Before I get to my issues: I love the P-51. I didn't think I would but it, as simulated by ED, is every bit the Cadillac it was advertised to be after the war. I am a sucker for sims. I buy them all and I love them all but this one is special sweet. That said, I will risk trolling a bit here with a few issues I have with the current beta. These things tend to get lost unanswered in the normal DCS forum Bug list, and more than anything, I am just curious if I am experiencing these things alone.

1- The ATI bug. I have not seen this in A-10 since one of the early releases. I have heard it described several ways but what I see are occasional black arc-shaped flashes at the top of the screen, they seem to occur must often when the sun is lower than its noon position. Only a few times have they been so bothersome that i felt the need to quit. As I have already said, I have not seen this in WH in quite some time, never in BS, and just once in DCS:World Su25.

2- Low frame rates. Some have found P-51 to be better. This would make sense as there is less to draw. For me, both the P-51 and Su25 are noticeably slower than WH or BS when flying the same mission. (I use my own benchmark mission for all three titles). Viewing another P-51 in formation really slows things down. I saw on the other forum that the skin files can run nearly 100 MB! I don't know much about this sort of thing but that just sounds like a big thing to draw 50 times a second.

3- G940 "Reversal Bug". If you are not familiar, it is like this: You desire 75% RPM. You push to 77. So you try to pull back a degree or two but no matter how gentle your input you get 72. So you push but you get 78. In other words, fine movements can only be achieved in on direction but the moment you stop or reverse, the next movement will result in a handful of input. This is Logitech's problem, not ED's. But I have never seen it so exaggerated before. The P-51 throttle is absolute craziness when controlled by my poor G940. I have a rotary mapped to the K-14 range and it is even crazier. Throttle/collective control in the other titles are very precise despit the known bug.

4- Rough engine control at altitude. This is likely explained by a combination of No. 3 with the fact that the engine behavior is still deep in beta. What I did was this: I made a mission where a flight of 4 P-51s takeoff and climb to 18000 feet. Because the current AI are impossibly muscular, I set them to climb and cruise at 200 mph true. This way I could easily keep up with them and stay in formation. But every time I throttled back a nudge to stay in position the engine would nearly stop. Of course I would quickly fall back and add power. The engine would then sputter for a few seconds then run clean again. This cycle continued indefinitely until I got tired and quit. Radiator and oil cooler were in auto, blower was running in high stage in Auto, both air levers were forward. I tried several RPM settings but all were in the green and none made any difference. I also tried blower in Low, no help.


So those are my issues that I haven't seen discussed much elsewhere. The one that is discussed often is the p-51 AI. it's known to be impossibly physics-defying currently and acknowledged to still be an early WIP. So no worries there.

But as you mentioned yourself...

Although engine cooling and Rads are still a WIP I have not encountered the above, ever. Try using the keyboard to make small adjustments to the throttle rather than you stick, just to see what happens.

Nate

Sounds like I'll be in for some fun next week when I get it on summer break. Looking forward to opening up the throttle on that Merlin

Right. But I understood that just the plane is beta. The Caucuses over which we fly it is unchanged. If this was Nevada Beta, well, I wouldn't bring it up. But a graphically simpler plane over the same world would, to my equally simple mind, run at least the same. Plus, being beta doesn't make a product immune from comment. If it it did then the paid beta concept is brilliant--by encouraging people to praise the product they just paid for while discouraging them from critiquing it. In any case, I am not so much critiquing is I am attempting to see if my experiences are unique.

It sounds flipping awesome! It raises the hairs on your neck exactly the same way that does the "buuurrrp" of the GAU-8.

Sorry mate, didn't mean to pish on yer muesli there Regardless -



Yes, but how about the underlying graphics engine? They may have changed many things there, we just don't know about it.



How do you know it's simpler? How many polygons does the model have compared to, say, the v1.1.1.1 Warthog?

Now again I DON'T mean to downplay your opinions, but please do remember that it is an early beta still and thus has got to be largely unoptimized at this point, and at least some of the issues you raise may well be rectified as a matter of course. And that's all I've got to say about it really

Further, don't make the mistake of thinking that "FPS = graphics". It's just not. This is not Quake Live or Battlefield 3. The simulation runs in frames too, and if that gets bogged down then for quite obvious reasons the graphics engine won't have anything to paint to the screen buffer since the simulation engine is getting slowed down in telling the graphics engine where things are - and your "FPS" goes down.

G940 reversal "bug" sounds very weird to me - I don't see this behaviour on my TM HOTAS, but haven't tested on a G940. However, I feel it is unlikely that DCS is able to "bug out" in this regard since it doesn't load any specific extra code for specific joysticks. That's all DirectInput and driver territory. (The only specialization that has ever been implemented - as far as I know, I can be wrong here - is that A-10C was made to use a specific control map if and when the DirectInput-reported device was a TM HOTAS Warthog.)

G940 is a fault of crabby design by logitech. DCS can't do anything to fix that.

This is the frustration of communicating via forum. And I admit that perhaps I am grammatically challenged and maybe don't express myself at all clearly.

I am not listing gripes that I expect ED to "fix". I am listing gripes which I'd like to learn are either unique to me or are shared by other players. What I was hoping for from the responses is, "yep, that's my experience too" or "sorry man, runs better than WH on my system".

Regarding the "reversal bug": I clearly stated that it is a known Logitech issue. I don't expect ED to fix a poorly designed piece of third party hardware. Having said that, the problem for me is multiplied by a factor of 10 in the P-51D. So there is something unique in how inputs are implemented in this new product. In IL2, LOMAC, FC1, FC2, DCS: BS, DCS:BS2, DCS: WH, and Rise of Flight; the reversal bug exists. But in those products we are talking a 1 or 2 percent skip. It is minor to the point of being easily ignored unless you happen to fly for a virtual aerobatic team. In the P-51D, the skips are 5-10 percent and impossible to ignore. I don't expect ED to do a thing. It's not their problem. But what I hoped to see was, again, something like, "dude, I have a g940 and I don't observe any of the behavior you describe". Then I know that I must change something on my end.

Look, I know all about the desire to defend a product one cares about. I was once a core beta tester for Rise of Flight and made literally thousands of posts explaining and defending that product. Try to read what I am writing and not pre-judge my motivations doing so.