Beery

Hi folks, I've looked through all the posts here, but it seems this is not covered. Now I'm the first to admit that I'm a duffer at this modern combat lark. WW1 flight sims are my area. So anyway, I must be doing something very basically wrong. Anyway, on to the problem: I'm flying in an Intruder (just because I liked the movie 'Flight of the Intruder' and the old DOS game that was based on it) and no matter what I do I can't seem to drop bombs on the target. Firstly I can't get any of the radar targeting things to designate a target, but I'm sure that just takes practice. More annoyingly, it seems like it won't let me drop bombs unless I get a target lock first - is that right? Whenever I try to just drop them, nothing happens. I'm used to a bomb toggle in an SE5a or a Camel - you just pull out the locking pin and 'bombs gone', so I'm lost with all this electronic mumbo jumbo. Please help.

I bought LOMAC a year or so ago, but its linear campaign made me lose interest in it after just a couple of missions. Yet I often see it listed on forums even now. So what's the deal? What is it that makes LOMAC so popular and so long-lasting despite the lack of a dynamic (or even random) campaign - which I see as a fatal flaw?

I've been playing WoV version 1 for a few days. Today I found and installed the three game patches, and now the sky is significantly darker than it was before (noontime is now like late afternoon/early evening). I tried adjusting my computer's gamma and brightness settings, but it doesn't do anything. Has anyone else experienced this, and if so, is there a solution?

Thanks for the info. I downloaded the utility, now for some tweaking.

Hmm. I looked in all the game folders. There's an 'EnvironmentSystem.dll' which contains a lot of coded stuff, but no EnvironmentSystem.ini file. Do we have to create the file ourselves, or am I just failing to look in the right place for it?

Remember, folks, that Combatplanes and X1 (Seawolves) are infamous for taking freeware mods and packaging them up for profit without compensating the creators of the mods. Combatplanes' 'Worldmod' used third party mods without the permission of the authors, and X1's Seawolves mod included mods that were stolen from freeware sites and sold for profit against the wishes of the modmakers. Buyer beware. Note that the folks behind Combatplanes were also involved in X1 and Seawolves. Also be aware that these folks often come onto forums using assumed names in order to cloud the issue and attack people who point out the ethical issues of these companies. The mod community for SH3 is well-established and extremely professional, and there are many large and small scale mods available for free. I urge everyone to try free mods before buying expansions with questionable content from companies (i.e. X1 and Combatplanes) who have a history of unethical business practices.

Certainly ships should be harder to sink than most simulations model them, and perhaps IL-2/PF is better than most in this regard. However, IMO damage modelling is the fatal flaw in all of the Maddox (IL-2 - based) sims. In all Maddox games flak is hugely more effective than it was in real life. In fact all weapons are far too effective, but flak is ridiculously so. Also, bullet trajectory modelling is simplistic at best, which makes the damage model problems so much worse. This all leads to a simulation that is about 20 times more deadly than real life. All sims tend to exaggerate casualties to a certain extent, but the IL-2/PF series is the worst offender in terms of survivability modelling. I love the graphics, which are probably the best in the industry, but because of the awful survivability/damage modelling I find that Maddox sims are best regarded as arcade games dressed up as simulations. These games are fun to fly and nice to look at, but it's impossible to fly a realistic campaign in IL-2/PF.

There are a lot of great screenshots here, but virtually none of them list the simulation that they're taken from. I think it would be nice if we knew what sim was being used, because the one thing that makes me want to buy a simulation game more than anything else is the screenshots. So please list the sim you're using, so that we know what game's graphics we're drooling over. Also, please list the aircraft's name. If the photo gets deleted the caption alone means nothing. I just read a post that said something like "It will be missed. End of an era", but the screenshot was no longer there, and now I'm wondering what aircraft was removed from service, or what happened. Thanks. :yes:

No. That looks like night-time.

'A bit excessive'? Most flight sims are about ten times as dangerous as real life combat. I disagree. I find most combat sims unpalatable because I end up going on mission after mission where it's always virtual suicide, so there's no chance of surviving a career. This is the main reason why I find myself modding sims - to make the career mode less suicidal. I don't know why they bother having a career feature when the survival odds are virtually zero. Just for once I'd like the OPTION of flying in an environment where the threat level was more realistic. In IL-2 it's virtually impossible to survive for more than a month or so, whereas in reality many pilots not only survived a campaign, they also survived the entire war. Half of all Battle of Britain pilots survived the war, yet every Battle of Britain sim I've ever played has had a pilot life expectancy of a few weeks. This lack of realism is beyond ridiculous. Heck, there's not even a good reason for it - with a threat level slider (like that of Wings over Vietnam) it should be possible to tune any simulation to pose as great or as small a threat to the player as desired.

I've played a lot of flight sim games and a lot of the time I find realism to be lacking. Just look at IL-2 for example - an arcade game masquerading as a realistic simulation. The other thing is that realism is subjective: for one person realism might mean having an aircraft that behaves exactly the same as its real-life counterpart, whereas another person might want the game to produce historically reasonable casualties (no simulation ever made does this - they're all way too bloody (arcade-ism strikes again). So realism is important, because it needs defining, and it is often lacking in sims. My main goal would be a dynamic campaign in terms of having at the very least a random mission generator. It doesn't matter if a flight sim models planes and the environment to a high standard, if the campaign is linear there's not much point in me buying it because the game disc will be a coaster within a week.

Thanks. I knew it had to be that I was doing something stupid. I had assumed that if you were carrying only one type of bomb it was already selected.