Just picked up BS2 upgrade from BS1 this weekend. Some comments

Positives:
+ Easy download via the official torrent, took about 5 hours, went well.
+ Install was easy, found my existing BS1 install no problem.
+ Sound is much improved
+ Ground textures both in Med and Low look better, more saturated
+ overall environment looks much better, better 'fog', easier to see profiles of ridges, bridges look much better
+ At lowest settings runs as about well as BS1 on my older rig and looks better in some ways than the older sim.
+ Wingman AI: Ran the Blow Stuff Up tutorial with an added wingman and had him do the dirty work. He was good, if sluggish getting into an attack run, took orders, acted sanely and even did a reasonable rocket run against infantry.
+ Ground Vehicle AI: in the above mission the tanks were more dangerous and responsive
+ Radio is improved. I ran it with Radio Assists and the option to have invalid radio commands invisible was quite nice. ATC is also more sensible. Realistic radio also seems appealing.

= Random Mission Generator is appealing, but I'm not sure of it's flexibility or variety. A quick run as BLUE with 'easy' and an 'in air' start put me on the edge of a small armor engagement. Air assets were OPFOR Mi-28s and ka-50s and friendly AH-64s.I quickly got taken out by something. Surprisingly there was no JTAC option in the radio, though the preloaded waypoints took me to the battle quickly.

= JTAC sounds good, but I have not tested it. I wonder how well it will work given that the Ka-50 is (presumably) not compatible with the electronic texting and SPI(?) assignment that the A-10c uses.

Caveats
= If are are running Windows XP 32bit and are getting crashes on startup, check the readme for how to run 3GB. Made a big difference. Now I can run Med textures on the smaller scenarios, though I do get some stuttering when loading new textures.
= Handling feels slightly 'different'. In general, subtly more responsive, though it also seems to in induce autopilot 'bouncing'
= Ground Troop AI seems unimproved so far... thanks goodness, I can barely hit 'em when they stand still.
= Roads still hard to see in profile and in Shkval, IMHO.
= ABRIS is more cluttered at default zoom. Gotta learn how to declutter.

Negatives:
- It appears BS2 launcher.exe will not run from command line or even from the BS2 folder via Windows File Browser. This was incorrect, see below

- Attempting to import my controller settings from BS1 via the import option in controllers tab was buggy. It usually ended up in at least one button or axis on the controller failing to work in-game, though it appeared to work the options area. However, reprogramming manually only took about 15 minutes.

- Autopilot seems to be unstable at times, pitching up and down.(this is really annoying) fixed in 1.1.1.1 patch

- On my rig, running a second monitor with Helios sucked up way more FPS in BS2 than it did on BS1. This is without exporting the ABRIS and Shkval. I suspect BS2 consumes more graphics card resources even at low settings than BS1 did. However, I should repeat that in fullscreen, single monitor, performance was comparable to BS1.


Assessment: Nice upgrade, more of a 1.5 than a 2, but there are certainly enough advancements to warrant the modest upgrade fee. Wingman AI upgrade really helps immersion. Downside it that getting it to run on older rigs may take a bit of tweaking.

I agree with pretty much everything you said, it's a pretty honest and unbiased assessment of the upgrade if you ask me.



I actually know the answer to this one, and it holds for all the recent DCS sims. The launcher's are unusual executables, they have to be run from the game's root folder but that isn't the directory they live in. Check out your desktop's shortcut and you'll see what I mean, the "target" and "start in" aren't the same directory. Make sure to create your new shortcut the same way and it'll work fine.

And yeah, stuff is still hard to see with the Shkval sometimes. It has been really, really hard for me to make the transition back after being spoiled by the IR in the A-10C's TGP!

Thanks for the tip rud24, that works.