DCS F/A-18C

My system has been having the odd stutter here and there - I will have to test this myself too.

Are you on a xx80 graphics card?
I am using a 1070TI with 8GB VRAM.
32GB ram so no issues there.

RTX 2080ti / i7 8700 @ 4.8 / 32GB DDR 3200

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The Data Link (D/L) Situational Awareness (SA) page and new radar functions are making steady progress, so I thought I’d make another little update using images. This all very much work in progress and subject to change.

The first image shows the radar format on the left DDI with Latent Track While Scan (LTWS) selected and the TDC hovering over a brick. The brick now displays the selected weapon Launch Acceptable Region (LAR) as well as target Mach (left of HAFU) and altitude in thousands of feet (right of HAFU). The next step would be to designate the target as the Launch and Steering (L&S) target and the ability to set a secondary Designated Target (DT2). Along with a hover over contact, you can get additional information up to three contacts in LTWS mode. With MSI enabled, you’ll also then have D/L information available. Once LTWS is done, then we’ll take care of Track While Scan (TWS) mode.

On the right DDI is the SA page five unknown contacts at the top of the page., They are yellow because they have no ownship IFF interrogation (hover over contact and depress sensor hat switch to interrogate). The staple at the top of the HAFU indicates the player has no IFF on a target, but the lower chevrons indicate friendly donor aircraft (F/F) have set the targets as hostile. Once both the player interrogates the contact and comes back negative, then the HAFU would change to red and be a diamond. In this way, the color and top and bottom of the HAFU tell you a lot about the classification of the contact.

Remember: staple = unknown, chevron = hostile, and semi-circle = friendly. Yellow = unknown, red = hostile, and green = friendly based on ownship.

In the second image the left DDI now shows a target locked in STT with Non-Cooperative Target Recognition (NCTR) enabled. A successful NCTR print of the target depends on range and aspect angle into the intakes of the contact.

On the right DDI we see that the target is identified as an IL-76 and the star HAFU indicates the STT L&S track. It is yellow because no ownship IFF interrogation has been made. Because the radar is in STT, it is not scanning for other targets. As such, all other contacts on the SA page are from F/F and SURV sources over the D/L. The smaller red triangles are SURV tracks from an AWACS that only the AWACS is seeing. The red lower chevrons with the dot is from a friendly donor (F/F) source.

  • Wags


EDIT by MOD: I have corrected the image order… I think :slight_smile:

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I believe the images are reversed order, with the LTWS on the bottom image and STT shown on the top.

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Very Cool! :slight_smile:
Will all SA tracks only be air tracks? Will surface tracks also be shown? Subs?

Will input also come from surface radars? I am thinking about a SPY-1 ship in company with the carrier. If an E-2 is not airborne.

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Looks good now. :+1:

I’m filing that one in my little brain next to iambic pentameter.

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DCS just stutters no matter what your settings or specs are. It’s not a constant stutter immediately when starting a mission, it’s intermittent. You might not even notice it unless you’re testing for it and tracking fps. I originally thought the stuttering had to do with clouds because they seem to make it worse.

Now I think it has more to do with memory management because if you F11 cycle through all the airbases on a map it drastically reduces stuttering. I also have 32 GB of RAM and if I do the F11 cycle on the PG map my RAM usage goes up to around 19 GB before slowly falling back down to around 11.

Preload radius seems to have zero affect on memory usage. I’m not even sure what that setting is doing now?

Ah okay - so I am not the only one.
I have also noted that DCS ends up making page file calls regardless of free memory. Each page file call results in a stutter. Moving my page file from a hard disk to a solid state made an improvement but quite a bit.

To note my disk layout is:
Windows - SSD1
DCS - SSD2
Other games/pagefile - SSD3
Media/Storage - HDD1
Recordings - HDD2

Am I missing something? When did DCS get an F-2?

Edit - To stop the weird looks:

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I just disable the pagefile in Windows although even when I’ve tried enabling it DCS doesn’t use it. At least according to perfmon pagefile usage.

The pagefile shouldn’t be used unless you consume all of your system RAM, which is pretty hard to do with 32 GB in DCS.

I dont have much in the way of stutters if any. The cycling of views just shows how much its trying not to load at once, so if you cycle through the views, it takes a little bit to catch up, but I believe they are still optimizing that.

Preload radius is how much is preloaded when you load a map, it really helps when connecting to MP servers, although with the up and coming dedicated tool, I think that is gonna be less of an issue.

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I’ve been able consistently reproduce stuttering by setting the static cloud level to 5 - 8. I do a test on the PG map where I just float (ctrl-f11) above an empty map with clouds set to level 8 and log the results with Rivatuner. This produces stuttering every time:

Tests length in graphs are 7 minutes.

stutter_test1

And here’s the results of the same test after cycling through F11 on the PG map and restarting the game.

stutter_test2

I was under the impression that preload radius had more to do with active memory management while in a mission? I expected to see a difference in my system RAM usage with the min vs max setting based on how it’s described in the manual.

Radius of the preloaded terrain around user position in meters. A large setting can decrease hard disk swapping but it requires more system RAM.”

Looks like they snuck in a change the helmet model in the latest update… :grin::+1:

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You mean the JHMCS helmet? I think that has been in for a while now.

Shadow in my screenshot made it a little less noticeable, but they changed the color from grey to white.

Old helmet:

New helmet:

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Hornet Mission of the Week
Tolicha Peak Shootout
https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=3798495&postcount=129

This week’s Hornet mission is back in the Nevada map and focuses on SEAD. I have included both a single player version and a heavily modified 4-player coop version.

Operated as part of the Nevada Test and Training Range (NTTR) between Groom Lake and Tonopah Test Range (TTR) is the Tolicha Peak Electronic Combat Range (TPECR). Operated by the 554th Range Group, it is located on the Pahute Mesa and in the middle of nowhere. The TPECR is reported to operate a large array threat air defense radars and associated Surface-to-Air Missile (SAM) systems. The facility is used to evaluate these systems and allow aircrews to train against them. Just as the Air Force has the Red Eagles flying Soviet aircraft out of the Tonopah, the TPECR is the Soviet SAM equivalent.

In this mission, you will takeoff from Tonopah Air Force base and fly south to the TPECR and engage SAM threats as they activate. As you kill one, another will activate. You are loaded with four AGM-88C HARMs, and if you’re good, you can go four for four on the threats. If not, you can rearm at Tonopah.

Good luck!

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You guys are going to force me to buy this Nevada map yet aren’t you? LOL…

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You do want to buy the Nevada map…

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What, you mean you didn’t already? dude!

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