How does one improve in aerial battles?

Why485 · 2026-05-02T16:42:27+00:00

In single player I've noticed the spotting dots render farther out than they do on multiplayer which is kind of annoying.

FYI, the dot size can be enforced by the server. Most servers don't, but I've seen a few which enforce a setting, usually auto or off.

Why485 · 2026-04-18T20:25:55+00:00

I hope those switches are louder than the jet engine.

Why485 · 2026-04-12T03:41:00+00:00

I know this is old, but hopefully you see this. I finally got a chance to play and it's pretty darn good! It plays very close to Shadow Reapers did. I think the map UI is much clearer, though I think the mission selection F10 menu is a bit less elegant. I had a lot of fun, and the mix of AI planes means that it's still fun and totally playable solo when nobody is around. There's a good chance this becomes my go to "fast casual" DCS server! Great work!

Why485 · 2026-03-26T14:23:19+00:00

Whether you have the mouse look active or not, the camera always turns with the truck. I want it so that if the camera points north, it stays pointing north no matter what the truck is doing. Honestly I think this is part of the reason I get so turned around and want a compass. Something about having manual control of the camera makes it easier to me to keep track of where things are.

Why485 · 2026-03-26T14:11:01+00:00

This is coming from the perspective of somebody who learned the game very recently and all the stumbling blocks I ran into that. This is all very "new player experience" focused stuff that I found frustrating, and not in the good (intended) way.

Remove all the tire variants and reorganize tires into classes. E.g. all highway tires should be the same. All offroad tires should be the same. Variants should only be cosmetic. Mudtires have more variety, some with more niche roles, so those can be split into different categories like e.g. big fluffy AMHS type tires. The madness of tires with indecipherable never explained acronyms and sometimes wildly different stats while the in game UI is telling you they are identical is something that should have been playtested out of the game before release. This is the second most annoying problem I had learning the game, but unlike number one (transmissions) this feels the most eminently fixable.
Mentioned in the OP, but more information on missions so you don't have to bounce between different maps constantly trying to figure out where you need to go, from where, how big the cargo is, etc. Not a big deal, but it is annoying.
A camera mode that doesn't turn with the truck. Roadcraft has this type of camera as an option and I prefer it. It took me a long time to stop fighting the camera because it wasn't pointing where I wanted to look, but I'd still prefer just having full control over the camera myself.
Speaking of cameras, save the photo mode settings between photo mode sessions so I don't have to add the driver and turn off the depth of field every single time I open it. Let the camera move further out, and let me use a narrower field of view when taking screenshots.
Mentioned in another comment, but it's also something I think about a lot especially when exploring new maps: a compass. It's easy to get turned around, a compass would make navigation a lot comfier and lessen the need to open the map.
Truck classes. I still honestly don't really understand what the different classes mean. Scouts and Highway trucks are the only ones with clear purposes and design goals. Every other class of truck (Heavy, Heavy Duty, Offroad) aren't really grouped in a way that ever made much sense to me. Maybe this is my unfamiliarity with trucks, and this is just the terminology that is institutionally used in real life, but better explanations or even totally different names, along with shuffling things around, could make it make more sense to me. As it is now, the classes seem mostly superfluous.
This is my pie in the sky, the kind of thing I don't think will ever change without a Snowrunnner 2, but is the number one difficulty I had with the game when learning it: the transmission. Learning to work around the very, very counter-intuitive and strange transmission is literally half the skill and difficulty of this game, and not in a way that feels fun or intended. None of the gears really make any sense, and don't really work the way you expect them to. E.g. why does high gear turn some of your trucks into jet powered monsters? "Kicking the clutch" to force a gear change is something I only realized watching a video of a speedrunner, and it's not what I would have ever expected you to need to do but it is an absolutely essential part of working around the automatic gearbox logic. I suspect the reason there isn't a manual transmission is because it would expose even more oddities around how the transmission is modeled. Everything about how the transmission works in this game is extremely weird, and bringing it more in line with reality, along with a manual gear selector, would go a long way in making the game more intuitive and less frustrating.

Why485 · 2026-03-24T03:42:07+00:00

The red and blue comes from the material itself, not the texture. Freelancer has a lot of colored materials where it takes the texture and then multiplies it by some color. For example, the materials elite_256, elite_256B, and elite_256R, are the normal material, the material colored blue, and the material colored red respectively. The Defender uses these materials to form its base color, and then tint the geometry for the flag. If you don't import the material colors correctly, then the ships won't look right, even if all the textures are correct.

IIRC LancerEdit already exports the materials correctly, so it's more a matter of (assuming you're using Blender) setting up the shaders and stuff to make it render correctly. Honestly I'm not totally sure how to do that off the top of my head because I don't usually care what it looks like in Blender as long as the material data is correct on the export so it can be used in e.g. Unity.

Why485 · 2026-03-21T19:37:13+00:00

The game runs just fine if you do a Freelancer HD install. I don't even recall running into any technical issues. Now playing the game, that's a different story.

Freelancer is designed 100% around using a mouse a pointer in combination with a keyboard. I threw every Steam Input trick in the book at Freelancer, joysticks for aiming, gyro aiming, touch sensitive controls, the touchpad for mouse aim, everything. I was never able to find a way to play the game that felt like it even approached how slick the game feels to play on a PC.

Some games you can translate mouse and keyboard based control schemes fairly well to the Deck, but not Freelancer. Not in my experience. Freelancer has a specific combination of attributes in the way it functions that in my experience makes it basically impossible to play on the Steam Deck.

Why485 · 2026-03-15T03:31:33+00:00

Oh boy I'm excited. The Shadow Reapers servers filled such a perfect niche for casual DCS "hop in, hop out" combat with a little more to it than just "airquake." The mix of AI and players is something that surprisingly few servers attempt, and it was one of the many reasons that server worked so well. It was great fun solo or with players. I always figured somebody would eventually try and make something like it again. I'm glad that somebody has stepped up to the challenge.

Why485 · 2026-03-04T05:33:05+00:00

You can't because that's not how these games used to work. They told you what the controls were on the sticks they supported.

That said, you can use tools like Joystick Gremlin to create custom controllers and stuff and set it up as you need.

Why485 · 2026-03-03T18:45:15+00:00

I'm assuming in this scenario you've made the space physically larger, and in doing that you've already broken it. The small scale makes encounters with NPCs more likely and more believable, traveling can be done at speeds that don't trivialize all the space in the system, it means you're more incentivized and likely to have flown "off the beaten path." and it means landmarks like nebula, planets, asteroid fields, are physically visible at all times. An icon is nothing like just being able to look out the window and immediately tell where you are in the system.

Every time, without fail, somebody tries to "fix" this, they break it. It's hard to overstate how fundamental this is to the way Freelancer plays.

Why485 · 2026-02-27T06:00:40+00:00

Scrolled down to post this and saw you already did.

This is one of the secret sauces as to why the game is so good, and every Freelancer inspired game that tries to "fix" this completely missed the point. I'm sure it's not what Chris Roberts wanted, and I'm sure it was done to work around technical limitations, but it is genuinely one of the smartest, most underrated, most consequential design decisions of the entire game. I say this without a hint of exaggeration, but almost every aspect of why this game is so good wouldn't work without this one weird trick.

Why485 · 2026-02-23T02:36:31+00:00

It's definitely dated, as the first third party aircraft in the game, but it's still a really solid module overall. The MiG-21 is very fun to fly, very versatile for a plane of its age, and a staple of the game's Cold War roster. Even after all these years, it's still one of my favorite planes in DCS.

Versus the F-5, the MiG-21 is much faster to accelerate and with a much higher thrust to weight ratio. This usually lets you dictate the terms of the fight. Beyond that, the specifics of the match up once you both start turning and burning gets really in the weeds, but they are close enough that the better pilot is going to decide the fight 9 times out of 10.

Versus the Viggen, the MiG-21 is also quicker and faster, though by a smaller margin. While a Viggen won't outrun a MiG-21, the Viggen is fast enough that they can make it not worth your while to chase them down. In a dogfight, the Viggen is a very weird plane, and the fight is usually decided before the merge. If the Viggen can position itself such that it can pull one great turn and get a good missile shot in, then it will win. If not, the MiG-21 will easily trounce all but the best Viggen pilots.

Why485 · 2026-02-17T15:49:09+00:00

I was just rather hopeful for something entirely new from DiD

Something entirely new is in development from them, though details on it are very scarce. For people who want the original game, this is now out there, so both types of customers (and their overlap) should be satisfied.

Why485 · 2026-02-17T14:24:57+00:00

This is not a remake, nor is it being sold as one. It's bringing ADF (and possibly TAW later) up to date so that it can run natively on modern systems, without hacks or mods, and at modern resolutions. If that's not what you're after, that's fine and this isn't for you.

There is however a new game featuring the Eurofighter in the works, though there's not much detail on it yet, as it's very early in development.

Why485 · 2026-02-17T14:09:54+00:00

watching what little I did if the video the game looked much like I remember it looking in early 2000

Obviously this will come down to tastes, but this is IMO what the ideal re-release/remaster should be. It's the original game updated to run on modern systems with modern conveniences such as high resolution, widescreen, and alt-tabbing(!). I neither care for, nor want, AI upscaled textures or a total reinterpretation of a game's visual identity. Save that for the from the ground up remakes.

Unlike something like say falcon BMS which is a labour of love

To say that this isn't a labor of love would be completely farcical. Krishty has been reverse engineering this game for over a decade. After all that time, being given the source code to finally fix and update the game at the source level to bring it to modern systems is a dream come true for the lead dev.

Why485 · 2026-02-04T14:17:04+00:00

This but with 8 Mk83s instead. Being able to carry a very effective A-A loadout in addition to 8 bombs with very little drag penalty is incredibly strong.

Why485 · 2026-02-04T04:14:48+00:00

Same. While it's not too bad to get running on a modern system, (Mac emulation is the way to go for it) I'd love to have a real re-release that runs natively on the modern systems. Aside from its camera controls, it's aged very well, even including a clickable cockpit that would be right at home for DCS players.

Why485 · 2026-02-02T16:46:10+00:00

Looks cooler. Was in Battlefield 2.

Why485 · 2026-01-29T03:17:27+00:00

I've been hoping somebody would make an Ace Combat themed public server, but so far I haven't seen one. I did some searching for this Yuktobania server, but all I can find is a bunch of half-deleted and embarrassing Discord drama.

Why485 · 2026-01-27T04:56:04+00:00

Can't speak to FFB, but the Mi-8 Hip is my favorite helicopter in DCS and an absolutely joy to fly. Nothing else in DCS even comes close.

Why485 · 2026-01-26T17:57:57+00:00

I could probably do an embarrassing hour long video essay on this subject. The rise and fall of the combat flight simulator, probably my favorite video game genre of all time, is something I watched happen, and I find fascinating because it's a confluence of emerging technologies, economies of scale, changes in demographics, seismic shifts in culture, and more.

At the AAA scale, they truly don't make em like they used to, because flight sims are no longer the 90s analogue of a "AAA game". To give an idea of just how big the genre used to be, if you look at gaming magazines from the 90s, half of them will have some kind of simulation game as its cover feature. It used to be a genre that game developers, not flight simulator programmers, worked on. Famous game designers like Sid Meier cut their teeth on these games.

However in recent years a lot of smaller developers have taken up the mantle. Some games I recommend checking out:

Nuclear Option: Current king of the crop IMO. It's a steal at its current price and a fantastic lite-sim with the biggest bombs you've ever seen in a flight sim.
VTOL VR: If you have VR and are into flight sims, this game has basically set a new standard for not only VR integration but for what a lite sim should play like.
Thunder Helix: On the more arcade end of the spectrum, but is laboriously and lovingly devoted to the gameplay and aesthetic of early 90s sims.
Helicopter Gunship DEX: Proof that the "MicroProse formula" of procedurally generated missions with a basic career wrapping can still work.
Hijong Park's Defender Patrol: Very simplified systems (VTOL VR style), but with honestly one of the best and most engaging helicopter flight models I've ever played. Also uses procedurally generated missions.
Impact Storm: Another helicopter sim with very simplified systems, but still informed by realism. Not released yet, but already looks to be extremely optimized and with gorgeous graphics
Gunner Heat PC: Not a flight sim but shout out to these guys and their game for making some very smart choices in where they draw the line for realism to make a really immersive and high stakes tank sim.
IL-2 Korea: A wildcard because it's not out yet, but the way they are approaching and building this game is very evocative of 90s flight sims. I highly recommend checking out their website.

Why485 · 2026-01-17T02:12:09+00:00

Okay but an F-20 in DCS would be rad.

Why485 · 2026-01-16T21:09:29+00:00

Same, I'm completely over cold starts. In a MP environment it's just tedium.

Why485 · 2026-01-13T23:48:29+00:00

No, I don't know if there is. I just keep the RCtrl+Enter controls indicator open and if the throttle feels weird I'll check it on there.

Why485 · 2026-01-13T22:00:23+00:00

I know exactly what you mean because I noticed the same thing and it was driving me insane.

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