IRFC Hawkeye

@Pfeil, @Baron, Just for information purposes, here is an error log for a typical IL2 crash that I was getting, from the Windows Event viewer: Maybe it gives you or somebody an idea as to why the crashes occurred. As for flying with you guys: I would very much like to continue; and I usually get on our JG1 TS channel at about 3:00 pm EST, which is 8:00 pm for Loopy, and I guess 9:00 pm for you guys? But I can get on much earlier any time, if it is better for you fellows. I know you fly WWII on some days. I'm interested in FC mostly right now; so if there are certain days that you dedicate to that, please let me know. S!

So the reinstall didn't work! But after many patient sorties flown with many thanks to @loopy.... Brano @Baron and Sipi @Pfeil came to my rescue. Together we went through every graphics setting in the game, and then every setting in the Nvidia Control Panel. Many changes were made in both places, and especially in the game they were actually increased. With that number of changes it is hard to pin down exactly what caused the apparent resolution, which I am still only very cautiously beginning to believe. My sincere thanks to all three of them for helping me overcome this unexpected obstacle! Flying is fun again, and I hope to continue finding you all online. S!

On a related note for the O.P. in this thread, FC in multiplayer has become unplayable for me, though not in the sense of actual game performance, which was actually very good; but by reason of CTD's/DTD's. Ever since the most recent update, I've been unable to finish any sortie that I've started on the J5 server. Whether I crash 5 minutes into a sortie or over an hour in, I've crashed 100% of the time. At first I thought it was only on the J5 server, but after seeing that it can occur well after an hour into a sortie, I am by no means sure of that; and I don't really have the desire to fly for over an hour on different servers, to say nothing of how the other BoX games perform. I rarely if ever fly those. The one thing that I could think of to do was clear out my "Missions" folder for multiplayer; but after initially seeming successful, that too eventually failed. So I took the drastic step yesterday of uninstalling my entire game and re-downloading it; and since I have all of the series except the newest pre-order of BoN, it was nearly 20 GB. I did back up my skins, snapviews and input folders, and printed out almost all of my previous game settings. However my original installation had a bunch of obsolete game controllers recorded in it, so I've decided to re-enter all of those bindings from scratch to get a cleaner installation. First thing I noticed was a change in the directory name of "..../IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Moscow" to "..../IL-2 Sturmovik: Great Battles". The uninstall actually left a remnant of the first one in that location, so I just manually removed it. Some of the settings in the game launcher and in the main game are slightly different, in a very few places; I don't really know what significance that has. At least I am fairly confident that I have the most current of all the game files, DirectX and Runtime components. We will see if I can get back to reliable operation and be able to fly with you guys again, without crashing. Fingers crossed!

Well done, fellas!

Really outstanding work, beautiful skins! So happy to see the expansion of the USAS going so successfully! S!

Got a message from Loopy saying he was going to fly FC today at around 3:00 - 3:30 pm EST. I'll be joining him. So if anybody is available, hope to see you then, probably on the J5 server.

Heartiest congratulations to you sir; and best possible wishes for her total health and well-being. Prost!

Just another variation of if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Damned good policy to follow. Looking forward to your intensely professional and scientific approach to flying and destroying stuff, once again, buddy. S!

So the Flying Goat has new skins for Angry Circus? Just messin' with ya, bud

Oh man....I was going to do that exact same thing to the Camel cowl You snooze, you lose They all look beautiful. Simpler, bolder combinations that will show up far better; and great color shades, too. Superb design theme!

Well your's is a T-50, so who knows how it's different inside the base.... could be a lot different, and a lot better. But extensions or not, all T-50's are the same from the base of the neck on down.... extensions have no bearing on that. What you're talking about is just the cable extensions that simply lengthen the reach of the plug coming from the grip, which goes through the tube extensions. Whether you have a bunch of them, or none of them, the same exact problem could happen inside the base unit, since it all comes down to the wires that go through the parts that move. To clarify, the short cable shown in my case is inside the chassis of the base unit. The top of it is the female socket on the base, where the grip screws on to, and travels through the moving gimbal assembly to the internal circuit board. Honestly, it might never be a problem on the T-50. The root of it may very well have a lot to do with the fact that the WarBRD base has more degrees of movement than the T-50. That's because the WarBRD is made to be shorter, for desktop use, while the T-50 is meant to be used with extensions. Less degrees of movement equals less flexing of the cable, all other things being equal. So hopefully you'll never have to worry about this problem. If I were you, and I had all of those shorter cables connected together, each with a top and bottom plug on it, I would take one apart and lengthen it to the appropriate full length using some bulk cable, and eliminate all of those connections. However I think you told me once that it was more complicated than that, so I won't pretend it would be easy, if even possible.

All's well that ends well....?

I did remember that, Loopy.... but honestly I had thought that it was your joystick, and not your throttle. I've had both the Warthog throttle and joystick apart, and they seem quite well designed inside, and you wouldn't think that problem would ever happen. Of course when you look at how the Virpil is designed, you would never think it would fail, either. There seems to be plenty of room for that cable to flex; and nothing is tied down which might restrict movement, or concentrate it on one specific area of the cable. I think if they ever dug into the root of the problem, they might find that if they used a cable with wires that had more strands of a finer diameter, it would flex easier and for many more cycles.

My problem has been resolved, though not in the way I expected it to be. First, after sending 12 messages back and forth between me and Virpil, each with weeks between a reply and getting a response, and in the end a total lack of response, I finally gave up. In two of those responses, they said that they would "collect" my grip for repair, and I agreed and asked for information on where and how to send it, they never did reply or give the information on how to do that. So I just gave up and ordered a new grip. That was far, far faster and easier, though obviously a waste of money; but I wasn't willing to screw around forever. For one thing, the Virpil store website now has almost everything in stock, with the exception of some items that haven't been released yet. Paying is also far easier than it once was, with them now accepting credit card orders, AND Paypal. Lastly, the shipping seemed much faster than it used to be. I think it took somewhere between a week and two weeks (don't know for sure because it arrived while I was away on vacation). In any case it was waiting for me when I came home, so when I had time, I shut everything down, removed Klaiber's perfectly working TM Warthog grip, and installed the new one. Well, it didn't work. After physically installing it, I was pretty sure I'd need to re-load the firmware, and especially the profile, since it had been set for the WarBRD base + TM Warthog grip configuration; and when you do that kind of thing, you have also to re-do the calibration as a matter of course....it's part of the procedure. So, I wasn't too worried when it didn't work before doing all of that; I expected it not to. But after loading everything and proceeding to the calibration part, I could again see that the X and Y axis worked perfectly, but the Z axis was unresponsive. But here is what gave me a clue as to what was going on. While moving the stick back and forth to calibrate the X and Y axis', I noticed that the Z axis would jump a little bit every now and then. So I figured out exactly where it seemed to have some response, and then moved the Z axis while it was in that position. I could get it to move through about half of it's range. The problem was somehow in the base! Then I went to the "buttons" tab, and this time, instead of seeing error messages scrolling continuously for the stick, I saw all of the button indicators lit up at the same time, as if being pushed all at once. When I moved the stick to the position it seemed to respond in, I could then push individual buttons, and they'd turn back to blue when not pushed, and then red when pushed; and they all worked. So I shut everything down again, removed the grip, and unmounted my base to work on it on the bench. When I had it all apart, which was not very difficult at all, I could see how it worked inside. The X and Y axis are independent, and each has it's own sensor with a white ribbon cable coming from it. Those cables basically don't move at all, because on those axis', the movement is completely rotational; the only thing that actually moves is a small magnet on the end of those gimbal shafts. The input from the Z axis and the buttons from the grip was completely different and independent, so I could see how the ones would work, and not the other. From the round 5-pin socket in the top of the base neck, there is a 5-wire cable that comes down and exits the neck through a slot in the front. There is slack in that cable, and it then connects to the main circuit board via a 5-pin plastic plug. I completely removed that cable assembly, got out my multimeter, rigged up some thin wire strands that I could fit into each end of the female socket and plug, and tested the continuity of each individual wire. I moved and bent the cable while doing so. The red, yellow, green and white wires were ok; but when I got to the black wire (the ground), the continuity made and broke while I was flexing the cable. The wire strands inside of that wire were broken inside of the wire's insulation; and when you moved the cable, the ends of the broken strands would sometimes touch together. This is a problem that sometimes happens in electronics, when moving parts are involved....I've seen it before. So the real solution would be to get a new cable assembly from Virpil somehow, or send them my unit to be repaired, which I would never do because at their apparent rate of work that might take years. So I decided to repair the cable myself, at least for now. I knew where the break was; it had to be where the cable bends 90 degrees on exiting the neck of the moving shaft, near the slot. So I very carefully scored the cable's external jacket in about a 2-inch section of that area, and removed that section of jacket, exposing the wires inside. Then I looked very carefully at the black wire, and bent it back and forth in the suspect area, and found a weak area in the wire (strands broken inside, only insulation holding it together). Then I simply pulled on each side of it, and the wire came apart easily at the break. Then I stripped each end of the wire, and installed a section of thin heat shrink tubing over one end. Then I hooked the exposed strands together, and soldered them; then I slid the small heat shrink tubing over the repair, and shrunk it over that with a heat gun. Of course that wire was now somewhat shorter than all of the rest, which would tend to put all of the pressure on that one wire, which is not good. So, I looped all of the other wires over themselves, so that they were all the same length again. Now, the outer jacket of the cable needed repairing. This called for a somewhat larger diameter section of heat shrink tubing, which I had, but the correct size will not fit over the connectors which are on each end of the cable. So, I carefully removed each of the 5 pins from the plastic plug on the circuit board end of the cable, by prying up the plastic retainers and pulling the pins out at the same time. With only the small pins on the wires instead of the plastic connector body, I was able to slide the appropriate size of heat shrink tubing over the cable assembly, and shrink it in place over the stripped area of the cable. I again tested every wire end to end, and found them all to be good now. Then I put it all back together, and installed the new grip back on it. Then I started up the interface software and went straight to the calibration area and started that procedure. Nothing worked at all. No movement at all from any of the axis; no X, no Y, and no Z. WTF???? Then I about died....now totally out of business for a LONG time. Think, think, think....what's wrong? Hey, maybe when the wire was broken, the firmware never did correctly install itself, since the data could not have passed to the grip part of the assembly. Fire it up again, restart the software, this time reinstall the firmware....profile....calibration....it works!!! So, the real question is how is it that a different brand of grip worked flawlessly, even with a broken wire inside the base, for weeks and weeks? Is the original Virpil grip actually bad? I spent some time researching the Virpil forum, and in the technical area for hardware/software, I found a thread with a title alluding to a WarBRD base that worked intermittently for the Z axis and buttons; and that thread had a LOT of replies from people saying that they had the same problem. WarBRD base users, beware, expect trouble! These bases, all bought just after they first came out, are all about the same age, and it seems like MANY are failing with that same trouble. However, two of the posts stated that they had gotten replacement cables from Virpil, and of course that cured their problem. So in any case, I submitted another support ticket in order to get at least one, if not more brand new replacement cable assemblies. This is bound to break again in the future. I don't expect my repair to last forever....or even more than a few months....because a soldered wire often breaks more easily than an unsoldered one, due to the rigid nature of the repaired area. So I want to have a new part available as soon as I need it; and, hopefully, Virpil may have begun using an improved, or higher quality product part as their replacement. I would hope so, because if they don't, they're going to be swamped with support requests for a very, very long time, is my guess. S!

@Wittmann, This is a link to our forum's thread detailing JG1's "community chest". S!

Maybe you could post a screenshot of that for other steam users. To be honest there is probably a way to do it within the standard game too....I forgot about that possibility.

EVEN map tomorrow (11/23) !

@Etzel C:\Program Files (x86)\1C Game Studios\IL-2 Sturmovik Battle of Moscow\bin\game\Launcher.exe How steam versions differ, I do not know, but there must be a way.

MFD = Multi Function Display. From my understanding, basically a bunch of buttons with templates for you to label them with, that are easily changed.

We have a squadron inventory of equipment, and a thread on that subject somewhere, and I am the keeper of that equipment. Bottom line is that I have a CH Throttle Quadrant that you could have free of charge, except for the shipping cost. I used one for many years without trouble. It has 6 axis', with exchangeable handles, and each axis has detent switch integrated into the bottom end of it's range (like an idle/off detent). It also has 6 up/down momentarily switches (12 buttons) on the front. It can clamp to the edge of a table or desk. Just let me know if you'd like to try it.

How does the simple gauges digital reading compare to the cockpit gauge reading? I've checked many of the planes on the WWI side and have found some pretty big differences between the two readings. It seems to me that they probably can make the cockpit gauge read anything they want; but what really matters is how fast it's true speed in the sim. The devs seem purposefully unclear on that subject. I don't think they want to be pinned down when the planes don't perform up to their stated abilities. They are, after all, the ones who make the final determination on what those parameters are. This is especially frustrating when they choose the lowest end of the range of historical data, and then the product performs short even of that, in both the cockpit and digital readings.

That has got me thinking. I wonder if there is any processor I could upgrade to from my Haswell 6-core? I think it is a socket 2011 newer version though, but not sure, not home to check it right now. That socket is very good, but I don't think it was ever very widespread, so it would be pretty limiting I imagine.

This guy is a natural. Takes on all comers without blinking an eye. It's easy to tell how new this game is, since there are actually people flying that would try to turn-fight in an S.E.5a. Such a thing would never happen in RoF. I don't think that situation will last too long though, after the education that HL gave them. I was wondering if the S.E.5(s?) that attacked when you were egressing were the same ones, or others? If the same ones, they sure took a lot of punishment and still remained viable.

Good job, guys. Raz, I didn't realize your streak was that high. S!

Well if they're in the same order, we should be able to figure it out. Thanks. Didn't quite get those last settings, though