MetalMania

I'm probably not the first person to call it out, but I just looked up the satellite picture of Davis Monthan Air Force Base on Google Maps. WOW. Mind blowing how many aircraft are out there covering several decades of military aviation. What surprised me was I even spotted a couple of F-102 or F-106, and what appeared to be a decent number of what looked like P-80? Even some Canberras (or what appeared to be Canberras). There must be hundreds of F-4s out there. F-111s. B-52s. B-1s. F-15, F-16, A-10, F-18, F-14, A-6, T-38, A-7, A-8, and on and on and on and on. Amazing.

I landed a Spitfire once with one of the main landing gear gone in the BoB mod. I don't know what settings I had though, probably "normal" as I usually leave most things on that. I think? It's been a while since I've changed any of that. Funny thing is, it probably would have been more historically realistic if I had just bailed out!

I don't want to undo any of the learning that everything you guys have been discussing may have accomplished (I'm no genius with this stuff and admittedly haven't done too much of it), but I have a habit of doing things the hard way before I realize I missed an easier solution. So - what are the chances the objects he's trying to get working are already part of one of the weapons packs?

It's not a mod but a hardware addon, that is supported in many games these days but works spectacularly with flight and driving sims. There are two physical components, one is a little IR camera that mounts to the top of your monitor. The other is (I think there are a few ways you can do this part now) a metal clip that you put on a baseball cap that has 3 reflectors on it. The IR camera reads the relative position of these reflectors on it and translates it into head movement in your game. So, you're flying along in your plane (you must be in the virtual cockpit view) and you want to look left - just turn your head and the viewpoint follows. Up, down, left right just turn your head a bit. Games that support "6 degrees of freedom" (6DOF) are even better - you can move laterally or even move your head closer and it will zoom in as if you were moving your head closer to the panel to read a guage or something. It's very cool and adds a lot to the immersion! I will anticipate a common question - "How can I see the screen if I'm turning my head?". It is scaled so that a relatively small movement is required to turn the view a long way. For example you can have your head turned 30 or 45 degrees from the screen and still see it easily but the viewpoint in the game can be looking over your shoulder. How much you need to turn and how fast the rotation responds is all customizable, but I use mine almost exactly as it came "out of the box". The hardest part is learning to control your head movements so you can stay focused on one spot if you need to - but a handy way to remedy that (like if you need to do an instrument scan and don't want to hold perfectly still) is using a hotkey to temporarily pause the TrackIR and then turn it back on when you want your eyes out of the cockpit. I think most people will tell you once you try it and get comfortable with it, there's no going back. It's indispensible in a dogfight, I used to get disoriented in seconds during hard maneuvering using snap views with the hat switch (or worse, VC panning with the hat switch) or internal padlock views. It's way better now with TrackIR, you always know which way you're looking (where's your head pointing?) and it reacts very fast - no more waiting for the manual pan rate to catch up. I don't know what the cost is these days, I got mine a couple years ago and I think it was around $150 - $180 (US). I actually think it's worth it, it has made that much of a difference for me. If you can swing it, I'd say buy it - I doubt you will be disappointed.

Thankfully I've never had to deal with that (yet....). I just happened to read this just before I headed over to CA this evening: http://www.nascar.com/2009/news/headlines/...p.10/index.html People can say what they want about race car drivers not being athletes etc. (I disagree), but you hear about stuff like this all the time. Man that's gotta take some guts and serious focus. I just can't see myself saying "yeah, I've got a kidney stone I'm dealing with right now but I'm still good for some laps at 190 mph". I hope you feel better!

I can't comment related to OFF, but I use TIR4 with FS9, Third Wire series, and IL-2. It's the best thing for flight sims since the 3-D cockpit. I sometimes get the little screen tears/gaps too but I agree it's probably from turning your head too fast. Think about it, with a normal 3D pit head swivel via a hat switch it's at a constant rate that I guess the system can anticipate rendering for. With TIR you can rotate the view from dead ahead to over your shoulder and all points in between in a blink so it makes sense that it might need a second to "catch up" with where your view is directed. I've never had it last for more than a second and it hasn't been a problem. I did a quick flight in FS9 last night and forgot to turn on TIR before I launched flight simulator. I took off and was turning my head all over because I was so used to using it, bothered me so much I backed out and started all over again with it on. So you will get used to it quick, and after that there's no going back! Another nice thing (for me) in combat sims too is that it's easier to maintain orientation of your aircraft's nose relative to your view direction. Before TIR I would try tracking targets either via padlock or hat switch, it took me all of about 5 seconds to get disoriented if things were happening fast. With TIR you turn your head, so you know your nose is always "face forward".

So what about if I'm flying a campaign mission that starts from a carrier, I fly the mission and when I return ..... the carrier's gone - but not always. It's been a while since I've done it so some of the details are fuzzy but I basically fly to the last waypoint and there's no boat. I ask Red Crown for vector to home base and she basically tells me I'm right on top of it but it's not there. Is this a waypoint problem or would I be better off noting the carrier's heading when I take off and then flying that heading when I get to the last waypoint and try to find it? I was thinking maybe during the mission I just got off schedule, and maybe the last waypoint was where the carrier was supposed to be at a certain duration into the mission. So if I arrived there either early or late the ship wouldn't be there. Or is Red Crown right - I'm in the right spot but for some reason the carrier object isn't displayed? Is it "smart" enough to know that being a carrier home base is a moving target or is it strictly wherever the last fixed waypoint is? This is in a campaign generated mission - not a standalone single mission. This happened to me a few times in the Burning Sands '83 campaign.

No doubt, I wasn't suggesting migrating from PC to the consoles and abandoning the considerable investments many of us have made. Only that it's probably fair to say that the current generation of consoles might be capable of running a robust simulator with the kind of processing power and data storage space that they're now packing. Decent flightsim controls aren't abundant for consoles, but they're basically USB (though I think XB360 is still a proprietary connection?) so they could show up if enough interest was there to support it. I guess what I was trying to get at was that if a developer felt they had to adapt their product to a modern console to stay afloat, that we're potentially at a point where it could be done and still be "faithful" to the simulation genre. I would strongly prefer that the PC remains the core platform for such products, but in this grim economy for a game developer in a niche market the consoles might be tempting waters to try.

It will be interesting to see how Maddox and SimBin's forays into consoles goes, with IL2-Birds of Prey and Race Pro. I would expect that these two titles will probably be the most "sim" oriented of their respective genres that any console has ever seen. I'm sure a lot of people are looking at it from the perspective of "that's it, the death of PC simming is upon us. They're all going to become console crap." I don't know, perhaps if scaleable enough they could serve as a bridge to regain some interest in the genre. Or maybe at least (and most practical) generate enough sales to allow the continuation of the PC lines by those developers alongside the console versions. At the end of the day it's a business and cash flow makes it all happen. I'm not saying I'm willing to abandon my PC to do it all on consoles either, but they ARE getting to be pretty darn powerful systems. GM can't make Corvettes if they don't sell enough Malibus, Impalas and pickup trucks. Ok - maybe that's a bad example with the current economic situation and that company in particular but you get the point.

I don't have this one but have put in many hours with GTR2, which is by the same developer. Not that this will help since you've already got GT Legends but I've seen a double pack of GTR2 and GTL for $19.99. Check out www.nogripracing.com for mods and addons.

So in the interim if one wanted to fly it with a substitute pit, would it work if one knew how to do it? Or does that require lots of reworking of other stuff to make it "flyable"? Just curious, I've never delved to that level of editing - trying to make an AI flyable or use the cockpit from another plane. Not asking for instructions - I'll look them up if they're out there - just wondering if it's reasonably easy to do or a really deep edit that's best left to the "experts".

My brother used to play one of those sim theme park type games several years ago, I don't remember which one it was. But I think he had rides that actually killed passengers. Not good for business! My little dream of enhancing the visual immersion in sims (or anything really) is to project onto a dome shaped screen that fills your whole peripheral vision. Like an OmniMax theater, only on a smaller scale that you can set up in your home. Of course taking it a step further you'd be seated on a platform that pitches banks and yaws! Ever been on the old "Back to the Future" ride at Universal Studios in Florida? The home version of the motion platform of course would be electric rather than hydraulic. I think some company already has this but it's REALLY expensive. I don't think I'd be all too interested in touch screens. I hate wiping off fingerprints. And with TrackIR I'd have to keep pausing it to use them - sometimes I have to just to focus on a particular instrument, I can't seem to hold my head still enough to keep it from moving just enough to make reading it hard.

I think the one you're thinking of is "Fighter Ops". That one sounds almost like they're trying to bite off too much to me. Uber realism from top to bottom for everything. Don't get me wrong, I hope they can pull it off and the peeks of stuff they've shown are fantastic but like you said - don't expect anything soon. Already been in development for a couple of years I think. On the PC vs consoles subject, well it's more expensive for one thing to have a rig capable of running the latest and greatest software compared to modern consoles. I don't want to get into the "BS, you can build a killer gaming PC for the price of a PS3" argument. The average person doesn't want to built it themselves, and if you're looking for a decently capable "off the shelf" system from a known manufacturer you're realistically probably looking at $1,000. And most of the (non sim) games are also available for the consoles and look just about as good if you don't have the latest $600 world beating graphics card. As far as our particular realm here of flight sims - I don't know, are kids even fascinated by airplanes anymore? My cousins and nephews couldn't care less. Flight sims have been my main attraction since the 80's, but I didn't have Call of Duty as an option then either. I think the world in general has gotten into too much of an instant gratification mindset. Technology has removed so much waiting it's also skewed perception of "reasonable". I've spoken to kids just getting out of college that expect to just fall into $80,000 jobs. "Start at the bottom and move up? Screw that!". Good luck. Sorry, veering a little off topic.

Nah, that's where the giant paintball gun in the tail comes in. It sprays backwards and covers up the seeker head so it can't track you.

I forgot to add some of the ones I didn't fly as: Harrier, Jaguar, Tornado.

+1 vote for the more modern scenario, as the previous early 80's sounded a lot like the Burning Sands '83 mod which used the F-15A, F-16A, F-111, A-10, can't remember if it had F-4's?, F-18A, F-14 and A-7 (from carriers). Plus the Reds had Mig-25's to go along with the 21's and others. It was really a good mod. There are a couple of "out there" elements to it, like the F-19 stealth and I got the occasional strike mission flying F-15A's, but I did the campaign a number of times flying different aircraft. I'd give the theater another go with modern forces!

That's kind of what I was thinking, only a 20mm on a lowered turret from one of the bomb bays. Kind of like the Phalanx (I think?) guns used on aircraft carriers as a "last ditch" defense against inbound missiles. It could also be used as a strafing weapon on low level bombing runs, but you wouldn't have to fly straight at the target (that the cannon was aiming at) because it's on a swiveling turret! The firing arc would obviously be limited due to engines and whatnot - but within limitations how cool would that be?

What are the rules for screenshots here? Can you attach right into the thread or do you have to link to an external site? One of my favorites is one where I got a Mig-21 "in the lips" with a Sparrow and caught a nice shot of the wreckage flying past at the merge.

I need to pay more attention to it, because I "manage" to get them KIA a lot! Things heat up, order #2 to cover my six, bag some bogies, "#2 status check". "#2...........?" Gone. Or he's supposed to be covering me, mission accomplished and leaving the area, I'm quite a ways off target and I'm looking around. "Where the hell is he?" I order a rejoin and he's 12 miles away still over the target! Um, you wanna stick with me buddy? And this is gonna sound REAL dumb, but I only recently discovered that you can assign more and specific pilots to your flight! I used to just take whoever was auto generated in the campaign, wondering why I was always going out with only a wingman or MAYBE a 2nd element for a total of 4. Now I know I can put a little more strategy behind it! Question: when you take less experienced pilots, assuming they make it back, do they get "better" over time or just stay at the same level?

I just tried it (Minot) and it's not blacked out but there's a join between two different sat images right in the middle of it so it's a little off. I've poked around a little and most of them seem to be "normal" images. Ellsworth for example has the B-1s in plain sight.

I've been spending some time on the range map experimenting with dive and level attack profiles using various weapons and planes (how about that, actually TRAINING before my next foray into combat!) and was wondering what a realistic approach would be. For dive bomb attacks I start my run at about 10,000 ft and 450 - 500 kts. At around 3 miles from target I chop throttle and go into about a 30 degree dive. Different planes have different sight references for release points but I release at about 1 mile from target, altitude is between 4000 - 4500 ft AGL (I think) and airspeed shows +/- 500 kts. I got that attack profile from an article at SimHQ a while ago and it works to a pretty decent level of accuracy so far, barring something like precision guidance or CCIP. For level bomb runs (both high and low) I set throttle to I guess what you'd call military power, the highest I can go before the afterburner kicks in. In the planes I've tried so far this usually gives me again pretty close to 500 kts indicated, +/- a little depending how far out I start my run. Release points of course vary with altitude and speed, but so far I've had fairly consistent results from 700 ft on the low end and 10,000ft on the high end. I need to work on going lower and higher but it's a start. So I guess what I'm really wondering: - Is using mil power (no afterburner) a "normal" practice for an attack run, or is it really open to the target environment at the time of the attack? It just seemed easier to achieve a more constant speed to work out repeatable release parameters by staying out of the burner. - What would a "normal" low level high speed / high drag munition pass be made at (alt and airspeed)? - What speed and altitude would a medium or high level strike by something like an F-111 be made at, generally? Obviously, at the end of the day we need to employ whatever works best IN THE GAME with its own strengths/weaknesses and limitations - but I think most of us would try to do that with whatever degree of realism we can manage within that framework.

I'm not a programmer, so I have no idea what the "cost" to implement something into a game engine is. I certainly don't want to sound like I'm bitching either, because I have been able to enjoy playing Strike Fighters in a way that I have not had the time to achieve in other sims I'm interested in. I appreciate all the work TK has done in the series and will always be interested in whatever product rolls out of the Third Wire hangar. The same can be said for the modders who have infinitely broadened the appeal of the series and ensured its longevity. That being said, and I admit I have no technical background to counter what I'm about to say, but I just don't see why implementing a rudimentary air-refueling code is such a big deal. It's been present in a whole bunch of sims/games for many years so it's not like it's unprecedented. I for one don't care if you have to expertly fly into position - I'd be happy enough with "fly into a box area x distance from the tanker and press 'shift-R'" or something, which then triggers an animation of the model of your plane connecting to the boom of the tanker model for a few seconds and then presto! Your tanks are full. I would guess the refueling receptacle could be programmed as an attatchment point/weapons station or something that the game would always connect the boom or drogue to, so it could be in a different location for each aircraft type. For me it's more about if I want to fly all the way home but need to top off to make it, I can do it. If someone doesn't want to bother with it, Alt-N or Esc after mission accomplished and no penalties applied. I feel the same about a mission recorder/replay capability. Not unprecedented and has been around for a long time in many titles. Even if it only worked with "original equipment" and not guaranteed for mods (but better if it did) - OK. None of them are deal breakers - but I just don't see why they "can't" be done. Maybe a next generation game engine would better support them. Obviously Third Wire has budget limitations, totally understandable. I wonder if it would be feasible for TK to somehow work out say the top 5 features that people want (FEATURES supported in the game engine - not particular planes or theaters), identify what the cost to implement them is, and then open up a donation system. When enough money is raised, the features are implemented. I think it's fair to say that given his attention to the community and dedication to supporting the series (free updates to current standards for all of the titles!) that he's not likely going to rip us off. It probably wouldn't totally offset the cost obstacles, but might allow them to be overcome faster. Then whatever the next title that comes out and includes them is that much of a stronger product which hopefully drives more sales and so on. Or, what's the typical price of a new TW sim - $19.99? $29.99? Cheap by today's standards. Would you pay another $10 - $20 for the next title if it had refueling, a mission recorder, built in mission editor, more X Y and Z and retained the moddability? I would - it's still within the cost of your average XBox or Playstation game with waaaaaaay more longevity.

I'm just adding my own enthusiasm to the pile for this one, whenever it comes out. AWESOME. When the day comes I will be laughing maniacally while loading up 84 Mk82's looking for some vast area to disintegrate. Bad guys, you're toast. Definitely one of the most beautiful combat aircraft ever.

So am I basically way behind the times if I'm still using Bunyap's last pack? Then again I still haven't installed WOE yet (still playing through SFP1 Mods) or patched anything to the latest 10/08......

I'm currently using SFP1 with SP4 and Bunyap's Weapons Pack 10/06. Is targeting with LGBs the same as EO Guided weapons like the Maverick - "E" until your desired target is bracketed and drop when in range? Unless I missed it I don't recall seeing a specific command to activate the laser designator and the Weapons delivery manual doesn't differentiate specific targeting procedures for laser guided weapons. Seeing that there's no way to lock a target with the AG radar I'm assuming it's the same. (Haven't had a chance to actually try it yet). Thanks