streakeagle

Oh no! I hope it is as minor as possible, and you recover quickly and fully.

For me, the problem was caused by the gpu driver. I think I had to lower one of the Strike Fighters 2 graphic settings from Ultimate? That was using an nVidia 1080. Eventually, an update to the driver allowed it to run without issues. One thing I learned going from Windows 7 to Windows 10 was upgrading the Windows 7 caused many headaches, particularly with USB 3 ports which was critical to my original Oculus VR headset. I ended up wiping the hard drive and using a clean Windows 10 install, which at the time still worked perfectly using the Windows 7 key to validate the free Windows 10 install even though Windows 7 was wiped off of the drive. Right now, I am not only able to run SF2 on Windows 11, but can even implement primitive but functional VR using the 3rd party vorpX software with Stary's SF2 vorpX profile. With my 7900 XTX, performance is oustanding.

It is risky because compatibility has been on and off over the years. But right now it is working better than it ever has before.

I have now verified that the HP Reverb G2 works with SF2/vorpX just as well as the Quest 3 if you use the SteamVR mode instead of the OpenXR driver. This leads me to believe that almost any mainstream VR headset should work with SF2/vorpX as long as it is compatible with either OpenXR or SteamVR.

I just remembered: SimHq was the place for refugees from CombatSim.com after they went payware. CombatSim.com learned real quick that no one wanted to pay for community forums, especially when there were plenty of competitors still available for free. The late 90s to the 2000s was a crazy time for the flight sim community. But CombatAce.com (formerly BioHaz) rose above the mess and is still here over 20 years later.

I generally don't mind these types of disruptions as long as CombatAce comes back. Whereas I remember a certain WWI group abandoning CombatAce for SimHq because of an unavoidable unplanned outage. As if SimHq was an upgrade. At one time, SimHq was the place to be, but at some point CombatAce became the refuge for people fed up with SimHq, especially for the Strike Fighters series. SimHq eventually gave up the .com for a .net because the new owner had a better use for the .com domain. Maybe its just me, but pc game forums are a luxury not a necessity. It is no big deal if service is down, especially since I am active on so many other forums, too. Now, if the internet goes down, I am screwed. One of the disadvantages to my primary sim, DCS World, is that you can only play offline for 24 hours, then it shuts down until you can log into the internet again. Likewise, when their licensing servers are down, I am screwed. SF2 may not support multiplayer and the graphics engine may be a bit dated, but the software has no anti-piracy crap and runs anytime. If Eagle Dynamics were to go out of business, would they issue one last patch to unlock their software so people could keep playing without the ED servers? If not, I would be back to flying Strike Fighters 2 until another F-4/MiG-21 sim arose from the ashes.

It isn't implemented yet. I had not noticed that, or I would have mentioned it. The radio is important for getting GCI calls as well as ATC.

A little tricky to taxi / takeoff and far from stable, but the only real limitation of this "early access" release is that many useful controls cannot be mapped to controllers, you must use the mouse to click on a lot of controls particularly during startup. It is otherwise a fairly polished release.

When TK was a programmer for other game companies as part of a team, he was notorious for writing code only he could understand. Falcon 4.0 was leaked over 20 years ago. It was a long time before real gains were being made in key areas such as updating the graphics engine or supporting anything other than F-16 avionics for non-F-16 flyable aircraft. That fact that TK never finished his Win10 update that began with a failed GoFundMe campaign should tell you that updating the code will take some effort.

The investment it would take to update the game to modern standards by someone other than TK could be more costly than starting from scratch. The only way this moves forward is if TK releases the code for free. Even then, it will require some talented coders investing a lot of their time for free to reverse engineer TK's source code to make useful improvements. To date, TK has no intention of giving up the rights to his software for free and who knows how much money it would take for him to sell it?

I did another test using Virtual Desktop and the OpenXR driver. That works, too. I don't know why it is suddenly working so well, but it is great.

Every now and then, I test to see if I can use VR with Strike Fighters 2. This requires a third party application named vorpX that allows 3d games to be adapted to VR with a correctly configured profile. A long time ago, CAStary made a DX10 profile that worked with Strike Fighters 2. I got a copy of his custom profile and he gave me permission to upload it to the public vorpX profile library. However, as gpu drivers change, windows gets patched, and vorpX is updated, my ability to run Strike Fighters 2 in VR has come and gone. It has been on the gone side for quite a few years. I don't normally use the Oculus driver for my Quest 3, as Virtual Desktop using the WiFi connection gives me the best graphics quality and performance in most VR games, especially DCS World. But that format doesn't work for HiTech Creations Aces High WW2 combat flight sim. So, I updated my Oculus install and used it yesterday. Today, I decided to see if the Oculus/Quest 3 combination would work with the latest vorpX and AMD gpu drivers. It works great. The game looks good and runs between 70 and 90 fps. It takes a little bit of practice to learn how to start the game and toggle between the 3d VR view and a floating 2D view, but once you have that down, it is easy to use and works really well. The main limitation is that SF2 was not designed for VR. In particular, you head movement is limited by default to keep you from seeing the low detail and/or non-existent cockpit behind and below the pilot's viewpoint. Some modern free mods don't have this limitation: if you view is unlocked, you can see a fully detailed cockpit in all directions possibly with animated controls like the stick and rudder pedals. One advantage of SF2 in VR is that the graphics are relatively low quality compared to modern sims, which leads to high frame rates and the ability to fly complex missions with lots of AI. This isn't for everyone and the fact is compatibility isn't guaranteed. Another vorpX update could break it for another 5 or 6 years. But when it works, it is impressive, especially if you already spent a decade or more playing the SFP1/WoX/SF2 series.

First Eagles 1 & 2 were great games. I wish TK would bring these games up to modern standards with full support for VR and being able to look around 360 degrees with full detail.

Not only a great F-4 video, but correctly presents the fact that it is the pilots that ultimately make the aircraft great

Aside from any bias in the weapons data, TK's way to make missions more "fun" is to have AI focus on engaging the player. It is one thing if the AIM-7 and AIM-9 perform better than they should relative to Soviet missiles, it is another thing if every aircraft with overpowered weapons aims them all at you. While TK did quite a bit to make a rivet counter like me happy over the years, he still made a lot of decisions that favored gameplay and fun over realism. Early on he decided to make the game only playable from the blue NATO/Western/US side and complaints about player missile reliability were addressed in patches, particularly after the release of SF2 North Atlantic. If you install SFP1 SP2a (the last major release before Wings Over Vietnam, which marked a major turn in AI dogfighting ability and flight modeling), you will find a given scenario such as 4 x F-4D vs 4 x MiG-21MF plays very differently. The AIM-7s and AIM-9s are far more likely to fail and if you don't have a gun, the MiG-21s have a decent chance. Having played online multiplayer with SFP1/WoX for years, I can say in a 1 vs 1 with player flown F-4s vs player flown MiGs, the F-4 has a hard time winning. The MiG-19 was the best PvP aircraft in the game, having the maneuverability of the MiG-17 and the power of the F-4. The MiG-17 wasn't easy to beat. The MiG-21 was for the most part a fair fight. The deviation between blue and red weapons parameters are but one small piece of the puzzle: it is the AI that really determines the difficulty of a given mission.