As a DCS noob I endorse the Hornet.
Keep em flying, fellas. I’m not upset at all that you’re having such a good time with my first girlfriend. No, really. Happy for you both.
What’s the state of the IL2 WW1 expansion these days?
Six planes, map not done yet.
Le sharp end of liberte, fraternite, egalite.
Rolling with the boys. This formation was pretty close and it was fucking awesome to have it form up around me in VR, and when we reached the deployment zone have them peel off in pairs.
Alphonse Idiot and Aristide Inanime the AIs can pull off perfect formation landings. Tres cool.
My loyal friends doing a parade thing in front of their jets while I shut down. Martinet sounds French, non?
The mirage is an awesome jet. She is fast and powerful. She does not carry much, four missiles of which just two can be radar guided. They are pretty good sticks too. She can also bomb, and be fairly accurate doing that. No targeting camera pod tho.
The mirage has a digital fly-by-wire system, like the F/A-18 and F-16 have. This means pilot input tells the jet what he wants to do, and the jet does it. This makes for extremely smooth, precise flight. Forming up, tanking and BFM are relatively easy in the mirage. You do need to watch for the drag effect of the large delta wing if you pull a lot of AoA. It becomes a mighty airbrake then, and the mirage will happily glide to her demise at a barely controlled 80 knots if you let it devolve into that.
Navigation is done by a faithfully simulated inertial navigation system. It’s what the cool boys used before GPS became all the rage and made us dumb. Learning the intricacies of that is to me a deeply satisfying fun experience.
Her engine can be quite frugal, so if you are smart about it she has some pretty long legs. She burns about ten times as much fuel in afterburner than in cruise, so one should use that sparingly.
I love my mirage.
That would be fantastic.
I’m drooling over the new VR display from HP called the reverb
Oculus ergonomics, which are great, and double the resolution. I spent a mint on a 2070 and know it won’t push VR with the HP in DCS current state. Maybe they make it viable to actually upgrade to the higher res using that card.
Amusing side note: on the PC Master Race reddit, some guy posted a picture of the guts of a fairly nice machine. i9, some fat Nvidia card, M.2, etc. Very neat and tidy with no flash. Poster didn’t own the machine, stated he was doing a quick repair of something in the owner’s Windows, whatever.
The usual discussion until he got the part, “Yeah, this actually belongs to a pretty old guy. He put it together just for flight simulators.”
More discussion from other folks about all these “old guys” putting together these Ascended machines because, you know, they need them to fly their flight sims. That’s right. PCMR seniors because, you know, flight sims.
I didn’t know what to think.
How about: fucking awesome!!
Editer
3755
53 year old dude with a Core i9-9800/RTX 2080Ti machine dedicated to flight sims and VR games, its desk the only occupant of a room my son and I have branded “The Dreamatorium?”
Check.
Back when, in the before times when not every game was a first person shooter, flight sims drove hardware requirements. Falcon 3.0 was the first general use app that could tangibly benefit from a floating point unit.
For years it has been glitzy shooters that drove gaming tech upwards through ever sweeter effects and high-poly super antialiassed coolness.
But now, if you really want to wring a God rig out, you need DCS. And that’s not just shitty programming. It’s just those are made by engineers who push the envelope. DCS is the only bit of software on my machine that really benefits from the 32gb of ram I have in it, or the CPU upgrade I did last year.
Where something awesome like Alien Isolation is about 23GB in total, my DCS install weighs in at a whopping 160gb! And it wants a fast SSD.
And while 50% extra frames in VR are nice next week, my rig will never be sufficient. I will always be chasing the smoothness, the extra view distance, etc. And that’s great. Because I love powerful computers, and I love seeing that power in action.
And simulating all the wrinkles in an F-14B (in VR!) is one helluva way of seeing all that power go. Just as seeing gourad shaded polygonal terrain in Falcon 3.0 was an awesome way of feeling the power of your new 486 over that old 286.
Ever wondered which jet is fastest? Here’s a 12-plane drag race, from stopped on the runway to six miles from the end of it.
Love how they have an A-10 there but didn’t even rank it at the end. Probably it got distracted by something shiny it had to go blow up.
schurem
3759
Mayhaps the -29 might have won had he thought to leave the bag at home and tuck his gear…
Matt Wagner on Rift S
I think I’ll be getting that. If they have improved VR performance by 50% then there are no downsides!
schurem
3761
I will make do with my current rift for at least one more year. Then I hope to have some money for new rig. My CPU, mainboard, GPU will all be getting long in the tooth by then and who knows what’ll be on the market…
That said, the rift S sounds yummy, as does that HP thing. I’m partial to the latter as I despise the way oculus pushes its store.
JeffL
3762
To chip in some old fart memories:
I remember back in the “golden years” of flight sims, Andy Hollis’s Longbow 2. A dynamic campaign with action going on all around you. But what really made it stand out in my memories: fluid co-op. My brother was in Tennessee and I was in Michigan and he flew in the back seat, shouting out instructions to me as I flew and he ran the weapons. It was simply an amazing, sweat inducing, adrenaline rush of an experience. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a more enjoyable experience in a flight sim.
That was back in 1997. I’d immediately spend $100 for an updated version of that game. And build a PC to play it.
Longbow 2 was my first helo sim, and the one which sparked in me a lifelong love of aircraft whose wings whirl about overhead.
