This repository holds releases only. There is no source code here.
Crew Chief gets your PC ready to fly DCS World, then puts it back exactly how it was.
It shuts down the background apps that inject themselves into DCS — overlays like RTSS, Discord and Steam are a leading cause of stutter and crashes in VR — launches your support apps in the right order, watches the flight, and restores everything afterwards.
It does not modify core DCS files, and it is multiplayer safe.
How Crew Chief works → — a short illustrated walkthrough of what it does and why.
Grab the newest app-* release from the Releases page.
Crew Chief checks this depot on launch and will offer updates itself, so this is normally a first-install step only.
| Asset | What it is | Size |
|---|---|---|
CrewChief-*.zip |
The application. This is what updates most often. | small |
OptimizationBundle-*.zip |
DLSS libraries, NVIDIA Inspector profiles and DCS performance mods. Changes rarely. | large |
The two are versioned separately so a routine app update does not re-download the bundle.
- Unzip somewhere you can write to — for example
C:\Games\Tools\Crew Chief. AvoidC:\Program Files, which needs administrator rights to write logs and settings. - Run
NullsetForge.CrewChief.exe. - First run walks you through setup and explains what each step does.
Your settings, logbook and crash reports live in the install folder and are never overwritten by an update.
Crew Chief is not code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen will show a blue "Windows protected your PC" box the first time you run it.
That is expected. It means the file has no purchased signing certificate — not that anything is wrong with it. To continue: click More info, then Run anyway.
Every release asset carries a cryptographic signature in its notes, made with a private key that never leaves the developer's machine.
Crew Chief verifies that signature before applying any automatic update, and refuses anything it cannot prove came from us. So while Windows can't vouch for the app on first download, an update cannot be swapped for something malicious — not by a compromised depot, and not by anything sitting between you and GitHub.
That is a different and stronger guarantee than a checksum, which only tells you the file downloaded intact.
- Windows 10 or 11
- WebView2 Runtime — already present on most Windows 11 machines
- DCS World, Standalone or Steam
Crash reports are written to Resources\_Logs\DCS Crash Logs inside your install folder, one
folder per crash. Open the newest one, press Copy prompt, paste it into an AI assistant and
drag dcs.log in behind it — the report is built to be handed over exactly that way.
Closed source, free for personal use. See EULA.txt.