streakeagle

My OFP game night went well. 6 people counting me. We did a few death matches for warmups since most of us had not played in awhile. We did co-op including the much over-played Somlia mod mission. Finally, we did a little team vs team play, which was a lot of fun even if we didn't play to win. Everyone hopped into whatever vehicle they liked (helos, tanks, patrol boats, you name it) and tried to either take out the other's vehicles or cross islands to get to the flag or camp the bridge to protect the flag... lots of deaths with very little teamwork, just a lot of fun and shouting while consuming beer. Wish my wife could go an 2 week vacations with the baby more often I barely had time to install 1.14 ArmA. At a glance, I don't really see any significant performance improvements, but I think my Athlon 64 3800 single core is the bottleneck. I am watching the PC CPU and GPU market and looking for the next big hardware jumps before building a PC. Looks like WinXP is going away... so I may wait until Vista's successor is stable and patched as well (though if driver support continues for XP as long as it did for Win98SE, I may keep XP running on new PCs one way or another).

Some day... I will play online again. Probably when my son learns to entertain himself and won't press the power button or the reset button when daddy is on the computer.

No to question No. 1 from both a political and economic point of view: Any such program would only further threaten already depleted F-22 funding. For better or worse, the F-22 is now in inventory and would become even more expensive and wasteful if production were terminated prematurely in favor of an older cheaper less capable aircraft. Economically, if the US is going to build fighters, they should be based on US designs. If you don't use a capability, you lose it. Better to keep our own engineers busy upgrading existing designs like the Hornet rather than buying someone elses design and shrinking the US industrial base even further. An upgraded F-15 would be as good as any Flanker based design: new radar/avionics, new engines, canards, and maneuvering flaps would make it more capable than an F-22 except in stealth capability, keep the 2nd seat and it simultaneously becomes the best fighter and strike aircraft in the world if you aren't worried about stealth.

While I don't have the buttons wired up yet, I have flown the F-4 in WoV and the feel of the stick is impressive... Even without any kind of centering forces, I had no problems getting within the center deadband to maintain steady state flight. When I move the stick, I get very fine and precise control. It is amazing how much of a difference having the full shaft length makes compared to using the typical short grip on PC joysticks. Here are some photos: The entire project: Detail of the mechanical interface between the stick and the Microsoft Sidewinder USB: Closeup of the grip: The wires for the buttons (I need terminals, relays, DIN rail, and a 24VDC powersupply to finish this part:

Now that I have a b-8 grip with the amphenol adapter, I can list the pin map based on the letters on the connector at the base of the grip: A to E = Thumb Hat Left B to E = Thumb Hat Down C to E = Thumb Hat Right D is unused E = common for all Thumb Hat switches F to K = Bottom Button (pinky switch) G to R = Middle Button (side switch) H to N = Trigger (pulled all the way in to the 2nd stage switch) J is unused L is unused M is unused P to E = Thumb Hat Up S to T = Top Button (top switch next to thumb hat) The trigger feels like it has a two-stage switch, but the first stage does not appear to be wired... I ran out of time last night, but I will double-check again tonight to make sure the 1st stage isn't wired using a pair of the unused pins. The wires I am using come from the stick shaker box below the grip, which has its own connector with a few more pins (and wires). Two of the wires come from the nose-gear steering switch. Meter indications show that the nose-gear steering switch is normally closed and opens when the switch is pressed. I need to figure out how the stick shaker is wired and what kind of power it uses so that I can see if it is operational. My dream of having an F-4 stick for flying on the PC is finally coming true after waiting so long, I can't believer it!

Multiplayer co-op is always 8 vs 8. Players can fly on either side and any aircraft not flown by players are flown by ai. To try it out, simply start a multiplayer co-op session and play by yourself. Multi-player co-op is actually a great single-player quick mission generator where you can control the aircraft and missions flown by both sides and choose which aircraft to fly, including non-flyables like MiGs. While playing co-op by yourself, you can experiment to find out some of the limitations: Fewer ground objects (enemy defenses are only placed at the target). No clouds or carriers. Starting in air near the target (no ground starts or long transits). But, the two sides' aircraft will definitely cross paths, which is the intent for some of the limitations imposed on co-op.

Hook, line, and sinker... How could you?

I finally won a B-8 with an amphenol adapter on eBay. It looks like it is an F-4 grip. If the wiring and switches are fully intact, then I should be able to bolt this baby on and move forward with my project right away. If not, then I can mix and match with the other grip I bought to get one working with the adapter. YEEEEE HAAAAA!!!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080523/ap_on_...th_helicopter_2 It may not have weapons and does not look like an attack helo... but the real threat Blue Thunder posed to our society in the movie was the ability to spy on anybody anywhere without being noticed... until it was too late. This helo is doing an important job and if used properly will only watch people in public places where they are already subject to being watched by other people anyway... But powerful tools almost inevitably get abused. Is the threat of terrorists so great that we should entirely give up the pre-911 way of life and live under the watchful eye of big brother? George Orwell was a visionary... Animal Farm and 1984 showed the world for what it is and what it will be. The standard question for paranoid delusional conspiracy freaks like me is: If you aren't doing anything wrong, why does it matter if someone is watching me, what am I worried about? My answer is: If you don't understand what is wrong with the government trying to monitor everyone, everywhere, all the time, then you need to review human history and in particular the pros and cons of totalitarian governments even when they have been created for the good of everyone. Despite the apparent victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, the ongoing "democratic" process of the West (i.e. North America and Europe) is slowing transitioning our form of government into one is little different than the "Reds" we were taught to fear and hate so much. My mind is slipping away... all this psycho babble from one media story about a helo with big cameras and listening equipment. But didn't the cameras and listening devices used to be reserved for our enemies? Oh, wait, we allowed our enemies to freely come into the country and set up shop, so now we have to watch ourselves since any one of us might be the enemy. Babbling brook that I am...

He didn't say what he is going to do after the Vista releases... rather he explained how he might approach doing some of the requested material. I think he is leaning toward doing a series of smaller projects to build up the planesets needed to do the bigger projects like Desert Storm and Korea. Othewise, bigger projects will be broken up into much smaller parts. Alternatively, he may do some hypotheticals to fill certain gaps in the timeframe and planesets that he thinks would be popular.

It is a crazy world when someone can brag about a crime before they commit it in front of the entire world and the police may not actually be able to do anything about it in advance due to technical problems.

The ideology of politicians is usually very simple: Their goal is to make things better for the people who elected them. Unfortunately, a lot of politicians (perhaps rightfully so) feel the people that elected them are too stupid to know what is best for them. Therefore they feel it is the government's responisibility to decide what is best for them and make the people comply willing or not by passing appropriate laws. At the same time, in order to do the most good, they have to stay in power as long as possible. To get re-elected requires doing things that the people want even if it isn't what is best for them. I submit that in a democratic republic, voters should elect someone because they can trust them to make the right decision even when it is not a popular one. If, once in office, they perform as well or better than voters expected, then they should vote for them again until the politician violates their trust or hits a term limit. Instead, politicians running for office use polls to determine what they have to say to get elected. Once elected, they do whatever they want (which can actually be for the good of the people sometimes, but usually isn't). Then, when election year is approaching again, they start taking polls and coming up with cover stories for the actions they took in office that contradict the ideas they need to support based on the polls. So, the politicians who should either being keeping their election promises or making tough decisions based on what they believe to be the right thing to do are instead alternating between pandering for votes and pursuing their personal agendas whether it is what they people elected them to do or not. Of course the people voting are no better since they will clearly vote for whoever gives them the best short term deal like a tax break rather than choosing a leader based on their knowledge and experience. In my case, I have a tough time finding someone to vote for. The two dominant parties typcially field candidates that will never represent my interest the way I want them to and the independents are extremists and/or simply unelectable due to the dominance of the two main paties. I don't see a way out of this trap and both the Republican and Democratic parties are going to lead to this country's downfall if they don't start doing some good instead of just trying to maintain the status quo.

You have to remember, my idea of fun is reverse engineering TK's flight models to create an FM editor that allows you to predict in-game aircraft performance by scanning in aircraft data ini files. I am a part of the flight simming community (at least as much as time permits me) because I share the same desires as most of the other people here: to enjoy simulating flying various military aircraft in combat situations that are challenging and/or entertaining in some way. But what constitutes a simulation? What is challenging and/or entertaining? Calling me a liar because my defininition of simulator is different than yours is ridiculous. Claiming that the sim market was killed by the demands of people like Stiglr and/or me is also ridiculous. I can and have argue just as easily that the demands of people like us created the flight sim market in the first place. And for the record, I think we can agree that anything that is intended to replicate some aspect of reality could be called a simulator. Just some simulators are higher fidelity than others. The original Atari 2600 Combat game cartridge with tanks, biplanes, and jets was a form of combat simulator... hence the name Combat. Out of all of the Atari games ever made, that was not only the first one I had since it came with the system, but was one of my favorites... The problem is that most of my friends found it boring, they would rather play Pac Man, Asteroids, Galaga, ect. Ace Combat is a sim, and from graphical point of view better than a lot of PC sims. X-Plane tends to focus more on the physics and less on the graphics. Microsoft focuses on variety of aircraft and locations with potentially great graphics, though the physics can be good if someone works hard enough. They are also all games. Kind of like a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square. Consumer combat flight sims are games, but not all games are combat flight sims. Professional flight sims are still little more than really expensive computer games, but their goal is to maximize training value rather than entertainment value. The US Army was so impressed by Battlezone, that they had it adapted to provide tank combat training, but they didn't get rid of the arcade scoring system. Operation Flashpoint is another excellent game that got adapted for real military training. So a game can be realistic enough to be a true training simulator AND a consumer grade entertainment system with minimal differences between the two versions. So why is it so wrong to want combat flight sims that are accurate enough to provide decent ACM training and/or flight operating procedures? Having a difference in opinion on a forum is normal and good... much better than everyone have to agree to one point of view or be banned. But resulting to insults and accusations because my opinions and viewpoints radically differ from someone elses isn't much of a discussion. I am not lying or trying to fool anyone nor was I even trying to rile anyone up... I simply disagree with your assessments of why the flight sim market is the way it is and what could or should be done to make it grow. My 5 year old nephew who plays Ace Combat right now will probably one day learn how to fly F-4s and F-15s from me. My own son is almost 18 months old but can already drive a radio control 747 forward or turn in reverse and has successfully made my $200 RC helicopter take off (he knows what the collective stick does and really loves seeing the helicopter go up and down at his command). In my opinion, that is how you build a community... it starts with exposing children to the fundamentals and taking the ones that show an interest even further. Not stopping production of state of the art sims like Fighter Ops and Black Shark to update old sims that no one flies anymore in the hopes that other gamers might see them as fun as the other shooters, racing games, or whatever else it is they normally play on their XBox or PlayStation. My son may not ever take up flight simming... or he may love growing up being able to try flying an F-4 with a hyper-realistic FM using his dad's actual F-4 stick. That will be his call not mine. To get back on topic, Fighter Ops hopes to be the mother of all flight sims. If you are mainly into flight operations and tooling around the countryside like in FSX, it will have that aspect modeled as well or better than FSX. If the future modules are released, then the combat parts become accessible. But just because there is an option to fly using clickable pits and detailed checklists, does that mean you will have to? The interview makes it pretty clear to me, they will let you scale the difficulty level to your liking, much as SFP1 does. Which, if you think about it, with the settings dumbed down a bit, the cockpits in SFP1 function almost identically to the ones in the F-15 Strike Eagle/F-19 series-- complete with 360 radar and the ability to identify your target and his stats. If you think Stike Commander and F-19 are the be-all end-all sims, get them running on XP and get as many people as possible to try playing them. Anyone who has played a modern flight sim may find them nostalgic, but won't tolerate the step backwards very long. Anyone who is happy playing XBox/PS/Nintendo games will wonder why you are wasting their time.

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 :)