DCS news roundup: F-4E OST, Kiowa testing, new Bo-105 feature

February 11, 2024

1–2 minutes

A few DCS World news items to round-up this Sunday with the first full music release for the DCS: F-4E soundtrack, a new G36 rifle feature for the Bo-105, and an OH-58D update from Eagle Dynamics. Let’s have a look!

Listening to F-4’s soundtrack

Yet more reinforcement that we’re getting closer to F-4E is the release of a full track from Heatblur collaborator music project Meteor. The self described Synthwave/Outrun/Darksynth project previously supplied a full length album for the F-14 and are back at it again for the F-4. “Bolo” is track number 2 of the album titled “Of Ghosts and Thunder.” Good listening for the rest of the DCS World news!

Bo-105 gains a few more features

A few months back we saw a short clip from Polychop’s OH-58D with the left seat player firing an M4 out the window at a technical. Well it looks like Miltech-5 aren’t going to be left out on doing that in DCS either as their DCS: Bo-105 helicopter project is gaining a G36.

Miltech-5 report that the weapon will be functional similar to what we saw with the OH-58D.

OH-58D Kiowa Warrior update

On this weeks’ DCS World Weekend News update we got some news from Eagle Dynamics on the status of the OH-58. The key piece of news here is that the project is now being tested by Eagle Dynamics themselves as well as by their external testing team. This marks a key milestone for the project and likely the best indication that we’ve had in a few years now that the project is now moving into a position for release.

The rest of the update reiterates the capabilities of the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior with a variety of weapon systems that include a .50 caliber M3P machine gun, laser guided Hellfire, Stinger air-to-air, as well as a variety of rocket types that include the laser guided APKWS. Always good to be reminded what this little helicopter can do.

Eagle Dynamics have also uploaded a bunch of screenshots over in their In Development section.

One response to “DCS news roundup: F-4E OST, Kiowa testing, new Bo-105 feature”

beggyg

February 11, 2024 at 3:38 pm

I enjoyed the music, perfect for the subject, IMO.

I have a comment about the video – YouTube file size compression chews up videos which don’t have much contrast, here you can see a lot of banding in the video, which probably wasn’t visible in the original render. I did a lot of video for YouTube a while ago, and there’s a trick that can (I say can, the compression changes regularly and it depends to a degree on the video itself) reduce this banding to something less obvious. Just add a layer of noise! You can experiment with colour noise or black and white noise or a recording of film grain. I’ve had good luck with static noise and also with noise that changes frame by frame. Again, it depends on the video which works best. Layer the noise with a level of transparency so that you can barely see it, even if you’re looking for it. What this does is a type of dithering. Depending on the algorithm, the compression can see the noise as an important part of the video, so doesn’t over compress. It’s a bit fiddly, but I used to have clients who would really hate banding and this was the only way I found to reduce, or if I was really lucky, eliminate the banding.

It seems counterintuitive to add noise to improve quality but it’s at such a low level that it can be barely perceptible and if done right, ‘feels’ like film grain if it is visible on more than a subliminal level at all. This is apropos of nothing, and just in case the people who made the video haven’t heard of this technique. I always think tricks like this are worth a try.

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