finiteless

Robert the poet was a smart guy then I reckon. ;) I came very close to death a few times in quick succession when 6 and the experience had a lasting effect on my outlook. I don't worry too much about what anyone thinks or says about what I do with my life, I've seen how easily it slips away when you least expect that to occur, so I live as you say, doing what I love to do, and as a result have no particular commitment to social consistency or the imposed expectations of others, or their 'important' concerns. Whatever life serves up, that’s fine by me. :) I once heard someone once call that a ‘fatalistic’ outlook (said as though it's a great ‘tragedy’ lol), whatever that means. I just live and enjoy what I do, as I do it, don’t care why, not interested in trying to be other than what I love doing, and it just seems to involve a fair amount of simming for the past few years. Nice to meet you Nick, I’m living in Queensland Australia.

Great post Nick, you too huh? After about 4 billion years of evolutionary struggle and once I have taken care of all of my daily life’s necessities, my delight is to sim and to read and yap completely pointlessly about simming, and as you say, to expend many hours of living time doing incredibly detailed and tedious work upon sim related stuff—which I have no qualms about doing. I don’t know what that’s all about, but it seems like a perfectly natural bipedal hominid type thing to do. It sure is a peculiar technoculture, but I seem to love complexity and experimentation for its own sake, and I don’t fight it now, it feels ‘right’ for some reason. However, I also go through periods when I don’t go near the PC for a year or more, and that’s fine with me as well, but that’s usually when there is no ‘hot’ new hardcore combat sim on the horizon to explore or work on. I don’t like to mix sims as you do though, I learn one in detail, them dump it and move on to the next big thing; I don’t like them to overlap or compete for my time. Interesting what you said about IL-2FB though, because it has that very same effect on me as well. I tend to put it down to the fact that I've never been interested in historical sims, only sims of contemporary tech. I’m post-LOMAC right now, I tried to stay interested in it but no luck, but have started salivating in the general direction of “Dangerous Waters”, so the wheel turns once more ... Maybe I’ll go do something constructive in the ‘real world’ until DW arrives. ;)

lol ... whatever, it works I guess. Sinister in implications? Could be, but combat sims are just giving us the 'entertainment' we've always demanded. People always clamour for more ‘realism’ and gore so it's natural enough for the truly addicted and/or very skilled to go into the ultimate reality of actual war. Does it breed war itself though? … there was plenty of war before this development … or does it just provide motivated skilled recruits that will perform better and quicker? If it keeps them alive, great. I’m more concerned by how the Islamo-creeps might be utilising this stuff in parallel ...

Perhaps they'll surgical implant explosives in a few years? They could do that, why not if you are going to be blown up anyway ...

As I understand it, you can use the 'Extract' and 'Insert' functions within LOMANs CDDS Browser to place your new skins into the appropriate original Lock On CDDS skin file. According to SkyPat it will: "Insert BMP or TGA or DDS in CDDS files or to temptextures automatically when installing addon"

Realistic Gaming for me (this option is easily winning the voting).

An Aussie SAS patrol used a sonic boom tactically in Iraq's western desert. They came upon a grain silo, with infantry in it, presumably guarding the area. The SAS tried to get then to surrender, but got the inappropriate answer, so rather than level it with an air strike, they decided to try and preserve the grain silo, because people would really need it after the war, so they had an F-14 do a low-level supersonic flyby, and the Iraqis thought they were being bombed, so they came streaming out with their hands up disarming themselves. They were then allowed to go home, as the SAS were mobile and had no time or capacity to hold them as POWs, nor to off-load them to others. The Iraqis were shocked, not what they had been expecting at all. A lot cheaper than having to build a new food storage silo after the war. :)

Skins – problems with overuse I love the many new skins people are making, and I have several dozen downloaded, but I’ve ‘discovered’ a problem in using them; SkyPat warned about this 6 months ago. I like to make/fly guns-only furball missions containing lots of different aircraft types on each side, which means, lots of pretty, hi-res skins, but I found my FPS has gone to hell and I started getting terrible graphics juddering during flybys, and when you have some ‘guy’ lined up to fire ... (grrrr) It never used to be like this, and thought about what could have caused it, so I decided to experiment by uninstalling all of the non-CDDS type skins, and then went back into Lock On and found that my gunzo missions were fluid and smooth again—no more graphical juddering at just the wrong moment (and TrackIR’s panning was smoother as well because of it). So that settled it, SkyPat was right, skins should be in CDDS format, or you else get problems you don’t want. If you are (or have) making hi-res skins, think seriously about making CDDS only release versions. I won’t be using anything else in future. The “Temp textures” folder is just that, overuse it at your peril.

Excellent hehe Check this video and see if it reminds you of a certain git in Najaf (sans the beard) http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/...brian-clip.html

Looking forward to the perfected one. I honestly could not go back to using a POV hat now. If my TrackIR broke I'd be pissed lol. Suppose I should d/l the H/L client and have another go at Lock On Online, I got so peived with 1.01's m/p bugs that I've only been playing single player missions since May, but I realy miss the m/p guns only action in Lock On--bliss. :D

Sweet, wish more people were making and distributing tracks and you can make edited versions of them as well. Need to watch out for those trees but the formation landing was sweet (was sure there was going to be a collision on finals whew!) TrackIR is also a must have item Creepy, it makes close formation flying and relative position holding, maneuvering, navigation and maintain constant visual on flight members much easier, particularly if you over-shoot the leader like that

Cheers Jeff, have a greta day!

If you’re like me, you probably also have been downloading and collecting missions and campaigns since Lock On came out, and likewise have folders full of them. I couldn’t even tell exactly which missions and campaigns I had so I spent a day extracting and sorting them into folders, then checking what they actually were within Lock On, then renaming them to indicate which flyable aircraft is flown (many original file names don’t even indicate it!), the original file name is otherwise preserved, and a separate folder allocated for each flyable. I then did the same with the many campaigns, and when done, created a single LOMAN zip for all of them, so that I could easily install and uninstall them, and/or add any new missions or campaigns to this single zip, instead of battling with hundreds of obscure .zip and .rar files. So now I have large and accessible bundle of missions and campaigns in one neat package, and thought I might share it with others to download. The LOMAN zip itself is only 3 megs but decompresses to 18 megs of Lock On flying goodness! :) So if you were wanting a BIG library of Lock On single-player missions and campaigns to download in one convenient LOMAN zip, then here you go: Campaigns and missions bundle

Thanks guys, I'm glad you are getting a hit out of them; I use those same speakers ruggbutt, so you couild say it was made for them. :D

Very well said.