streakeagle

But if you read exactly what he said, the future of this sim series rides on how well the online sales are doing. I have bought every game on CD that was released in the US on CD and even got SF Gold from Britain. I did not do so for First Eagles and to my knowledge there is no WOI cd yet... I bought all of those games from stores and online despite being one of TK's beta testers with free access to the game during development/release cycles. I have turned around and re-purchased all of the CD games from the online store. In some ways, that is very wasteful of my own money since I already had ever game. However, having all the download versions of the games allowed me to create a single DVD with every install on it. Presently, only the FE and WOI installs need patches, and those fit on the DVD with tons of space to spare for future patches and game releases. More importantly, I gave TK a direct vote of support with my $ rather than having some publisher and retail chain get most of the profits. While my purchases may not make a huge difference in the big picture... if everyone who could afford to do it did the same as me, TK would be in a much better position to fulfill his vision for this game: at least another 20 years of development covering as many historical and hypothetical subjects as possible while continuously refining the core engine to keep up with the state of the art in technology. Who can't fault a guy who provides free updates to the latest game release to everything else he has already released despite having quite a few releases at this point? The main flaw I see in TK's vision is that his one-man show business model means I may actually have to wait another 20 years to see this game engine reach its full potential. I would love it if he could find a way to do more in less time without going out of business or giving up his life outside of work (does he have a life outside of work? ... another limitation of his one-man show: little to no personal free time).

If Fighter Ops ever gets released... I will pay the price even if it is $100 or more. Games that reach the levels they are aiming for should have a price tag to match. And people should be willing to pay it since they already clearly spend far more on things that are worth far less. I truly want them to succeed. However, I won't give them a dollar until they have a worthy product to put in my hands. Even if they never make another module due to the first one not selling, I will be happy if they reach their goals. Of course, I would much rather them make the other modules :) Black Shark is different to me. I am not sure it is going to be anything I want until they have something more than a helo and an A-10. Even if they release the first few modules they have listed for the future... the planeset will make it just a higher fidelity version of LOMAC. I have never enjoyed LOMAC much. The time frame is too modern with combat too dependent on how missiles and ecm devices interact. Whereas Fighter Ops with its training syllabus will require far more focus on stick and rudder skills despite the modern planeset. I will probably buy it, but like LOMAC, it may languish on my hard drive most of the time. If it is ever released, Jet Thunder will definitely get my attention. The primary aircraft of both sides are of great interest to me. Harriers are amazing aircraft and trying to take out their carriers with A-4s and Mirages while dodging SAMs, AAA, and Harriers with AIM-9Ls should be as fun as flying the Harriers. It will be interesting to see how this sim compares with the SFP1 series. But, like Fighter Ops, I have my doubts about this one ever being finished.

Yes... I should have mentioned David Bowie with my other favorites. He didn't follow the trends... he set them. As far as 60's music versus 80's music, my CD collection has a 2nd peak in a graph of songs owned versus release dates: the 60s. The 70's had some great music, but just not as much as the 60's and 80's Likewise, I have some great music from the 90's, but in quantity it just can't compare to the 80's and 60's. Since about 2000, I have only purchased a few CDs here and there. I no longer have the time to hang out in music stores and go through every listening station looking for my next CD. But when I did have the time to do that, I stumbled onto some great music. Most of what I liked went on to become big sellers... like Moby. Obscure music isn't completely outside of the 80's. Planet P's Why Me? was a cool video on MTV around 1983... but getting the original black vinyl or even a used cassette of the album took me years in the early '90s. Along the way, I stumbled on to a 2nd album I had not heard of, Planet P Pink World, which was a story concept on a scale similar to Pink Floyd's The Wall including a pink vinyl double album. If anyone reading this post or even a member of this forum knows who Planet P is and has heard the entire Pink World album, I would be very surprised. Would you believe the most expensive single CD I have is a greatest hits of an ex-Abba member so that I could get one song-- "Something's Going On". I really wanted the song bad and it was no where to be found in the early '90s. Then, in a Tower Records in Berkeley, CA, I found a Euro import CD for $30, which is more than I paid for the Euro import of Pink Floyd's "Relics" CD since the US didn't have that one at the time. Despite all my interest in the music and movies of the period, there is no doubt that I am much better off now living in 2008 looking back on the 80's than when I was actually living in the '80s. One more thing no one here has brought up: While PC games were starting to appear in the early '80s, most games were played on table tops. I still have all of my wargames and original Advanced Dungeons and Dragons books. PCs may make these type of games easier to play and allow finding other players globally, but I had many dogfights and firefights just as memorable than any pc game sitting around a table eating pizza and chips with several close friends (too young to drink beer). Game companies like GDW and Avalon Hill were cranking out as many games as they could covering every aspect of modern warfare and I was buying them up and playing them as fast as they hit the shelves. When I started collecting these games, they were about $15 for a big box full of high quality color printed materials and map boards mounted on good hard board. When I bought my last games in the late 90s, they were about $50 each and the average home owner can print out better play materials than were coming in the box. The end of these games and the companies that made them is the one great thing I lost with the passage of time and rise of the PC.

Why is Falcon 4.0, the most hard core sim ever released not a good game? It can be a sim with all options turned up... Or you can make yourself invincible with unlimited ammo and fly circles popping everything you see. How is that a lie? And there have been plenty of games released at the F-19 level of gameplay... and none of them sell well enough to stay on the shelf. The Jetfighter series hung around for a long time in the budget section, but who bought it? A hand full of flight simmers. How is the SFP1 series not an F-19 type game? It has modern graphics, but gameplay is little different. Where are the crowds clamoring for the SFP1 series? They weren't there when Janes USAF was released and they still aren't there now... which is why TK aims for a very specific niche of people rather than the entire world. The people that liked Stirke Commander want something more now... or they would still be playing Strike Commander. Ever tried playing Fighters Anthology after playing Jane's USAF for a year or going back to Jane's USAF after playing SFP1 for a year? There are some subtle and important differnces between those games, but in general they are the same except for better graphics. None of them are hard-core sims, all of them are fun games... none of them sold well enough to even begin to be compared with mega hit games that companies like EA are churning out. "Certain demographics" not liking them didn't really impact sales at all. Even today, all the crap that goes on in forums has little impact on the big markets because as TK so often points out, less than 1% of the market is even aware of and participates online. The lack of sales occurs when little Bobby or Sue go to the store to spend some money and pick anything but flying games because they just are not interested in them.

If I am so snobbish, why is 99% of my pc time spent playing the lightest sim series available? SFP1 is NOT Falcon 4.0, Jane's F-15, Jane's F/A-18. The kind of games you are claiming would be our salvation already exist... and they were financial failures in comparison to Super Mario Brothers. It is not my fault that 99.9% of the market buys games like Madden NFL, the Sims, and Sonic the Hedgehog. Flight simmers are a minority compared to FPS gamers... and even they are a minority compared to the rest of the game market. When enough people who aren't already in this hobby show that they will plop down as much money for a flight sim series as other people do for the mega games like EA Sports, then we will get more developers delivering more and better products. You think EA and Microprose stopped selling the big sims because the people who bought them complained they weren't good enough? As I said above, it is all about the $. Not enough people bought them in the first place, or they would still be cranking them out like they did in the 1990s... and that is not my fault or anyone else who refuses to buy a game that is incomplete or lacks enough detail and realism to be called a sim. Producing a modern game takes big bucks just for the 3d modeling and texturing. But the mega-popular games like the GTA series can afford it... and I would definitely call that series a simulation, but I don't buy, play it, or care about how realistic it is because I have never wanted to be a criminal. But because a large fraction of the modern kiddies think it is cool to pretend to kill cops and hos, that game sells like no other. On the other hand, I did want to be a fighter pilot and therefore buy and play almost every game that comes out hoping for one that will fulfill my desires better than the ones before it. I don't understand your argument that the downfall of sims is the simmers themselves. How is it wrong for people to want sims to be sims instead of arcadish eye candy? The arcadish fun flight games already exist (and don't sell any better than the hard-core sims). All of the good sims are fully scalable down to an arcade level anyway: Falcon 4.0, LOMAC, and IL-2 series. Falcon 4.0 Instant Action doesn't take 20 minute startup procedures and allows unlimited ammo. An arcade game can't please a simmer, but a sim can easily have options to make it a fun arcade game. So what is it that the simmers are doing so wrong that makes no one buy the sims that have been released? Nothing. Falcon 4.0 was a buggy piece of crap when it was released. Microprose bit off more than they could chew (and spent more money making the game than it was ever going to make in sales). So Micrprose went the way that all businesses that make bad decisions go... out of business. Falcon 4.0 AF is where it is at now thanks to a leak of the source code and a long hard road that no profit-seeking company could have ever followed. I think it is a little unfair that only a handful of the F4 community is now reaping the profits of what was a free and open community project to finish the game right. Ironically, some of the (now illegal) free community mods continue to provide superior alternatives to the current legal payware version. EA was much smarter than Microprose. They had several projects in progress under their Jane's label, including the idea of making a single online virtual war that integrated land, air, and sea to try to please everyone at once and provide the most amazing online experience possible. They suddenly noticed that other games cost far less to produce and had a much larger potential audience than Jane's games. Jane's was a great brand name... but investing further in it given the market trend made about as much sense as trying to sell dog poop in a grocery store. EA did what all good businesses do: cut their losses and run from money losing investments and dump as much as they can into the next big thing. That IS what happened to sims and neither of those situations was directly caused by a few hundred people sniveling about rivet counts in forums only read by the other rivet counters. I am just thankful that a handful of developers think that the void left by the collapse of the big companies might give them enough profits to make it worth their while to give us new sims. TK appears to be doing ok, but he struggled for a long time and with one or two failed releases, could be forced out of the business. The Russians doing LOMAC and IL-2 live under a much different economy. The labor costs are much lower and the potential sales numbers are much higher... but software piracy is practically legal there (which brings up a problem with PC games in general: a lot of people find ways to get them for free). One thing is for sure, if there is an untapped market just waiting for someone to open the flood gates and take the money, someone will find it and ride the wave. The question is are there really enough flight simmers to make it worth anybody's time to make new and better sims? Fighter Ops, Blackshark, and Jet Thunder are going to find out. But each one of those releases has some limitation that will probably keep it from being a runaway success story. Fighter Ops initially has no combat, so why are people buying this instead of FSX? Blackshark is an awesome sim... of a relatively obscure Russian attack helo (as opposed to the infamous Hind). I don't really want to waste my time flying an Apache, much less a Soviet helo. Jet Thunder may be the best sim ever made of the Falklands War... let me see, how many Falklands sims have their been? If it isn't WW2, it just doesn't exist... or if it does exist it doesn't sell nearly so well. I will buy all of them (I have paid for every game I play), but I bet they are going to fail to meet the necessary sales figures to continue improving and adding new features. But if there had not been a sizable group of demanding simmers, none of these games would be under development, much less released. We might still be playing Atari Combat with side views of blocky biplanes and top views of blocky delta-winged jets flying and shooting in 2-dimensions. So I would argue just the opposite of what you have said... we don't need less Stiglrs, we need about 100 milllion or more so that some big companies will see an untapped market and take software developers away from planning the next GTA game and give us a flight sim that would blow away anything we have ever seen. Companies don't care if we complain... as long as they get our money.

I just can't win :( All I want is a grip with the amphenol adapter so I can finish my project. Last time, the grip was an actual F-4 grip in good condition, but with a bid limit of $300, I lost to a guy who bid $305 when the auction ended while I was as work. This time, the grip didn't even look like an F-4 grip (it had the hand guard) and it look badly worn, but just to be safe, I raised my bid limit to $400. I didn't want to spend more than $300 since I have learned the market well enough to know that it was worth at most $250. I was outbid by someone in France at $405. In a way, he saved me, otherwise I was paying at least $355 as a result of yesterday's bidding. I hate to say it, but I think the guys who are using 3rd party tools to hold off on bidding at all until the last possible second are the smart ones. They let some newbie think he is getting away with a good deal, then snatch a pretty good item at a pretty low price at the last second as the auction is closing. Arghh!!! At this rate, I am never going to be able to finish this project the way I want to :( If I had just bought the crappy looking grip with a sticky trigger for $250 I found nearby in Tampa, I would be doing great right now. I held it in my hand and just couldn't see paying $250 for a grip I couldn't use since it needed some serious overhauling. The guy selling it tried to tell me how the amphenol adapter alone was worth $125 on the street... But I wouldn't listen and bought a virtually brand new refurbished grip that doesn't come with the adapter :(

I look for patches almost daily... the one week when I get distracted and they get this one by me!!! Unfortunately, I can't afford to replace all my old P3 PCs with Core2 Duos, so the game night I am hosting tomorrow night will be OFP/Resistance/GOTY as I have been playing for years. Right now, I only have two ArmA licenses since I only have 2 pcs strong enough to run it. I have yet to introduce this game to any of my OFP buddies since I am not happy with how it is running on my best pc. Maybe this patch will change things... or I will have to wait until my next PC upgrade to fully enjoy this game.

A handful of Stiglrs isn't the reason the sim market collapsed. It is all about $. At its height, the Jane's sims never approached the numbers Madden NFL, Fifa Soccer, etc. have brought in. At this point, flight simmers are a very small percentage of a multi-billion dollar industry. In the not so distant past, not everyone had a PC and played games. Only hard-core geeks had PCs. In that group, flight simmers made up a signficant % of the market. The PC market exploded. The number of people that enjoy playing games did not. As it is, I find myself a Stiglr... If the game is arcadish, I simply have no interest in it. I am not going to buy games I don't like. If it is not a decent sim, no money from me. Money spent making kiddie arcade games is money not spent making a game I would actually like to play. Ace Combat series has great graphics but plays like the console game it is... it is almost exactly what you claim we need to bring newbies in. But I don't see people lining up to buy LOMAC and IL-2 after playing Ace Combat. In fact, compared to other console games, it is in the same small niche category as PC sims. I don't think you bait people into this hobby with dumbed down games. I think people in this hobby end up in it because they love airplanes and air combat enough to waste hundreds of dollars and hours simulating it as best they can. At best, a small percentage in the whole flight sim community didn't know they were flight sim nuts until someone coerced them into trying it. The rest sought out this hobby on their own... generally, if you like this kind of thing, your already know it and will end up doing this without any marketing ploys. TK's games are the bottom limit of what I will throw money at. They are on the same level as Jane's USAF in approach, but with mo' better graphics, flight models, cockpit models, etc. Jet Fighter series, Hornet Korea family, etc. never got $1 from me. The only reason TK's games aren't as fun as Jane's Fighters Anthology is he refuses to spend any time on some key features that made FA so popular: simple but powerful mission editor and great support for online gameplay. Jane's USAF had terrible flight models and physics, but it had most of the gameplay features of FA and spectacular graphics for the time with fully customizable skins. Jane's USAF even supported in-air refueling and had an exceptional mission editor. The tutorials and free Thunderbirds addon were nice goodies too. Apparently, TK is happy with the sales he already has. Rather than trying to expand the scope of his games to draw in both newbies and hard-core types, he just keeps on expanding the planeset and maps to get repeat business from the fans he already has. But as long as he keeps making progress, he will continue to get my $ Black Shark and Fighter Ops aren't so conservative. They are taking a chance on spending so much time and money trying to cater to the very small hard-core combat flight sim crowd. I really hope their efforts pay off. I like their goals and really want to see them reach them.

From the radio, 1979-1987 is the source of over half of my 700 CD collection. I start in 1979 because that is when I really started paying attention to songs and recording favorites to cassettes directly from the radio. Some of the music from that time frame transcends the period Pat Benatar consistently produced great music until she had a kid. Her early songs like Heart Breaker and Hit Me With Your Best Shot were powerful. Love Is a Battlefield, Shadows of the Night, and We Belong were a bit softer but made somewhat entertaining videos. Invincible was a return to the power of the early songs. I can't name a single song she made after that. Blondie made some great songs and came back with a few more in the late 90's! Heart of Glass and Call Me are two of my all-time favorite songs, but there isn't a song I don't like on her greatest hits. Pink Floyd preceeds this period, but is my favorite music of all time and definitely released plenty of material in this time frame. One of their greatest albums, The Wall, was released in 1979. Another Brick in the Wall Pt2 still gets tremendous air time on just about any station that plays any kind of rock along with Comfortably Numb, Hey You, and Run Like Hell. In my opinion, The Final Cut is every bit as good as the wall, but it never really made it mainstream... not quite top 40 pop music... very serious, powerful, introspective work. Momentary Lapse of Reason was more of a pop album with great concept MTV videos: Learning to Fly, Dogs of War, One Slip, and On the Turning Away. As much as I like Pink Floyd, there is one artist that really dominated before, during, and after the period we are discussing. I must say, if I like anyone more than Pink Floyd, it is Tom Petty. I won't even bother to list all his great songs... too many. My favorite from the MTV videos is You Got Lucky with its sad post apocalyptic Mad Max theme (the Mad Max movies are a great part of the 80's too!). My favorite album is Southern Accents. While his career was much shorter than Pink Floyd or Tom Petty, Billy Idol was an MTV icon: a mix of powerful songs and soft rock ballads. White Wedding, Dancing with Myself, Eyes without a Face, Sweet 16, Rebel Yell, Rock the Cradle of Love. There is a song on one of his albums that never made it to the radio or MTV, but became one of my favorite all-time songs the moment I heard it: The Dead Next Door http://www.last.fm/music/Billy+Idol/_/The+Dead+Next+Door I can't mention the above artists without mentioning Peter Gabriel. Like Pink Floyd and Tom Petty, I have almost every major album he released from his first to the present. His female equivalent deserves special mention: Kate Bush A lot of her music sounds very bizzarre, but she had some great songs and Hounds of Love was a great album. I love Running Up That Hill. MTV produced lots of 1-hit wonders, too. Wall of Voodoo's Mexcian Radio (Stan Ridgeway went solo and produced some excellent folk songs, most notably Camouflage http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFYxCIr-Byo) Planet P's Why me I could go on and on until I name half my CDs. If someone thinks all the 80s were about has big hair and David Lee Roth in spandex, then they missed some of the greatest pop music that has ever been released. My car is a 1980 Corvette. My shoes are Nike Cortez which have been around since 1972, but I started wearing them in 1980. I am not completely stuck in the 80s, but it is where my heart lies. My music CD collection covers a vast range of music, but if you plot a bell curve of songs versus release dates (and I have), there is a huge spike from 1979 to 1987 with 1983 being the single biggest year in the entire collection.

The quest for the grail produced Falcon 4.0 and Jane's F/A-18... If simmers and developers had lowered their sights neither of these excellent sims would ever have come to be. The key to the future of high-fidelity flight sims is that no one can afford to start from scratch any more. Existing code-bases need to be modular and re-utilized as much as possible to build towards a better future instead of re-inventing the wheel every 2 or 3 years. TK get that. The guys building new sims from the Rowan BoB/MiG Alley code get that. The Falcon 4.0 AF guys get that. The Flanker/LOMAC/FC/Black Shark guys get that. Fighter Ops, if it is ever released, will probably be the last consumer grade high fidelity sim built from the ground up. I hope it succeeds. If they reach their goals, Falcon 4.0 will finally be surpassed as the most detailed and realistic hard-core air combat sim available (which is sad since it is nearly 10 years old). If they reach their goals, it will also be so scalable to be as easy and fun as SFP1 for newbies. While I will take whatever the best is that the market can support, I would never want to send developers the message that I will happily pay out good money for combat flight sims that are not significantly improved over previous releases. If we are going to settle for whatever they can afford to crank out in a year or two, we will never get anything better than Jane's USAF... we might as well keep playing Jane's USAF. When you aim too high, you may not ever hit your target, but you will still hit much higher than if you aim low!

It is interesting to compare the history of Fighter Ops to the SFP1 series: SFP1 was under development for quite a while with an open forum at SimHQ and TK providing info and screenshots every few months. When SFP1 was finally released, it wasn't even finished... the framework was rough and a lot of key features were not even implemented yet. The patches for SFP1 drug on for quite some time, mainly providing bug fixes, but also adding some of the missing key features. WOV patched more bugs, added aircraft carriers, but also introduced some new bugs. WOE patched more bugs, added clouds, vectored thrust, and 1970s avionics/weapons, but again introduced some new bugs. WOI patched more bugs, dramatically enchanced the terrain and AI, but brought even more new bugs (some associated with the new AI). In my opinion, the net result is that WOI represents what SFP1 was supposed to be so many years ago. But TK's 1-man programming show drug it out painfully over many years. Of course he let us play the game and provide feedback while he finished it... but then we were paying to be beta testers. The only software I know of with a longer ongoing development process is Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. Fighter Ops has been under development for awhile, but has not been around nearly as long as "Project 1"'s initial announcements. There is no public release available. In fact, based on the info available from the website, it is just now getting to the alpha stage and still may be awhile before a potential release candidate actually goes into beta testing. In the mean time, you can get development info 3 months after it is released, or pay them to get access to first hand knowledge on the status of this project. I find it strange that anyone would pay money for access to a forum without actually getting the game. Of course, if you are really devoted to the idea, the best way to see become a real release is to lob money at them in the hopes that they are able to finish it before they run out of money and time. Then again, collecting money for a non-existant product is one of the oldest cons and there is actually a fairly substantial history of this happening in flight sims. Hard core flight simmers have so much passion for their hobby, that they will do anything to increase the odds of them finding the Holy Grail of flight sims: great graphics, ultra-realistic physics, totally immersive/believable, and runs smooth as silk on an average PC with no bugs. So, it has happened that every now and then, a con artist comes along, shows some in-game development screen shots, collects some money to finish development, then is never heard from again. I thought TargetWare was vaporware, but you can actually play that game now and it has never gone pay for play as intended since it lacks the necessary manpower to finish it right and is forever under development. In fact, I think its development was so slow, that it was obsolete in many ways before it was even publicly released. I believe Fighter Ops to be a real project, but they have set very high standards for what they want their product to be and have only a small team to try to reach those standards. Their standards are so high, that they might run out of time and/or money before they ever get a chance to publish their product. Initially, it will only be a flight training environment with no combat... I can already get a lot of what they intend to provide from Microsoft Flight Simulator X. In fact, FSX will let you do almost everything their initial release intends to do and a whole lot more! Will the initial T-38 training release do well enough to fund future addons? Even if they manage to stay in business to get to the air combat part, how much longer is that going to take to complete? I have been looking forward to Fighter Ops for a long time, but I am not holding my breath. I wonder what operating system it is going to run on? Vista may already be replaced by the time this game is available.

Cool to see a slick canopy (flush with spine) and small nose. There are some variants that can be made of these early prototypes such as without the IR chin pod and early style intakes. While the bigger radar and bubbled up canopy made the aircraft much more capable, I like the early F-4s with the small noses and sleek canopies :)

while the video card is normally the key factor to frame rates... WOI also pushes the limits on cpu bottlenecks with more objects. The entire SFP1 series can lose fps to sound issues... just fly over Hanoi in WOV, once the flak starts popping all around you, the extra sound loud combined with the visual effects really drops the system down in fps. WOI also has much larger textures, so the video card needs a lot of fast memory that has a big 256-bit bus... it also helps if you have a gig or 2 of very fast system RAM. Those with 8800 GTs and having issues are either facing a driver problem or have one of the above bottlenecks. My x1800xt is getting bogged down by the new shadows. Mirrors tend to get bottlenecked by the cpu, and my cpu is loaded down very hard by WOI, so I am leaving mirrors off for the first time in years. Balance your system... don't waste money on high end video cards if you don't have a cpu and ram to match... and a sound card that does not offload anything to the cpu can help quite a bit too. Unfortunately, quite a few sound cards are little better than an onboard chipset when it comes to processing 3d sound for games. The ones that do process game sounds without bogging down the cpu tend to be the more expensive cards.

Teamspeak Overlay is a cool utility available for free download that allows you to see what is going on in teamspeak while playing a game. But it doesn't work right with the Third Wire SFP1/WOV/WOE/WOI series. It only appears on the menu screens and disappears once you are in flight. I found a similar utility called VoiceOverlay that is also available for free download here: http://halb.servercamp.de/proggi/VoiceOverlay/home_en.php This works with Teamspeak or Ventrillo and it works the way it should. So if you are playing online and using Teamspeak, you can see who just talked on your channel, who is connecting/disconnecting, and list everyone in your room with an optional key toggle. The exact type of information and presentation is configurable on an options page, and there is even an optional key to toggle the display on and off in case you want to take clean screen shots.

While I have loved the idea of having a merged install as WOE permitted automatically with WOV, the game engine isn't designed to work very well in that format. I still like the idea of a fully merged SFP1/WOV/WOE install so I can create any matchup I want, but at this point I like to spend most of my time flying somewhat historically accurate situations generated randomly in single player. Random missions will be anything but historical with a merged install: screwed up nationalities and wrong aircraft in wrong place at wrong time. So, I actually prefer to have all my installs completely separate and stock/patched while keeping a spare install or two of SFP1, WOV, or WOE as needed for modding and merging. WOV and/or YAP have been my favorites, but I find WOI to be equally entertaining and will spend more time on it when I have a PC strong enough to keep 60 fps with all graphics settings maxed out. The differences between WOI and the others is just too great right now... I want the final patches before I even thinkg about merging any stuff to/from WOI. I want to play WOV with less reliable missiles, ground clutter, and AI that will get in close and spank you even if you come up from behind on a recon flight :)

Canards can perform several functions. In a tailless delta, if the canard is movable as on the XB-70, it replaces the elevator. It has a big advantage in this role since the elevator must push down on the tail to stabilize the aircraft and therefore subtracts from the lift of the wing. The canard on the otherhand, pulls up the nose to stabilize the aircraft, which adds to the lift. The Wright brothers chose to use a canard on the original Flyer for this very reason (they were struggling to get the best possible lift/drag ratio to make up for their lack of power). The disadvantage to the canard in this role is that having the stabilizing force forward of the wing is inherently unstable. Almost all planes after the Wright Flyer used a tail instead of a canard for this reason. Modern fly-by-wire solves the stability problem and makes the canard superior to having a tail in most situations. A movable canard is a huge advantage for tailless delta winged aircraft. Without the canard, they cannot have landing flaps, as the trailing edge flaps are the sole means of controlling pitch. With a canard, the wing can lower the trailing edge flaps and the canard can push up to counter the resulting pitch moment, providing the maximum amount of lift possible for STOL. Small fixed canards are not nearly so useful, but can provide much better airflow over a wing at high angles of attack for very little cost in drag and weight. They pretty much provide the same benefits as leading edge root extensions by helping the air flow stay attached to the wing at angles where is would normally separate and lead to stalling. The canard generate vortices which energize the air over the wing to keep it flowing despite the high angle of attack. Vortices are a drag penalty, but the turbulent separation of airflow from the wing is both a huge drag and lift penalty. So there is a useful net gain in lift and drag despite the drag caused by the canards. The only time you should see canards moving down on an aircraft is when the pilot wants to lower the nose and/or reduce the angle of attack. In level flight and sustained turns, the canard should generally be in a position to cause lift or be in a neutral position.

Like France never stopped shipping aircraft and weapons when their customers differed politically. Israel switched to US arms and produced its own Mirages after France cut them off. Argentina could have done much better in the Falklands if they had access to plenty of Exocet missiles. When you buy advanced aircraft from nations powerful enough to design and build them, they always come with strings attached... guaranteed.

I got the chance to win an F-4 grip with the amphenol adapter I need on eBay... and blew it. I didn't set my max limit higher than my public bid... and got busy at work today. At 7:30 am I was still the winner. By 11:00 am I was a loser... by $5. I couldn't afford to go much higher, but I might have jacked him up to $400 if I had been online at the time. The guy who won it just wants the grip, so I may get the amphenol adapter from him. But, I would have liked to have had the grip as well since it IS an F-4 grip with no hand rest at the base, unlike the one I bought. At a minimum, I hope to get the full part number for the adapter from the buyer and/or seller so I can try to find one through the same supplier that got me my grip. This is the only thing holding my project up. I have the x and y axis working fine and just need to mount the grip and wire up the buttons.

It depends on how you measure "better". TKs are not espeically realistic when you measure performance, but generally match relative values (i.e. the F-4E out of the box in SFP1/WOV flies more like an F-16, but is still easily outturned by the MiG-17). Addon aircraft FMs tend to shoot for realistic performance which makes them less capable than they would be against stock aircraft if TK had modeled them. Also, addon aircraft are far more likely to give the AI trouble. There are plenty of addons with enjoyable flight modeling... But none of the few doing FMs knows what criteria TK is using to build his and therefore will never have FMs that fit perfectly into TKs unique balance of playability, realism, and AI friendly... and when it comes to stability parameters (as opposed to performance figures), I don't even think TK has fully mastered his own game engine. From a technical standpoint and seat of the pants feel, the addon FMs frequently are much better than TKs, but in terms of game balance and AI when mixed with stock aircraft, I don't know of any addons that mix well with stock FMs. The only way to remedy this situation is to have the same group of people following the same standards provide FMs for every aircraft from stock to most obscure addon. Until that happens (which apparently already did for First Eagles before the addon screwed things up), I personally don't like to fly missions with stock versus addons. I much prefer having all addons or all stock and with multiplayer limiations making it favorable to stick with stock installs... that is where I spend my time.

The F-4 can and does continue to serve quite successfully on the modern battlefield... that's not my opinion, it is a fact. In the case of the now retired F-4G, no other aircraft has stepped up to replace it... certainly not the F-16s which are now attempting to fill the Wild Weasel role. Perhaps it would be futile to put F-4s up against F-22s, but according to exercises the F-15, F-16, F-18, MiG-29, Su-27, etc. are all woefully obsolete as well... Of course there are literally thousands of those other aircraft operational all over the world and only a few hundred F-22s are ever going to be built. You are free to believe whatever you want, but the many air forces still operating the F-4 obviously believe differently than you.

I agree with your advice... but it seems to a certain point, TK already has his own plans and isn't really looking for suggestiongs at all.

An F-4, like any aircraft, is a weapon system. Certain parts of the F-4 have been updated (radar, ecm, missiles), others still could be (engines). Both the age and the original design limitations of the airframe ensure that the F-4 will never be able to mix it up with agile dogfighters... but then that was the way the F-4 always has been from the start. Aside from agility, what does an F-16 or F-18 do that the F-4F+ ICE, F-4E 2000, F-4EJ, and updated F-4Es in Greece and Turkey can't do? The F-4's payload capacity has never been an issue... it is still a great bomb truck and 8 air-to-air missiles is still a decent warload for interception. If there are any weapons it can't deliver due to fire control lmitations, that is nothing that can't be fixed with some hasty re-wiring and a few black boxes or software updates. There are two ways to deal with stealth capabilities: 1) make your platform stealthy (which isn't going to happen with the F-4, but what aircraft currently in service are truly stealthy beyond the B-2, F-22, and F-35?). 2) give your platform sensors which overcome stealth (i.e. advanced radar and infrared/thermal imaging). The F-4 is no more obsolete than my 1980 Corvette... it is old and maintenance hungry, but otherwise does all the jobs it always did as well as it always did. For many nations, upgrading their F-4 fleet is so much cheaper than buying new planes. With the right upgrades, it is not a bad option as long as you don't frequently get into dogfights with F-16s, F-18s, MiG-29s, or Su-27s. In the case of Iran, it would be interesting to see how operational their F-4 fleet really is. Are they just stock F-4Es as delivered degraded by age and lack of decent spare parts? Or have they been updated to remain competitive against much more modern systems owned by neighbors? Even if they are pretty much stock, they still have guns and can still competently shoot down anything short of modern agile fighters (and could even do that with good tactics--think F4Fs versus A6Ms). If they face the US and their F-4s get toasted by F-15s and F-16s, they won't be doing any worse than any other air force that has faced the same combination, including MiG-29s. Part of the US success (and allies employing the same aircraft) has been the design of the aircraft, but more of it has been the improvement in weapons systems combined with excellent pilot training and outstanding maintenance crews.

I would not submit LOMAC as an example of a game that succeeded because it was focused on Soviet forces. LOMAC was actually an upgrade of Flanker which was purely a Soviet flyables game. While Flanker was an excellent sim, its lack of US aircraft held it back in this market. What made LOMAC a better option in the US besides the fantastic graphics was the addition of the F-15 and A-10 to the planeset. The refusal to make an F/A-18 addon and instead adding a more detailed Su-25 did not go over well in the mainstream US market. The idea of a Soviet helo being the next expansion, then ultimately breaking off into a separate game engine largely limits LOMAC's future given its limited moddability. IL-2 followed a similar path. While its graphics impressed many people and it had a good reputation as a complex/realistic sim, it was never going to be the success it has become in the US until people could fly P-51s, P-38s, P-47s, F4Us, and F6Fs. The European market is somewhat different, but the majority of the US market clearly wants the option to fly US equipment FOR the US as the "good guys". It will be interesting to see how Black Shark does in the US. As a collector of flight sims, it may go on my shelf. But like Falcon 4.0 AF, IL-2 series, and LOMAC, it may sit idle on my hard drive since it probably won't meet my current needs in a flight sim. Not to mention the fact that I am not particularly interested in flying that helo :P I personally like a balanced sim with equally modeled/detailed flyables for both sides. TK's sims out of the box don't meet this criteria, but the addons available clearly remedy this problem. The problem with addons is that they are not made to the same standard as the other stock aircraft. Only TK knows exactly how to balance the flight models so that they have the right amount of playability versus realism to be compatible and comparable to the other stock FMs. TK is also fairly good at providing the right amount of polygons/texturing to keep frames rates stable no matter which flyable you choose (WOI has set a new standard, so this isn't as true anymore until TK updates the older planes like the F-4 to conform to the new higher quality standards).

The F-4 is going to outlive the F-15 that replaced it in US service. I wouldn't be surprised if there are still F-4s in service when the F-22 is withdrawn from US service.

I am not sure where the WOI update is taking the series, but I find myself unable to go back to earlier revisions once TK gets everything nailed down until the next big release. In my opinion, SFP1 SP2a was better than any of the SP3 or SP4 (current state of SFP1/WOV/WOE) patches in terms of flight modeling and AI... but who wants to give up clouds, aircraft carriers, 1970s avionics, etc. ? A lot of things were arbitrarily changed or even outright broke in SP3. SP4 with final hotfix was a solid release, but some of the broken things remained broken. WOI didn't fix some of the things broken by SP3/SP4 either. I am sure the code is so complicated and large at this point, that every little alteration TK makes to add new features or fix broken ones somehow causes unintended consequences. TK also has a tendency to make a few typos in the ini files, which leads me to two concerns: 1. How many errors in the ini files has the community missed and are still causing some weird bugs? 2. How many other typo errors exist in the rest of the code that are causing some of the problems being reported, but we have no way of knowing they are even there much less finding and fixing such errors?