes wrong on a given flight, I can always fall back on saying, “Well, at least I started it up right.”

(Although now I’m realizing I have more steps to do for countermeasures setup, so maybe I wasn’t starting it up 100% right in the first place…)