streakeagle

I know you are primarily interested in the SH-2, but the SH-60 simulation in Dangerous Waters lets you fly the same missions in very realistic detail, albeit with more modern hardware. Skip through parts in this video introduction to glimpse everything the Dangerous Waters SH-60 has to offer, no other sim even comes close for an ASW helo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNCp7Jdv-zE

You have keep in mind that Fleet Command is very old. This means the graphics are pretty ugly, even with the mods (the SH-2 has a mirror texture between left and right halves, so "NAVY" looks wrong on the other side). It takes some magic to get it running well on Windows 7, and is even harder still to get going on Win 8 and Win 10. The graphics are pretty ugly with only the following resolutions available: 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200. On a typical 1920x1080 monitor, you have to choose between 1024x768 and 1280x1024 and whether or not to stretch them to fit the screen. The old NWP mod series provides an awesome array of old ships and planes, but is no longer being developed. The current release version, NWP 19.2 bug fix, has problems... it didn't work at all for me. Fortunately I had downloaded the previous NWP 19.2 without the bug fix some time ago, and that worked great. The game is still very entertaining and challenging if you like Cold War naval combat, but it is still unstable and can crash... especially on bigger missions.

Reverted to earlier version of 19.2 (pre-big fix release) and got a very stable setup. Here are some shots:

I am partially in error. Out of the box, Fleet Command doesn't come with the older ships. You have to download and install the "NWP 19.2 mod". I can remember having NWP installed almost as long as having Fleet Command. It greatly expands the ships, aircraft and weapons of Fleet Command. But upon attempting to play with NWP installed, I am having stability issues. I did get a Knox class destroyer to launch an SH-2... then the game crashed to desktop.

Helo ASW sims are very hard to come by! The closest I can get to your request is "Dangerous Waters", which has crewable ASW aircraft, including the SH-60R Seahawk. http://www.sonalystscombatsims.com/dangerous_waters/ The graphics aren't so great and you don't get this for the flight model. This sim was originally just 688i submarines, expanded to more subs, then in this final variant, covered surface and air as well. The next closest game I can think of is the even more dated "Fleet Command" still available on steam. It is a "you are the admiral commanding the fleet" kind of game, but retains 3d graphics and direct control of individual aviation units. You most certainly can perform ASW missions with an SH-2 in that game, just not very high fidelity and no cockpit view.

Well, it seems after all these years, there was no procedure for detecting or preventing this problem. But in my experience in the Navy, the military never allows the blame to not be assigned to someone even if a rational person would place the blame on circumstances beyond anyone's control. There will be a "root cause" and he will have a name. The detent is a safety to prevent the pilot from making a mistake, but the pilot still inadvertently moved the throttle per the report. So to place the blame on a tech that had no procedure to detect or prevent this problem... and it probably failed at this very moment, or it could have been noticed by the pilot on the ground during preflight/takeoff/flying the show. In a just world, such a situation would be a "lesson learned", but in the military someone will be part of the "root cause" and punished in some way. On a sub, the captain usually pays the price when anyone under him fails in a way that has catastrophic results.

Accidents happen. Fortunately, in this case the pilot lived. What the articles don't say is whether the pilot is being punished in any way for this accident. The real problem was the idle stop interlock failure, which wasn't really the pilot's fault. But someone is usually held accountable for the loss of a multi-million dollar aircraft, and it is often the pilot, especially when his own action, the "inadvertent" movement of the throttle, ultimately caused the loss. I know what it is like to make a mistake and be held accountable... it doesn't feel very good.

I am a big fan of MiG fighters. So many great designs serving so well over so many years. It is sad to see the passing of such historical figures... but inevitable. The USSR and its MiG fighters were (and are?) the enemy of my country, but I still love and respect the aircraft, and the men that designed and flew them.

Despite the performance loss, I am migrating my Wings Over Vietnam 24/7 unattended dogfight server to the Oct2008b patch level. This will make it easier for others to join with a pure stock install without the CTD effect of the earlier version without mods. You can go here to see that the server is available (Wings Over Vietnam counter > 0) and whether anyone else is there (Wings Over Vietnam counter > 1). If any of the old veterans and/or myself are there, we will be happy to help others overcome obstacles to flying. I am now in the process of evaluating Evolve as a replacement for Hamachi in creating a virtual LAN to overcome connectivity issues. Apparently Evolve can also replace Hyperlobby as a network for meeting up and Teamspeak as a tool for in-game voice chat. This all sounds very promising if it works as advertised.

Some shots with Sony Tuckson:

yubba is still showing up pretty much every night I monitor hyperlobby. I have enjoyed flying all the different aircraft. The flight modeling in the SF/WoX series did not match real performance as well as it could have. The engine was capable of very realistic behavior, but Third Wire felt fun and easy was better than realistic and hard. Having said that, the "Hard" flight model always entertained me. Each type of aircraft and sometimes even minor subvariants had quite unique flight performance and characteristics. It was only the tuning to produce a simple mushed out stall easily recovered rather than having most planes easily go into departed flight that made the flight models seem so similar to those who never flew them very much. In this screenshot, I am in a MiG-19 with yubba's MiG-19 in my sight. In multiplayer, you can only take a screenshot about once every minute or two to prevent cheating by taking screenshots to create lag. So, I couldn't get a good shot of the hits/damage/explosion that followed shortly after this screenshot :)

Real life has kept me busy over the weekend. Next weekend I will be out of town. But I will try to be online/have the server up from Monday to Thursday this week. Having the server up doesn't seem to do much good, but it does act as a beacon to let people know that I am up and running. I get better results by actively hanging out in Hyperlobby at the same time the server is up, but I get distracted easily and don't always see someone pop in while I am browsing, etc. Windows 10 continues to be a showstopper. Windows 7 and the Evolve friend finder/voice chat/vlan software are winners for this application. I hope to see some more faces eventually show up.

Of course the F-35 can dogfight, but so can the F-4. Their performance characteristics are very similar. But against Su-27 and MiG-29 in a WVR situation, they will lose against even average pilots unless. The F-35 wasn't built to dogfight, but to rely on stealth to deliver bombs without facing air-to-air threats head on. If modern radars or other sensors render the F-35's stealth worthless, you end up with an F-4. Which will still get the job done, but with unacceptable losses by modern standards. Now suppose you simply continue to use the much superior WVR dogfighter F-16 instead of buying the F-35. In low intensity conflicts, the F-16 works great, and if one goes down to AAA/golden BB, it costs a whole lot less to lose on. In an all-out WW3 scenario, if the F-35's stealth works as well as the brochure claims, it will fly a whole lot more sorties before being shot down than any F-16... but it needs too since there will be a lot less of them due to cost. But if stealth fails to work as advertised, you will have high losses and not enough aircraft available to replace them and no money left to buy more. Stealth has always seemed more costly than its benefits to me. If modern sensors can see them at 40 miles, the money and performance lost to making a fighter or bomber stealthy is wasted.

ok, Sixgun reports that he got DX9.0x installed and WoV is running fine on his Win10 PC, however DirectPlay functionality is not verified yet. He was unable to join the server and I wasn't around to troubleshoot. I also saw a new login on the server when I got home today, "legend". This could mean two more actively flying, with a few more still possibly in the wings. 8 would be a good number with either 8 co-op or 4 vs 4 teams. My dream is 16 for 8 vs 8 teams. I think the most I ever saw on my server was 12. I have lost the screenshot of that event.

Looking for something else, I found this topic and thought I might of completely missed this post. I was nowhere near the first page, but I didn't miss it. However, I missed one more detail: Thank you for funding Third Wire's First Eagles. It remains my preferred sim for WW1 flying. The Third Wire engine and bi-plane combat were a perfect fit :)

How things have changed so much since this story/post :(

Some more pics with Creature, Yubba, and myself:

It has to be extracted from the terrain cat file, which requires the old SFP1E Cat extractor tool... a utility that is available here for download. But discussing the problem with other win 10 users and doing some internet searches, it seems the real issue is that Win 10 doesn't come with DX9, but at some point received a patch that included a d3d9 dll to provide backwards support. But the new dll somehow doesn't work very well and causes low fps or isn't even recognized as being DX9 by some games. So, I saw two paths for getting Win 10 to support DX9 properly: 1. Find a way to trick Win 10 into allowing the installation of DX9 given that the DX9 installer refuses to run since it recognizes a newer version. 2. Download the required dll files and past them into any old games that need DX9. I don't have a machine to try either path, otherwise I would develop a sure-fire solution and make it available here.

I am running on Windows 7 64-bit and have all the old games running as well or better at they did on XP. However, I am hearing from multiple sources that Windows 10 runs the old games at horribly low frame rates after a certain patch level. Everyone I have spoken with is running an nVidia card, so it may also be a gpu driver issue. I have no ability to replicate and troubleshoot the issue because I don't have a single Win 10 machine or an nVidia gpu. The games may run fine prior to the 083006 patch. The problem is definitely there in the final Oct2008b patch. The 083006 patch level was the gold standard for mods, if it won't run well at that level, that would be very bad. The 083006 patch level requires an edit to the terrain data ini files to turn off the shaders taht cause a CTD or black screen when quitting a mission. [NormalTextureMaterial] UseEffectShader=FALSE [WaterTextureMaterial] UseEffectShader=FALSE

You should absolutely test this. Install from the CD, patch it up to Oct2008b (last patch available from Third Wire), then try to join the unattended 24/7 server. If you can get into that, then it is just a matter of finding a schedule where the guys who are flying are online at the same time. On weekdays, I may be monitoring the server as early as 6 PM EDT, but typically more around 8 or 9 PM up to about midnight. But if I get distracted, I may not see you in hyperlobby or in the server... this weekend, Creature's first join of the server was missed by me, because I took a nap. But if we get enough guys flying, people living in the different time zones will have different overlapping schedules. Hopefully, we can find an hour or two when everyone can show up at the same time. It is really fun if the internet and networking issues don't get in the way.

A couple of shots of my first online with Wings Over Vietnam in over 9 years!

That is good news :) If we have Crusader/Supacharga, Creature, Yubba, and myself all participating at the same time, we have enough for some fun flying.

Anyone who ever played the SF/WoX series online has to recall how horrible the DirectPlay networking interface worked over routers. The networking protocol was designed for LANs and worked okay when each PC had its own unique public internet address, but just a few years later, everyone was using routers to share high speed internet among multiple PCs and support wireless. Network Address Translation (NAT) is the protocol used by routers to allow local PCs with locally assigned network addresses to share a single public address. Firewall software (and hardware settings on routers) was designed to block unwanted incoming internet traffic as well. These technologies wreaked havoc with the simple server/client communication requiring open two-way communication, with the client needing to be able to scan for hosts, and the host needing to accept requests to join from new clients. The solution SFP1/WoV/WoE/WoI players relied on for overcoming this problem was a free Virtual Private Network (VPN) server system called Hamachi. Hamachi allowed all of the computers that wanted to play to be assigned addresses that made it seem like they were all physically connected to the same switch -- which is exactly what DirectPlay prefers to have a good chance of working correctly. However, Hamachi's business model didn't appear to work so well since most people got what they needed using the free version. Years later, the company that bought them still exists, LogMeIn or something like that, but the simple, free VPN software known as Hamachi is long gone. Now, here I am nearly 10 years later trying to stir up Third Wire SF series multiplayer. I have succeeded in hosting via Hyperlobby and configuring my router to overcome NAT/Firewall problems, but it would be much better if Hamachi was still around to help those less capable of configuring their modern hardware and operating systems to run 13 year old games. I found the answer and it worked pretty well last night: https://www.evolvehq.com/ Evolve is a mix between the old GameSpy/Hyperlobby style chat rooms, Hamachi VPN rooms, and Teamspeak voice chat. People who played SF series online typically ran all three types of programs. Evolve provides a single application that easily gets the job done without needing any expertise in configuring routers and software. One successful night isn't much of a track record, but it was a great start :)

I am sorry I couldn't join the server while you were in... the game just wouldn't cooperate. When I fly, I need to kill the server and host with my pc to minimize routing conflicts. Sometimes it works ok, other times it doesn't. If you can register with evolve and install the client, you can join the lan party linked above to get in rather than hyperlobby... and it includes voice chat with everyone in the evolved lan party.

Second person has joined the server: Yubba. But I couldn't get my primary PC to join while Yubba was in. I was able to do this last night, but not tonight. That is just how finicky the DirectPlay interface is when faced with a server behind a router trying to deal with internet clients and local clients at the same time. At a minimum, two outsiders have been able to join my Hyperlobby server without my supervision, and that is a good thing! This means that the unattended server will work for most people with minimal trouble even if I can't join it at the same time.