Rookie with ‘speed’ concern

Howdy all from Oz. Melbourne.

I bought my first DCS game - A10 - back in 2012 for $10.

Bootcamped a Mac and never got it to run. Just paused at the start. The graphics of the cockpit blew me away though

Bought a gaming laptop 12 moths ago RTX 2060; and bought Huey; F-18; and AV 8.

Didn’t get to load them once before my laptop bag was run over. By me. (I’m almost 50. And an idiot)

Sooo. Replaced it with an MSI 1 & further 2TB SSD; 17 inch 250hz screen with an RTX 2070 card - 32g ram. If I had to go again - I was going hard.

Anyway. I’ve now further got F14 and viper; and spitfire.

I haven’t gotten into any of them yet - just screwing around. But being isolated from Covid (& with 4 stepdaughters!) is changing that. I have a CPL in real life - so am motivated to really fly these things and teach my 8 year old.

So that’s the intro.

My concern is how ‘slow’ the planes appear to go over the ground - particularly at tree top height.

You watch the trailer videos; and the ground flies by underneath you. I’m even paranoid I’m not using afterburner - but I’ve read (and correct me if I’m wrong) full throttle is simply afterburner

But even at 400knots - the ground should be wizzing by.

Think F1 games - the cars really have a sense of speed - and you really need to slow for the corners - so straights make you feel like you’re flying pardon the pun.

But try buzz a carrier.

I reckon the cessnas in fsw or x plane 11 don’t look much slower.

Ironically I don’t have A 10 anymore - but THAT’s the game I want for ground hugging speed; seat of your pants; ‘one blink and you’ve bit the dust’ missions and graphics.

What gives????

Any ideas? Is it just ne? My settings (all maxed out and frame rate seems fine - no lagging etc. roll the plane and it’s real fast like real life)

Please help - given I started all this 8 years ago and am now into my 3rd 3k plus laptop - and only NOW getting into it - I’m a little disappointed...

Cheers

400 knots is 740kms per hour - almost 12.5km per minute or roughly 200m per second. Half a football field.

Dunno. Now that I’ve written it like that - more confused than ever.

Again - watch the trailers. The low level stuff - I think there’s a good one on viper.

The in game stuff ain’t like that.....

How are your frame rates?

The trailers add quick cuts, some artificial motion blur, and flashy sound effects to create a sense of speed. Which is interesting because all of the flying in it is usually pretty slow anyways.. Just like aircraft in Ace Combat move very slow, but the designers do a lot to make them "feel" like they're going fast.

Yet at 12km MSL in my MiG-21Bis Mach 2.05 looks fairly slow.... but it's certainly not. It doesn't look flashy enough to be in a trailer.

Check out normal play through videos of low level attacks and see if they replicate the experience you have.

What type of AC do you fly as a CPL? You may already be adjusted to the sensation of high speeds.

Here's a well executed attack run at about 475KIAS and under 600FT AGL.

The feel of speed is dependant mainly on your field of view and peripheral view. In VR you'd be amazed but on the flat screen that small you're very limited. The lower you fly and more objects you see the more you will sense the speed.

Personally I choose the real fov over some cool looks anytime.

What you see in the trailers is the same thing you see in aviation film and photography; a camera positioned far from the object, with a lens zoomed in that imparts a tremendous sense of speed as you are only looking at a tiny area of the ground.

Press F2 for an external view of your aircraft. Use the mouse wheel to zoom out until the camera position is about a half mile from the aircraft. Press rctrl num* to zoom the camera lens in. Notice now the ground is screaming by in your field of view. The effect is even more noticeable with the F3 flyby view.

What you see in the pit has to do with the absence of peripheral vision. Consider when driving your car at highway speed; if you focus on the road at the horizon, you don't appear to be moving quickly at all. If you look to your side you see the ground whizzing by.

400 knots is 740kms per hour - almost 12.5km per minute or roughly 200m per second. Half a football field.

 

Dunno. Now that I’ve written it like that - more confused than ever.

Again - watch the trailers. The low level stuff - I think there’s a good one on viper.

The in game stuff ain’t like that.....

You can literally fly over football fields and stadiums in this game.

''scale'' is the easiest thing to get right in a game, it's just agreeing that X many units in the game world equates to X many inches/feet, etc. I'm pretty sure all the engineers can handle something that simple, or why are we trusting their aerodynamics and avionics modeling?

@op

Your reference point ingame for 90% of people is very different from your reference point in life. Your real world field of vision and senses vs whatever screen you're using positioned however far away. These are extremely obvious differences and yes, they have a comsiderable impact on how things ''feel'' as you would expect.

A laptop screen does not equal anything about your realworld experience.

Well I got my rig and bought a few mods and terrains yesterday. I will have to agree with the no feel of speed. Although I’m so new to this sim that it might be all of settings as far as in game and Gpu. I’m running a 240 hz monitor and a rtx 2080 super and I may have it set up for a shooter game profile or something. I did spudknuckers settings and a nvidia 2020 control panel setting on a YouTube video. Everything looks amazing and very smooth. I have not done a FPS test yet. But yeah low level flying by structure doesn’t seem to feel the speed. But yeah I’m an FNG and there’s going to be a lot of learning and tweaking to get what’s good for me and my gaming experience.

Thanks all.

Even flying to or through a cloud feels slower than a Cessna....!!!!

The sense of speed isn't that great on normal view. I find myself thinking that over and over.

But then normal view in this sim is a restricted FOV (field of view) compared to real life.

If you enlarge FOV a bit, the sense of speed increases because you see more things wizz by then on a restricted FOV, just like feefifofum says.

But, go low, real low, zoom out a bit and the sense of speed will increase a lot.

F1 cars go fast but they sit 5 cm above the road with a big FOV so you can see things "fly" by in the corners of you eye, move them up to a few meters and it's like riding a truck.

And.. even at this low sense of speed, do a low level air to ground attack run, notice how slow you seem to go but how fast the target seems to approach and how little time you have to do the actual attack run.