streakeagle

Warbirds 3 won't die for some reason. Not sure how it keeps limping along given that it doesn't have near the subscriber level that Warbirds 2 once had. Given that Aces High is far superior and programmed by the original creator of Warbirds, I can't understand why anyone is still flying there at all.

An old trick for lubing the friction ring on Saitek sticks is to use candle wax since it won't hurt anything: non- corrosive and non-conductive. I suspect the light bicycle grease works better and maybe even lasts longer? But I know candle wax worked fine over years of use on an old X-45.

Exactly how does it favor nVidia gpus? I have been running ATi all along and there have been very few ATi specific issues... in fact, in recent months, nearly every post I see involving graphics issues are people with nVidia cards. I presume you have been using nVidia all along. So, I think my experience with AMD/ATi is a bit more conclusive than your broad statement: Radeon 8500 128Mb <-- hardware TnL problem that could be eliminated using 3rd party tweaker, TK changed graphics engine to get around Radeon 9800 Pro 128Mb <-- by the time I got this card, there were no problems, but FPS were greatly improved by using short horizon rather than normal or far. x800XL 256Mb <-- I think around this time there was a problem with shadows having lines between model and ground, not sure if this was ATi specific No ATi driver specific problems over the past few years with these cards: x1800XT 512Mb HD 4890 1Gb HD 7870 1Gb That's about 10 years of ATi and other than turning shadows off or having to briefly use a 3rd party utility to configure the driver, I simply didn't have any problems that were caused by my card/driver. It is sad but true that the Intel i5 is by far the way to go right now. AMD is slowly but surely going the way of the other CPU competitors: being forced to focus on making low power and/or budget chips since they cannot afford to keep up with top-end performance. That is partly the result of Intel suppressing the AMD market when the x64 chips were smoking the Pentium 4s. But the end result of the x64 success was that it forced Intel to make a better product. If AMD can't keep up, who is going to put competitive pressure on Intel to prevent forcing hot/slow chips like P4s down consumer throats? Make no mistake, without competition, companies get lazy and will take as much money as they can without offering as good a product as they could.

If others like playing ultra simulations of killing zombies or futuristic fighting with hardware that doesn't exist, more power to them. With rare exceptions, I don't want or need to play science fiction games. Whether that fiction is zombies or future hardware. If a developer wants my money, they have to give me what I want. Since I am obviously in the minority and businesses succeed by catering to the majority, that puts me up against the wall. OFP and SFP1 were both targeted at people with my interests. OFP did quite well without having science fiction (though it could be modded to have such). If "indie" developers like Third Wire and Bohemia discover that they can get the real money from the masses, who is left to cater to me? The answer is no one. Except that DCS seems to be opening up a path the other developers claimed was impossible: survey sim covering all of aviation history, but with each aircraft being detailed to the level of a study sim. Still waiting to see ED defy all the claims: big companies say their is not enough money in flight sims, little companies say they don't have the budget to make anything better than flight games. ED may hit the niche just right as Microsoft has folded and X-Plane just doesn't compete with DCS on a lot of levels.

What he said :) Mytai skins/decals + Sundowners generic skins = possibility for very accurate skins of every kind imaginable for naval F-4s. It doesn't take too much work to merge the two.

The difference is, if I wanted a futuristic fps game, I would have been buying one all along. I used to play table top miniatures games all the time. WW3 never happened in Europe and my table did not make a very good model of Germany either... but all of the equipment existed and the data tables were as accurate as possible given that much of the info was at least partially classified. OFP/ArmA is my replacement for those games. M60A3s and M1A1s vs T-72s and T-80s... M-16s vs AK-47s. Whether I am recreating battles that actually happened or experimenting with hypothetical ones that could have happened, realistic tactics got realistic results. SFP1's fictional desert never bothered me too much aside from the fact that it should have been Israel from the start. The aircraft and weapons performed close enough to their real world counterparts that I could test real world encounters and expect comparable results. If I wanted otherwise I would play Tom Clancy games, not ArmA. As long as they keep the real stuff there, I could care less if they have fictional stuff to expand their audience. Might as well build in a stock Zombie mod if it generates more revenue... but if the elements I enjoy go away, so do my dollars. I spend my money on things that cater to my wants and needs, not on things that cater to the masses. They already own console game development, do they have to come steal the few good PC sims that are left on the market? Third Wire and Bohemia games are supposed to tap the niche markets missed by the mega-million blockbuster games, not become just another console game or iPad app that is indistinguishable from the dozens already saturating the market.

This link is from an ad on CombatAce.com: http://lp.vertitechnologygroup.com/flightSim/?o=33&campid=352&creaid=33&cm=D67C5214-D9DD-4F58-8475-1FA942100125 "FreeFlightSimulator" Purports to be an upgrade of Flight Gear with combat. This looks all too familiar. Not even going to bother investigating any further, just asking the question: is this legit? Or does CA need to get rid of it.

Not every body has heard of Flight Gear, and the clones trying to rip you off by selling you free software are all too common. The "honey" for this one is the idea that it fully supports combat. I doubt it contains any more support for combat than can be obtained via the Flight Gear website. There are plenty of people who are not in the online flight sim community and wander to what ever website their browser take them to. The presentations on these ripoff sites look very convincing and only someone already in the know can readily distinguish their tricks. If this one isn't asking for any money, it's not too bad. Plenty of legit software installers try to trick users into installing Google toolbar, Bing toolbar, etc. As long as it is as "harmless" as all the other bloatware (i.e. little performance penalty and easily uninstalled), it isn't as bad as it could be. Arguably, Facebook is as bad as any of them even though quite a few people, including myself, are willing to tolerate the invasion of privacy for the free services it provides.

In TK's defense, he was even accused of stealing a third party shader effect for the improved afterburner effects of SF2. Locking down the text files eliminates those kind of liabilities which could cost a lot of time and money in court even if you are innocent. If you can't read his files, you can't make mods based on them, then turn around and claim those mods as your own IP and sue Third Wire. The reason most games are locked down is to make sure the ones selling the games secure all profits possible from the game. If end users are able to compete with and even surpass the source files, why would people buy the various expansions/DLC? There were quite a few posts by people explaining that they only bought SFP1 and never any subsequent games because they were able to get any aircraft or map they wanted for free and if they ever upgraded to the SF2 series, they only bought one sim again for the same reasons. From the very beginning, TK should have made SFP1 the "core" game and each release after that a module that added features unique to that module. WoV: carrier operations. WoE: clouds, 70s avionics. etc. As Jessie Jackson once said repeatedly in an SNL gameshow skit, "The question is moot!" Nothing has really changed since I bought my first PC and flew the F-4E in Jane's USAF. All I can do is settle for what's available and wait to see if things will improve. On the bright side, both SF2 and DCS are still being actively developed, which means one or both have the potential to improve significantly over time. Whereas, imagine if SFP1 had stopped without WoV and/or WoE ever being released? I am sure there would have been fans similar to EAW still trying to wring every bit of potential out of the unchanging core code, but the majority would have moved on. Sadly, given the lack of support for F-4 Phantoms, I probably would have been one of the ones still playing SFP1. My F-4B flight model worked really well in SP2a... damn near text book performance right down to the instability at high AoA. Instead, TK brought us a lot of improvements that were exciting to experience (and frustrating to debug!).

The trap I am in is that I have to stay with the latest patches to use the latest DLC. If I go back to the revision of the game that has several key features I am currently missing... I lose so much content (and features) that came with later patches. Way back when the unified SFP1/WoV/WoE 083006 was the standard, Korea played much better with SFP1 SP2a. The AI was clearly far superior in the older revision. But so many things had been added between WoV and WoE, both in terms of graphics and game play, that it was too painful to go back to SP2a. So, for a mod to be useful to me, it has to stay current. The fact that most user mods do not maintain currency due to the rapid development of SF2 versus the number of mods available is why I almost wholly run stock installs. Didn't really expect a problem with this one. Oh well.

Why can't TK make this more accessible as an easily edited ini setting or even a graphics option drop down or slider? It was really sad when people couldn't even see runways as they were coming in for a landing. Is there a similar shader file for extending the range to view aircraft? Aircraft used to "pop-up" at the range specified by their data ini file, which was typically at or further than the range they would show up as one pixel when zoomed all the way in... the way I preferred it. It is extremely frustrating from a game play perspective to deal with all the limits currently imposed in SF2 that were not there before.

File mistakes aside, Starry is a "funny" guy in a good way. Enjoy his photos and comments on Facebook

But is it really upgraded and are they charging for it? There are several guys out there reselling FlightGear. These guys are at least admitting it is flight gear, but is this a legit payware project or just the same scam (maybe even by the same people?) misrepresenting their "product" to get people to buy software that is publicly available for free? It seems like they are using this as bait to get you to install their "Rocketfuel Toolbar".

Two problems: 1) I get double range scales on the right hand side of the HUD when in STT (whether I use search or air combat mode to go into STT). 2) Maybe provide a USAF stars-n-bars without the blue edge on the bars per early Eagles. Otherwise, looks good and flies well :)

I would be one of the ones whining about the setting of ArmA3. I have no interest in playing Zombie games either. I want to simulate specific equipment in specific circumstances... usally historically accurate or hypothetically probable with existing equipment/orders of battle. You can like whatever you like... but that's what I like and why games like OFP and SFP1 were appealing to me as opposed to fanciful console games.

Oh, I forgot to mention another feature of DCS long sought after in the SF world: air-to-air refueling :)

A-10C is absolutely a blast just to take off, fly, and land. Instant action Su-25T dogfight with A-10C gave me a quick taste of air combat... again well done. P-51D is challenging to fly on the edge and fun to fight another P-51D. I don't have time to map the controls and figure out how to fly and fight the Black Shark yet, but the feel of the flight models is very interesting. Oh, and the graphics aren't too shabby either!

You may not see it -- but by your own admission FSX sales of your model surely reflected it. No amount of research can produce truly accurate flight modeling for something that never flew. Most planes that sell well are historically significant in some way. They are also normally one of the most capable of their generation. There are some "what-if" planes that tend to get demanded, but even most of those actually had flying prototypes like the XB-70. But an obscure aircraft that nobody has ever heard of that never even reached the flying prototype stage isn't going to draw the sales that a far more famous aircraft like an F-20 Tigershark might get. Personally, I love the SF2 version of the Convair. It is different and fun yet clearly a believable aircraft. However, like most other addon aircraft, it doesn't survive the next patch/game release and I primarily prefer to fly historical matchups using random single missions -- having the Convair pop up was an undesired effect.

Jug, it is simply a matter of reorganizing the WoV/YAP2 files into the SF2 format. The carrier deck mesh is flawed, so you can fall off the port edge trying to use the waist catapults. But someone said that can be fixed by borrowing the stock (or mod?) deck mesh or something like that. Call me stupid! I essentially paid $100 for CVAN-65 (actually $200 since I originally bought YAP1 expecting to get the Enterprise). The model and textures are awesome. I guess it really wasn't worth the money, but the only other version available wasn't even up to SFP1 standards much less SF2. Another problem is the YAP approach of making 2 or 3 different models of the carriers to arrange the deck for launching and landing. I would rather have a single model set up to support both. It would be great if the carrier was re-released in a format fully compatible with the new SF2NA setup. At one point, I had reworked several F-4 skins that were available into a single very accurate one to match photos I had of Enterprise operations in Vietnam. I lost them in a uninstall/reinstall for an expansion pack or something like that. I love the Enterprise. I also got the America before I pissed of 05 and stopped getting notices of new files from him. Funny, I paid in full but didn't get the updates other customers eventually got. He claimed he didn't want my money but certainly didn't give me a refund either. If SF2 had DLC or expansion packs with all the super carriers from the game's time frame, I would have no further need of any YAP files.

As long as the DCS majority is made up of people wanting A-10C level of realism, it doesn't make sense to release a "what-if" aircraft. These guys are already upset that an F-22 is planned when the performance and operation of that aircraft remain classified, so providing and aircraft that never flew is not likely to draw a crowd. On the other hand, if the SF type customers start showing up in numbers who are looking for variety, you might score well and it is a decent opponent for the MiG-21bis given that the imminent 3rd party and FC3 releases and current flyables are not exactly the best match-ups.

SF2 gave the game a facelift in looks, functions, and frame rates. Stepping back to WoV (even with 3rd party models and textures) is not nearly as good as the current revision of SF2. If you can accept that, the YAP stuff looks good and mostly works well... at least well enough to "tell stories". The focus in YAP 2 is reliving specific historical missions as best as possible within game engine limitations. While the missions are exactly as promised, to me the value is in getting nice carriers like an excellent CVAN-65 Enterprise. Aside from the carriers, I much prefer SF2 and the free mods that are available for it. If you have money to burn, give it a try, otherwise, SF2 up to the SF2NA standard for carriers is more than adequate, perhaps even preferable. The YAP models can be transferred into SF2 in case you are wondering ;) One big factor is that WoV in the 083006 format has relatively dumb AI. The AI came a long way since then.

FC2 AMD settings for anti-aliasing: Anti-Aliasing Mode (drop down): Override Application Settings Level (slider): desired level (8xEQ gives me 40-60 fps, 4x gives me 60+ fps) Anti-Aliasing Mode (slider): Super Sample AA awesome AA quality!

If you like creative missions exploiting existing game mechanics to create new ones... YAP is the addon for you. Unusual cargo type missions. Rescue missions. Even a way to simulate in-air refueling. But you have to go back to WoV as TK took away many of the bugs/features the YAP crew was exploiting. Beware of pissing off 05 though. He only wants you using his product if you play his way and kiss up to his point of view.

I don't know what TK is doing, but he has and is certainly progressively changing his business model. It is somewhat obvious that the game is heading more in the direction of MS Flight where you get all the mods you want via DLC. So it is no surprise to me that templates are no longer provided and more and more files are being locked down. This could also be a sign that multiplayer is somewhere around the corner since TK thinks you can't have multiplayer without having everything locked down. Of course Bohemia has proven with the OFP/ArmA series that you can have one of the most moddable games ever made AND one of the best multiplayer games ever made. So, I have never bought that argument. I really don't mind files being locked. The changes to the game are so frequent that I can barely keep up with making sure my takes on the MiG-21 and MiG-23 work after every overwrite. But if I don't like where the game is going and I can't easily mod it back to what I liked... then it becomes totally irrelevant. Which is where I am at. I might buy the Mirage from Oz (though I really want the F-1C!) and the F-4 skins DLC or maybe not. All my money has gone into DCS. I just put $50 into a MiG-21 that isn't even available as a beta yet. TK wouldn't give me a stock MiG-21 at any price and no user mod has fully matched the quality that could be achieved if TK created a stock one (i.e. a radar for the MiG-21 that is as accurate in display and functions as the F-4, F-14, F-15, and F-16). Heck, TK hasn't even brought the stock F-104G into SF2 as a flyable and that is one of the planes that really made SFP1 special. DCS may have one or more F-104 variants sooner than TK ever gets around to bringing the F-104 back into SF2 (and that may be awhile!). It is hard to believe after all the years that I spent on the SF series that I have outgrown it or a competitor has passed it by or TK is heading down a different path or a combination of all three. Countless memories playing this game, though some of my best memories are from playing online. I just flew a fighter sweep in the F-4D over Vietnam in 1972 last night. After flying DCS A-10C all week, it hurt my eyes as much as going back to Jane's USAF after playing SFP1 or going back to Fighters Anthology after playing Jane's USAF. Eye candy isn't everything, but SF terrains looked dated in 2002 and its 10 years later. Technically, LOMAC/DCS terrain is somewhat dated, but was state of the art when it was originally released and runs fairly smooth now... making it look much better than SFP1. I am waiting to see what TK does with the new terrain engine. The resolution is there but if he can only make small islands surrounded by water without bringing a PC to its knees and can't even populate that island any better than SFP1, what is point? TK might surprise me and grab me back. Over the short term, SF2 is still the only sim to use with my real F-4 stick (besides the A-10A in LOMAC/FC2). When A2A releases their F-4 for FSX, I might actually buy an FSX addon and try my stick out with that... but without combat capability what is the point? I am really hoping for a DCS F-4 within the next year or two. I guess I will live with the MiG-21bis and FC3 planeset until a decent DCS F-4 addon appears. While I wait for DCS and SF to progress, I am going to stay away from Third Wire's site. I have nothing good to say and have already spoke my mind there, so nothing more to say. Kind of frustrating after waiting for SF2NA so long. I was pretty happy with the state of the sim a patch or two before SF2NA, but had to stay with the later patches to support the later DLC. I love some of the features of SF2NA: decent F-14A, decent naval combat, and populated carrier decks. But why did anything else have to be broken/changed to add these things?

I got FSAA of some sort to work in FC2. I can't remember what I did, but I have a 7870 and I am using the application profiles provided by AMD with the Catalyst driver. I went to create my own application profile like I use for SF2 and Aces High, but I was warned that I would be overwriting AMD's profile if I did so. So I trusted warning and left everything at Application Settings and upped the AA quality to Super Sample. Not sure because I didn't save the settings and have tweaked them all over the place due to playing/experimenting with other games. FC2 at high frame rates is very entertaining. It is like SF2 on steroids. However, I always get bored of flying modern types and being limited to only a few aircraft. If the SF2 planeset and historical terrains were in the FC2 game, I would be pretty darn happy. But DCS doesn't have to be that much harder and may end up having an excellent plane set and similar terrain locations. Keeping my fingers crossed :)