streakeagle

In SFP1, you could assign a negative fuel flow value to an engine. So I think they rigged it so you refilled your fuel tank by entering the throttle setting where flow was negative or something similar. Zerocinco was somewhat irritated by the fact that TK patched the code to eliminate negative fuel flow. TK was merely fixing a bug, but 05 took it personal as if TK was trying to hurt his business model by releasing patches/new games that were incompatible with his previous work. To be fair, Razbam finally gave up since patches were coming out too frequently and breaking their SF payware, too. Ironically, just as Razbam gave up, SF2 has become extremely stable. I really wish the market would have supported the SF series better. For the longest time the SF series was steadily progressing into a better game and sim. The sudden stop is sad and frustrating.

Just one problem after another... but then that's what life seems to be all about. Just some people seem to get more than their fair share of problems. Small complication... but progress nonetheless. I don't envy you having to take all those medicines (or all the problems that require the medicines for that matter). Sometimes the cure can be as bad or worse than the disease! Look on the bright side, surely by the time you are over all of this and feeling better, some new flight sim or addon you like will have been released and you can have some fun trying it out.

Not much can be said other than I am sorry. At least the long stretch of suffering is over so the healing can begin for everyone else. You have had a stressful stretch of years. I hope this will mark a turn toward good times for a long while after you and your family have recovered from this sad, painful loss.

I am sorry the I5 is too pricey for you, as it is the way to go. The 3750K proved to be a great choice for me. I am not an overclocker, but my ASUS motherboard/tuning software made it easy to safely squeeze additional performance out of it without aftermarket cooling or stability issues. The I3 isn't that much worse than the I5. I loved my old AMD Athlon 64, but Intel has been smoking AMD on performance since Core2Duo and even ties or wins on cost effectiveness for gaming with the "cheap" I3 rivaling the best of the AMD processors and the I5 outright beating them. The dilemma I faced was whether to get the I5 or I7, and from everything I read, the key difference was Hyperthreading, which needs to be turned off for gaming to avoid latency issues giving the I7 only a small advantage on memory cache and stock clock speeds. So I settled on the I5 as the best bang for the buck. Most games only use 1 or 2 cores, or at most 4 cores. So going for 6 or more cores isn't particularly cost effective for gaming.

I have never focused on modern aircraft, my focus for Jane's FA, Jane's USAF, and SF series has been to fly Vietnam era aircraft, so I haven't ever installed or played the ODS mod for SF. I am curious. Looking at the screen shots, it looks like flying the F-15E in SF2 rivals/exceeds flying it in Jane's USAF, leaving multiplayer and refueling as the only major features missing compared to Jane's USAF. I never played Jane's F-15E much. The graphics, even when played on a Voodoo 5500, were just too terrible for me (melting mountains were the most annoying thing). Jane's F/A-18 never held my attention long either. I didn't enjoy flying the Super Hornet, I wanted the more agile F/A-18A or F/A-18C as I favor air-to-air over ground pounding. The SF series was the right game at the right time for me, it just took a long time for it to expand its feature set and squash the bugs: SAMs, ECM, clouds, aircraft carriers, and repeated tweaks to FM and AI. Even now, SF2 is the only game to fly if you want to fly combat in Cold War era aircraft.

Even without those features, SF2 already has that title in my opinion. No other combat flight sim since Jane's Fighters Anthology has permitted such a large planeset to be enjoyed over such a large terrain set. The stock options alone are impressive... add in what you can download for free from CombatAce and buy from RAZBAM or YAP, and you have the combat flight sim equivalent to MS Flight Sim. The next closest survey sim is Jane's USAF, and even in its most heavily modded SuperPro form, it never even came close to what the SFP1/SF2 series offered. The multiplayer issue can be partially fixed by going back to SFP1/WoX. For a sacrifice in graphics, electronic warfare detail/accuracy, and AI behavior, you can have enjoy co-op or deathmatch gameplay. The early SF2 3d models can be imported into Wings Over Israel when it has the Expansion Pack 1 installed. That's right, you can have multiplayer AND SF2 aircraft/cockpit models, but the RWR functionality has to be retrograded to the SFP1/WoX level. Multiplayer was unpopular with the majority of the original fanbase for SFP1/SF2. Go to his forum. You can see that in later years, almost anytime I posted anything at all advocating multiplayer or even simply responded to someone elses post about mutliplayer, one or more anti-multiplayer fans would chime in requesting me to shut up. For some reason, the changes they wanted outranked my interest in the improvement or (after the release of SF2) return of multiplayer. TK assessed that the cost effectiveness/profitability of programming multiplayer (as opposed to shoehorning in a basic DirectPlay interface per SFP1) just wasn't there. He always stressed how much of a minority the online crowd was but I suspect the flip side of the coin is that TK lacked the skills/experience necessary. Achieving anything like other mainstream multiplayer flight sims in terms of net code efficiency would take too much time to expand his knowlege or too much money to hire someone else. Instead, he struggled to improve the terrain graphics per the majority of fan requests, and still bankrupted himself. Now SF2 fans are left with a new terrain/environment system that is not particularly mod friendly, doesn't support large maps, causes a big hit on performance, and will never be improved due to SF2 game development apparently being frozen indefinitely. Many people don't even play with the latest patch level because of some problems that it causes that won't be fixed. All "new" modder terrains still use the original map system. In fact, modders duplicated the Iceland map of SF2NA to improve performance for those having problems with the new Iceland map. Perhaps SF2NA would have been equally successful in terms of sales, but more profitable due to reduced costs if just the F-14 and naval operations had been added? Now the only news from TK is when another plane is added to one of the mobile apps. The mobile apps could be more fun if they had multiplayer, too! Simple head to head fighting like the SFP1 deathmatch could be fun.

I hope you truly are "almost done".

If you fly a mission with just a few aircraft and minimal defenses, it will run great. But one of the worst environments that slows down the game is in the vicinity of Hanoi in 1972. There is just a tremendous volume of things going on: flak, SAMs, countless aircraft. The game will not take advantage of four cores.

Game loop does not cause fps drops, game loop responds to your fps. Game loop is how fast the game processes all of the data: AI, physics, etc. The game loop normally runs at x1: the same rate as your frame rate, but when your frame rate drops off, the game loop runs faster. This ensures all of the other functions are maintained at an acceptable rate despite your PC's inability to display the information fast enough. The game loop tries to stay at 60 fps, so if you graphic fps drops to 30, it goes to a game loop of x2, and if you drop to 15 fps, it goes to x4. The fix is to have a hardware combination that can maintain a high frame rate despite the load on the system. When flying Linebacker II, the number of aircraft, flak guns, and SAMs is tremendous. The number of sounds alone loads the system down: flak bursts, radio calls being buffered up, etc. What operating system and hardware do you have? The latest and greatest does a pretty good job of handling the SF2 series. I am usually locked at 60 fps unless I am flying over Iceland in SF2NA... but then I mainly fly pure air-to-air missions that don't have the load of air-to-ground.

SFP1 ran great on Win98SE machines... but later WoX releases and patches kept slowing it down. When I built my Athlon 64 PC with a Radeon x800XL gpu, it was smoking fast running WoV even with mirrors enabled and maxed out graphics settings. WoE slowed it a bit more and WoI brought it to the limits of playable frame rates for me (as if I was back to Win98SE and a Radeon 9800 Pro even though I was using an x1800XT and WinXP by this point). The shift from WinXP to Win7 (64 bit), a newer video card that supported DX10, and SF2 restored my frame rate and improved visual quality as well (higher resolution stock textures). SFP1 patched up to final level still runs quite a bit slower on this same setup, presumably due to DX9 and other things that were never designed for multicore CPUs and 64-bit OS. If you don't mind giving up a ton of advancements in the game code and available addons, SFP1 patched to SP2a was pretty darn good and was the patch level of the original Korea mods. It also had the best dogfight AI until WoI came out. WoV and WoE all the way up to the classic 083006 patch level had incompetent AI that was not very effective had engaging in air to air combat. But once you have had a taste of the SF2 level of gameplay, especially up to the SF2NA level when considering naval operations, it is hard on me to go back to any version of SFP1/WoX. The only reasons to do so would be for compatibility with Win98SE or multiplayer... though if your hardware can't run SF2 fast enough but could run SFP1 SP2a, that might be another reason to go back.

My son and all his friends can sing this song (which is also an Android game):

Is it USB 3.0 compliant?

Why is it nothing is ever easy? From a long term perspective: just a bump in the road!

MiG-17F Freco C data is in the Have Drill performance evaluation by the USAF. You can do a flash version of this report here: http://area51specialprojects.com/video/havedrill_tactical.swf

<S> I sincerely believe they truly were the greatest generation.

While I still believe this will be released, it's all talk until I get a download link. Still more unexpected delays. Even without the internal mix-up, I don't see how they would have made the announced March 31 release, especially since they said the internal struggle didn't really impact progress, yet delayed the release anyway. How can you be so certain that the release is imminent to call out a "no later than" date just 2 months away, and then still have no news about when it is really going to be released as you are over a week into March? I would be surprised if I get this before Christmas. If it isn't released by Christmas, I will put it in the "Fighter Ops" category of wishful thinking. It looks like it would really be cool to fly, though. So, while I expect the worst, I am hoping for a release as soon as possible... April? May? June? Combined with the AFM for the F-15C, this could make for some awesome close in dogfights both offline and in multiplayer.

Keep on truckin' ! 1/48 is really good for me: Almost as popular as 1/72 (you can get almost any aircraft you can think of in 1/48). Large enough to see good detail. Small/cheap enough to have lots of them. Of course, some 1/48 models end up being large: I have an SR-71, B-17G, and PBY hanging up and a half-finished B-1B that dwarfs all of them (with functioning swing wing). My son just blew all of his saved up money buying this and having me build it for him: http://www.amazon.com/Bandai-MS-06F-Zaku-Real-Grade/dp/B004XQNEXM/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_d_1 It is small, but had countless small parts, lots of jointed/hinged parts, and the eye is geared to move with the head. Most amazing model I have ever seen and it fits in the palm of my hand. Molded in colors, no glue or paint needed, just press fit and vinyl(?) stickers.

What was offensive or inaccurate in my original answer that merited a response like "sorry I asked" ? Is it odd for someone who has been flying a sim since its original release and privately beta tested it for the developer for years to provide answers about that sim? I have answered and will continue to answer questions about any sim I have sufficient knowledge to provide an accurate answer. Just check my posts. I can and have told how to get Jane's Fighters Anthology running on Windows 7 64-bit even though I stopped flying it with any regularity once I had Jane's USAF. I can do the same for Jane's USAF if someone ever asks. Because: 1) I still have these sims installed and running on my latest PC. 2) I have no problem sharing knowledge to help others getting them to run. 3) As far as I know there are no forum police preventing me from doing so just because I have moved on to another sim.

While I down own it and haven't flown it, I understand the VRS Superbug with TACPACK is a very good way to go. I have never been vert interested in the Super Hornet and as such never flew Jane's F/A-18 very much. I would like to fly the original F/A-18A and as such can't wait for DCS F/A-18C, which is close enough for my purposes.

SF game engine is not being updated anymore. If you don't like the way it works now, you are never going to like it. If IL-2 makes you happier, don't waste your time on SF.

Bought it quite some time ago. Didn't care for flying fictional helicopters. I know someone did a ton of work trying to tune the flight models to be much more accurate compared to the real helos the fictional ones are modeled after... But it never really felt any different or better than ArmA2, which gave me more fun with its UH-1 and AH-1 options. You can't beat OFP/ArmA helo missions for immersion. So much more to helo ops than a detailed/accurate flight model. Since the UH-1/AH-1 helos I want to fly the most aren't even modeled in Take On Helicopters more detailed flight model, I never play it even though it integrated ArmA2 into it. But, I primarily want to feel like I am flying a real helicopter, and right or wrong, DCS UH-1H and Mi-8 are fulfilling that role for me better than any helo sim I have ever tried before. If I could just fly the DCS UH-1H in the ArmA game engine without any compromises, I don't think helo flight sims could ever improve much. While I would never recommend Take On Helicopters over other helo flight sim options, at $3 who wouldn't buy it just to see if maybe it somehow is good for you?

Not a dumbass, just an unexpected change from one software version to the next. I encountered the problem myself some time ago and as stubborn as I am, I bang my head against a wall quite some time before I go searching for help. I just happened to stumble onto the solution and vaguely remembered it well enough to convey my lesson to you. Glad I could help.

I don't know a thing about creating LODs, but assuming you have created one correctly, then the most likely cause for missing components is either: 1) Incorrect file path (i.e. the LOD is not in the directory that is being searched by the game) 2) Incorrect file name Of course some programming geeks might consider that the file name is really part of the complete file path, in which case there is only one cause of this problem.

Since some game developers did not provide the option in their game settings for TrackIR, I think the later software includes a checkbox that determines the behavior. Maybe try the "Trueview" checkbox on the profile you are using for a given game?

Originally, the game didn't even have the ability to stop the engine or turn off the radar. Be happy with what you have.