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piratepilates posted:Supposedly the third party Aermacchi MB-339 training jet is going to be released soon. The same aircraft is also coming to DCS. It's not particularly useful there, but it's still an interesting move to see a third party target both platforms at once.
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Oct 14, 2020 06:13
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Sagebrush posted:look what's back! in mod form! Oh good. It's finally a MSFS game.
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Oct 27, 2020 20:37
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Cojawfee posted:Sim nerds get way too far up their own asses. When multiple sims do the same wrong thing, they start thinking it must be real. Racing sims used to have slippery as hell tires and people assumed that must be realistic because it's hard to drive. Then a sim would come out and people complain about the cars being on rails and the cars are too easy to drive, so they must be fake. Hard to drive means it's real. And then the devs bring up how they spent a bunch of time modeling how tires actually behave, and they hired an actual professional driver who has driven most of these cars in real life and he says it's good. The whole “real ≡ hard” crowd infests every sim crowd. If there was ever anything that needed to be purged with fire to instantly create a five-fold increase in quality for everyone, that's the prime target.
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Nov 5, 2020 21:21
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Sagebrush posted:Oh yeah this is a real big one. One of the things that CLOD was supposed to implement -- don't know if they actually did, but it would help explain the lovely performance -- was a complete physically simulated engine model. All 16 pistons running on their conrods, valves opening and closing, fuel going in and exhaust coming out, air going into the supercharger, yada yada. The idea being that if you were shot in the engine, yes, the bullet would damage specific components and create ~~realistic~~ engine failures, like power loss because a cylinder was punched open or oil pressure dropping because a line was cut, as opposed to just rolling a die and failing some subsystems which is IMMERSION BREAKING and I CAN TOTALLY TELL. …would this be a bad time to post the latest Eagle Dynamics blog post? 
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Nov 6, 2020 22:20
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…and free-fly weeks.
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Dec 18, 2020 20:06
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Trillhouse posted:I didn't know that. I have a lot of trouble differentiating the weapons in this game. I literally have a spreadsheet for the other monitor with everything listed because no-way can I remember the difference between a GBU-12, 32, 38, etc. If it has a laser code under it in the DSMS, it can be laser guided, but after that I'm lost. https://www.airgoons.com/w/DCS_Reference/Stores_List
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Feb 2, 2021 17:30
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For reference, the Virpil pedals are very good as well. And also possibly available before the end of the decade. Maybe.
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Feb 3, 2021 03:37
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Sapozhnik posted:these keyboards are probably for people who have terminal vi brain Well, yeah — if you have GUI vi brain, there's just something wrong with you. 
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Feb 20, 2021 01:44
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lobsterminator posted:What do you need the numpad for in flight sims? I don't remember ever touching the numpad in MSFS or IL-2 or anything.    
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Feb 20, 2021 15:08
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lobsterminator posted:I stand corrected. I'm not into modern fighters! True. It's really more when you get into the digital interfaces and nav systems and all that junk that you start “needing” keyboards. You can still hunt-and-peck with the mouse, of course, but if you ever want to start entering larger amounts and/or more complex data, a physical keyboard becomes really nice to have bound to the corresponding buttons. I guess a lot of it also depends on how good the sim's pre-planning tools are — if you can just enter everything before you take off and load it into whatever storage the aircraft has in one go, then that takes some of it away as well. The thing about combat sims is that you often want to be able to deviate from the plan and enter completely new data out of nowhere, and given the size of those cockpits, a numpad of some form is commonly the way to do that. Tippis fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Feb 20, 2021 |
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Feb 20, 2021 16:38
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Combat Pretzel posted:I'm trying to understand what the graphics engine actually does. Due to this ReBAR poo poo on NVidia, I've been trying various games and things. Eventually I flew over open ocean, no land in sight, still 45 fps, on external view. I mean how? There's barely anything in geometry. Welcome to flight sims where everyone still does everything via CPU, and only occasionally tells the graphics card to actually draw anything.
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Mar 31, 2021 18:20
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JayKay posted:Going to get the F-18, should I also get Supercarrier or Syria? (Already have NTTR, the OG A10, and Huey) Yes. Syria is in strong competition for “the second module you should buy”, tied with Persian Gulf. The carrier certainly makes the Hornet more interesting, but isn't nearly as required for anything unless you are in the particular mood for slightly less useless (but still very unclear and often late) ATC instructions.
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Apr 14, 2021 21:32
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Cojawfee posted:How long has that been a thing? Or was it always? Maybe it's the other way around that doesn't work. I bought the vegas map in some way that doesn't allow transferring to the other system. It's been on and off a couple of times over the last 7 years or so. It's subject to the whims of Valve and Eagle Dynamics and the third party devs, depending on who's got a bee in their bonnet today. It seems to have calmed down a bit now, but it was very fractured a few years back — some devs refusing to go on steam because they demanded their own DRM, and then all broke down and the capability was removed for a year or two… but it works now. Above all, it works now because they've largely moved away from classic product keys — you get registered as an owner upon purchase, and then you don't worry about it any more. It's not a cross-platform “check-in” system by the looks of it either, so even if they were to suddenly disagree again, you wouldn't lose your old transferred purchases since you're already a registered owner at that point. …oh, and people have been alluding to it already, but let's just very clearly reiterate: Don't buy the FC3 planes separately. If you want one of them for whatever reason, just get the full FC3 package.
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Apr 23, 2021 07:39
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:I mostly disagree. The only FC3 plane I care about at all is the F-15, you miss out on the tutorials but there’s plenty on YouTube. The reason I always suggest against buying the individual planes is that even if right now you only care about one, there will come a day where you are in the mood for something else, and you could have had that for a pretty small extra outlay rather than now having to pay an inflated cost for a once-or-maybe-twice-off. It just opens up more options to goof around… well, assuming you buy it on a sale of course because for the love of all that's holy, don't buy anything for DCS without a discount. Also, for the most part, all the FC3 planes are effectively the same from a control standpoint. You can almost (but not quite) symlink their binds directories together so that, if you bind one of them, this applies to all of them. Even when the differences are a bit too much to do that, you can still always try to directly import binds from one to another and let the game sort out which ones need to be ignored, so that lowers the bar quite a lot.  Sagebrush posted:Does TrackIR have a raw camera view? OpenTrack is somewhat more finicky to set up, but one nice thing is that it does show exactly what your tracking camera is seeing, so you can ensure that it's got a solid view of the whole envelope you're trying to use. I can attest to the fact that it does and that this can be a pretty crucial part of trouble-shooting. When I upgraded from reflective hat clip to a delanclip using active IR LEDs to create trackign dots, the first thing that happened was that I got a huge amount of ghost input, and not (just) because I had first forgotten to tell TrackIR to change the pattern to look for. The raw camera view revealed that it was seeing three times as many dots as it was expected and was flailing around wildly to try to figure out which ones it should be tracking. It turns out that those LEDs were… quite powerful and were sending off reflections off of my headset and glasses. A bit of masking tape and a reduction in camera sensitivity cleared that issue right up, but I would have had no idea what to fix or how without that view.
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Apr 24, 2021 05:06
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Lord Stimperor posted:I have FC3 and I didn't like it much tbh. Like the planes are nice of course, but clickable cockpits makes everyting so much easier and engaging. In the F18, the entire flow of operations is really logical, especially when you're setting up things in the computer. With the FC planes, it's always memorizing tens of keybinds. That being said if you just want to buzz around and shoot heat-seeking missiles from a MiG 29, it's absolutely fine. Oh definitely. It's one of the reasons why I vastly prefer DCS over something like IL2: because my brain is far better wired to remember switch positions and cockpit sweeps rather than CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-Z to wobble the gubbin. This is where that 95% commonality between the different FC3 planes help, though, since they can pretty much all be bound to the TM MFDs I have, and with a handy insert that lists each function. It's like the olden days of keyboard overlays all over again. 
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Apr 24, 2021 16:15
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ethanol posted:I just ordered a gladiator nxt but i didnt think to check this thread... any thoughts? Good call? It's a good stick. It straddles the fence between the older top-end generation (TM Warthog and the like) and the current boutique top-end stuff (Virpil and the higher-priced VKB sticks). It's been around for long enough that any uglier hidden warts should have appeared, and none have. It's not quite as customisable or button-festooned as some of the top offerings, but that still leaves it solidly in the “really good stick that will last you a long while” until and unless you get very demanding and eclectic in what you want your flight stick to be able to do. You'll know when you get there… …and you will. 
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Apr 30, 2021 19:43
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Cojawfee posted:Why is it an awful idea? VR controllers were pretty awesome for XPlane. Because you have to transition between them and your HOTAS all the time, at least up until that point where the controllers can fully and precisely track all of your finger positions on both hands and also provide the full tactile feedback of telling you the position of your stick and throttle.
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Jul 11, 2021 06:44
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EMsUx2t_Us …or just this for the ridiculousness:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvqYH5GPQ_I
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Aug 12, 2021 00:41
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lobsterminator posted:I mainly played Red Baron, but all these Dynamix sims with the same engine had a nice balance of realism and fun gameplay. I have a completely unrelated association with Dynamix — one with far less balance in its gameplay. (Grumble grumble arcade mandatory point-and-click arcade sequences grumble grumbl.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIue08JFz9k
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Aug 12, 2021 14:06
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Animal posted:ATF and EF2000 got me into jet sims as a teen, which led to eventually getting flight lessons, which led to me being tired as hell right now from flying a Boeing 767 all night Discussion > Games > Flight Sim Megathread: a gateway to professional tiredness and boredom.
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Aug 12, 2021 15:49
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azflyboy posted:The way MSFS implemented afterburners is actually a step back about 20 years. One immediate guess would be that they're trying to replicate “finger lift” or hard throttle detent mechanical devices in a way, but didn't quite make it work properly. The Hornet (and many other aircraft) require you to either manipulate a locking device on the throttle or lift the throttle into a different track before you can actually push it into the AB region — simulating that with a button press to work the locking mechanism isn't entirely out of the ordinary. Still, if that's what they were going for, it sounds like the implementation got a bit… odd.
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Nov 20, 2021 19:34
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To add to the FC3 comments… …the FC3 aircraft are really easy to handle if you have a sufficiently large control device to bind all the functions. It could be a Stream Deck or a couple of MFDs or something similar, with maybe 30+ available buttons. In such a situation, the simplified and (more importantly) unified nature of the FC3 aircraft means that you can bind all functions to work the same in all aircraft and just use the same procedures for everything, rather than having to remember those RCTRL-LALT-LSHIFT-PgUp vs LCTRL-RSHIFT-Home keyboard combos. But the were built for, and retain the design sensibilities, of a very different era where you had a keyboard and maybe as many as six(!) joystick buttons, and have only really been brought along in DCS because they were readily available and easy to revamp for this new sim platform. That is where the simplification lies: all AA modes work essentially the same, no matter the aircraft; all AG modes work the same; all weapon release works (mostly) the same; all those functions are tied to the same keyboard combos; and the differences come down to exactly how the radar or targeting display tells you it has found something. At the same time, that's also where the FC3 aircraft ultimately end up lacklustre: there's just not a whole lot of fancy things you can do with them, compared to all the trickery that a full-feature, full-function, switch-festooned buttonfest aircraft can perform. Maybe you can pick a Mig with long-range IR missiles for some added sneakiness as opposed to the radar-reliant F-15, but that's about it. You never get to pick one aircraft over the other because of better sensors or ease of use, and only barely need to consider any difference in flight characteristics and performance. While it also rarely comes up, a critical distinction between full sim and simplified aircraft is that there are no real fault mitigation in the FC3 aircraft. If you get shot, you blow up (or don't) and maybe you only catch a little fire and limp back to base because there's nothing else you can do about it. It's very binary. This can be compared against a full-sim aircraft where you may lose partial hydraulics and have to remember how on earth to switch to (and use) alternate controls, or you get one sensor knocked out and can potentially rely on other ones to keep doing the job. Granted, some of that is also dependent on how deep the full simulation is — some (ostensibly) full-sim aircraft have a long history of also being as binary: they either work, or they blow up completely. The functional difference between FC3 and full-sim aircraft is the entire difference and the whole point.
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Nov 25, 2021 23:19
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Sagebrush posted:Finally, with the right mindset you may find that the study-level planes are not that hard to grasp. The cockpits look complicated at first, but they are designed to be used by a pilot and generally have some sort of organization. Rather than memorizing lists of obscure button presses for startup, you can start thinking about the plane's systems and how they interact with each other: …and on top of this, most aircraft from the post-Korea era will have very purposefully built in “sweeps” where those necessary steps are aligned (mostly) next to each other: turn on electrics over here, move a panel over and do the fuel, move another panel over and do the engine start, move another panel over and turn on primary systems now that you have engine power to draw on; reset and do another sweep to set up all advanced systems; reset and do a third sweep to finalise. But then you get to the nutcase aircraft that some of us nutcase pilots love, where none of that is true. In DCS, the switch-placement-by-shotgun design of he MiG-21 is probably the most notorious. That makes it the most entertaining plane ever.
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Nov 26, 2021 19:16
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skooma512 posted:MFS is good but it's in beta on main branch anyway, why would I want to get in the double beta and double hosed? Sometimes i doubt your commitment to sparkle motion.
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Dec 4, 2021 03:36
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skooma512 posted:Flying DCS C-101: Haha stick go brrrrrrrrrrr Yes, but only when you try to take off, gain altitude, not crash into the ground, maintain speed, pull G:s, or generally avoid things. If you're just diving or turning gently, it stays mostly quiet.
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Dec 12, 2021 01:23
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ethanol posted:Get the vkb 100% worth it, there should be zero doubt, the vkb owns and is very similarly priced Just in general, in the last year or three, there's been a pretty big inversion in this: the boutique stuff has become much more available, far more sensibly priced, and it was always better (just more modern if nothing else) than the old big-name manufacturers. Even in the cases where there's a bit of a premium on the price (or a hell of a lot of premium, like with Virpil), you get your money's worth and then some. Logitech and TM have name recognition and ubiquity, but their stuff is old, often questionably built, and stuck in an era where an annoying and intrusive software layer was the norm. They're not bad, as such, just… behind.
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Dec 25, 2021 01:09
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Shipon posted:Started off with the x52 and drat that thing did not age well now that I'm on the TCA airbus pack as well as the VKB Gladiator I'm in a similar situation. I started out with whatever the precursor to the Hotas X was called, aeons ago, and these days, it's all Virpil + an old TM Warthog throttle. And even the Warthog stuff is feeling the burden of age because, again, it's from that old software-layer era compared to the Virpil bits where everything is done in the programmable firmware — I program the stick bases what the buttons should do, how the switches should behave, how lights should come on, and they do that no matter what without the need to have any drivers or software running on the computer. Once you leave the programmable-in-software idea behind, it feels so antiquated to have to have some silly interpretation layer running in the background and having to faff around with profiles to change anything away from the default.  It's 💸💸💸, for sure, but also very easy to rationalise as somehow being sensible and a good idea…
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Dec 25, 2021 05:23
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kalleth posted:Assuming you're going to go for a big boy trackir, post your thoughts itt plx when you try it out? The absolutely massive benefit TrackIR has, where none of the other solutions really manage to do “the simple thing” is filtering and arbitrary-precision position mapping. The filtering part is easy to grasp: any camera-based solution (including TIR) is prone to picking up false tracking dots, no matter what those dots are calculated from. Being able to filter out stray and weaker signals is one of the easiest ways to remove sudden twitches and vibrating views, and TIR offers the benefit of giving you both an unfiltered view of what the sensor sees (so you can figure out exactly what it is that is causing any glitches — maybe it's just some reflective surface that needs to be adjusted) and also having the ability to simply set a required signal strength for the camera to react to something. It's not perfect, but it's at the very least pretty darn good and it will solve a bunch of things that other solutions don't quite get. A related thing that occurs with some solutions is also just one of range: they require a strong and clear signal, and if you head is too far back, it just can't provide that necessary level of feedback any more. And once you start cluttering up your desk with keyboards and table mounts and a stick or toke hanging from that, and then you sit back a bit further to give the controls a good range of motion… and suddenly you're way outside the tacking range of the thing you're trying to use. TIR, in all its dumb simplicity, doesn't really suffer from that — almost the opposite: it will happily track things that are way too far back, and thus you need to set your filters to ignore those weak signals. The precision bit is a bit more complicated. That word salad I used really just means “my curves are better than your curves”. What the TIR software lets you do is very precisely, with arbitrary complexity, and with real-time feedback, set up any kind of response curve you want, including things like having pauses in the response (maybe a dead zone in the middle, or at the very end, or at 90°) along any and all axes. Hell, you can even set it up to go backwards at some positions, if you'd ever want that for some reason. Calling it a curve is technically correct, I suppose, but it is obfuscating what you end up doing: you're creating a position map where you can precisely control exactly what head position and rotation will match exactly what in-game camera position and rotation, and there are no limits or restrictions to how those map against each other along the full range of motion. This also offers another way to filter out stray movement. If you know you have a problem holding your head still in a given position, or just want to be able to park the view in a specific direction without having to be all that precise, just flatten the curve there — give it a bit of a resting shelf where small head movements simply don't translate to the in-game camera. Or, like above, maybe you want a lot of precision straight ahead (to scan instruments), down (to fiddle with controls), and to your left and right (to look for other planes), but everywhere else (eg. upwards, but not down), you want to be able to whip around at huge speed — just set the different regions to have different curve slopes, with each are being tailored to exactly how shaky or how stable the view should be. The benefit of this freedom compared to just tweaking slopes and endpoints, which is what a lot of other software offers, is massive. This, in particular, is where the newest and flashiest stuff (like Tobii eye and face tracking) just faceplants and embarrasses itself: it offers a curve. It's a very simple curve with three control points, none of which can be controlled all that much. If you're really advanced, you can make the curve asymmetric along some axes. That's the extent of its customisation, and also its baseline movement filter just makes everything unresponsive — it can't even come close to the kind of bespoke, and complex setups that the antiquated TIR software offers out of the box. There are some attempts being made to come up with a good TIR replacement, but they all fail at these two most critical points: filtering (including being able to pick up stuff at range) and position tweaking in the software. Of the commercial offerings out there, Tobii is probably the closest, but it 's going to need at least a generation of two of both hardware and software development to get there. 
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Jan 3, 2022 10:40
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Number_6 posted:I'm looking to get back into sim gaming, but it's been a long time and I just used to use the hat switch to check views around the cockpit, and maybe use labels to help compensate for the inherent limitations any game has on situational awareness. (I never even liked padlock in games, as it made me disoriented compared to fixed views.) Back then I was quite competitive in IL2, up to a point where the online player base seemed to evolve into hardened experts. But now I'm starting to think that coming back to sims at 1080p on a 23" monitor with no VR aids and full real settings, plus a 10+ year gap in my simflying skills, is just going to mean relentlessly getting my rear end kicked. Can a player still be competitive playing the same way we did before Track IR, etc. and large monitors were available? Depends on the game, and not always in the way you'd expect. Some sensible games use some variant of Serfoss scaling, or similar spotting enhancements, to make targets match what the brain sees rather than what the simple geometry maths would suggest. This fuzzies the line between how much better you see with higher resolutions. There are also some pretty simplistic variants of this, where far-off planes get represented, not by scaled geometry, but by dots or even small impostor sprites, again because it has been fairly well established that the cognitive process of seeing stuff isn't fully captured by just pure geometry. IL2 is one of the games that uses such systems to improve spotting visibility (or making it worse, from the target's perspective). The poster boy for this technique is still BMS, though, and it is a very different experience from a lot of other sims. They've had almost two decades to perfect it by now… For something like DCS, the developers are adamant that simulating the cognitive processes of perception is highly unrealistic, and they even took out an older impostor-based system because. Instead, it now sits in a very curious space where throwing more, fancier hardware at the problem decreases visibility of small and far-off targets — where on lower resolutions, they'd end up showing as dark:ish blobs, higher-resolution setups will instead happily show them as a single pixel that, thanks to anti-aliasing, is all of 8 RGB values away from the background. To compensate, a fair amount of servers have co-opted the built-in unit labelling system to give everything tiny dots, similar to (but less dynamic than) a dot/impostor methodology. It became so prevalent that ED actually relented and implemented dot labels as a standard feature. Still, on “hard-core” servers, no labels are allowed so you get back to the whole better hardware = worse spotting problem because. Compared to VR, the issue becomes a slightly different one. Or a combination of different ones, really. For one, there's just the issue of resolution — even high-end VR doesn't have a whole lot of it, and even if the numbers may look like there's a lot of pixels there, they are spread out over your entire field of view rather than the part where you're looking (there have been rumblings about systems that will have uneven density to work around this, though, so that may pass over time). VR helps in a huge number of other ways, as far as being aware of where something is and where you are, and just the general spatial orientation of everything, and in any situation where you're close to the ground, it just massively improves your sense of where you are in space. But as far as being competitive goes, that only really matters if you're getting into helo dogfights. On top of this, there's the super-sampling that is often layered on top, which lets more detail show up, but obviously smears it out a bit, and doesn't necessarily help with spotting — again, you can easily get that situation where you get an indistinct smudge rather than a high-contrast dot. But of course, this all depends on exactly how the underlying game deals with spotting in general — well-implemented use of dots and smart scaling can make this distinction go away almost completely. Another issue is zoom. The brain hates it in VR. It is usually on offer anyway, but at lower zoom levels and with less control than you get in pancake mode. So where a flatlander can just sit at 6x zoom and patiently scan for something on the horizon, the VR user will either not have that ability at all, or get queasy trying to use it for any length of time. Headtracking in pancake mode doesn't suffer from those disadvantages, and also gets a bit of a bonus in that you don't have to crane your neck around to check your six. Indeed, the speed at which you can look around is occasionally brought up as a complaint or even an accusation of cheating when the VR-vs-TIR wars get heated up. This is probably where you will feel the most left behind using an older setup: any kind of headtracking massively helps with tracking targets, so keeping up with just a switch or with mouse-slewing the camera around will… require some effort. Can you be competitive? Probably. Of the things that we hvae now that you might not have had before, headtracking is probably the biggest game-changer. The rest — including screen size and resolution — is very secondary and can usually be compensated for in other ways. Indeed, in some games, it even offers a very odd advantage to not go all out.
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Jan 4, 2022 16:20
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FPS_Sage posted:What is the recommended combo for Virpil? This is what I'm thinking from their website: The Constellation grips are good general-purpose options. Again, smaller than the Mongoos (which helps on a desk), and with a very decent set of buttons and — more importantly — hats galore. You'll be paying for that smaller size and also for the twist axis so if you want to get pedals as well, you might want to consider whether you need that axis or if it will just stay locked all the time, in which case you might want to look at the Mongoos again. Just understand that ether combo gets pretty tall (the Constellation just slightly less so), and optimally, you'd still want either a low table, or some kind of lower side-tray to lower it a bit. It works well enough without it, but yeah… if you have the option, use it. The throttle is top notch. Your biggest problem will be to get into a knife fight with the programming software (this holds true for all Virpil stuff, but especially so for the throttle if you want to use the mode switch as a mode switch). Also, you will end up in endless debates with everyone on what detents are the best option. Be warned. As for pedals, it comes down to two questions: do you want to rest your heels on the floor, and how big are your feet? Like all their other stuff, the VPC ACE can be tweaked a whole lot to adjust for angles and positions, but it will always still pretty high off the floor, and you might need to stretch a bit to reach the toe brakes unless you're big-footed. Or you can just dangle your heels in the air, which is how I use mine. Basically, choose between the Flight Pedals and Interceptor depending on where you want your heels to be. Oh, and definitely get one of the variants with brakes — you'll kick yourself later otherwise. If the whole package comes out as too darn expensive, retain that one thing: you will want toe brakes unless you specifically and exclusively only ever want to fly some old WWII bird with differential braking only. quote:Or maybe after all that, the Warthog is just as good I should get that? Even so, it is definitely not as good as the VPC (or VKB) stuff. The smoothness, precision, lightness, ease of tuning, and definitely the programmability in Virpil's bases are in a different league entirely. You pay a premium over the Hog, but that money actually goes somewhere. The TMWH is the best of an older generation; the VPC stuff has almost a decade worth of good design ideas and sensibilities poured into it. Of the things listed, the one that shocked me the most when I transitioned from TMWH to VPC was actually the last one: the fact that you program the stick in hardware and don't have to rely on any kind of silly old software layer in order to get beyond just basic button inputs is a tiny detail with huge consequences. Even if you want different profiles for different games (and you rarely do unless you play a lot of old games with limited control customisation), it is entirely possible to make that something you set using the switches — hell, the throttle almost begs for that kind of setup. It is a bit tricky to do due to how you should only really program one device at a time, but it is entirely feasible to make the throttle switches change how the stick (and rudder for that matter, if you want to go completely nuts) behaves.
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Jan 20, 2022 02:10
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That Works posted:I am wanting to get some suggestions / input on hotas hardware. I am looking to budget out an update over my current setup and buy between now and sometime this summer depending on final cost. If we're not dealing with civ sims, then there are a few things that are worth noting. The first is, one of the most massive upgrades you can get is not a HOTAS at all, but rather some kind of headtracking. If you don't have that already, include that first and adjust your remaining budget accordingly. This can be had for cheap or for far too much money, and don't expect more money to yield a better solution. Second, in a (modern) combat sim, two things will be at a premium: hats and encoders. So much of most the combat UI, especially in something like the F16, bundles together functionality in directional hats (target management, data management, comms management, sensor management, trim, countermeasures) that assume you choose between four different things… or maybe five if it's a push-hat. Encoders are worth their weight in gold since quite a few things are controlled by good old dials, and having to scroll-wheel or click-drag those into position gets tiresome and annoying. Thus, if you're wavering between two options, the one that offers more of these two will serve you better. Other buttons and switches are nice and all, but the hats and encoders will see constant use for everything. As for your questions… 1. The TMWH is a tried and true workhorse in the segment but it is getting old. With the current price inflation from lingering parts and logistics shortfalls, it is questionable whether it's worth the price. A lot of the classic criticism has been its stiff gimbal and (even at the time) middling sensors. It was never bad, just perhaps not fully up to what people expected at the price point. It has also had its periods of shoddy build quality, but that has also been more of a subjective thing than anything that has been statistically proven in any way. The current criticism is that it's quite simply old. The old mechanical construction isn't very sensible next to the far more easily tweakable and modable mechanisms; the old software translation layer to offer programmability doesn't hold a candle to modern hardware programming sensibilities. Its fundamental design works on the assumption that you want something planted on your desk, with a lot of heft to keep it from moving around, rather than the modern assumption that you want to be able to lighten the load and hang it from a table or chair mount, and that this should be an easy transition. It is still not bad, exactly, just… well… not modern. 2. The VKB is not strictly worse, just different. In some areas, it is better because it doesn't suffer from those old design sensibilities. You get it for less because you're not paying for that “tried and true workhorse” brand, and also because the TMWH is (almost) available at any time, whereas with some of the more boutique options, you have to wait until one is ready for shipping. 3. The difference between the two setups in large part comes down to the second point above: the hats and dials. The F-18 has fewer of them, and while having an extra throttle axis might seem like a big extra thing, it's really not. Especially not when it's something as simple and linear compared to the weird movement track of the F-16 throttle. As for issues that may arise from using a single-engine throttle in a two-engine plane, sure, the other way around is better, but it's not crippling, and in-game binds will often already offer workarounds for this — if not, combo/mode buttons and or just some hardware programming trickery can usually overcome it anyway. As for further suggestions, if I were to ignore your budget preferences, I would also point to Virpil — in particular the CM3 throttle and Cthey're the cream of the crop, and while you may pay a premium for them, you (somewhat worryingly) get what you pay for.
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Feb 3, 2022 15:43
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Yooper posted:How often does one actually move engine throttles individually in a modern jet? I've got an X56 and I'm not sure I've ever done anything but move the whole throttle. Emergency operations as above, and engine start. Oh and in a absolutely tiny sliver of aircraft, it helps with the trimming procedure. Also, if you ever want to get into flying helos (and a few things with propellers), the two side-by-side axes come in handy.
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Feb 3, 2022 18:31
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As a year ago, yes. It's not quite the same old self-DDoS tool any more though, so there's always that. Granted, that was a bit of a rare bug so maybe it's not much of an improvement to begin with. Tippis fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Apr 4, 2022 |
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Apr 4, 2022 20:06
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+1 on deadseed's appraisal. The TMWH is from an older era where Thrustmaster was the only real game in town and could just sit back and remain on top while doing nothing. It wasn't, and still isn't, a bad setup by any means, even though it has gone through a few rough patches of lacklustre quality control, but it is quite simply old at this point. It uses an antiquated gimbal system that is horrible to work with compared to modern designs where exchanging cams and springs is an entirely expected procedure that is designed to be as trivial as possible. It also has some questionable design decisions, like the ostensibly analogue nipple stick that is… less than ergonomic to use, let's say. Aside from filing down the afterburner detent to make it push-through rather than something you have to lift over, replacing the nipple with (effectively) an game controller analogue stick is probably the most common mod for it. It isn't strictly speaking programmable, so while it has a bunch of buttons and hats, they all work in exactly one way. Instead, it relies on a translation software layer that you have to keep running to make it do anything special — and the So, again, it's not bad, but at this stage, you shouldn't really pay full price for it. If you can get it at a discount or get one second-hand — possibly pre-modded with a better detent and/or analogue stick — that's a better way to go. For the full price, you might as well just pay a bit more and get one of the modern alternatives from the get go.
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Nov 5, 2022 05:14
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I said come in! posted:Ooh right, this is a good call out. I would be using this for Elite Dangerous as well, and that would hinder the game greatly for me. What are some other really good current generation joysticks for Elite Dangerous? Really good? Virpil. Always virpil. In particular, their Constellation Alpha grips (come in Left and Right configurations) on top on either of their bases (tabletop or table mounted), with no-centre cams and loose (or not very tensioned) springs. They have optional twist, with lockout if you don't need it for whatever reason, and all their bases are immensely programmable and flexible. The programming software is made by hardware guys and is therefore a bit unintuitive, but once you get them set up, you don't need any other software layer or extra drivers or anything — it's all done in hardware and transfers to whatever you plug it into. It costs… ehm… a fair bit, but the annoying thing about Virpil stuff is that you almost get what you pay for. 💸💸💸 Tippis fucked around with this message at 13:48 on Dec 19, 2022 |
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Dec 19, 2022 12:59
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Bedurndurn posted:How proprietary are stick extensions? Building on what Sagebrush said, there's really two main lines here: Thrustmaster Warthog (which is what Virpil and Winwing use as well) and VKB, who decided to do their own thing rather than something that offers an easy cross-compatibility upgrade path. Since you're already on the TMWH path, just about anything is already compatible as it is, again, except VKB where you'd also need to worry about adaptor kits. If you look around, it's also possible to find bespoke builds for sticks that aren't really modular — all the low- and mid-end stuff — but by virtue of those mostly being hardware hacks rather than replacement parts for an inherently modular system, they will obviously be proprietary by default. But that's something you obviously don't need to worry about in your situation. As for Virpil backorders, that's pretty much the default state — it used to be that you had to watch the store like a hawk or set up some botting alert system, but these days, you can just order and you'll be put into the queue so you get whatever you order once they've managed to build one.
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Dec 25, 2022 01:05
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Possibly more a topic for the other flight sim thread, but for those who haven't been paying attention, there's an new old new old contender out… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=658ax0y8KHs It has only been a day, but it seems like quite an improvement on both the single-player, client, and hosting side, and the VR actually works. It remains to be seen if it catches on enough to get a full MP campaign going, but anyone who misses the clickymania of old can get it here: https://www.falcon-bms.com/downloads/ As before, possession of Falcon 4.0 needs to be proven, but that's easy to fix via places such as GOG or even Steam.
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Dec 30, 2022 23:03
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I said come in! posted:Speaking of, how is IL-2 Sturmovik nowadays? I am more of a super casual on the combat flight sim side of things, does it have a lot of difficulty settings to make it more arcade and easier? I use to really enjoy War Thunder, but the blatant pay to win cash shop, and unreasonable grind, really killed the game for me. Plus it's not that good with a joystick. IL2 is skewing towards the sim side, but it is (largely purposefully) held back by virtue of being entirely controlled via button binds and short cuts rather than clicky cockpits where you fiddle with every switch and frobnitz to make the aircraft go. It does have some difficulty tuning as well, but most of it comes down to not flying like a complete spanner, and occasionally treating your engine properly. In fact, engine management is often what half (or more) of your binds will end up being dedicated to. So for the most part, it picks a lane and sticks with it. I would recommend the Airgoons beginner guide to get over some of that initial hump. Its biggest issue right now is that, as mentioned in the IL2 thread, it's a bit stuck in a rut and is slowly stagnating because it doesn't really have anywhere to go.
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May 19, 2023 17:47
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Hey, gotta pay for those pseudo-Jeppesen chart subscriptions somehow.
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Jun 11, 2023 20:04
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Optimist.
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Jun 11, 2023 23:21
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