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This doesn't affect anyone much but I'm putting it out there in case anyone was thinking of using VAICOM Pro.

The beta update broke VAICOM Pro. Not only that, it broke the radios in DCS. I can no longer use VAICOM Pro, it is unresponsive. If I hit "\" for the radio menu, none comes up. So I have no way to communicate not only with Jester but to ATC, AI, AWACS etc.

The problem worsens in that the author of VAICOM Pro is a one man show. HE updates the software when the patches come out, but apparently he has been missing for months now and word has it on the forums that VAICOM Pro has become abandonware. Which really sucks not just for the abandonment, but because it was a great program that I have come to rely on quite a bit, and it certainly beats the Jester wheel. I may have to go back to Bailey's Voice Attack profile, but it is a huge disappointment to have to do so.

But my first priority now is to fix what is not working in DCS from this. I can't be without radios. Apparently in the installation of VAICOM Pro, it changes lines in the lua to integrate it in, and you either have to change them back or do a slow repair, which is a DCS standalone thing, I don't know that an integrity check will do it for the Steam version.

AS for lua, I have always been squeamish about messing with lua lines. I know some of you have. I may have to bug you for some help on this so I don't really mess things up and end up having to do a full reinstall.

Sad sad day for me.

v6,
boNes

Update. I did a file integrity check and although VAICOM Pro still is not working, I do get my radio menus back, but ONLY for the Tomcat, so I dunno. It will just suck to have to either learn the Jester wheel all over again, or to downgrade to Bailey's Voice Attack profile until someone fixes VAICOM. It's gotten tot he point that people are worrying that something drastic happened to the author of VAICOM as he just upped and disappeared, yet the product is still for sale. One guy bought it for the first time 3 weeks ago and loved it, and then this patch came out. Talk about big time buyer's remorse.

v6,
boNes

I forgot what I was using for voice control - I haven't used it for awhile. But it did not require any integration with DCS to work. I would check to make sure you have the radio menu key mapped properly in each plane.

EDIT: I used Voice Attack.

XPen,

That is what I am using. Vaicom Pro is a "profile" used with Vice Attack. But it's not a Voice Attack thing, it is a VAICOM Pro thing, which is just a profile thing but it integrates with DCS. I could switch to Bailey's profile or do just the wheel, just sucks because Vaivom Pro was so powerful.

Well, other people who had the issue where just the radio menu doesn't even come up anymore they fixed it by deleting the Vaicom Pro line from the export.lua. I tried that but it didn't do anything for the Hornet. So, for other planes like the Tomcat, Falcon, etc I can get comms menus with a keystroke. But only in the Hornet does it not work. Makes no sense.

v6,
boNes

Vaicom Pro has been resurrected. Well, I wold say more re-animated than resurrected. The zombie that is Vaicom Pro is on GitHub. The creator of made it available as open source code and so a community who love it are going to get together to fix it/continue it. They are even talking about adding the Apache and HIND to it

https://github.com/Hollywood315/VAICOMPRO-GPL

v6,
boNes

That's good news Bones!

Did they have an ETA?

That’s great news since I own a copy and have been meaning to set it up and use it. Hopefully they will fix the problem. Otherwise I just thre money down the drain.

They have a fix set up right now, but they rightly said it is a temporary fix until they can dissect the code and see what does what. But to that, they say they can also hopefully alot of bugs that went unaddressed and further the development to the Apache for instance.

The problem I see right now is that they are offering the fix and instructions in so many ways that it's hard to make coherent sense of what the correct procedure is. They have a few posts on the DCS forum for it, to which everyone is commenting/asking questions and so you have to scroll through and read a bunch of extraneous fluff. They have a Discord channel but it's worse. I had to leave that server because my phone was exploding with questions and chatter about how to do this and that. If I left it on, my battery would die in a few hours or I'd go insane just hearing the notification of a new message over and over.

Anyway, it involves using a zip from the community that replaces certain dll files so that the software doesn't attempt a Vaicom Pro update and overwrite the luas back into bad ones. But I don't feel the explanation is detailed enough. I think part of the problem is that English is the second language of many of the people working on the fix so it doesn't come across properly.

Anyway I might try it. If it doesn't work I can just go back to what I'm doing now, it's just a pain because I have to integrity check the files if I want to fix anything and that takes a while.

v6,
boNes

SUCCESS!

I was able to restore VAICOM Pro with a few tweaks fixes here and there to the most up to date state before beta 2.8 came out. So it works for now!

Anyone need help on this I can walk you through it.

v6,
boNes

I ran some quick tests last night. Jester was back alive inthe Tomcat and was working everything like he usually does (for better and for worse). I tried it with the Hornet too, but admittedly I don't use it much for that except for ATC and that was working fine also. The only thing I noticed is when the radio messages come in on the upper right of the screen, they were indented down to the lower middle right of the screen. Purely asthetic but fine. Also the Vaicom Pro kneeboard was back, albeit in an aged state. In Vaicom Pro, you have a kneeboard with fresh white "paper" and as time goes on, it gets weathered, aged, and smeared as if it was in use over time. Just a cool realism thing they added. But it now starts in the weathered state instead of the fresh state. Again, cosmetic.

v6,
boNes

Glad you got this sorted out.....

Yes, you'll have to walk me through the install sometime in the near future. I'd like to get this up and running, but haven't had the time to invest in it.