[Flight Sims] DCS open-beta approaches something modern: Using more than one CPU core!

Drake

For a while keys were interchangeable between ED's DCS store and the Steam store. You could put Steam keys in the standalone client and you could put ED DCS keys into Steam and it'd register. There was some kind of discussion between Valve and ED and now Steam keys will work in the standalone DCS client but ED's store keys won't unlock DLC on Steam. Now you'll maybe catch a slightly deeper discount on ED's DCS store but if you buy on Steam your keys will work in either client. I think that's a fairly even and considerate break from the previous policy.

Sir Carcass

Drake wrote: »

For a while keys were interchangeable between ED's DCS store and the Steam store. You could put Steam keys in the standalone client and you could put ED DCS keys into Steam and it'd register. There was some kind of discussion between Valve and ED and now Steam keys will work in the standalone DCS client but ED's store keys won't unlock DLC on Steam. Now you'll maybe catch a slightly deeper discount on ED's DCS store but if you buy on Steam your keys will work in either client. I think that's a fairly even and considerate break from the previous policy.

Steam stopped accepting new keys from DCS last June, but any bought before that will still work. My A-10C key from 2011 worked last night. Everything except upgrade keys. I don't know if that was a DCS or a Valve decision.

Really, when DCS stopped selling the BS2 upgrade keys, they should have just added a full BS2 key to each owners account because it's basically the same thing except with a few hoops to jump through. Yeah, there's nothing to prove you didn't just buy an upgrade key without buying the base game, but it would have been useless previously and as it stands, I won't be buying a full BS2 key on Steam unless it's so cheap as to be pointless to DCS. I already bought it once.

GnomeTank

Which is fair. At least you got A-10C working, which is the important module, amirite? :biggrin:

GnomeTank

My TrackIR just got delivered to my apartment. I finally broke down and bought one, couldn't hold out for the Rift. Excited to get it setup and try some dog fights.

Drake

Honestly as awesome as Black Shark 2 is, I have more fun flying the Huey around. The Black Shark is all about providing a stable weapons platform for close air support, especially as an anti-armor mud mover. It's all about going head down on your instruments in a stable autopilot hover and firing laser riding missiles at targets kilometers away. It's a sovtech sniping dragonfly.

The Huey is all about The Flight of the Valkyries and rocket pod salvos.

TOGSolid

GnomeTank wrote: »

My TrackIR just got delivered to my apartment. I finally broke down and bought one, couldn't hold out for the Rift. Excited to get it setup and try some dog fights.

One of us! One of us! One of us! One of us! Make sure you don't have any sunlight directly shining into the TrackIR or the hat/headset clip thingy unless you want really weird shit to happen occasionally.

Drake

Nice. Yeah I am going to build an IR LED arm that I can attach to my headphones. FacetrackNoIR is decent enough with the facetracking api but it could be better. With just a little work you can use it to track IR LEDs too. I can take some stiff high gauge wire, attach some LEDs and stick that on my headphones easy. Then you just put a dark photographic filter over the lens of your webcam and bingo. Solid DIY headtracking.

I just have to get off my lazy ass and do it. :rotate:

edit: This is what I'm talking about in case anyone else is interested in what I'm blabbering about.

GnomeTank

Added some stuff from @TOGSolid to the OP, mostly about Rise of Flight and Cliffs of Dover mods. I'll add a section about the X-52 when I get home and can crop some images and stuff.

GnomeTank

Wow....this TrackIR is amazing. Almost no setup, just plugged it in, opened DCS, and viola, it worked. And it's nearly calibrated perfectly. I think I'm going to make it a touch more sensitive horizontally, so I have to move my head just a touch less to see behind me, but other than, it's perfect.

I am going to want the ProClip though. Sitting here with a cap on with these headphones isn't going to be comfortable for long.

TOGSolid

GnomeTank wrote: »

Wow....this TrackIR is amazing. Almost no setup, just plugged it in, opened DCS, and viola, it worked. And it's nearly calibrated perfectly. I think I'm going to make it a touch more sensitive horizontally, so I have to move my head just a touch less to see behind me, but other than, it's perfect.

I am going to want the ProClip though. Sitting here with a cap on with these headphones isn't going to be comfortable for long.

I gave up on using a hat and just jam the clip onto the headband for my cans directly. It stays just fine while I'm playing, I just need to be careful about taking my cans off because if I set them down on the wrong side the clip goes flying. If you use any sort of webcam while gaming for streaming or whatever you do kinda look like a doofus with it sticking up off the headphones but whatever.

Also, I dunno if TrackIR improved the build quality on the ProClip but the last time I got one it was kinda flimsy and didn't take long to break. That was seven years ago though so hopefully they're better these days. I haven't gotten a new one cause I'm running low on USB slots and haven't felt motivated to get a PCI USB card.

GnomeTank

From my understanding it's still pretty flimsy, but a lot of the breakage problems seem to be from people overextending the clip and putting stress on the arms. I may try to just jam the ballcap clip on to my headphones. I bet I could get some velcro and attach it that way too.

TOGSolid

Nanu nanu earthling! So yeah, just jamming it on works pretty well. I fiddled around with tape and all that but found it to be pretty unnecessary.

GnomeTank

Is that a statue of Renekton behind you?

TOGSolid

GnomeTank wrote: »

Is that a statue of Renekton behind you?

Nah, even better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VpNGrj9IsQ

Oh, and the other nice thing about mounting the clip like that is it puts it perfectly level with my TrackIR which resulted in slightly better accuracy.

Drake

Here's a pretty great little website for General Aviation types. World Airport Codes.

TOGSolid

Huh, I didn't expect Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International to be the busiest airport in the world in 2012.

GnomeTank

Yeah, Hartsfield Jackson and Heathrow bounce that title back and forth I think. Because they are both major international hubs for several airlines.

GnomeTank

So apparently NaturalPoint did work to resolve the TrackClip PRO problem, from their forum:

In short, we have indeed made significant changes to both the materials and underlying structure of the TrackClip PRO—including reinforcements to the joint mentioned in this thread. As a result, the failure rate in the field has gone way down. Part of what seemed like a delay in how we responded to this issue was just us searching for what turned out to be a brutally inconspicuous problem with our original plastics, where they would only fail after being exposed to conditions that only appear during long-duration air shipping. We couldn't easily reproduce those conditions in-house, so it took a while to determine what was wrong, and how to fix it. The new plastics are far more durable when exposed to these extreme conditions, and we've reinforced the plastics underneath to make the unit extra resilient.

That was from October of last year.

GnomeTank

And now I've run in to every flight sim enthusiasts big issue: I've run out of USB ports. Time to order a hub.

Drake

I've heard planes zooming around all day today so I knew it was a gorgeous day to fly. It's pretty neat how accurately X Plane gets the lighting and visibility. This is pretty much how sunsets go around here.



That's the Stampe SV-4 as modeled by XPFR. I've been saving it for a nice day and I wasn't disappointed. It's as much fun as biplanes always are, and it's a sturdy and modern one. If you are used to the biplanes in period combat sims like Rise of Flight a modern one has some real performance improvements over those early models.

GnomeTank

I probably shouldn't, because I just bought TrackIR and the A-10C module...but I think I'm gonna grab X Plane this paycheck.

TOGSolid

I'm tempted to get X-Plane and see if they got Southeast Alaska right. I remember Ketchikan being pretty off in MFSX. I just need to somehow pull myself away from Elite and with all the shit going down in Mikunn it's hard not to spend all day playing it.

GnomeTank

I need to fly my Viper out to Mikunn and get in on that action, especially now that I have TrackIR.

Erlkönig

I remember playing MS Flight and wanting to check out Valdez. Now, I know it's been a little over a decade since I was last there, but I don't think that the town would've grown quite that much and gotten rid of the pipeline/tanker terminal.

Drake

The local scenery in X Plane is pretty accurate as far as elevations, roads, radio and cel towers and all of that goes. Our beaches are whiter than they are presented in X Plane, and our coast has a lot more high rise condos than what is represented in the sim. Building types and densities can be funny but it's not terrible. But in general I've been surprised by how accurately the game represents my area. The shapes of the coasts are pretty accurate, and it has all of the protected waters and rivers right or close enough that I don't notice. That's going to be fun for some amphibious action.

striderjg

Sir Carcass wrote: »

One time I was flying with @striderjg and I hit a bird on takeoff, breaking my nosewheel and leaving it hanging down. I had a warning klaxon blaring at me the whole time, but I finished the mission and managed to belly land it on the grass.

I was doing the f-15 campaign just a bit ago in fc3 and was on the low level infill mission and kept fucking sucking in birds. I wound up turning birds off for the time being after getting really irritated. It's one thing if it's a rare failure that you have to try to recover from but it was happening EVERY SINGLE TIME in that mission. Heh. Actually gotta jump back into that campaign. Got side tracked.

GnomeTank

Bear Trap is a good campaign. It'll put you in some pretty serious fur balls once it gets going.

striderjg

ya, unfortunately some of the mission triggers have been broken with engine updates. The mission I got distracted on was a strike against mozdok which I found out has broken trigger. Package was pushing before I was even wheels up. Found someone who had fixed the mission but have yet to beat it before getting distracted with something else. Thankfully now it's my own ineptitude when I fail though:) In other news, I've been playing with the arma 3 mission: Pilot Civillian Air Rescue. Quite a bit of fun with the advanced flight model if you enjoy the simcade experience of take on helicopters. Still has lots of room for improvement however.

Sir Carcass

Hmm, I haven't played Take On Helicopters since I upgraded my computer back in August. It ran kinda on the choppy side for me before, so I never finished it. Gotta find some hard drive space because that is a big one.

GnomeTank

Going to get the rough cut of that BMS video done today. I'm going to record it with no voice, and then edit it post record with voice overs and such, so I can pause it at important parts and all that.

GnomeTank

Ordered the new TrackClip PRO for my TrackIR, and it gets here today. NaturalPoint is just down south of me in Oregon, so it doesn't take but a day to ship up to Portland, which is nice. Got a USB hub coming tomorrow as well, with individual power switches, so when I want to shut all my flight gear off, I can (very handy since games like Dark Souls get super confused when I have it all plugged in, and won't detect my regular game pad).

Synthesis

I've done a bit of surveying on the X-Plane mod scene and am very pleased with what I've seen (it's not as depressingly underdeveloped as I remember it way back). Of course, it's pretty much mandatory that you get the Global Edition or nothing, so I might hang off until I can find it on sale (it does seem odd that the 64-bit version is cheaper on Amazon than the 32-bit version...or is that release for both 32-bit and 64-bit?). Tooling around in FSX, seeing what mods have advanced and which ones haven't, it's very rough looking on anything that isn't smooth, less cluttered, more scenic terrain, but then again, even XP10 looks a bit dated too.

Is it bad that the single best argument I can think of for X-Plane 10 is wanting to fly over Sun-Yat Sen Freeway (FWY 1) in Taiwan in a single-engine prop and visit my hometown and see how the rice fields look? I really would enjoy that.

Also teaching myself how to fly DCS with the X-55 (finally got my replacement rubber foot--my joystick unit was missing one rubber foot out of the box, Saitek eventually sent me a bunch of spares, free of charge). Not an easy task, but the X-55 feels damn good when I am doing things right. I'm actually quite glad the only modules I have are the Combined Armed (I will never pass up a chance to roll around in a BMP-2, shooting crap up and laughing hysterically) and FC2 (because Flaming Cliffs is, well, awesome). They're both a good bit less "instruction intensive" than I remember DCS:BS1 being (and I imagine the plane-specific modules). I really don't have enough time to learn anything that in-depth at the moment.

Also, need to get a USB extension cable if I'm ever going to use my TrackIR 5 again. Really hope that thing still works, I bought it because my TrackIR 4 just stopped working one day, for no clear reasons (no sudden shocks or anything, the sensor just...stopped).

striderjg

GnomeTank wrote: »

Ordered the new TrackClip PRO for my TrackIR, and it gets here today. NaturalPoint is just down south of me in Oregon, so it doesn't take but a day to ship up to Portland, which is nice. Got a USB hub coming tomorrow as well, with individual power switches, so when I want to shut all my flight gear off, I can (very handy since games like Dark Souls get super confused when I have it all plugged in, and won't detect my regular game pad).

Ya, I did the same thing for my hotas setup with a powered hub so I can unplug the whole shabang easily for games with broken input (which is what it is, broken - pc developed games should be able to cope with multiple input devices). At some point I gotta plan out and build a fixture of some kind.. thinking of using pvc, that I can attach everything to with the hub, so i can move it out of the way and hook it up easily and not always have boxes next to my chair.

Synthesis wrote: »

I've done a bit of surveying on the X-Plane mod scene and am very pleased with what I've seen (it's not as depressingly underdeveloped as I remember it way back). Of course, it's pretty much mandatory that you get the Global Edition or nothing, so I might hang off until I can find it on sale (it does seem odd that the 64-bit version is cheaper on Amazon than the 32-bit version...or is that release for both 32-bit and 64-bit?). Tooling around in FSX, seeing what mods have advanced and which ones haven't, it's very rough looking on anything that isn't smooth, less cluttered, more scenic terrain, but then again, even XP10 looks a bit dated too.

Is it bad that the single best argument I can think of for X-Plane 10 is wanting to fly over Sun-Yat Sen Freeway (FWY 1) in Taiwan in a single-engine prop and visit my hometown and see how the rice fields look? I really would enjoy that.

Also teaching myself how to fly DCS with the X-55 (finally got my replacement rubber foot--my joystick unit was missing one rubber foot out of the box, Saitek eventually sent me a bunch of spares, free of charge). Not an easy task, but the X-55 feels damn good when I am doing things right. I'm actually quite glad the only modules I have are the Combined Armed (I will never pass up a chance to roll around in a BMP-2, shooting crap up and laughing hysterically) and FC2 (because Flaming Cliffs is, well, awesome). They're both a good bit less "instruction intensive" than I remember DCS:BS1 being (and I imagine the plane-specific modules). I really don't have enough time to learn anything that in-depth at the moment.

Also, need to get a USB extension cable if I'm ever going to use my TrackIR 5 again. Really hope that thing still works, I bought it because my TrackIR 4 just stopped working one day, for no clear reasons (no sudden shocks or anything, the sensor just...stopped).

Ya, the blackshark and the a-10c are still the 2 big modules for study simming. (that I have so far) The other full plane releases are in there way as well, but being aircraft with simpler systems there is simply less to learn in that regard. Learning to just manage to fly some of them though takes quite a bit of practice. If you're looking for a airframe that isn't gonna take a lot of study time with the manual but is a blast to fly the huey is great and would recommend grabbing in a sale. Been a while since I've flow her but as I have my heli stick hooked up at the moment for arma, I think I might hop in right now with the last of my coffee and give her a whirl.

Drake

I think DCS World's Huey and Mustang modules are probably my favorites in terms of pure fun flight models.

Especially the Huey if you've spent a lot of time with any of the Black Shark modules. They fly so differently in so many ways. The Ka-50 is a precision flight beast, but it depends on some complex autopilot systems and requires a conservative touch on the cyclic. Pull too many Gs in a turn and you'll clash your rotors for example. The Huey is a bit more demanding for precision flying like going in and out of hover and managing rotor torque but it's a ball to just fly. It has much more robust high energy maneuvering, so you can swoop, dive and turn to your hearts content. It's also doesn't depend on a lot of technology, the Huey is pretty undemanding on the side of avionics and weapon packages.

TOGSolid

Pull too many Gs in a turn and you'll clash your rotors for example.

I laughed my god damn ass off when I saw that happen. I fired up Blackshark way back when and took it for a spin and got really confused the first time I tried some helo-acrobatics because I didn't see an obvious reason as to why I fell out of the air. It was the third or fourth time it happened when I saw a big black rectangular chunk of rotor go flying out in front of me that I had my "oh...OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH" moment and started laughing. The downside is that knowing that kinda sucked the fun out of that helo for me since I really like doing stupid shit in helicopters and the Blackshark is definitely NOT the craft to do that in.

Erlkönig

TOGSolid wrote: »

Pull too many Gs in a turn and you'll clash your rotors for example.

I laughed my god damn ass off when I saw that happen. I fired up Blackshark way back when and took it for a spin and got really confused the first time I tried some helo-acrobatics because I didn't see an obvious reason as to why I fell out of the air. It was the third or fourth time it happened when I saw a big black rectangular chunk of rotor go flying out in front of me that I had my "oh...OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH" moment and started laughing. The downside is that knowing that kinda sucked the fun out of that helo for me since I really like doing stupid shit in helicopters and the Blackshark is definitely NOT the craft to do that in.

I would consistently have my main rotors destroy themselves three minutes after takeoff in the shooting range. After the third time, I watched the replay. After the fourth time, I figured out what was going on. Turns out, even flying too fast will result in your rotors clashing.

striderjg

Dissymmetry of lift. Speed will absolutely do it. Interesting simple article on some of the dynamics of a coaxial rotor: http://www.simhq.com/_air13/air_427a.html I actually think someone in the previous sim thread posted that for me a few years back.

TOGSolid

Synthesis wrote: »

Also, need to get a USB extension cable if I'm ever going to use my TrackIR 5 again. Really hope that thing still works, I bought it because my TrackIR 4 just stopped working one day, for no clear reasons (no sudden shocks or anything, the sensor just...stopped).

I noticed that my TrackIR can get kinda toasty after a while so I've made sure it has a lot of wide open air around it. I used to have a desk that had a top to it but when I replaced it I went with an open layout to make sure everything can breath better. I dunno if yours overheated itself to death because of something like that but it's worth mentioning either way.

GnomeTank wrote: »

Ordered the new TrackClip PRO for my TrackIR, and it gets here today. NaturalPoint is just down south of me in Oregon, so it doesn't take but a day to ship up to Portland, which is nice. Got a USB hub coming tomorrow as well, with individual power switches, so when I want to shut all my flight gear off, I can (very handy since games like Dark Souls get super confused when I have it all plugged in, and won't detect my regular game pad).

This is another thing I love about the CH software. It comes with an off button so I can just shut my entire setup off when playing other games. :biggrin:

Drake

TOGSolid wrote: »

Pull too many Gs in a turn and you'll clash your rotors for example.

I laughed my god damn ass off when I saw that happen. I fired up Blackshark way back when and took it for a spin and got really confused the first time I tried some helo-acrobatics because I didn't see an obvious reason as to why I fell out of the air. It was the third or fourth time it happened when I saw a big black rectangular chunk of rotor go flying out in front of me that I had my "oh...OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH" moment and started laughing. The downside is that knowing that kinda sucked the fun out of that helo for me since I really like doing stupid shit in helicopters and the Blackshark is definitely NOT the craft to do that in.

Yep, the Ka-50 is all about letting forward elements find targets for you, going in NOE, getting in position, popping up, getting a visual on vidja and putting a laser on the target so you can paste it with one of your weapons systems. The stable platform provided by the Ka-50 autopilot systems allows a pilot to operate the sensor and weapon packages while heads down on the instruments. It's a pretty stealthy and precise anti-armor and close air support platform in a single seat configuration and the Soviet sensors, weapons and doctrine behind the Ka-50 make it a pretty interesting study sim.

Like I said earlier in the thread, the Huey is all BMG .50s, rocket pod salvos and Flight of the Valkyries. It's a far more seat of your pants experience that works very well for helicopter insanity time.

GnomeTank

So the TrackClip PRO fits nicely on my A-50's. Unfortunately it stops me from bringing my mic up in to the mute position, but that's okay, when I'm using TrackIR I'm generally in a PTT voice comms situation.

It does still feel a touch flimsy, but I'll take their assurances they've reinforced it.