JediMaster

And there's a new one added today!

There were certainly inconsistencies with how some of the planes were modeled. If all you were doing was flying a plane on a ground attack mission, you didn't really notice, but take it up vs another plane and it could stick out. I'm not sure how much of that from back then is still applicable to the current DCS World however.

Actually, that can't happen. For whatever reason, in the late 90s Clancy set it up that the Koreas unified after Kim Jong Il's death (which was still a decade away in reality) and that whole area became stable. I think it was in Debt of Honor, the US/Japan war, where he puts that out there. Of course, despite his "peace in the Mid East" thing he did for Sum of All Fears, he reversed it for Teeth of the Tiger after 9/11 when he decided to let some actual history affect his books again. Still, it would be hard to fit it in his established world and he'd have to start over again. Personally, I always thought it was a mistake to think Korea would get fixed that easy. As for China, they want status quo. A dangerous, noisy NK that does nothing serious but THREATEN keeps the US from focusing to much on Taiwan and Chinese territorial claims. It's the distraction that serves them well. Obviously a full-blown war does NOT serve them well, and I'm wondering if the new Kim hasn't gotten the memo and is overdoing it like Shatner playing a Native American on Star Trek. China doesn't want a unified Korea, it doesn't even want a true peace there. The problem is that's a knife-edge balance and it's tipping the dangerous way right now.

Neither do we, and that's GOOD.

That's because I'm sure the smoke shaders and the water shaders don't have the same values for the wind, or if they do they merely use it in a different way like one uses "15" as kts and the other as kmh. I'm fairly sure the same guy didn't program both.

If you intend by that utilization of an obscure colloquialism to imply that their sanity is not up to snuff...you'd be right.

LOL, well, it's better that those are US planes on the USAF car...but those are USN/USMC Hornets. I'd recommend F-15s or F-16s or even F-22s instead.

Yeah, so 100% of your resources are devoted to the waves...so what about DOING something other than watching it? If it's not part of a believable world you can interact with and do things in, it's just a movie where you control the camera. In other words, it's a sim where all you can do is watch the boat GO. I'm sure that's no Ship Simulator 2012 there with realistic ship systems modeling and it's certainly not Dangerous Waters II with sonar performance amidst thermal layers. So while this is nice to look at, we still need a lot more work.

The truth is I don't know that we could save enough people to matter. Sure, we could get people off Earth, perhaps even enough to matter, but that doesn't SAVE them. What would this star do? You can say Earth and the Moon are gone right off the bat. Mars becomes your only destination, and anything like a neutron star passing through the inner solar system that's going to wipe out Earth would probably ruin Mars too. That leaves interstellar travel, and we frankly can't do that. Leaving propulsion out of it (although you can't because you'd have to leave far enough in advance to get away from the neutron star approaching and receding), you'd need to build a generational ship capable of sustaining people for an indefinite amount of time, and it would need at a minimum many thousands of people to "save humanity". Something like 500 people isn't worth it. Plus, how fragile would that be? A single asteroid undetected too long could pop the thing like a can and it's over. That means it would be very expensive and take a lot of work by a lot of people. I certainly wouldn't work myself to the bone for decades to save a few thousand people out of billions that most likely wouldn't include me and my family and quite possibly would just be extending their lives a short time anyway. Some would, but I think most would prefer to spend the time they had left as best as they could and working hard like that would not be on the list.

Depends on the campaign. I can honestly say I've never finished any of the Arma 1, 2, OA, or DLC campaigns. I know for a fact that some campaigns have flying missions, I believe A2:OA's campaign has an Apache mission as #3 or 4, but I can't state yay or nay for all of them.

They're not as simple as they appear at first glance, that's for sure, even if you come from a helo sim background. The flight modeling is akward at best, bizarre at worst. It can be done, though. It's a lot easier than flying the Apache in the old BF42 Desert Storm mod, that's for sure!

LOL, guess I showed up right after it was fixed just to make you look bad.

The reason flight sims do so poorly is the community is too damned nearsighted. The number of simmers who enjoy WWI, WWII, jets, modern, arcade (WoP), lite (SF2), medium (LOMAC), and hardcore (DCS) is VERY small (I'm one of them). Instead, you get the guys who ONLY fly WWI, but only want VERY real, so things like First Eagles aren't good enough. Or, they want to fly jets, but LOMAC is "too simple" for their tastes, so DCS is the only thing they fly and therefore buy. Meanwhile, you have people who find DCS more like a job than fun, so SF2 is where it's at for them...but they don't really care for fictional, so no SF2 (Desert)...and they never cared for the Middle East, so no SF2:I...and SF2NA was just Iceland and an F-14, and the MF F-14 is better, Iceland is "meh"...so they have SF2:E, SF2:V, and a few DLC. And then they think they "support" flight sims? People who like RTS games tend to get a LOT of RTS games. People who play RPGs buy a LOT of RPGs. People who play shooters buy a LOT of shooters. But flight simmers buy like $100 worth of sims, not per year but TOTAL, and then spend $2000 on HOTAS, TIR, PC upgrades, a cockpit, and so on, and then complain that there's not enough for them to use all this fancy hardware on! They have this skewed value of a sim in their minds, that they should pay no more than $40-50 for it but get HUNDREDS of hours of simming for a DECADE out of it. Meanwhile, other people buy games at $50-60 each, play them for maybe 40-50 hrs tops (even less in the case of some modern shooter/action games) and then move on and consider it a great value. Guess what? Paying $50/sim a couple of times a decade doesn't make a healthy market. The fallacy is the interpretation of the "vote with your wallet" concept. By not buying something, you tell the creators "I don't want this", but that's all you tell them...YOU may think you're telling them "I want something more realistic" or "I want something modern, not WWII" or "blah blah blah", but all they hear is "flight sims don't sell well." So they stop making them, they don't go back and make something else with an equal or LARGER budget in the hopes that this time it will be a hit. I see far too many complaints that a given sim is only "75% of what I want", so they don't buy it. Well, guess what? Not only will they not make that 100% of what you want, but the other people out there for whom that title was 90%+ of their ideal get screwed as well when sales tank. The other thing is often the reasoning given is WAY off. For example, feature "X" isn't present, so the ENTIRE sim is barely 50% for you...like say clickable cockpits. Yeah, such as the Il-2:BoS whiners saying that since it won't have clickable cockpits like CloD (even though Il-2:1946 and all before it didn't have that) makes it a "crappy arcade" game, all the myriad other failings of CloD being set aside because clickable cockpits is apparently the SOLE discriminator of how good a sim is or is not. Now I don't advocate buying complete crap or something you despise. If you're a prop guy and can't stand jets or radars or missiles, fine....but you should then buy all the decent (note I didn't say "good" or "great") WWI and WWII sims out there to let them know you are in that market. However, to not buy Flaming Cliffs 3 because you can't BEAR to do anything lower fidelity than A-10C is not doing the market any favors, you're hastening its demise. If you like it enough to put just a few hours in it, you should get it so that the market is there long enough to make the next thing you do want. As for the "no money to be made" idea, notice no flight sims come out of the West aside from SF2, and that's a 1-man show? A show that now appears to have drawn its curtain the last time? The last major sim release from the West was FSX (I don't count MS Flight, it was a major company but not a major sim), and that was how far back now? I think CFS3 was the last major combat sim release from the West? For jets, was it Jane's F/A-18? There is money to be made, but it's not GOOD money, it's small-margins money, and the big publishers aren't interested in that at all. Hence all our sims are made in Russia! So if you get all cheap and principled and refuse to buy any sim that doesn't meet 100% of your standards, you'll soon find there won't even be one at 50%.

Here in FL, it's 50F outside right now with ~15-20mph winds. The high is forecast to be 65F, but lately it's been struggling to get to those highs. Worst part is today at 5PM is my daughter's weekly soccer practice. Sigh...

I would love to be an analyst. You give people your opinions, with shady support at best, and get paid for it, plus you often get interviewed on TV as "an expert" when you don't really know more than anyone else. Doesn't matter what kind of analyst, I'll be a financial, political, military, entertainment, judicial, whatever. My opinions and estimates are right in all of those fields just as often as theirs are, so why not? As for Su-35s, of course China wants the engines because that's their Achilles heel. All their "best" planes have foreign engines, even the ones they didn't license build, reverse engineer, or just steal. They'd like to have a look inside the F-35's radar and cockpit too, I'm sure. Honestly, Russia shouldn't be so hard up for cash that they sell them their best stuff anymore. China has demonstrated a pattern so loud a blind person could see it a mile away, and if they continue to blithely sell a few to China for a measly amount and then watch helplessly as China mass produces it without giving them a ruble for it they're frankly too dumb to be believed.

Will everyone STOP with the irrelevancy? This is irritating me beyond belief. Why do you continue to harp on the thing that matters least? The F-22 is not supposed to be the "best fighter against other fighters." That is NOT the idea, so STOP saying "oh, it fails at this," because that's not its mission!! It's not supposed to go up and get in dogfights with every enemy plane out there in 1 v 100 scenarios. It's supposed to be a stealthy missile carrier! It's supposed to go up and fight about as well as an F-15 in DENIED airspace. What the hell good is your F-15 or F-16 with its "superior" dogfighting ability if the stupid thing is shot down an SA-xx long before it gets in range of the enemy fighters? It's stealthy AGAINST GROUND DEFENSES...why? Because 95% of US fighter losses in the past 50 years have been to SAMs and AAA, so don't you think that's worth guarding against? Being able to fight on even terms with an enemy fighter in airspace that is 100% lethal to any other allied platform is what it's all about! No, everyone would rather argue about angels dancing on pinheads, sorry, I mean how it will perform against some other as-yet not-in-production POSSIBLY-as-good-as-F-22 plane. Anyone can make a prototype. Make an operationally viable force that is an actual threat and THEN we can compare it to what the F-22 can do. BTW, I'm putting the F-35 in that because it's not in service yet either as apparently the program managers there expected godlike abilities from their programmers and when they failed to be Hercules-at-the-keyboard, the entire program fell down and is still trying to recover. I suppose the F-117 was a major failure because we didn't have a fleet of hundreds of them to carpet bomb Iraq in 1991? I mean, that's what bombers do, right? Look at WWII!! The B-17 and B-24 worked that way, but the F-117 couldn't, so it must have been a big fail.

Really? If I go to the link DWCAce posted, click E-shop under the sale announcement, and click "add to cart" next to Combined Arms it works no problem.

Most things in arma are done by using the mouse wheel and selecting the option. If you don't see it, you may need to move yourself closer or to a different spot. For example, if you want to take something out of a vehicle or store something inside, you can't do it from just anywhere. You need to stand in certain areas around it to get the option.

Especially today. The days of churning out carriers and planes by the thousands within a year after a war starting are long gone. Today you have to plan for your war 20 years in advance.

I'll admit I find CA costing "$1" more than the others a bit puzzling, but I like playing it. Not great fun to be a tank when there are enemy planes around, however!

LOMAC doesn't do mods like SF2. You can't just add a new plane by dropping some files in. That said, lockonfiles.com has the most extensive collection of anyone out there, and while I don't personally know of any such mods for ANY of the ones you listed, maybe something is there. LOMAC is 10 years old, and between FC2 and then DCS World w/FC3, people have pretty much quit doing LOMAC stuff so I wouldn't expect a PAK-FA certainly.

The F-22 is not there to shoot down enemy "F-22s." It is there to defend friendly bombers and shoot down enemy MiGs over heavily-SAM defended territory without worrying so much about said SAMs. Just because the other guy's planes aren't as great doesn't mean he doesn't have better SAMs. Forget about how good their planes are, it's irrelevant. Yes, our F-15s are likely still better than their planes, but it doesn't matter if the F-15 is better when it gets nailed by an SA-20 long before it can fire on their MiGs, does it? As for the F-35, the entire reason the F-22 program was capped where it was supposedly was so the funds could be diverted to the F-35 and get it done faster. That sure worked well, didn't it? The F-35 was supposed to cost between $30-45m each, depending on model. They're currently costing the SAME as the F-22s that were coming off the line at the end ($140m), and they do even LESS than the F-22s can do, and the F-22s are still getting upgraded to do more. Building fewer F-22s after all the R&D was spent wouldn't have saved much at all. Building more of them would probably have been a smart bet, one reason the F-22 hasn't been used yet (among many) is the whole "why waste such an expensive plane in a place that cheaper could do?" We don't want to risk losing an F-22 in a dumb non-combat mishap when other planes can handle what's going just fine. After all, Libya was a joke in both air defense and fighter forces, why would the F-22 be needed? Likewise Iraq and Afghan resistance was too small for that. In simple terms, the "expensive" F-22 program, with a plane that worked, was cut short to help out the "cheaper" F-35 program and that has NOT worked because the F-35 program was designed with a fundamental flaw--that we could build a plane from the first example to a production standard. Instead, the F-35 is equivalent to every plane that came before it, with problems found during testing that need reworking and other fixes, extensive computer modeling helped out ZERO in that case, and now the entire program is screwed up because of that mistake...and make no mistake, that IS the fundamental problem with it. Had a standard "design it, build it, test it, fix it, put it in production" pattern been used, the program would've taken longer (in the initial estimates, ironically it will probably take LONGER this way) and certainly would've been cheaper (although the estimates were this way was to have been cheaper).

[fimg=left]http://www.arma3.com/images/post_thumbs/arma3_alpha.jpg[/fimg]For those of us who have enjoyed playing OFP, Arma, Arma 2, and Arma 2: Operation Arrowhead over the past decade, today BIS released a playable alpha version of Arma 3 on Steam. It features the smaller of the 2 islands that the final version will ship with, a few single player scenarios, the mission editor, and multiplayer. Steam Arma 3 page: http://store.steampo...com/app/107410/ BIS page: http://www.arma3.com/ In case you're wondering, yes, Arma 3 is Steam-only. Check BIS' site for their explanation. You can buy the Steam key direct from their site, or just buy it direct on Steam, unless you want the big "Supporter Edition" which is only for sale on BIS' site. Either way, you're getting a key for Steam.

I thought the bottom of FL was in that map? US forces certainly had land bases to take off from. Now it doesn't LOOK like FL, and I don't think either of the Keys with airports (Marathon and Key West) were modeled either, but that's as far as anyone cared to go.

No My Little Pony??