• There seems to be an uptick in Political comments in recent months. Those of us who are long time members of the site know that Political and Religious content has been banned for years. Nothing has changed. Please leave all political and religious comments out of the forums.

    If you recently joined the forums you were not presented with this restriction in the terms of service. This was due to a conversion error when we went from vBulletin to Xenforo. We have updated our terms of service to reflect these corrections.

    Please note any post refering to a politician will be considered political even if it is intended to be humor. Our experience is these topics have a way of dividing the forums and causing deep resentment among members. It is a poison to the community. We appreciate compliance with the rules.

    The Staff of SOH

  • Server side Maintenance is done. We still have an update to the forum software to run but that one will have to wait for a better time.

New to DCS

Priller

Moderator
Staff member
Good afternoon,

I'm completely new to DCS, just installed it yesterday afternoon.

I would be most grateful for pointers to freeware addons that can be installed into this sim.

Also, pointers to good settings for a fairly modest system would be highly appreciated. My system specs:

i7 6700K @ 4.2 Ghz
GTX1070
16 Gb of DDR4 RAM
DCS installed on a 512 Gb Samsung EVO 850

Thanks in advance!

Priller
 
In the meantime, I've found a freeware A-4E, downloaded and installed Flaming cliffs and the Nevada map.

Did a few easy free flights, but this is flight simulator on another level than FSX and P3D! This is going to take some reading! :jump:

Priller
 
HI Priller,

There was a nice MB-339 released just a while back.

http://www.freccetricolorivirtuali.net/

Also, the included SU-25 and TF-51 are excellent aircraft. I would suggest going through the training missions for any aircraft you have installed, and if there are missions and campaigns, then these are also excellent ways to figure things out "on the fly", or at least they force you to figure things out. You will need to set up control commands for each aircraft separately. I usually do this while I am learning. As I am going through training or free missions and I see I should be assigning commands to joystick or throttle, then I will just press "esc" key and go in to the controls menu and change that setting there and then. I also try and base my joystick and throttle HOTAS assignments to replicate the real aircrafts layout as close as possible ( I use a HOTAS Warthog).

Also check out the DCS World forums, there is some excellent information and downloads to be found there.

As for settings, there are presets, so you could start with medium and go from there. You may want to keep things like texture resolution on high (1024) and terrain settings fairly high. Compared to FSX and P3D, DCS World performance is generally excellent. The usual things such as shadows etc will have detrimantal effect on performance, but really you will just need to see what works on your system. I don't imagine you will have much trouble. I used to run DCS smoothly on my i7-2700k, even in VR.

Cheers,
 
Welcome Priller to an entirely new flying experience! I HIGHLY recommend you pickup the F-14B tomcat package by Heatblur. It's not freeware but it includes the F-14B, and soon F-14A. This is THE module to own in any sim. It should also at some point include a forestall class carrier and possibly AI A-6 tanker.
 
Welcome Priller to an entirely new flying experience! I HIGHLY recommend you pickup the F-14B tomcat package by Heatblur. It's not freeware but it includes the F-14B, and soon F-14A. This is THE module to own in any sim. It should also at some point include a forestall class carrier and possibly AI A-6 tanker.

Thanks Rick! I've done some reading and read about that package. I'm definitely interested.

The packages that interest me the most are the F/A-18C and the F-16 in development. But given that I've already spend about 100,-€ on one sim today, I'm waiting till payday!

Priller
 
I highly recommend "Chuck's guides" for any plane you have:

https://www.mudspike.com/chucks-guides-dcs/

He makes things as simple as possible for you. I very much appreciate the parts where he recommends which functions to program on your stick and throttle. Helped me a lot enjoy DCS and eased up that learning curve slope.
 
Highly recommend Frecce Tricolori Virtuali's Aermacchi MB339A. it's by far the best freeware DCS aircraft. My claim to fame is that I translated the manual into English.

[FONT=Verdana,Arial,Tahoma,Calibri,Geneva,sans-serif]http://www.freccetricolorivirtuali.net/


Ian
[/FONT]
 
Highly recommend Frecce Tricolori Virtuali's Aermacchi MB339A. it's by far the best freeware DCS aircraft. My claim to fame is that I translated the manual into English.

http://www.freccetricolorivirtuali.net/


Ian

Thanks Ian! Flew it, and crashed it! :)

Priller
 
DCS have sales quite often, so you may want to wait for one of those. The modules mentioned above, being the F/A-18, F-14, and F-16 are the current cream of the crop. Apart from the Hornet, these may not be discounted in sales yet as they have not been released long enough, or at all in the F-16s case. TBH though even the oldest modules are awesome in DCS World. I believe most of the FC3 aircraft have had upgrades recently. The A-10C is still one of my all time favourites.
 
Thanks to all of you! I'll be away for the coming days with my family, so not much time to spend behind a PC, but I'm pleasantly surprised by the warm welcome on this board!

Priller
 
Last edited:
A few shots to show what I've achieved so far. Modest is the word!

DCS-Frogfoot-Nevada.jpg

DCS-Warthog.jpg


Priller
 
Priller if you want to turn off the labels, Left shift+F2. If you've cropped the images to remove the info bar at the base, you can turn it off and ON by LCTRL+Y twice.
 
I'd just like the terrain to look better frankly!

But thanks for the pointer Rick!

BTW, what GFX card do you have?

Priller
 
So DCS is not like FSX/P3D at all. It only uses 2 cores. One for Audio, and one for everything else. if anything it's like the old version of FSX, heavily CPU dependant, but utilizes the power much mpre efficiently. My system is an AMD FX 8150. 3.8ghz. It's 7 years old. Pretty modest. I've put in SSD and I just recently upgraded from a GTX 770 to a GTX 1080Ti. I can post a screen of my settings sliders when home. my gamma is set to 1.8
 
So DCS is not like FSX/P3D at all. It only uses 2 cores. One for Audio, and one for everything else. if anything it's like the old version of FSX, heavily CPU dependant, but utilizes the power much mpre efficiently. My system is an AMD FX 8150. 3.8ghz. It's 7 years old. Pretty modest. I've put in SSD and I just recently upgraded from a GTX 770 to a GTX 1080Ti. I can post a screen of my settings sliders when home. my gamma is set to 1.8

That would be very nice of you Rick!

Priller
 
Back
Top