streakeagle

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.

The A-X specification kept changing. At some point, the requirement for 30mm cannon was added. Aircraft designs progressed continuously as the specification changed from turboprop to turbofan and adding the gun. Was the A-10 design significantly complete before the gun requirement was added, then modified? Or was a completely new approach used to accommodate the gun? There is a clear history of the USAF request for proposal requirements. There are examples of proposals with turboprops long before the gun requirement was added. I suspect the designs we know as the A-9 and A-10 were not finalized until after the 1970 RFPs (including the gun). Since the gun was exceptionally large, the aircraft had to be designed around it, but they were also designed around the rest of the specifications for armor, payload, maneuverability, range, loiter time, and redundancy/survivability. The gun was just one of many requirements. But its size, shape, and weight definitely affected the overall design. It is not an exaggeration to say the A-10 was built around the gun, but it was also built around the titanium "bathtub" cockpit and the widely separated pod mounted engines. It is false to believe the gun design came first, then prototype aircraft were designed around it.

I have been wondering what happened to KillerBee. We interacted several times via emails/forums because we shared interest not only in Strike Fighters Project 1, but in some of the skins and missions for it. A lot of us old Strike Fighters fans are on the wrong side of the aging curve, so I had feared the worst. Now I know I was correct. I am sad to hear the news but relieved to know what happened. It seems you are as proud of your father as I you should be and I hope you carry on his legacy with pride. Everyone here shares the love of military aviation and Strike Fighters, too. I am glad you got to share that with your father. My son happens to have joined the Marines last summer. He has never taken to flight sims, but he grew up with my models, played some of my sims, went to airshows, and toured some of the best museums; so he knows a little bit more about airplane recognition than most and has sat in many cockpits. I hope you share your love and knowledge of military aviation with others, too. Semper Fi! and may your father rest in peace.