I’ve had an incredibly busy week and I’m not as on top of the news as I like to be so here’s my quick round-up of the latest news and information coming out of Eagle Dynamics, Heatblur, RAZBAM and the rest of the DCS World news community.

ED miles update

Eagle Dynamics has responded to complaints about the ED miles program not giving people who have bonus dollars enough time to spend their bonuses.

After reading your feedback from our earlier announcement of the upcoming ED Miles loyalty program, we have modified our plans to better support our clients with Bonus Program points. Rather than have Bonus Program points expire at the launch of the ED Miles, we will allow Bonus Program points to expire one year from their earning or until March 31st, 2020, whichever comes first. This will allow all clients to use their Bonus Program points for up to one year since the points were earned. Additionally, you can get up to 30% off DCS World e-Shop purchases using your Bonus Points during the week before the launch of ED Miles. This will include all developers taking part in the Bonus Program.

DCS World Weekend News

Although I think I would have preferred to see a roll over to the new system, this seems like at least something of a workable compromise.

Beta update out, but it may be causing problems

Users across the Reddit, Facebook, and Eagle Dynamics forums communities are all complaining about more crashes to desktop than usual with DCS World after the latest beta patch came out. The fix itself was supposed to improve performance, particularly with the F-14 which has horrendous loading times.

There’s a long list of changes in the latest beta although some of them are not fully implemented in the case of RAZBAM that we’re unaware of the Friday patch and hadn’t committed some of the code.

Today an update was released by ED but the changelog was ment to be for the Wed 27th (every 2nd wed) unfortunately we were not informed the update was being brought forward to today.

As a result certain fixes were not updated and we can only send out an apology for this.

Razbam has recently moved to a new internal File structure and increased our internal testing team by 4 to prevent the errors of past changelog glitches reoccurring.

We are so very sorry for the missing changes and we will make sure this DOESN’T happen again.

Thank you for understanding.

RAZBAM Facebook page

Another AV-8B fix

The ASL line for the Harrier has been problematic for some time now and it looks like RAZBAM will get this update in (if I’m reading this right – it will be next Wednesday).

Bugs, crashes, and reporting!

Eagle Dynamics is adding a “Send Crash Report” button to the crash screen for DCS World. When DCS crashes you can now opt to send Eagle Dynamics the crash report directly.

As some of you may have experienced already, we have added a function to the core of DCS World to submit information directly the Eagle Dynamics Team. When a crash occurs in DCS World, a window will pop up, and allow you to send the required logs and associated files to the team, as well as a message describing the issue.

DCS World Weekend News

Eagle Dynamics appears to be working to be as transparent with this process as possible and you can chose the “See in Explorer” option to see the files that Eagle Dynamics would be sent if you click send.

Hopefully this will let them nail down some annoying bugs.

Bouncing aircraft

If you’ve been in a DCS multiplayer server, you’ve undoubtedly seen bouncing aircraft. The aircraft is on the ground on their own screen but for everyone else they are bouncing up and down by several hundred feet. I’ve seen it happen many times!

A thread on the DCS forums and a call by r/Hoggit users is encouraging people to send track files in to try and help Eagle Dynamics get this bug fixed. Check that out here.

LTWS comes to DCS: F/A-18C Hornet next week

The LTWS or Latent Track While Scan feature is coming to the DCS: F/A-18C in next week’s open beta.

According to Matt Wagner, LTWS gives Hornet drivers some new options:

• Soft lock a contact with a Target Under Cursor (TUC)
• Designate a target to become the Launch and Steering (L&S) track file with airspeed, altitude, and MSI indications. This has a star HAFU symbol.
• A second contact designation becomes the Designated Target 2 (DT2) and has the same information as the L&S but has a diamond HAFU symbol.
• You can TUC a third contact as well.

Importantly, LTWS is the foundation for TWS mode (Track While Scan) which again should open up additional functionality. In the Eagle, the TWS mode can be used to paint targets for multiple target AMRAAM launches under some circumstances so it’ll be interesting to see that kind of thing come to the Hornet (at least, my understanding that this is possible).

Bug reporting for the F-14

Heatblur did a pretty good job of launching the F-14 with a lot of features right off the bat but it hasn’t been problem free. Performance issues, extremely long loading times, Jester AI bugs, VR issues, and RIO’s being able to click things in the pilots cockpit are all being brought up as potential issues. DCS World crashes also seem to have accelerated with the F-14 in particular.

If you’re having an issue with the F-14, bug reporting and tracking is happening in this sub-forum.

JF-17 planned loadouts

Deka Ironworks posted on their Facebook page earlier in the week with a chart showing off their proposed loadouts for the JF-17. The loadout list includes the Chinese PL-5EII (an AIM-9/R-13 related development), SD-10 (roughly equivalent to the AIM-120/R-77), LD-10 (anti-radiation missiles) as well as Western weapons such as the MK-82, MK-20, GBU-12, etc.

Did I miss anything?

It’s been an incredibly busy week all around. Let me know in the comments if I missed anything!