JediMaster

Wasn't it Douglas Adams who said "and then 2000 years ago this bloke showed up named Jesus who said, hey, wouldn't it be great if we were all kind to each other, and got killed for his trouble"?

Yeah, unfortunately PSU considerations limit options. I'm not exactly certain what nvidia's top "safe" card (almost certain to work on any system) is.

Some bolt on wouldn't explain the different tail rotor blade count or the split stab, though. It was a bigger effort than just slapping on pieces.

The Final Countdown...Tomcats splashing Zeros FTW!

Considering the likelihood that he'll die well before his sentence is over, I would call it a fail. It only matters when you're taking their freedom away and altering their future. The guy lived his life. Now he may spend the last few years in a true prison instead of a nursing home pseudo-prison? Big deal.

I only find it odd when it's an all-male group with a single female playing an instrument. A female vocalist with all-male band strikes no one as odd, nor do all-female bands like The Bangles, Go-Gos, or L7. Oh, the Breeders were all-female except a male drummer. And Lenny Kravitz has all-male backup with a female drummer. I'd say the only thing that would be unusual would be a female lead guitarist in an otherwise all-male band. Of course, my wife plays 12 instruments from keyboard to drums to guitar to sax to clarinet to xylophone, so...

That's because it's not a new design, like the PAK FA is. It's a modification of an existing design that was likely done on a very small scale. I'm sure there are less than a dozen of these helos and they were probably done inside a hangar at night at some base or other with few people involved.

Yup, because history has shown that only occurs a minority of the time.

There's a bunch of those "how they should have ended" ones. Most are pretty good.

Sovereignty is well and good, but so is loyalty.

I've got the same CPU but I've not bothered to OC it beyond the standard turbo because I've not run into any games that are CPU limited yet! My 5850 is the bottleneck now, but I'm waiting until the next gen of GPUs before I upgrade again! Either an AMD 7950 or nvidia GTX 670? I don't know what I get in the TW sims, but whatever it is more than equals "perfectly smooth". The funny thing is when TK put the DX10 optimizations into SF2 he sped the engine up quite a lot with a small increase in visual quality vs playing it on WinXP...so you get better performance AND a better picture than in the gen 1 sims. Anyway, get the fps too high and you just get miserable frame tearing anyway, unless you have a monitor with a 200Hz refresh?

If you can remember sleeping in your daddy's arms, you've got a hell of a memory!!

I'm not just a habitual flight simmer, but also naval simmer, sim racer, FPS'er, RTS'er, and even a few RPGs to boot. I think I have over 2 dozen games installed on my PC right now not counting the vast library of previous titles that aren't installed. So I have a much longer view of the patterns seen over the life of games (in the 90s, 2000s, and today) and can say with great confidence that today's audience/market is far more demanding than in the past. At the very minimum, it can be stated they want the sims to do more and look better than ever before while still paying the same $50 they paid 20 years ago! A good sim now is the price of one tank of gas. I think what I paid for Falcon 3 20 years ago ($65) would've bought at least 3 full tanks if not 4, depending on your vehicle. Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe charged $30 per expansion, and that was ONE plane each. All it did was add that plane to the campaign plus create a new career for it. There was no MP. People bought them in droves. I recall one of the biggest sellers was the P-38 (a WWII sim that covered the later war years that didn't come with a P-38 stock?? GASP!)

With a population of over 6 billion, I don't think you can classify man as "uncommon."

I remember reading that 25 years back or so and being astonished at how simple the concept was. To date, zero successful attempts however.

If there's one thing I think everyone can give Pakistan credit for, it's playing both sides for its own benefit. They are masters at it. They're not on anyone's side but their own, and if your interests and theirs coincide you are de facto allies until further notice in that area. Other areas? A later date? Maybe not.

Just 8 years after the first plane! We're also only 11 months away from the centennial of the sinking of Titanic...hard to believe it's already upon us.

"If RoF is already such a great sim, then why are there still so many people arguing about aspects of it that displease them?" LOL, I take it you don't hang out on many other flight sim forums then! Name ANY sim and I can find 5 complaints that people endlessly debate online. Even the venerated pantheons of Il-2 and Falcon 4 have flaws galore. I myself have a lot less time in Il-2 than I would like because after only a few hours playing it I tire of: overpowered cannon/underpowered MGs, bizarre A/C handling that makes it seem like I'm flying a model airplane more than a real airplane (like they don't weigh enough), AI that is more stupid than intelligent, a very sterile feeling in the cockpit that makes it feel like I'm flying a WWII simulator but NOT a pilot flying in WWII. Every sim has shortcomings. Some, like Il-2 after almost 10 years, will obviously never have them fixed because development is done aside from mods (the TD stuff is just official mods). Others are still in development and may see those flaws reduced/eliminated, and RoF is one of those. It's been 2 years but it's in full swing. Where was Il-2 after 2 years? Replaced by Forgotten Battles, you better buy that, nothing more for Il-2. Where was F4 after 2 years? Well the team was disbanded after 1 year so all we had was mods on the horizon starting with the realism patches. RoF has finally introduced flyable bombers and 2 seaters and more are coming along with a revamped career. So at the 2 year mark I would say RoF is doing far better than those classics which either said "hope you like it now because that's how it's staying" and folded, or said "hope you like it now because that's how it's staying unless you buy the sequel". As RoF has only charged for more planes (and now changes to those planes which aren't necessary, just nice to have), those who only bought the original release have a better experience now than 1 yr ago which was better than release. Don't give up on them.

My older daughter will be 3 in Sept, and her little sister is now 3 weeks old. She's sleeping in my arms as I type!

Again, I HAVE seen that many posts making those assertions, not in this thread necessarily, but around the net for months and months. The problem is that making a sim is time-consuming and expensive and something has to give. What would you be willing to put up with to get these extra non-flyable planes just flying around? A) Worse graphics, either in appearance or performance B) Worse AI, either being cow-stupid or Terminator-accurate C) Laggy MP D) constant crashes/game instability E) poor flight modeling F) poor damage modeling G) fewer ground targets, maybe they could just have the WWI equivalent of "comm building" for every mission? RoF does good on all those areas. It DOES have 2 seaters, one for each side. So instead of seeing a variety of different types of 2 seaters, when you see a German one you know it's a DFW CV. Is that really so bad? There are many areas that RoF still needs to improve on. Personally I'd rather have zeppelins before more 2 seaters because they were important too. After all, we DO have 2 seaters to both fly and fly against. Hence it seems like the focus on the fact that there aren't more of them seems to be disproportionate to the actual issue.

There are only a few things that DX10 can do that 9 can't. The deal is usually that do them in 9 would cripple the performance, so it wasn't even something you could toggle on or off.

Win7 is a big improvement over Vista, and frankly XP has become obsolete. Were you running XP before? If so, SF2 uses DX10 which helps speed things up compared to DX9 for an equivalent appearance, so that's likely helping you as well.

I suppose the problem is that I've seen literally dozens of posts complaining that the lack of 2-seaters = total fail at realism, so why bother getting RoF? I don't think I ever saw any claim made that RoF was to be some sweeping perfect recreation of WWI air combat. The sim was designed around single-seater fighter vs fighter combat. Due to clamor from the community, they've been putting other planes in at a rate they can manage that obviously is too slow for some people. The fact is that RoF has been out for 2 years, but in the last 4 months a 2-seater and 2 multi-crew bombers have been released, so I'd say progress in that area has been swift now that they've figured it out. So, to be clear, I'm simply fed up with people saying "game A doesn't have feature X (regardless of what else it has), therefore it's crap" or some variation. Is it a shortcoming that more 2-seaters aren't there, whether flyable or not? Certainly. However, to say said program is not worth the money because of that lack is "I believe at best a sweeping generalisation." This isn't limited to RoF. I see it all the time about TK's sims as well. They don't have MP (since SF2), they don't have proper prop-plane modeling, they don't do modern planes well enough, the terrains are too poor...and therefore not worth getting. I saw it when Black Shark was released because it wasn't a Western helicopter, but a Russian one they didn't care about. All because the poster claims that whatever particular feature in their opinion is very important is missing. Certainly a sim that misses on dozens of features that were present in sims before is worthy of criticism, but I've seen an undue amount aimed at RoF over the 2-seater issue as if that's the single most important facet of a WWI sim. Perhaps then the "hard truth" is that it's an opinion, not a fact, that a particular feature is vital. Therefore arguing about it is no more than two people of opposing viewpoints who will never be swayed from their opinion.

They needed to create the code to allow multi-crewing of planes. That was implemented first with the Gotha and HP, released only a couple of months ago, and now put into the DFW and Breguet. I know they have more 2-seaters coming. As for other games lacking things and claiming authenticity, have you ever paid any attention to the Battlefield, MoH or CoD games? They don't claim to be sims, but they claim authenticity because there are military advisors used (even if they're mostly ignored). What about a WWII sim that ignored the Pacific theater? I guess the original releases of Il-2 were crap then, because they were Eastern Front only. You can't have it all, something has to give. The hard truth many of you don't want to accept is the number of people that would buy the "perfect" (in your estimation) WWI sim is far too small to recoup the costs to make a sim like that. Unless you'd be happier with each copy costing $250 instead of only paying for the planes you want? Then however the number of people willing to buy that "perfect" sim would drop even more, as few seem to accept paying more than $40 for any software... Also remember RoF was begun by a Russian publisher that wanted a WWI MMO and then dropped it, leaving the team with code that was hardwired a certain way. Had they started from scratch knowing this was the way they were going, they might have made vastly different choices.

I knew a guy who was very Christian but swore all the time. There was another woman where he worked who was a real holier-than-thou type and finally asked him "how can you call yourself a Christian when you swear?" He answered "Jesus hung out with fishermen."