streakeagle

In case you haven't noticed, the days where TK gives away the F-4J and A-4F for free are gone. The bills went up and the market value for '60s era "sim lite" air combat games remained the same. TK made it clear from the start what DLC would be: skins and minor variants of existing aircraft. So, what is wrong with TK trying to maximize customer choice and income by releasing these minimum change DLCs? If you don't like a particular product, vote with your wallet. My only problem is that I have to keep applying the latest patch revisions to use the latest DLCs whether I like the changes in the patch or not. The game is becoming more "nerfed" for "casual" players who expect hard settings to allow their missiles to work every time and enemy missiles to miss or do at most minor damage, and can't be bothered to lower and raise landing gear/flaps/tailhooks (TK actually expressed that he is considering eliminating gear/flaps/hook controls in favor of automation to reduce button complexity), Charging $3 for minor aircraft variants that nobody is forced to buy is simply a non-issue for me, especially when contrasted with the future of the core detail/gameplay. For the record, the A-4L is just as unique as the Japanese F-4. It retains many physical features of the A-4C, especially the length. But besides the obvious hump, it has updated "separate" intakes and adds the spoilers prevalent on later Skyhawks. You can't make a 100% physically correct A-4L from either an A-4C, A-4E, or A-4F. It requires a dedicated model to get all the details correct. As a fan of the F-4, I appreciate every minor detail that distinguishes every variant of F-4 TK has released. It is therefore equally easy for me to appreciate the many Skyhawk, Hunter, Mirage, and other variants of stock aircraft TK has decided to cover. While I happen to like Skyhawks and Mirages, I have never cared much about Hunters -- yet I own all the variants released by TK. Call me stupid, but I actually enjoy having the largest possible library -- and in a way that doesn't get broken every time a major game engine update is released. If you can live without an A-4L (and I am sure everyone can short of true Skyhawk fanatics), don't buy it. But when you consider the price, it is more than fair for a unique new model with a customized ini. I have paid far more for the same or less between Razbam and YAP.

There is a reason to use third wire refueling probe: textures. Cockpit's texture won't change with external textures, external probe will.

Original F-15As (not sure when this stopped) were delivered without ALQ-135 system... development issues. I have the books that would document what systems were added when... just have to dig up the facts.

Actually, they made it clear that you already had to have FSX Gold or FSX + Addon installed in addition to the $50.

First month is $50... probably competitive rate after that. Looks like it will fulfill the intent of Fighter Ops. Some sort of role playing at being a real pilot starting with the training. Looks like it will favor modern aircraft... which isn't very compelling for me.

You need to try the free 2 weeks with Aces High and find a P-47 squad. They have plenty of P-47 variants to choose from and some really good guys. With built in voice coms that have multiple "radio" channels, you can have a lot of fun. The flight models are detailed enough that it takes a while to learn how to push a particular aircraft to its limits and the weaknesses of the other aircraft you are flying against. It you have the time to commit to flying regularly with a squad, Aces High can be one of the most rewarding sims you can fly.

Sorry for the misinformation. I had wrongly assumed that DLC skins locked the textures. I am sure TK would be bothered if somebody "modded" these new skins and distributed them. So, if terrain files that very few would ever steal or benefit from are locked down, why are skins that he is trying to sell be open to extraction/modding/redistribution? I don't get TK's logic on which files to lock down or no lock down? Leave them all open or protect your property as best you can, but sitting in the middle where honest modders are impeded but dishonest pirates are not does not make any sense to me.

$600/year? Not so sure I will even consider trying it. I don't believe they are going to deliver a flight/combat experience even as good as FC2 much less DCS. Of course if they get a sizable user base, they will have the kind of income it takes to make it as good or better than DCS. But they better do some market research. Aces High was $30/month and eventually trimmed its price down to $15/month which remains the going rate for a decent online game. $600 will take me a lot further in DCS... and still be mine to fly every year after tha. But, if it was everything I ever wanted in a combat sim... I still might try it for a month or two.

In the beginning (well not the beginning, but not too far from the beginning), TK would provide templates that would make it easy for anyone to make half-decent skins. Since SF2, no more templates. Make your own, or hope someone like Sundowner is kind enough to make and release them. Personally, I do not have the time or talent to make the skins I want, and others have not done them either. So, TK's DLC strategy appeals to someone like me. Added benefit is TK should keep them up to date if he makes 3d model fixes, which doesn't always happen with user made skins. I am interested in the Blue Angels and would equally appreciate the Thunderbirds. The problem I see is that I would like to use them as starting points for even better skins... an I don't see that happening without a way to extract dlc cat files. So the DLC are cheap and cool... but kind of empty compared to the community library of skins that are completely free and moddable!

By the way, TotalSims = iEN, who lifted the rights to Warbirds from Hitech and friends. Forum sig of the man that makes it all happen: WildBill Stealey CEO IENT Lt. Colonel, USAF Retired

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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