ED has patched the Hornet today with laser Mavericks, the Helmet Mounted Display (look to left or right and lock/fire 9x winders), and a super useful display showing optimal speed for mileage, like in your car but fancier. Maybe not huge news, but shows that they are actively improving this bird.
After five months I am still completely enthralled with this release. It is rare that a video game keeps my attention so long. I have zero concern that they will abandon it.
having more luck blasting propjob fokkers with the nine-Xāes? If you want to use laser mavs, I have found a good way to get targets lased is to put a predator drone in orbit near it and set that to be invisible. For show you can always put two soldiers and a jeep in a hill nearby.
Iāll be diving into the Helmet Mounted Display shortly and testing. Iām really wavering between using that with 9Xs for Turkey Shoot mission or 120s. The 120s are hella fun to just spam. No need for a lock. Just point and shoot. Mad-dog the crap outta them Nazi dirtbags :) If we do switch then the mission probably gets renamed Spam Ram.
Should have something to send over this weekend.
Heatblur released a track from their Tomcat soundtrack, along with a bunch of new video.
Waiting for initial reviews is worth the $10 for me, but itās refreshing to see a module that actually looks nearly done on release.
Turkeybird is sooooo gonna rock. No doubt about it. I preordered that the second it went available. Out of sheer love and enthousiasm for the thing. Ill be sure to report back if and when it gets out in the wild.
In other news, the community A-4E got released. The scooter. Heinemans hotrod. The bantam bomber. Also shrike missiles. And the best thing: it is entirely free.
Get it while its hot. https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=224989
ED is having a half off sale now for most of their modules. Alas Hornet is only 25% off, but most of the rest sees the bigger discount.
Speaking of Hornet, I just finished one hell of a mission. I gotta say, the hours of study have paid off. The realism of this sim is out of this world!
Killing 68 ME 109s in one intensive furball could only have been achieved with a full understanding of how the trigger system works. Pulling the HOTAS trigger fires the missile. This aha moment was eclipsed by the tactical knowledge of the power-up system. The NATOPS manual failed to fully explain that when a plane is continually ejecting flares, it has generated a quantum connection with its wingmen(people), and exploding it will propagate that kinetic energy throughout the group. Probably this information was redacted from publication and it is surprising that Eagle Dynamics went there.
Not to say it was easy. It took me at least ten tries. Each of those 68 planes were targeting my carrier and at a certain damage level, the mission would fail. I had to take them out fast! Explodatron power-up only cobliterated one or two extra.
Also, 109s are no slouches in the turning and firepower department. Going against so manyā¦ even in a Hornetā¦ if my speed was less than 500 knots, they would eat me for breakfast. I couldnāt just circle around, but had to build up speed.
All this in VR. Glorious missile contrails everywhere, swooping planes attacking a smoking carrier, tracers, exploding parts splashing into the sea like rainā¦ Freaking visceral fun.
My son got his first few victories in this one as well. He is nine. The satisfaction was so cool to see. He did start going too slow though, while gawking in VR at all the surrounding. Was just perfect; he looked out to admire his right wing and at that moment a hail of green tracers flew by and walked into the wing, completely sheering it off. Immediately he went into a spin and crashed. That was a video game moment I will always remember, and so will he.
Iāll try to figure out how to get some good screen grabs of this one.
So someone gets to play Viper and Jester?
Okay, I now own every DCS module except for Combined Arms.
Someday I have to set aside a Saturday to program the controllers for the other half of my hangar. ;)
I know you guys love hearing about my performance woes, but an updateā¦
I have been doing tests in DCS with the VR performance mod reinstalled and my i7 4770 is definitely a bottleneck. Canāt get 45fps in any fast mission or instant action due to all of the units around. If I fly a mission I made myself with a couple of ground bogies I can get constant 45 fps at OK settings, even at ground /low altitude. My 1080 GPU usage is only around 70%.
When I add more units or turn on civilian traffic then my GPU usage still stays around 70%, but now all of a sudden I canāt keep a steady 45 fps. So that must mean CPU is the bottleneck right? CPU usage is also low, yet I bet that low percentage is across all cores and itās stressing one or two cores in particular.
I just tweaked my config and autoexec to get enough low memory to enable the gold cockpit in my viper
Suck it
How much RAM is in your box? I think your both your CPU and GPU are sufficient, but for complex scenarioās, DCS needs a metric fuckton of RAM.
Have you checked your PCIE settings in your BIOS? If this is misconfigured it can slow a system down, but then youād notice in other applications as wellā¦
Is DCS the only thing that runs shittier than it should? 45 frames steady is nice enough tho. I wouldnāt aspire to more with current hardware / the state of DCS optimization (or utter lack thereof).
Have a look at this: https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=215373
I donāt use the above linked stuff, because I rather have shitty frames and purty looks, but YMMV.
16G. DCS and IL2 are the only games to run bad in either VR or pancake mode. Iām already using the VR shaders performance mod you linked, it does help.
Donāt get me wrong, I would be really happy with steady 45fps, itās when it dips below regularly that it gets really annoying. When using VR noticeable FPS drops really hamper enjoyment more than they would on a monitor.
In any event, I am at a point in DCS when I can get 90+% rate of 45 fps. It doesnāt look great, and on top of that it dips below with really anything other than my plane in the surrounds (civilian traffic or other planes). So there goes using DCS for anything other than joy flights.
Oh well, I have posted here enough about it, I will update again in a couple of months when I get around to putting together new CPU+Mobo combo.
Exactly at what setting did you have the civ traffic bit? I run almost the same cpu and a lesser gpu than you yet im happy with the sort of gameplay i get out of this. Il2 is far smoother even. I wish I could spend an afternoon with your machine and unfuck it for you
Gonna point out again that heās running at a higher resolution than you (WMR vs Rift). That combined with the 10% or so slower CPU (singlecore speed, assuming no overclocking) he has could be the difference perhaps.
But he does say his GPU is only showing 70% usage, indicating heās probably CPU bound.
Also you canāt assume anything with base res, you need to factor in any supersampling that people are using, eg schurem uses 1.1PD on the Rift.
Yeah, thatās true.
Iām out of ideas then!
I feel like I should wait until I buy VR gear to enjoy DCS, but you guys keep talking about it and I keep getting tempted.
First:
You guys, itās almost there!
Second:
No you should not. In fact, if you intend to do some studying, a flat screen might be the way to go because text is so much easier to read, and swapping back and forth to a chuckās guide or manual from /DCS/doc/ is so much easier. VR greatly enhances the experience, but it most definately is not a sine qua non.
Pretty huh? See the thing in the foreground? That plane is a free mod. You can drop that in a free install of DCS and fly a machine thatās about 80% as good as the paid modules. You can zip around in that, find the joy of blasting fools with twin 20mmās and salvoes of zuni rockets for the grand price of absolutely nothing and ifān you get a hankering for more technological enhanced deathmongering you can always opt for the AV-8B, the F/A-18C or the A-10C.
Beyond learning your machine and discovering these things are truly built as an extension of man (really big fucking clubs to bash the neighbors tbh) and revelling in your god-like powers of destruction thereās all kinds of things to do with 'em: You can fly scripted series of flights that range from the very serious to the utterly bonkers (winks @Anklebiter) as a single player. You can take a part in big multiplayer dynamic war things, or just fly formation airshows on another server.
jump on in, the water is warm.
Okay remind me again what we decided between Steam vs direct download? Thereās been about 800 posts since the last discussion of this.
Direct all the way! They have ditched Starforce DRM from their newer stuff and will eventually remove from the rest.
Direct gets new feature releases for the beta branch more quickly, but most importantly, direct means they donāt have to pay the 30% steam tax.
They are not such a big company and could use all the support they can get to hurry the f up finishing modules and optimizing.