Helicopter Gunship DEX update for 27 March 2023

The Norway terrain is now available in the general public branch and brings with it all the updates from the Norway BETA including the new flyable Kiowa Warrior.

This is a fairly comprehensive list of updates and improvements....

• OH-58D Kiowa Warrior to the flyable helicopter list. It is a light scout helicopter where its main strength lies in its mast mounted site which will allow you to remain totally undetected when scouting out areas.

• Fixed the disappearing targeting pod icon.

• Fixed a couple of bugs with the stores management system so it will now cycle weapons correctly and in order no matter what pylons they are on.

• Improved the terrain that lies outside the mission area in the Lush Desert zone. This prevents gaps from appearing where the terrain tile join due to different terrain resolutions.

• Added new "In Mission" music tracks to the game. These can be selected via the "Game Settings" menu where you will see a new drop down. You can select a specific track or set it to play a random track.

• Fixed a bug in the Video Settings menu that was causing the saved options to not load correctly.

• Fixed the Hellfires attack profile so that it will correctly account for its current launch altitude.

• Updated the loadout for the Kiowa so that it only has 2 hard points.

• Fixed the HUD waypoint icon, targeting pod icon and artificial horizon so that they are not displayed when their position is behind the current camera view. This should prevent confusion on where the targeting pod is looking when flying the Kiowa.

• Implemented texture streaming to help reduce VRAM usage as it was getting a bit high with all those 4k textures!

• Added some new options to the Video Settings menu so that you can control the amount of VRAM used by textures plus change the overall texture quality. For most people you can leave it at its default settings but if you have a GPU with less than 4Gb VRAM then this can help you limit the amount used by textures which should prevent any out of VRAM crashes.

• Forced Ambient Occlusion effects to off to stop things appearing through the terrain.

• Tidied up the map generation code so that it cleans up after itself.

• Fixed a few errors that would occur when the game shuts down. Not sure if it was really causing any issues but may have been stopping Steam from doing a clean exit.

• Tweaked the flight dynamics of the Gazelle so that it is a little more controllable when trying to slow down. It's still a fast aerodynamic helicopter so it will still take some time to slow down but it loses lift much faster which prevents it from climbing when the nose is pointing up as you decelerate.

• Tweaked the flight dynamics of the Lynx so it takes a little more time to build up to its maximum speed and it will also lose lift more quickly when slowing down. It is also now slightly faster than the Gazelle when clean.

• Tweaked the audio mastering so that there is less bass muddying up the sound. This effects music and helicopter engines so they should sound much clearer.

• Music will now loop correctly without that annoying small delay!