My thoughts on DCS World flight simulator as a new player. What do you get and what can you get?

[Music] hi guys welcome to the video and welcome to DCs world and this video obviously it's going to be about DCs world but it's going to be from a particular viewpoint it's not gonna be a review and it's not going to be a tutorial it's gonna be about some of the challenges that I faced in terms of getting into DCs world as a platform and some of the challenges that I suspect many others will have faced about it and from there where I'm at now but before we go into that we're going to do a little bit in terms of the context particularly with my relationship with combat Sims which I suspect may resonate with quite a few people out there so I started swimming in the mid to late 80s quite some time ago and in those days there weren't that many civilian simulators around there was flight simulator 3.0 Microsoft Flight Simulator 3.0 that obviously been versions previous to that but I kind of joined that at 3.0 and it was a very frustrating thing because there weren't that many manuals around there certainly no YouTube and that kind of stuff so it was quite a challenge to get to grips with even now but one of the things that was highly popular and there were dozens of games was combat simulation and as I say I started 85 on was something like that one of the earlier ones was this beastie here Falcon obviously some people may be aware of the later versions of it with falcon 4.0 and the community-developed project of falcon BMS but the aim of this video is not going to be to compare videos sorry to compare flight simulators because DCs for me is a an entity on its own it doesn't really warrant being a sort of compared to other Sims but you know in the days gone by we started with games even more basic than this but I mentioned this because this has got something that's prevalent all relevant relevant I should say to to modern-day siming this was a very very early sim as you can see very basic all key bind combinations joysticks in those days only had a couple of buttons at most and so everything was off a keyboard and quite often the keyboards came with a cardboard cutout overlay that went round the keyboard to give you some idea of what pressing what button did what but in addition there are some elements of Falcon that actually carry over and make you wonder about how good the developers were in those days as well so for example Falcon one had a persistent environment now there's a lot of games today don't have persistent environment but falcon 4.0 sorry Falcon one did so that if you killed a SAM site it would be dead for your three subsequent missions before it came back to life again so you could do your own ass anti Sam mission you could kill the Sam something you could go in your subsequent mission and go and kill the airfield great game absolutely love that another notable mention goes to digital integration and their game tornado this had just the most marvelous mission and weapon planning system so if I just click here you can see that you can do multiple aircraft mission editing you can do low-flying planet etc and add all the various bit and some of these haven't really been bettered to this day so let me see if we can just graphics obviously leave a lot to be desired as you would expect there we go so you can sort your loadout and it will give you options for loadout etc so really really excellent excellent game and again this is one of the games during the era when combat seems really kind of ruled the roost I would say this is pre sort of FS 98 which is when for me the civilian simulators really started to take on another level but the topic of this today is Eagle dynamics and DCs and just to give you a little sort of background as to where it came from DCs I remember seeing DCs in its original format which was su-27 flanker I had Frank 2.0 but there were obviously various versions of it that developed into lock on modern air combat which then had to for the versions of flaming cliffs - flaming cliffs 3 and flaming cliffs it's significant because it's still really part of DCs and then obviously DCs itself the first thing I'm gonna say is please ignore all of the colored icons down here these color in as and when you buy each module it looks like I bought everything I haven't we're in the middle of the coronavirus lockdown and so II D have very kindly said that people can have free access to the modules for the period of a month so the first thing really is to look at in terms of what do you get and the first thing that is important is to say that what you get to start with is free so the free download includes one terrain area and two aircraft and the terrain area is the caucus region and we will just have a quick look up here so this is the module manager these are all of the available aircraft modules and some of the navigation modules and bit these are the campaigns that I've got there's others available in the modules in the DLC that you can get and also there's terrains now caucus region is what you get free and the two aircraft you get free are the down here Sukhoi su-25 t frog foot and the tf-51 d mustang and we'll have a quick look at those in the sim everything else is basically bought and paid for so you have to shell out some hard-earned cash however we'll have a look at what you get for free first so cancel that instant action now obviously what you've got is a number of modes in terms of the game menus you've got instant action which does what it says on the tin create fast mission which is basically instant action with a bit more flexibility in terms of what you can select so you can select where you can select what aircraft what you're against theatres seasons etc so if you like that sir instant action on steroids mission is individual missions so where you've got individual missions for individual aircraft they come under that these quite commonly are going to be missions that come with the add-on when you buy them so for example these missions are what you would get with buying the f-5e tiger to you've also got a tab obviously for my missions which is where you have any saved missions or anything like that so yeah that's missions so you can have community created missions for example shook them in there or you can have a missions that came up with the ad on their campaign seriously the missions strung together and I can't recall because I haven't really used much in a way of campaigns at the moment but I haven't bought that many campaigns the campaigns have bought of generally being training type campaigns so I've got the a 10 C campaigns for red flag Georgian hammer but I've also got the basic flight training qualification and a couple of other bits and bobs so some of these are bought some of these are not if I go to the age is 37 which is the vegan there's three campaigns here and I haven't bought any campaigns so I don't know if these of sprung up as part of the free lockdown stuff or whether they've just just came with a very with the add-on anyway but got campaigns you've then got multiplayer which for DCs is actually quite a big thing I've got the access to multiplayer there's some reason I think my interwebs has gone down but you've also got logbook encyclopedia training missions which will be listed for each specific aircraft so there we go for the a GS 37 thing you've got that lot a v8 b na you've got loads of them absolutely loads of them and you can see they're all for the caucus reason region and obviously the make sense because if if you download the sim you automatically get the caucus region for free so everybody has that region so what you don't have to do is buy the aircraft and then go now I've got a by Persian Gulf so a lot of them will have that as their default area what I would say is that the when you're buying stuff it will highlight if you need something else so we're in he's a regional or an aircraft or whatever rule it will highlight that you need a another module if you don't already have it which will bring me on to the module manager in a moment so the module manager we've already mentioned it wants but one of the things I do like is that DCs auto updates all of the aircraft's all of your add-ons whether it be DCs themselves or third-party because some third-party manufacturers create aircraft for the sim so for example heat blur is one of them and razz bomb or another their third-party developers so what happens is once they're part of the package if you like that's on the module manager they automatically get downloaded just as if it was something of Eagle dynamics own making which is really really nice I do like the fact that it auto updates vehicles sorry add-ons I should say because it also updates the maps and everything however what we're going to do is continue our look at what's going on with this and yes I can see that my internet my internet is down at the moment so logbook encyclopedia training and you can replay missions if you wanted there's a mission editor which is absolutely crucial we will have a look at that in a bit but that's a really beneficial part of the program or the software and then a campaign builder if you want to make your own campaign you could then basically string a number of missions together to create a campaign and that's really the the barebone basics of the sim so what we're going to do now is we're going to load up a couple of aircraft which are going to be the free ones we're going to discuss those ok so here we are this is the su 25 t I've just selected free flight for what we're going to look at and we're going to jump in and get it flying now this represents a couple of things in terms of the good and the bad for me in terms of dzs world so the good thing is we've got a free aircraft we've got free terrain and we can fly along and jolly well enjoy ourselves and then it doesn't take much to look out the window realized that it looks beautiful on the ground the scenery is great the Lighting's great the clouds are great and you don't need to buy or pay anything extra for the clouds the weather or any of that stuff that you might do with other simulators as I say I'm not going to directly compare with other simulators but it is worth pointing out that everything you see on this screen is free now there's a couple of things I'm going to add to that in terms of what's going on let me just little go at trying to formate on this guy as we come along ok so where are we at with this you can see looking at the ground that the textures are nice the terrain is nice it's got lovely shadowing from the low-lying sunshine it's got a lot of good range in terms of distance there's no stutters and the frame rate I generally get is about 40 s re 90 frames whereas in other sims I often get about 30 with the settings that I have on those sims so I'm not particularly great at formation flying but we'll have a little bit of a go with this chap here likewise you can see that generally I mean I have a this is I don't know what you will see it out when you view on YouTube but I've got this on 4k on my monitor and I'm getting about as I say 90 frames 90 frames a second which is really quite impressive for the level of detail that we've got here nevermind I'm not particularly great at this we just quickly drop down low level in the meantime you can see around the cockpit there's some really good shadows they're crisp they're clear they move around logically with the aircraft as you throw around left/right up/down etc we'll just go down and have a look low-level attending a little bit my frames are not optimized particularly well in terms of the computer the system the game etc which means I tend to get a little bit of stutter when I go low down so looking at the cockpit you can see that the cockpit is relatively well detailed but there's no mouse cursor and that's because this cockpit is not a clickable cockpit over-speeding little bit hence the judder but this is not a clickable cockpit and that in itself is the biggest real turnoff for me in relation to some combat simulation stuff because when you're in a civilian simulator you can kind of get round it because all the civilian simulators at the moment generally have some sort of clickable cockpit in most of their aircraft but if they don't it's not generally a massive issue with the combat simulator you quite often need to have quite a complex set of switch switch work going on and for me I found that when I was playing flanker and lock-on I couldn't get the grips with them as games because I couldn't get to grips with the sheer volume and the numbers of keybinds so let's just pause they're just controls and you can see the number of available key binds now a lot of them won't necessarily be something that you have to keep owned they won't necessarily be something that you have to have sorry they're all key binds but there won't necessarily be something that you have to use frequently so you won't have to necessarily memorize them but obviously in terms of your controls if you've got a hands on throttle and stick or how to set up these any decent stick setup to be fair you can obviously allocate quite a few of them to them but in as it stands at the moment with this there's an awful lot of keybinds and that was the kind of thing that turned me off a sim that didn't have clickable cockpit and so that for me was a major barrier and I do wonder if that's the same with other people you can see it it's quite nice and smooth down at low level a bit of shadows popping in there but it is very nice and it's actually very smooth as well at the minute it's looking good the lighting in particular is just spectacular as you can see it come through the the canopy there it's got like a halo effect I don't really know how best to describe it with a Sun but is it kind of diffracts is it all different yeah as you get this diffraction of the sun's rays it's it's wonderful so yeah it's a bit of a turn-off and the reason that I find it bizarre is because this in effect by being one of the two free aircraft with the sim it's basically the sales pitch to say go out and buy other add-ons I appreciate there's a balance in that they're providing this for free and therefore the question would be well why should you invest salon money in developing a clickable cockpit for something that is free what's going to be the benefit etcetera but for me it's a shame because for DCs if this is what you then download and see you're not really getting a true reflection of the sim you are in terms of whether the mission editor the campaign system the community downloads that you can do you know you're getting a lot of it but as a representative of a modern combat aircraft this isn't particularly great because of that one single factor now maybe that's just me and the challenges I've had in terms of getting into military flight simulation but yes yes whatever power power power it's not the most maneuverable aircraft it's basically the Russian equivalent of the the a-10 it's a bomb carrier a bomb truck however you want to describe it if I just pop outside you can see the aircraft itself exterior wise is very rustic I would describe the graphics all those weapons beautiful you can see it's not the greatest in terms of its 3d modeling or certainly not in its texturing the lighting however is delightful but that's not to do with the aircraft so much as it is to do with a sim but yeah really really rudimentary compared to some of the other aircraft that are in the sim but it is free I suppose that's the way to look at it it's free and therefore do you get what you pay for I guess so as I say for me a little bit of a letdown if you were to look at it as a sales window fur for DCs and it also demonstrates a bar for me or a something that makes it more challenging to get into it's probably a better way of describing it in relation to trying to learn the keybinds as opposed to having a clickable cockpit so without further ado let's look at the other the other aircraft that comes with the sim so here we are this is the tf-51 D we're flying over to blee C and I've got my head tracking on now so you can have a quick impression that's what it's like with these things with track IR in this case now it will support multiple different head tracking options it is not essential for the game it has to be said there's a lot of people who will play it just using you know hat or whatever a button on their joystick to look around but for me if you're going to do combat it doesn't have helped a lot if you can just quickly look around and you can gain your bearings game sight of enemies or look on the ground and see you know whatever done however got on there so for me will mention equipment of peripherals fully in a moment we'll come back to this so this has got a fully clickable cockpit and it makes it different so let me just get it somewhere level it makes some difference because then what you can do is click things and move things around so you don't need millions of keybinds all you've got to do is learn roughly where something is in a cockpit you can zoom in and have a look so for me this is a much more accessible route into DCs is to look at something like this where you have the ability to just click on things and it becomes pertinent because one of the add-ons that you can buy for DCs is flaming cliffs so in effect flaming cliffs was seen as a starter or an intro to DCs for me is not because of the fact that it's less intuitive to get to grips with in terms of controlling the thing what it does do is it tends to offer a simplified set of systems and believe in some instances a simplified flight model so it won't necessarily be a full fidelity flight online it just sent my view again it's a bit closer than I was anticipating there we go so yeah this is the second of the two aircraft you can see it's got very nice cockpit shadows shading etc exactly all the same you can see the controls moving around and the nice animation within the cockpit and you can also see outside got lovely smooth animations there again part of the caucus region so all of this again free with the sim sounding a bit like a Salesman but fundamentally it's a free thing to go and have a look at so you can at least gauge whether it's for you or not as I say don't necessarily take what's in the free bit as represent fully representative of DCs just the same as for example explain you can have a demo version of explain but the stuff that's free and x-plane isn't necessarily while I say that the 737 in explain is very good at playing eleven but not everything that comes as an aircraft with it or indeed terrain is representative of what doesn't the machine is capable the sim is capable of so yeah here we are low-level getting a little bit of stuttering really as I say my systems probably not optimized properly for so the I do get that occasional sound bug where for some reason the sound cuts out not quite sure why I was kind of at low levels and they're mine don't know if that's just a book that I've got but I am running the beta that's important to point out this two versions of DCs both are free there's the stable version so there's 2.5 stable which obviously has pretty much got most of the books squashed and there's also 2.5 open beta this is the open beta and it commonly does have the odd bug in it because obviously this is what they are continually developing before it goes into the stable process or the stable download so this really is the limit of what you get so you get a fully functioning su-25 tea with guns bombs bullets and the abilities go in destroy things and you also get a tf-51 d which is something nice just to play around it but this is more representative of the actual capabilities of the sim shall we say so if I can just get it to balance out a little bit it's very sensitive on order I don't really fly this that much but you can see the graphics in terms of both the sim and the add-ons are really well this isn't an add-on this comes with a sin that was very very good very nice the lighting effects are particularly stunning sounds good oh all good but that's that's the free bin we're not going to talk about the free bit all day because that's not what we're here for it's jump out of that so all very good apart from that one element which was the the accessibility with the key binds now what I'm going to talk about briefly is head tracking and peripherals I'm fortunate I've got hands on throttle and stick is a combination of bits from Thrustmaster the Walker Thrustmaster warthog and a verbal warbird base for the joystick and you know it's very good but it's not cheap and likewise a set of rudder pedals which also weren't cheap but obviously there are much cheaper alternatives and there are you know ways into the sort of throttle hands on throttle and stick which are much cheaper the thrust must I think is the t 1600 or something like that saitec do a number of alternatives and I had the SciTech x45 for a while I think it was it's now been replaced by the 52 but you know it doesn't have to be expensive but I think to do so without hands on throttle and stick is quite a challenge in this in this sim can be done there are people who do with just a very basic joystick but what you do need is some form of rudder control particularly if you're gonna fly the propeller aircraft because the talk that tends to maneuver the aircraft around is your x axis needs some sort of controlling beyond that really head tracking is nice but not essential so you can use a thumb hat on it on a joystick for example to look around and there are quite a lot of people who do that and there's quite a lot of people who still do that or do that and then move on to having some sort of head tracking device and as I say it's compatible with a number of head tracking devices including VR I think track hat track clip whatever that one is and track IR which is what I use I've got VR but I don't if I'm honest I don't really use it that often I know people who swear by it and also know people who just they just say I'll stick with me with my track ir or track hat as per whatever personal want is so flaming cliffs three then let's have a quick discussion about that I go into instant action flaming cliffs flaming cliffs was kind of the bit before DCs so if you like flaming cliffs was the package that you bought flaming cliffs three and you got all of this and caucus region I assumed it was as a package now the difficulty will go into the mig-29 the difficulty was that in those days again for me there was an accessibility issue in terms of the cockpit so here we are nice little mig-29 we can look around with our track I are really nice nice looking thing you can even have a look down here the instruments looks very good now this is pay way but in theory this is the entry point for the jet pay way and flaming cliffs three as I say was a development of lock-on modern air combat the original and it's got as you saw eight ten whatever it is aircraft and you pay for all of those as a single purchase and it's supposed to be an entry into the DCs world in many respects it's simplified systems slightly simplified aircraft less aggressive handling for the aircraft so they're more stable straight more straightforward to fly there generally won't bite use about their fidelity of their flight modeling is to a lower level but fundamentally they're all you know they're all decent to look at they're all decent to fly but it's not they're not the high fidelity highly complex aircraft that some are but and this is the big but nope we'll cockpit so you're back to learning key binds with this thing and indeed you are with quite a few of the other flaming cliffs modules I bet we'll fly me Cliff's aircraft I believe some of them have moved on and some of them are a little bit more advanced and have been redone but I don't really know that much about flaming cliffs because I never really went down that path but this is kind of your next step on in terms of complexity for handling and weapons and systems and radars and all that kind of thing from the base level DCs however it's not necessarily for me the best route to follow and I will explain why so let's just get out of this so if you like you've got the basic free bit you've then got the option and it's by no means a requirement the option to get the flaming cliffs stuff now obviously the benefit is if that you do look at flaming cliffs so if I go back into here flaming cliffs you get an a-10 f-15c you make 28 sorry mig-29 mig-29 mig-29 su-25 su-27 su-33 and i think they might even be is that all the aircraft I think there's more than that but I'm not entirely sure now you'll note that this is the su-25 not the 3t so this is the additional su-25 I don't actually own flying cliffs what I've done is you can buy some of these individually as well so for example I've bought the a-10 a the f-15 see the mig-29 I think I bought the su-27 although I don't really use it but they are simplified modules basically but not all of them have a fully interactive cockpit so the query is then well if you wouldn't go flaming cliffs which I personally wouldn't what do you look at now there's a couple of things here you could look at something where there's really great training sport and you can also look at things where there's a really modest amount of learning for the aircraft is the best way of describing it and what we'll do is we'll have a look at one of those now so for me the one that started to change my mind in terms of how much I would get out of DCs was the fiv and we'll go into the free flight for the FIV now this is a fairly high fidelity model never flown in f5 so I can't tell you if it's accurate is a representation or not but it certainly feels accurate so this is free flight and the first thing you can see is that the cockpit is something that I can interact with directly I can also do key binds in terms of using key binds we don't go near you sunshine because you're just about to crash into me where have you gone okay let's go and try and formate on you well if you can't as I say I'm rubbish at formation please tell me it's not underneath there there is so it's gonna try and form eight anymore we talk so this cockpit obviously hands on throttle and stick and the more that you can use your hands on throttle and stick whatever your joystick of choice is then the better it is or the easier it is I should say but this has you need to learn about how to use the radar but it's a relatively simple radar it's not too difficult to learn but it is quite a challenge to use it hasn't got a hut it's got gun sight instead but what you do need to do as a result is it's not the aircraft that's complex then you start learning some of the skills in terms of using the aircraft by which I mean you've got to learn how to use dumb bombs you've got to learn how to use air brakes to try and get in formation [Music] and not slowed down too much and you know it's all about basic piloting skills and having a canopy frame right in the way of where you want to look when you're for mating whoo whoo Tiger this is not my forte and we'll just avoid a collision rather than end the video prematurely let's chase after him again but what it is does give you the opportunities it's got short-range infrared missiles so you can learn a bit about dogfighting it's got a gun so you can learn a bit about a dog fighting with a gun or ground strafing you've got straightforward bombs in terms of iron bombs dumb bombs as you'd call them so you can learn about bombing Rockets also all the basics but the systems and the aircraft aren't too complicated so once you get it up and running it's a relatively straightforward beast it's not gonna bite you particularly hard but it's also not the most terrifying thing to learn about the only thing I would say with an aircraft like this is on a lot of the multiplayer servers people like to play the most advanced aircraft they have or all the aircraft at the moment and this would get eaten alive by things like f-16 f-18 f-14 because it's relatively short-range fighter hasn't got a particularly powerful radar hasn't got particularly powerful weapons available to it but it is an awfully awfully enjoyable aircraft terribly enjoyable aircraft is probably a better way describing it and in amongst all that you've also got a couple of campaigns which are available for this one and what you do have is the ability to try and form eight on other aircraft like an absolute newb which is what I am as I say I'm really been that heavily introduced yes before now and I still wouldn't describe myself as heavily into it now but I thought I would make a video because I think it's pertinent to Sims that are currently out there on the market but this is a palling formation flight I mean I'm not good at it at the best of times but this is a good example of how not to do it and yeah probably as good as I'm gonna go for today but you can see again really nice fluid aircraft in terms of frame rates the sim itself I find to be better on frame rates than a lot of other sims for the comparable equipment so frames that I'm getting in this generally equate to between 85 and 95 the most aircraft and in other sims I'm generally looking at 45 to 50 the the detail level is not necessarily as good in fact can I see from here options what detail level are we running out we're running it high for most things low for heat blur cause I'm optically excited about heat heat blur there's a lot of things you can adjust in here but one of the things that you can do is you can set this to ultra so this isn't even ultra at the moment tree visibility you've got for a long way blah blah blah but there's an awful lot you can do in terms of the graphics and you can see you can go low medium high VR which is an important one obviously if you want to do PR and I would say that this is quite good sim for VR if that's your bag I've had a go in VR for a couple of the Sims and it I don't know if it's native if you describe it as native but it's very highly see the scratches on the canopy absolutely brilliant I don't know if it's native VR in terms of the the sim I think it possibly is I don't even know what that term would define really to be honest but I know that it does work very well with VR and I've got the oculus rift yes I think it is not entirely sure I think it's the s and it works very well with that so that is for me what a medium level aircraft looks like and if we have a look outside let me just try and trim it out so it's not going to crash we have a look outside you can see that it is absolutely you zoom in the attention to detail of things like the pilot the airframe all bits the equipment are around it markings I don't know many sims we can get that close into an aircraft model an exterior modeling see that level of quality to the exterior modeling it's beautiful absolutely wonderful I think an excellent job was done with this beastie and indeed most of the other payware beasties are very similar those that I've bought and paid for wonderful so that for me is a medium aircraft not overly complex in terms of the systems and enough to learn but not enough to overwhelm I think is the best way of describing it there's two more tiers which I'm going to describe now the first one is let's go into my current favorite which is the av-8b let's see what we've got free flight this for me is the the opposite end to where we started this is a high fidelity model there are different when the developers develop an aircraft in all four DCs they can have different levels of modeling so there's like simple all the way to the high level or the the accurate levels of modeling so some of the flaming cliffs stuff for example is fairly is simplified flight model and then others are not and this is obviously a fairly advanced flight model I think it's right at the top although I beg to be corrected so this kind of thing has an awful lot more in terms of the systems and you can see we start to get tallies we start to get lots of switches now this is one of the more straightforward simplified sorry one of the more straightforward complex aircraft is probably the best way to describe it so what I just do pop it onto auto pilot I get it to altitude Holt so we can have a look around without dying so as you can see as you look around the actual cockpit graphics quality is next-level it really is and the shadows that you get and the lighting that you get they're all top quality you know even just off parts of the cockpit you get the lighting and these flood lights turn on you can move them around it absolutely brilliant but when you get into the heart of these things the heart of these things are things like the Telly's there's one other side here up front control panel hands on throttle and sticks you need some buttons allocate is that you don't have to take your hands off the the throttle and stick when you're trying to do mavericks drop bombs whatever it may be you need to learn about armaments panels and this is the second for me thing that sometimes is a perceived barrier when you have an aircraft like this you need to learn unlike an airliner where you can learn the systems and you can learn about airways flying in you can learn about SIDS and stars and all that kind of stuff there's no sitting stars here really in dcs what you do have to do is you have to learn the performance of your aircraft how to fly your aircraft then you have to learn how to operate the aircraft then once you learn how to operate the aircraft you then need to learn how to fight the aircraft and in order to do so you need to learn about different sorts of surface-to-air missiles Sam's you need to learn about all of the things that go with that so enemy aircraft radar signatures when they come up on the early warning system we'll have a look at that in a moment and you need to learn an awful lot in terms of being able to use a modern jet and that could seem overwhelming what I would say most of the aircraft come with really really good documentation there's some of the flights in aircraft in civil simulators where you buy the thing you get absolutely appalling documentation all the modules I bought have had excellent documentation so you know in that respects there's an awful lot material for you there to start with then on top of that there so many YouTube videos are so many content creators who will run through basic tutorials for these things that really it's actually not as challenging to learn as you would have thought I'm still in the process of learning this as I say I'm a bit of a noob about the whole TCS thing even though I've opened all of the iterations before all you know I've owned pretty much all of them I've just never engaged with it because of those perceived barriers but I'm enjoying it at the moment so we'll see how we get on with it but this is obviously a new players perspective now the key thing here what I'll do is flip over to the a-10 and show you that the key thing here is to I would say have a stepped approach to this all right so let's close that instant action where's the a-10 gone take off because I'm not going to fly around in this because I want to demonstrate a couple bits the key thing here is to have a stepped approach to have a look at what your aims and objectives are to have a look at the modules that may or may not comply with those and have a look overall at what you want to do so for example there's no point buying the f-15 see if you don't like air-to-air combat because that's the only thing that aircraft does it's very easy to go out and buy that aircraft and then go oh I can't drop bombs let's just quit fly now I've loaded this aircraft it's had a recent update to the cockpit which means it looks absolutely stunning in fly point wrap it's beautiful it really is beautiful rates yeah just wonderful it's a stunning stunning thing and actually what we'll do is we'll just pop outside and have a look at the outside of this thing because the detail on it is astonishing you know look at the back of the missiles and the bombs and in fact we try and get a better angle have a look at the undercarriage have a look at how that's pieced together look at the missiles the weapons the details the the fact that when you get really close into the aircraft it doesn't lose any clarity at all and you can see the different kinds of materials so where the gun is at the front you can see it's got that metal shine to it other areas are much duller the way the lighting plays off it it's an absolutely glorious glorious add-on but herein lies the challenge working between the two TVs the HUD and then all the potential switch refor the weapons and the variety of weapons and up here you got the up front control panel this is quite a monster to try and learn on and the problem I had was this is the first module I had the reason I had it was because in the very early days of DCs world DCs world was kind of the world that when you bought the aircraft you kind of got DCs world with it you didn't go and download DCs world on its own I kind of bought the 8nc and you've got DCs that the environment the caucus region with it and the a-10 see in the KA 50 the first and second versions of it for example they were all part and parcel of it but this for me was the first aircraft I bought and I bought it out of love of the real aircraft only to find out but it is the most complex aircraft that you could have in DCs in my opinion and therefore the learning curve isn't just steep it's almost vertical if you're trying to learn this thing and even with tutorials and videos and and all sorts of stuff I find that I I try I start to get a foothold into this and then something in life distracts me by the time I get back to it in a couple of weeks time I've forgotten everything that I've got to or most of what I've got to so I've learned to start this thing time and time again I've learnt to do gun runs rockets GPUs but now I can't do gun runs rockets and GPUs and to be fair I'll to struggle to start it whereas the ABAP is for much more accessible and this is one of the things is that it's about understanding not just what you want to do but also a little bit about the module a bit of research about the module because otherwise what happens is these modules are expensive I say expensive Edie have frequent sales where they have 50% off you know 30 40 50 % off some of their their modules so it's not expensive outright but if you were to buy them at full price these things are expensive and you're getting value for money because you're getting an exceptional product but it depends how much time you want to commit to this and I think that's one of the key takeaways is that dcs is all about committing time and effort to it because you will in order to get the most out of it you have to learn a lot about it as I say Sam's missiles electric countermeasures identification Friend or Foe all of these kind of things are part and parcel of combat aircraft and we're not even into the multiplayer environment which I will mention now the multiplayer environment basically allows two themes there are permanent set up servers that you can basically go on as long as you have permission to go on them and access you can go on and you can just play but also you have the ability to set up your own servers so they might not you know they're not going to be permanent service if you turn your computer off then that server turns off but obviously you can set up your own player server for you and your friends to play on or just to play a mission on for example if you and just one other colleague or anyone actually you allow access that so you can play on you can do air-to-air combat or you can do things where you set the rules and strictly you know player versus environment whatever it might be but the multiplayer is quite a big thing in DCs much more so that I think then than other programs so for example that sim and IV AO greater than iron multiplayer actually in reality what you're doing is driving something from A to B and interacting with a human ATC which is great being not really doing the same as you would do in a combat sim where you would be working as a team or a pair or a team to achieve an objective against some adversary in fact it doesn't actually have to be that because Walters I'll cut out and point out another couple of bits it's not exclusively military aircraft so let's just go for that let's go free flight tandem I don't know forgot my control setup for that I'll point that out you actually have to set up the controls for each individual aircraft which sounds laborious but actually it's not as laborious as you would think but what it does mean is that because different aircraft have different missiles weapons cockpits configurations there's not necessarily one size fits all for for the aircraft so dependent on the aircraft it may be that you have the same configuration in terms of houses you had before it may be that you have a different one but this isn't a combat aircraft this is obviously a civilian biplane aerobatic aircraft I've never flown in in real life of flown quite a few aircraft but I've never flown a biplane I'd love to do so it'd be fantastic that sort of open cockpit feeling would be amazing but yeah it's it's subtly different to two civilian aircraft in something like fsx p3d explained in that there's not very many civilian aircraft and although you can do civilian flying so it has got vor s for example available so you can go and do some navigation flying it hasn't got airway now in terms of flight management systems complex airliners all that kind of thing it's just not that kind of sim really so it's the same in almost every program now not not just flight simulation but also gaming as a whole there is a propensity for designers or developers to release their product into the marketplace in a beta stage now I haven't got a problem with that as long as when I buy it it says it's in beta stage I do have an issue when products are released incomplete and it's only after you buy it that you find out that issue so I will say that on their on their downloads etc for IDI what they will do is they'll put it as if you're going to buy it and it's not completely I'll put it as early access which is great the f-14 for example came out virtually complete didn't have didn't have many things missing from that but the f16 that's going through at the moment it's early access and there's quite a bit of stuff that's missing from it at the moment so it has limited standoff capacity in terms of air-to-ground at the moment it does have things like LG B's but it's one of those things where as long as you're informed and you can make that decision it's great when you're not informed you buy something you find it's half complete as has frequently happened with both this sim and others so I'm not going to mention aircraft Sims or anything in specific but what I will say is it's always worth being aware that some games including this one will have add-ons that you can buy that are still in a sort of beta phase where they're still adding bits or developing bits so the f-18 came out it had limited abilities but I think it's now almost complete if not actually complete whereas the the f-16 that's just out came out with very limited capacity it didn't even have a damage model that was working at the time so if you took it in air to air it couldn't die you chutes many missiles you want it and it wouldn't die so it didn't have damage modelling which is it's one of those things where if it's combat sim is it's kind of an essential for me but nonetheless it depends on the developer depends on all sorts of things that are going on some are released to market complete some are released to market in a still under development stage or an early access stage however you want to call it that's exactly the same as any other sin these days frustrating as it is I can understand the developers thinking behind it because actually when you've got a small team of developers and beta testers in an aircraft that as complex as some of these it's very difficult to find all the bugs to squash so in some ways it's kind of of benefit to both the purchaser and the developer for that to happen because you can guarantee that purchasable purchasers will find bugs and they will have very little feedback when they're not happy particularly if they're paying full price now as I say these modules summer cheaper than others so some of them are really quite respectable so things like the yak-52 not particularly expensive don't know the price off the top of my head christen eagle not particularly expensive but things like the f-14 the f-16 and the f-18 which other the high fidelity high performing elements absolutely absolutely stunning what we'll do is we'll just have a quick look at in fact we have a look at the Harriet but we'll have a look at the beauty that is the f-14 and I'm not gonna have it airborne for the minute but we'll just have a quick look at the aesthetics and the graphics because this is one of the the modules that's fairly fairly expensive I would say I mean it's not it's not that expensive there are far more expensive aircraft and atoms in other sims I think this is reasonable I think it's something in the region of 70 or 80 pounds but don't quote me on that doesn't look anything amazing at the minute you can have the mirrors set up so that they reflect things I just have them turned off because I'm not that good a fighter pilot to to need to see in the mirrors and anyway with head tracking I'm probably better off looking over my shoulder but this thing is an absolute peach it's beautiful to look at in terms of the lighting the quality the instrumentation everything is just there that the detail in the cockpit is second-to-none absolutely amazing and this this really is a thing of beauty and for me it's this kind of thing where you know it it really starts to show that you're getting a very high level of value for money for this I'm even this stick is just beautiful absolutely wonderful and you know one of the other things to bear in mind is that these things aren't always as economically laid out as modern aircraft as well so can't find it ADF at the moment so it's spinning around having a bit of look and a hunt but the radios and the way the light comes off them so you can barely see the one because the lighting and the reflections the canopy is absolutely battered to hell it's all good good stuff very nice and if you pop outside just turn the head-tracking off for a moment the lighting and the detail are second to none and it's also beast to fly this thing accelerates quickly for its science Manor I remember reading an article about somebody where they were explaining what it's like to try and land 29 tons of aircraft of back aboard an aircraft carrier and how truly horrifying it is but as an example just have a look at that undercarriage leg it is an absolute joy to behold and absolute joy to Valdez it's amazing it's just stunning the undercarriage the wheels the Oh Leo's everything is just amazing and also as of note this is a carrier aircraft look at the strength of that undercarriage that is built to be busted into the deck of a carrier amazing I mean if you look inside the the spoilers you can see there all the actuators in the air waiting arms beautiful really really nicely modelled really nicely made flies absolutely wonderfully powerful potent as good as you ever want so actually what we will do is we'll just have a quick blast while we're here so this is the kind of thing where there's another benefit with DCs it does happen in other sims I will say this outright the sims do have shared cockpit but this is the this is a military shared cockpit where the two crew can workers as a crew in tandem so you've got a real radar intercept top to operator and you've also got let me just take that off you got radar intercept officer in the back who can operate the radar and all the weaponry and lots of the navigation stuff but it's also got artificial intelligence the voice that was just there was gesture who's the artificial intelligence Rio so they've actually done an amazing job in that if I remember which button I've got it set up as you can do things like this and say go red are silent and you can give him orders and commands for what to do and I think yeah you can see them moving about in the back there but this aircraft is an absolute beast but this is sort of mid to late Cold War and obviously you can see it's all steam gauge there's no telly in here but with help of gestures of Rio this thing can achieve a lot of things but look at that terms of the detail how often do you see that level of detail in an aircraft seat stunning that's a testament to heat blur as much as it is to to the sim I'm just gonna pull over the top now before we lose too much air speed install out and you know we've been talking for what 25 30 seconds and we're currently at you know handling your there is it had a bit of a wag of its nose what are we at 29,000 anyway just get out of that because demonstrate the final people that so yeah the only thing I would add within that is the actual number of add-ons available are quite limited so what gonna do is just pop in to the mission editor now this is one of the I would say that the gems of this this DCs element is that the mission editor allows you to upload other people's missions fly them and also modify them you can create your own missions and in this case I've got a mission I created and this is a this is a bit of a hodgepodge this is training mission really but basically what I've done is I've got the Persian Gulf and I have spaced around it it looks very busy when you look at it but it only took a couple of hours to build initially and then about three hours total so two hours to initially flesh it out and then another hour to get to the point of where I wanted it to be and it's relatively easy the the campaign or the mission editor I should I haven't used the campaign editor but the mission editor certainly is is a very good setup and it's relatively easy to use intuitively so this looks really busy but here's what's happened all of these blue bases are bases that when you start the map has no color to the bases so it doesn't they're all gray I'll see if there's any great ones left I can't see but no I don't think so but they're all gray and then what you can do is you can declare that something as a red base or a blue base and there from then on you can allocate assets you can test them you can do things so what I'm going to just quickly fire off in a moment is this mission here which is an example of what you can do now all of these air bases what I've done is I've set aircraft at each Air Base with different target so for example there's a flogger raid coming in here so this has got an f-16 that comes out from Lu airbase and seeks to do an area search and try and intercept that here is an air-to-air so simply just got an air target that spawns in in the air you start in the base which is over here at Abu Dhabi International Airport you fly out you intercept it and you have a bit of a dogfight got the same over here but what has happened is I've got mig-19 here so it's a relatively easy bandit to fight because it's guns only early cold war Korean War over here we've got a pair of mig-21s which are sort of vietnam area early cold war again in fact it went on to mid Cold War and I think there may even become countries still operating the mig-21 a very old stalwart of Eastern Bloc aviation but there's a couple of f-16s and a couple of f-18s available here to go out and target them and play with them and then right at the top I think it is I've put a mig-29 to ship to have some sport with so basically what will happen is if you go up here you'll have a an absolute humdinger and the circles are where I've set surface-to-air missiles so red is the actual threat zone of that surface-to-air missile yellow is the detection zone so you'd expect to be picked up and you'd expect to get your II W signals to say well actually being tracked by this Sam so this is an SI 6 and this is one of the things that I think becomes a challenge and the mission editor is great for doing this because in effect what you do is you go actually I want to learn how to fight against Sam's corresponding correspondingly what you can do then is go well let's have a look through some of the the stuff that's out there there is vast amount of information to help you with this this software in terms of this game and so I found well an SI six is radar guarded fairly short range and it has a radar unit and then allied to a radar unit it'll have a number of launches and I thought well a couple of things here I want to learn how to how to combat radars and I want to learn how to take out radars and also their launches so this is set up with a navy 8 B that takes off from here flies very short route up to the up to the north and in doing so you have to dodge the Sam's and try and kill the the Sam so I'm just going to launch that and we'll take it from there so it's just quickly fire up and what I'll do is I'll do kind of a summary as as we look around things head Tracking's gone with it let me see if I can fix that there we go head tracking back right and just Center that and off we go again so although it looks complex this isn't a particularly complex want module to learn the only thing I haven't really got to grips with our laser-guided bombs and the tpod to designate those bombs targets and hovering which is ironic given the fact it's a a Harrier and that's his main thing I can do the short takeoff and landing so that's all good let me just see we're gonna go to here I'm gonna go to stores and gonna turn on IR cooling and what we've got here is a couple of sidearms which are basically the anti radiation equivalent of Sidewinders and the IR mouth so we'll select that so it goes to standby and then over a period of time what will happen is it will eventually turn to ready and over here all we're gonna do over here is go to menu set a P W and that's what we're going to be looking for and I'm still not quite okay with the the Expendables in terms of chaff etcetera but and we see I think up gives you chaff and flares whereas if you go down it just gives you flares and the ECM I don't know a great deal about this at the moment but there we go still still learning but the aim of this is going to be to dodge the Sam's and practice dodging the Sam's and to try and get in close enough to kill with the sidearm and then maybe finish off the launches with a couple of IR Mavericks so without further ado we will have a look down here I do have some hotel stuff set up so don't want crews yet with regards to that I don't got this set up so knows well steering on it's got two settings for the nosewheel high gain and low gain I've just put it high gain so moving the rudder pedals activates nose wheel steering if I press and hold the button I get high gain nose wheel steering and I'll just demonstrate that lets go forwards so normal nose wheel steering has that rate of turn F activate high gain as you can imagine on a carrier you want to be able to turn really tight so that allows you to do that but I actually put it into the high game mode so that I don't have to hold the button to to use the nose wheel steering so as we're on our way out what we'll do is we'll excuse me adjusting myself mm-hmm as we're on the way out we'll have a quick quick discussion about where we're at in terms of DCs the first point I would make is it's absolutely free to try figure it out see what you think and there's loads of stuff out there about the su-25 t there's instructions videos all sorts you name it it's there the second thing I would suggest is it's always worth having a look on forums doesn't matter what's in any sim and you will quickly pick up on the the gripes the difficulties the problems that people have what I would say is that most forums are full of people who seek advice they're not always full of people who just literally have a you know you don't go into a format forum and find sections where they're just lavishing praise on companies people tend to go on forums either to seek advice or to give advice or to express an opinion which isn't a bad thing that's too it's just the way it is so in terms of that likewise this isn't really a review because I don't think I've had enough exposure experience of DCs to to be able to call it a review I'm relatively new to actually using the sim although I've had it in its various iterations for many many years this is the first point where I could say safely that I'm actually starting to put the effort in and get something out of it which is very remiss but then I think you know that's that's the way the world a lot of people are in exactly the same situation and when you're time poor then which is a an awfully awfully management speak way of saying things but when you're time poor I don't particularly like management a lot of the time but when you're time poor sometimes the thing that you put to one side the most is are things like learning this because it can be complex and that's one of the key things it depends on which aircraft it is that you're trying to learn and that's why I say it's all about a bit of research having a look at things and not just following your heart following your heart is great but it has to be something that's achievable beneficial that you're going to get something out of so here we go and we're away gear up slowly transition didn't need water for that takeoff because quite a long opportunity to run at it as we accelerate forward flight and the wing takes over will accelerate ignoring the low altitude warning but now that we're up flaps can stay there we put them on stall but I didn't but we still survived we survived okay so at this point we need to consider navigation ah they're ready so what we'll do in that case select sidearms and we've got the master switch on navigation we can go boom eh SD navigate that little marker there is where we're heading - that's nav one nav Steve won't one don't steer point one we're gonna go to two which is direct to the target and head-up displays don't know why it's taking so long to get into airliners but there are an absolute godsend for situational awareness and figuring out what's going on so as I say it's a sim that I think benefits most from researching what you want out of it what you expect from it and what you'd get from each tier so as I say in effect it starts with the first tier which is the free stuff the next tier up in terms of complexity and not being too expensive is flaming cliffs I wouldn't necessarily recommend that because as I say some of the aircraft are not as fleshed out as we have here I'm just going to get it onto the right heading and then I can set it all up for what I want to be doing so flaming cliffs for me isn't necessarily the way to go I think the way I went about it in terms of just getting the 8nc first was a poor decision on my part for some what will be fine for others it will be like me it would just be a bit of a challenge that we've maybe gone a step too far in our aspirations I still aspire to be able to operate the 8nc with some degree of competence I won't claim to be competent with this thing certainly not at the moment there's a very continual learning curve of stuff available and I think I would actually highlight that that's potentially one of the benefits over the civilian bias simulators in that you can get to a point with those where you stop learning but you can continue challenging what do we mean by that but once you know how to operate the aircraft you pretty knit pretty much know how to operate the aircraft some of them have the capacity to go beyond that in terms of say for example the p.3d majestic q400 excellent piece of kit because you can also practice what would happen with certain bits of kit failing pulling certain circuit breakers and so on and so forth so actually that's a very good training tool but not only that in addition to being a good training tool it's just a really well polished product and well worth the money it's actually a bargain for what you get without that piece of software I think it's astounding one of my all-time favorites in terms of civilian simulation but in effect you know the challenges then become instead of learning the air crafting are more about flying it professionally getting into certain airports you know for sofas civilian operations there's some exceptional Sims out there but what I would say is that military simulations sometimes have a perceived barrier to them be it the key binding the complexity the sheer amount of stuff you need to learn and that is one of the areas where I think it's for me it's been quite a challenge we don't need this anymore I'm gonna get rid of that I'm gonna go to stores it's gonna go to air-to-ground the sidearm is selected and that irritating noise is the seek head telling you it's active and it's looking for radar emissions so I sound like I know what I'm doing but I don't actually to be fair doesn't need to make them live good to go right si6 come up just ahead of us you can see it there you can also see it down here flashing to show it is looking at us I am not by any stretch of the imagination and expert I've only really dealt with si sixes and si8 at the moment which are both short-range radar tracking but you know it's it's a learning curve and I think that's a key takeaway message from here is that in addition to having a look at what you want managing your expectations and looking for the the add-ons or the areas that might benefit you most it's also about what you want to get for it what get from it what you want to achieve what your aspirations are when the tone changes we know that he's got us and these pictures up and he's potentially launching he's looking at us at the moment well any minute now he's gonna do something are still turning up with him oh there we go is launched you can see the things flashing and if i zoom in with those superhuman telescopic eyes you can see the launchers come up so I'm just going to turn 90 degrees on to him and I'll put some countermeasures out it's gone quiet because my electronic warfare detectors can't see underneath so they've followed me put some more countermeasures out we'll reverse the turn and hopefully they will have not got the energy to follow me let's make sure to keep speed up otherwise all my power up I have a rollback to the left yeah they've both exploded because they lost me another one coming out isn't we I'm gonna go a different way here pull hard down here see what's happening oh he's following or if I can't control the aircraft which we can't at the moment I've lost it he's gonna hit his I think we didn't defeat it there's another one there so what I'm going to do is go down should be okay with this really using our energy to try and dodge these things it's not by any stretch of the imagination how to how to do it but we're still alive and hopefully when I get around I'll be close enough for our sidearms to work there we go so our arms away I'm not going to close anymore and him otherwise my own response opportunity my time available to respond to any missiles he throws out as a is quite limited but we've got a very low energy with our speed only at three three hundred and thirty-odd not I'm trying to power up and get some altitude so I can respond to anything he does and yes I've got the noob labels on where it has the this is a agm-65 or whatever so we avoided that more by luck than judgment demonstrates my point exactly lots to learn losses develop that you also get certain our element of pucker factor in terms of adrenaline when you you know that you've got a bit of a fight on your hands he's still there so that missile isn't here help messaging the botton right he's destroyed so at the moment now all that's left to do is to mop up what's left with the Mavericks the two launches so and select the Mavericks and over here we're going to the duel mode track app as I say sound like I know what I'm all about but I don't really turn around onto the target I'll try and get it try and get a target for at least one maverick and that having the ho Tess makes a big difference but actually so I do that do that do that hopefully we can pick a target there's one there we go there's a maverick away because it's dual-mode tracker on the nose I'm not necessarily gonna be able to see the missile in terms of through the TV when it hits we can look out the window boom he's dead I'm not gonna go after the other one I'm gonna basically call it quits they're so long the short of it summary we started with the summary in terms of yeah the first step in terms of dcs is to figure out a whether you want to fly combat sim and if so do you want it to be dcs because there are others available there's world war ii stuff available in dcs it's not just modern but if it's world war ii it's worth looking at DCs il-2 and you know maybe what's available in that realm if it's modern there's only really DCs and falcon BMS i'm aware of for modern air combat sims so really it's down to having a look at the two falcon BMS is the underlying engine is about 20 years old but the community that have kept it going have done a marvelous job so certainly well worth having a look at but in terms of DCs and specifically DCs as i say take advantage of the fact that the base element of it is free and then if you decide to go further make sure you do your research make sure your expectations are matched with the module the aircraft or the terrain that you're buying it's often something that's worth being aware of it is the limitations so whether something is in beta or whether something is a combat aircraft in the first place likewise it doesn't necessarily have to be combat aircraft that you buy to fly in the sim but I think given the name is digital combat simulator I think it's a given that the civilian aircraft which funny old thing are generally a bit cheaper they're nice but they're they're not really what the sim is aimed at likewise crossing continents is not what the Sims aimed at so you know I hope that helps you guys as I say it's not really a review because I don't feel got enough experience in it or combat Sims modern combat Sims or current combat Sims I should say to be able to offer a review on it but what I thought I'd do is use the fact that I'm relatively new to actually using DCs to kind of explain my feelings where I'm at with it and the possibilities for anyone who wants to look down this pathway as I say the there are limited number of modules and aircraft limited amount of terrain what's there is generally very very well done as I hope have demonstrated with the f-14 the Harrier and whatnot and obviously also be aware of the difference between a fully fledged product and one that's undergoing beta or early access is the phrase used here so early access there are more aircraft being developed I don't know off the top of my head what they are but there's a as you can imagine there's a very long request list coming in from DCs fans for developers to have a look at this aircraft that aircraft whatever aircraft but yeah I mean certainly if they bring a phantom f-4 I would be ecstatic I'd be over the moon anyway I hope the videos have used to you guys hope you enjoyed it if you did please feel free to click like share or even subscribe to the channel and I shall hopefully speak to you soon take care

Channel: flightsim481

Views: 15,414

Rating: 4.8620691 out of 5

Keywords: fsx, flight, sim, simulator, simulation, tutorial, fly, review, first, impression, p3d, prepar3d, vs, system, systems, setup, how, to, pilot, XP11, X-Plane, guide, flightsim481, dynamics, controls, warthog, thrustmaster, mfg, rudder, vr, virtual, reality, effect, dcs, digital, combat, belsimtek, heatblur, av-8b, harrier, f-14, tomcat, free, flaming, cliffs, razbam, razzbam, f-5e, f-5, opinion

Id: bm3sGfcRnpE

Length: 80min 47sec (4847 seconds)

Published: Fri May 15 2020