I hardly ever have time for SP campaigns, but even a fifteen minute of take-off, bomb the range, shoot a drone, land is quite enough to fulfil my lifelong dream of being a viper pilot. And I get to do it in a wide variety of machines, each as lovingly recreated as the next.
DCS in itself is not a game. It’s more like an engine. In that aspect it’s very much like ARMA. Incidently (or perhaps not so), both are offshoots of millitary training tools. One can play pretty cool games with it that are very much fun and engaging. From doing interactive storybooks like the better scripted campaigns to a brawly game of tag with buddies online.
Chamot
5026
Isn’t this the other way round and the military training tools are offshoots of them? To be precise, both the military sims and the newer games are offshoots of Flanker/LOMAC and Operation Flashpoint?
AFAIK even those started life as training sims before they became games. But I might be wrong.
LOMAC was definitely a game first. The Ka-50 that kicked off DCS might have been a training tool, though—I’m foggy on the history there.
LOMAC is a descendant of the Flanker series of games.
Editer
5030
Went to look up what year Flanker shipped (1995) and discovered that CGW listed it as runner-up for Sim of the Year, an award that went to EF2000. (Funny I had to find this on Wikipedia, since I managed those sim nominations!)
Imaging if EF2000 had continued development the way that Flanker did through DCS…
/pours one for DiD, Rowan, and Razorworks
/Throws the bottle at the wall for Dynamix
/puts on VR headset to go cloudsurfing in a beautifully modelled jet.
We are in a golden age of flight sims. There’s more and better peripheral hardware on the market than ever. Our sims, few there may be, are thriving.
Editer
5034
I loaded up DCS to try to troubleshoot an f’ing annoying issue I’m having with my gaming PC (both MSFS and DCS stutter for about 2 seconds every 30 seconds on the mark, but IL-2 doesn’t, WTF?) and it’s absolutely amazing in many ways. I don’t knock it.
But read just about any combat recollection from WW1, WW2, Korea, or Vietnam and what the pilots saw there – huge formations, pilots doing boom-and-zoom or turning fights depending on what they were flying, dissimilar tactics, etc. – and you’ll see why I lament what we were starting to see happen in 90’s sims that didn’t survive the great profit purge that killed Jane’s and left IL-2 as the standard-bearer.
I fixed that by limiting the framerate to 45 (half my headsets refresh rate).
Editer
5036
No, this is some kind of weird system-level shit on my rig. Happens in 2D too. Check out this MSFS capture. Stutters at 4 seconds, 34 seconds, (weirdly not at 64), 1:34, 2:04, 2:34… The 30-second thing tells me it’s not a memory/buffering/etc issue, especially since it happens in MSFS and DCS. (Though weirdly IL-2 remains smooth.)
https://youtu.be/SJq0is_DI6E
I’m not running anything in the background, I removed all the video card and motherboard customization utilities, etc.
Something’s polling at every 30 seconds that’s ruining my flight sims.
Have you tried a limited fps? In DCS you can turn off hardware detection, this also cures some periodic stutters.
Chamot
5038
You’ve said you have no background stuff running but I had a similar -though not exactly the same- issue once, and it turned out to be Displayfusion, a display management program for multiple screens or ultrawide. It injects a button into windows UI so you can quickly move windows between assigned zones and that seemed to be the root of my issue. Thought it was worth mentioning due to your aspect ratio which makes it likely that you installed it at some point.
Editer
5039
So I have no idea what was causing the issue, but I used the Aliens debugging technique…
Flattened the C: drive, installed a fresh Win 10, and installed nothing except for the latest Nvidia drivers and MSFS. It’s like a new experience. Smooth 50-80 FPS in MSFS depending where I’m flying, with about two random stutters in a half-hour of flying.
DCS is also smooth now.
Yay, my sim PC is now a sim PC again!
Dont cry for me Argentina…
JeffL
5042
I used to love playing RB23D, WWI sims were always a favorite. I’ve watched, recently, some videos of people flying in OFF whatever the latest version is, with Track IR, and it really makes me wonder, how in the heck did fliers back then keep with the rest of their group, and find their way home without a computer map to show them the way? (I know, from reading a lot of books from fliers back then, reading another one right now, the answers; however, it looks totally confusing in the cockpit in the sim.)
Knowledge of local geography and ifr; i follow roads.
