Recent air combat sim recommendations?

Yes, I do. She’s ridiculous.

So in a move that probably makes bussiness sense somewhere, Eagle Dynamics released a new map, the Marianas Islands, for the whopping price of zero dollars, zero euros, zero pounds and zero yen or yuan. It’s free. And while it’s mostly water, the islands are beautiful.

https://youtu.be/gbaukPIFFyY

So if you feel like rocketing the everlovin’ crap out of a flight line of B-52’s at Andersen with an Mi-24 flown from the deck of a cargo ship, DCS got you covered.

“Man, even with all the graphics upgrades, the Caucasus map is still kind of ugly,” would be my guess.

DCS Liberation, one of the third-party dynamic campaign options, looks to be a lot more advanced than the last time I tried it, per this Mudspike review. Might be worth firing up again. Probably wouldn’t work too well on the Marianas map, but Georgia, Nevada, Syria, and Hormuz are probably all good choices.

Wow!!!

Is it? If that were the reason, why do they not offer a better free plane than the Su-25T? IMO the Caucasus map is fine. It just got a new lick of paint. But that old plane is decrepit to say the least.
On the other hand, with the new 14 day trial thing, you get to fly any plane if you’re in the “let’s check this shit out, see if it’s for me”-phase.
I’d recommend newcomers to give either the F-16 viper or F/A-18C hornet a go. The viper has a great view and a five year old can start it. The hornet is the swiss army knife jet.

I dunno—sure, the fact that it’s non-clickable is a little sad, but it’s much easier to put ordnance on target with a printed keybinds cheat sheet than it is in one of the American jets.

Holy crap. I haven’t had a gaming PC in years, just my laptop and my PS5, but I see myself spending money building a flight sim computer in the near future.

If you do, we’ll be here for advice, help and perhaps even mp coaching and sparring. You can find me here, or with my flying buddies over at www.mudspike.com In the mean time, get your Ace Combat on on the playstation. It is excellent and gets you intimate with rolling diving where-did-he-go, oh-shit-it’s-the-ground combat.

Does the playstation get War Thunder? Despite being a horrid free-to-play affair, it is pretty, features planes of all kinds, and can be set to a realism level slightly beyond Ace Combat.

I remember the days when I was covering sims for CGS+/CGM and CGW and I was playing everyday, with multiple HOTAS systems including those amazing heavy high end Thrustmaster sets. I could fly choppers like it was second nature and I could scissors and roll like a pro. I lived and breathed sims.

But it has been years - and years. And now, seeing this and a dynamic campaign, plus OFF (Red Baron 2 3D was an all time favorite) and I’m really getting the itch again.

I need to dig out my Hornet, Harrier, or Ka-50 cheatsheets and give it a try. As I alluded to, I played a much older version of Liberation and it was just okay, but it looks like it’s made leaps and bounds since.

DCS has always been a toybox in want of structure, and while the Eagle Dynamics guys get their own dynamic campaign engine together, maybe this’ll be an appetizer that keeps me playing.

WOFF2 is wonderful.

When you try a modern flight sim in VR, that itch will go insane.

And down the rabbit hole Alice fell, and fell and fell…

I was in exactly the same boat in 2016. Grew up on Falcon (Spectrum Holobyte for the Mac!), Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat, Falcon 3.0, EF2000, Pacific Air War… all the 1990s greats. Flew daily for years. Fell out of simming in the early 2000s. Yet when I purchased a VR headset (HTC Vive) in 2016, wanted to try out flying again and see if the old fire was still there.

It took a week or so of tweaking to get sufficient frame rates in VR where the illusion snapped into place. But once it did, I was in love. The experience of flying a fully 3D P-51D Mustang under that great bubble canopy, climbing up through clouds and then twisting my head to follow an incredibly detailed Bf 109 as it roared past… amazing. That was almost 5 years ago, and VR sims have been my main gaming experience ever since.

Schurem has been doing yeoman work here in proselytizing the experience of modern 2021-era sims, just want to add my voice to his. It’s worth the time and trouble to get back into the hobby, and remember the days of CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT tweaking with Falcon 3.0. It’s still a lot easier than that.

To their credit, Eagle Dynamics has really stepped up the production of SP campaigns over the past few years. Most airframes have at least one story-based campaign, many have several campaigns. These campaigns are usually ~12 missions long, and the quality of the ones I’ve flown has always been high. There’s a lot more SP content now than there was in 2016.

@schurem : how are you enjoying your reverb in DCS mate? I am looking to ditch Zuckerborg and retire my old rift S. I seem to recall you were a fellow Rift S user.

I am waiting for my new machine to arrive, which should be the case hopefully next week (3080 and 5900x). I am just wondering what rig is needed to drive that reverb and get decent performance and visuals. Would love to get your thoughts. How do you find the FOV?

How am I liking my G2? It is godly. It has a sweetspot, as all fresnel lensed hmd’s do. And in that sweetspot, which is quite large enough to cover my eyes natural sweetspot, the res is about as sharp as on my monitor.

I found myself leaning into MFDs just because I’m slightly nearsighted. Put VRoptician glasses in it, and now vr is sharper than real life lol.

I can tune DCS, il2, msfs and e:d to bring my 3080ti to it’s knees. But I can also tune them to run smooth as butter with hardly any image quality compromise at all.

For simming, the G2 is, for now, the absolute best choice. There’s no substitute for sheer amount of pixels.

As for FoV, I don’t feel it’s much different from other vr headsets. You are still wearing diving goggles. That’s something for a next generation I’m afraid, in a year or four, five.

What about the Vive Pro 2? From what I read, it renders the same amount of pixels as G2 but runs SteamVR content better, has better FoV, better colours, less screendoor, and better tracking. It would certainly have better software. The only negative seems to be more glare… and the price. :P

Well there you have it, perhaps the G2 has been dethroned then :)

Thanks! A big minus for the vive pro 2 seems to be that it has base stations for tracking. I hated fiddling with those for my rift. Our cleaning lady always moved them when dusting and I had to recalibrate them often.

I prefer to forgo pinpoint tracking for something a little more convenient. So the reverb looks like the right option for me.