DCS: Liberation interest

[Hammer]

i am going to investigate and see what I can find. if anyone else has time please do the same.

for us this is a big blocker as we just do not have the time for cold starts, and personally i do not want to be bothered with it as i do not want to simulate that part of a flight. i know some people really like all those aspects, and if i had more time available i might as well - but i just don't have that time available.

[Hammer]

I contacted the Liberation team on discord and was told warm starts should work (despite the warning in the options checkbox) except for OCS flights (not sure what that is yet). so we can perhaps give this a try.

[Hammer]

well i contacted the devs on discord and they say we can happily do warm starts instead of cold. the only thing it affects is OCA missions which are missions where you can strike enemy aircraft on the ground before the pilot enters - i.e. while they are sitting on the tarmac or being prepped by the crew chiefs. If we do warm starts there will be none of those targets as they planes spawn in at the appropriate time for their mission. so i will also need to ensure we (I) do not select OCA mission types for any aircraft on either side.

OCA= Offensive Counter Air.

[Grifter]

How are hot starts not an option?! Total BS. There has to be a fix for it. I'll look around once I get done with work this week.

[Hammer]

umm, maybe read what i wrote again. they are an option. maybe it is a terminology thing. liberation warm = dcs hot. i hope ins and everything is aligned with this warm start.

[Hammer]

I am going to generate a small campaign in Syria for us to try on Monday if we do not play ARMA. some things to note:

-not all flights will be scheduled to take off at the same time, so depending upon what flight you select you might have to wait to get into the cockpit. In the test I did some took off right away (BARCAP) and the rest seemed to be within 5-10 minutes of mission start.
-i would like to know what aircraft people want to fly so i can ensure they are set up in the campaign and have pilot slots. i think we need:

F/A-18C
F-14B
F-16C blk52
AV-8B
JF-17
Mirage 2000C
SU-25T
A-10C II
F-15C

Note that of a player does not take an aircraft then that plane will not fly during the mission and that may effect our outcome. So to mitigate that issue a bit I will have player slots not be lead for a flight unless player slots are the entire flight.

[Jedi Master]

What about helos? Ka-50, Mi-24, etc for those in the mood?

I think that list of planes is sufficient to cover AA and AG otherwise.

[Hammer]

yes, i can add them i believe.

[PanzerMeyer]

I'll be flying a KA-50. :-)

[PanzerMeyer]

Thanks again for all the mission stuff you do Hammer.

[gravyy]

I am going to generate a small campaign in Syria for us to try on Monday if we do not play ARMA. some things to note:

-not all flights will be scheduled to take off at the same time, so depending upon what flight you select you might have to wait to get into the cockpit. In the test I did some took off right away (BARCAP) and the rest seemed to be within 5-10 minutes of mission start.
-i would like to know what aircraft people want to fly so i can ensure they are set up in the campaign and have pilot slots. i think we need:

F/A-18C
F-14B
F-16C blk52
AV-8B
JF-17
Mirage 2000C
SU-25T
A-10C II
F-15C

Note that of a player does not take an aircraft then that plane will not fly during the mission and that may effect our outcome. So to mitigate that issue a bit I will have player slots not be lead for a flight unless player slots are the entire flight.

F/A-18C or A-10 C II for me. I dont think im up to snuff in the tomcat yet

[Grifter]

umm, maybe read what i wrote again. they are an option. maybe it is a terminology thing. liberation warm = dcs hot. i hope ins and everything is aligned with this warm start.

My bad. I must’ve misread what you wrote as I was grading papers at the time and was probably not altogether with it.

[PanzerMeyer]

I think grifter seriously needs one of those Calgon bubble baths to take him away from it all! ;-)

[Hammer]

so we tried this mission last night.

pros: a lot of great activity both on the ground and in the air, friendly flights performing their missions while we do ours, plemty of flights to choose from

cons: sometimes need to wait to get into the cockpit, all flights are scheduled based upon ToT (time on target) so may not be available for immedate takeoff (I tried balancing this some when working on the "turn" in the campaogn), some odd behaviors (Gator had 4 planes that wre already rolling, some in odd directions, when trying to occupy a plane), i had some serious lag around the Ramat David buildings (used Syria map), difficult to be in flights together as most were generated as flights of 2 (I left the flight lead as AI so if the other not occupied by a human would get some effort towards the campaign goals).

some of these could possibly be mitigated by flying a PG campaign. but the fact is some flight may not be available immediately upon mission start. also, if we want to do well in the campaign itself, we need a more concerted effort to use teamwork and accomplish the mission assigned to the flight we are in.

other opinions of those that participated last night would be welcome.

[gravyy]

Pros: Lots of fun, much different than what we usually see in MP at a target. Has potential once we can get some of the kinks ironed out. I loved looking down and seeing blue ground forces and red ground forces, it felt like it brought more life to the experience.

Cons:

My A-10 wingman did not depart with me, he was about 15 minutes late leaving. I think this probably has to do with the TOT value... however if we are in the same flight he should roll off with me. It took about 15 minutes for me to go from the airport to the ingress waypoint. Probably need to fly all waypoints in order. had a navigation/departure waypoint I bypassed because it was quicker to get to the ingress waypoint as the crow flies.

You want to make sure you check your loadout before leaving. The loadout that was on the plane at spawn is not what I normally would ever think about flying. I changed it up the second time around. I did notice my saved loadout I use when flying by myself came over in the MP server. Was easy to select my normal CAS loadout.

The Cloud Layer was an issue it seemed like, I think I heard bones say he almost plowed into a mountain coming under the cloud layer. Perhaps we can raise the cloud layer up a tad in mission editor prior to starting the turn.

The CAS waypoint for me still had an altitude of 1000' AGL (or higher)so I had to slew my TGP down to try to look for things. Normally that waypoint should have been at 0 AGL. By the time I found and marked a few targets the SA6 took me out. Next time through Im going to make an additional waypoint in my TAD on the ground level, will make looking for targets a bit easier.

Ingress and Egress waypoints should be moved out a few more miles. Close enough where we can locate targets but not close enough where we are in the SAM reach. At the ingress waypoint I setup a right hand orbit and was above the cloud layer. Had to descend down under and re-establish the orbit

I ran into an issue during departure of the AI F-4's taxing across the runway, normally they would have been told to hold short of the runway because of the departing aircraft. I understand the lack of an AI ATC would cause that.. AI ATC is still in development by ED

--

Overall, enjoyable experience. The dynamic flights are cool, watching the flight of F15s leave ahead of me from Ramat David. I would also recommend everyone check the ATIS info prior to depart, the frequency should be on the kneeboard. The Active at Ramat David required a taxi down the runway and a turn around for takeoff. At least that is what the AI was doing.


For the next time through, I would agree with the PG map, or even the Caucasus again because its not as hard on FPS.

[Hammer]

weather can be a factor in any mission. Bones DID run into a mountain.

The clouds, which we have not yet really utilized, did look really good.

my goal is to avoid opening this in the mission editor every mission. that would be quite painful to do so.

i do not know if i should perhaps just create separate flights/packages for us and leave all the ai flights? that would be another option. or set an entire flight to all players. maybe add flights is the thing to do if we decide to continue with this.

[gravyy]

Liberation updated to 4.0, bunch of fixes but nothing major

..fyi

https://github.com/dcs-liberation/dcs_l ... n/releases

[Hammer]

that will probably not fix the issues that affect our group although some of the odd behavior we noticed might be corrected. i wonder which campaigns are updated. there is an issue there as well. we fly dcs 2.7 which requires liberation 3.0+, but not all campaigns are updated to the latest liberation version (i.e. no nevada campaigns last time).

i wonder why they went to 4.0 so quickly.

[Hammer]

I took a look at 4.0, and they did make a couple of improvements.

added some more campaigns to be compatible with 4.0. notably a couple more Syria and PG campaigns as well as NTTR.

they modified their modern bluefor factions and it now includes all the aircraft our group flies, including jf-17 and ka-50. so i do not need to create a custom faction.

there seems to be a new checkbox (do not recall seeing it before) that has all player aircraft spawn immediately instead of waiting for mission schedule. this should make things work better for us instead of having to wait to ge into the cockpit.

i suggest we try this Monday night, I set up one of the small NTTR campaigns, just need to do a little tweaking to add the player aircraft.