JediMaster

Also the shuttle is quite a bit larger than any supersonic fighter ever was! Only bombers or the Concorde would be comparable. Actually, the funny thing is we felt the bangs just as Columbia went subsonic, entering its sharp right hand 270 degree spiraling descent to the SLF. The timing of that maneuver had to be so precise so they didn't fail to meet the runway! While I wanted to hear the sound of it gliding thru the wind, that was not to be because the chase plane's whiny little engines were loud enough to drown out the rest.

It likely had to do with the massive cruise missile implementation. Being able to fire on them with AIM-54s and all, ships targeting them, etc. So naturally changes had to be made, I think the AAM vs plane changes were an accidental side effect.

I have a sudden yearning for wild roses. Anyone know why?

I wouldn't bet on this year, but as it's not ED themselves no one can say. This is supposed to be 3rd party with a little input/handholding from them and that's it. No one was more upset than I when FC2 didn't integrate with BS and A-10C failed to integrate with either of them, necessitating BS2. DCS World is what I thought BS was going to be from day 1, but apparently their ambitions needed 3 more years of coding work to actually achieve. Anyway, when it comes to labeling these products, they've got a rather good framework, the question is going to be in its application. How realistic must it be to be called DCS? How many shortcuts/omissions/workarounds can there be? For instance, I've never liked that Black Shark simply fails to include so-called "classified" systems like the laser jammer. You have a non-working switch in the cockpit, a 3D model that omits the dome clearly seen in many pictures (and blurred in the photos in ED's own manuals), and are sent into combat against many laser-armed opponents with quite simply less than the real pilots get to work with. Ok, so that system's operation is classified, can't you make a guess? Jammer reduces laser effectiveness by X%? Makes the range smaller before they can fire on you? Anything? ECM in flight sims has always been a sore subject for me as aside from 60s sims, where noise jamming is it, modern ECM has other modes like deception and now towed decoys. How many sims model those? None. Instead we get the same BS about "turning on the ECM broadcasts your presence"...only noise jamming should do that! Deception jamming is about misdirection, and towed decoys are about misplacing your return behind you. Why can I pick up any book or magazine or freaking AW&ST and read about how these things work yet the flight sim devs all throw up their hands and talk about the "secret" bugaboo? Do it based on unclassified sources then! If you can't use real numbers, use fake ones!

According to MS and the reports I've heard, yes. Just as 7 ran better than Vista, 8 runs better than 7, due to even more stripping out of extra code and whatnot. However, it's still not going to run as fast as XP on a given system. Also the improvement isn't AS drastic (say if Vista was a 1 for speed and XP was 10, 7 was around 5 and 8 will be around 6-7). I had planned and later abandoned an upgrade to my wife's netbook from XP to 7 for that reason. She found on XP it was acceptable on performance AFTER we upgraded the RAM from 1GB to 2. With 1GB she really didn't like it that much. I surmised Win7 would just be too slow for her.

The Su-25T is NOT DCS though. It's been included free in DCS World, but it's not DCS: Su-25T. Besides, compared to the Ka-50 and A-10 the 25T in FC was a breeze to fly and fight in...except landing. I still have more trouble landing the 25T than the A-10 or 50, but I think the 25T's gear is overly weak! Oh, and that complicated autopilot. Never got the handle on it so I just flew manual or used the straight-and-level setting for hands-off. I think all DCS planes will have a clickable pit as well. Now here's the kicker: they've said planes like the F-22 will not be called DCS because they can't be modeled that well. Yet they've said nothing about what they will charge! So if the F-22 costs as much as a "DCS" labeled plane, I may have some trepidations about literally paying more for less, or at least the same for less.

Oh, I figure it's probably not the same one, because when I got WinMerge a year or so back I was also looking for a totally different program. I only have vague recollections of it, other than I believe the two files had different colored backgrounds as you looked at them. It was nowhere to be seen, though, and I found this one readily enough and it seems to work for the limited stuff I've done so far.

I believe there are some parts of DX10 that will run without a DX10-capable GPU. You're not truly running DX10, but you get some benefits. The only way to know for sure would be to benchmark SF2 on a system running XP w/DX9 card and then upgrade it to Vista/7 and run it again without a h/w change. Obviously if the system had a DX10/11 card even on XP the numbers would have less meaning.

There are no new cockpits for planes in the DLCs. The most you get are repaints. Basically, it's no different from some of the old mods done here as far as .ini editing and new skins. IIRC, there was a rather humorous instance of Wrench uploading an A-4A package here based on new skins and .ini edits of the existing in-game A-4B simultaneous with TK's A-4A DLC release. Wrench's reaction was the humorous part, of course.

You fired 4 9Gs and got 4 kills? I don't usually get that kind of success rate with 9Gs, and certainly not against 17s.

If it says "DCS:" in front of the title, you can bet it will be modeled to that same level. If it does NOT say DCS, like the F-22, then it will be more like LOMAC.

LOL, that's what the one I posted the link to does, WinMerge!

Anyone else have a problem with my little scheme? Marching up and down the square??

WinXP = DX9 only. SF2 runs nicer with DX10/11 Vista/7/8, always has.

Like I said before, forget putting MP into the SF2 titles we have now. The only way I could see it work is if TK put it in ROF-style with a "mods on/off" checkbox. However, in ROF there's a launcher. SF2 doesn't have that, and if you have mods it loads them all on startup before you get to the options screen. So at this point, with all the SF2 titles, TK has a hangar FULL of flyables from the 60s and 70s with a trickle of earlier and later planes. Sell one "SF2 Online" sim for $50 with say 2/3 of those planes but no modding ability (should be easy for him to code it NOT to look for files in those folders), then put the rest out as DLC (the less popular ones maybe, or perhaps extra variants). Think about it, though. People would pay $50 to get to fly MP with F14, F15, and F16, plus older planes like the F-4 and A-4. You know, I think I'll just post this over there so TK can see it and maybe give him a firmer idea of what I mean.

I use DVDVideoSoft, Notepad++, and WinMerge a lot. http://winmerge.org/ Also I use Calibre for my Kindle, which isn't everyday but still very useful. http://calibre-ebook.com/download_windows

Heavy artillery comes to Broadway at last! Step, kick, kick, leap, kick, touch...Again! Step, kick, kick, leap, kick, touch...Again! Step, kick, kick, leap, kick, touch...Again! Step, kick, kick, leap, kick, touch...Right! That connects with... Turn, turn, out, in, jump, step, Step, kick, kick, leap, kick, touch. Got it?... Going on. And... Turn, turn, touch, down, back, step, Pivot, step, walk, walk, walk. Right! Let's do the whole combination, Facing away from the mirror. From the top. A-Five, six, seven, eight! God, I hope I get it. I hope I get it. How many people does he need?

That's been a choice dictated by money. Sweden had the luxury of dealing with smaller territory it seldom leaves. That means your force can consist entirely of smaller planes (like the Gripen) so making them STOL capable isn't a big deal. Simply put STOL requirements heavily impact design and resulted in tradeoffs that were often too far for what the plane was being designed to do. That said, while STOL is a great idea in theory, in practice the last US airbase to be attacked to any real degree was in Vietnam, and there were always bases a little farther away that were outside that threat range. When the last serious threat was in Korea and WWII, you naturally see it as something that is of secondary importance. Doesn't mean it won't come back to bite you someday, but it makes the decision understandable.

Hmmm. I'm not seeing any problem with my 60's planes at all with the latest patch. However, I did skip the previous patch that supposedly introduced that. I went from April to June in one step. Still, that doesn't explain why a fresh install with the latest installers starting out at June would experience this. Are there any other common points? For instance, I have an i7 CPU and a GTX570. Is it people with AMD video getting this? AMD CPUs? AMD CPU + nvidia? Intel CPU + AMD video?

TK needs to get creative on the business side. It seems like every suggestion for anything other than a minor change is met with "nope, nope, can't afford the time/money to do it" even when it really wouldn't take that much. StratFirst was 10 years ago now, it's time to move on. Start a new company separate from TW. Get a bunch of loans to set it up, using his existing SF series code as the basis and with his expanded plans of where to take it, but still at a fraction of the development cost of games like Ace Combat. License his engine to it, hire a few programmers out of college or similar that are willing to work cheap. Let them work on the easy stuff that consumes a lot of his time (unavoidably) and he can concentrate on the high-level stuff...become the John Carmack of the 21st century flight sim genre (as people like Damon Slye and Wild Bill were in the 90s). Put in MP, spruce up the graphics like the water and sky (which should take time but not be technically difficult), maybe get some new voice acting recorded, sell the thing for $50 with multiple flyables. It can make the mobile games, too, with people dedicated to that who are more familiar with that realm using existing assets licensed from TW. Meanwhile TW itself soldiers on with the same thing as before except the engine will get the benefit of the coding done by the other company to make incremental improvements for those who like SF2 and have no interest in the "bigger commercial" sim, along with the money from the licensing allowing perhaps another hire to make each release a little more than we've been generally seeing. If it fails, the new company fails. Big tax write-offs all around. The programmers and other content creators go on to other projects. TW itself is unaffected other than it loses the licensing from the new company. It just seems like with PC games it's feast or famine. You're either an indie making enough to pay the bills and keep open, or you're a AAA studio spending $10m+ a title and needing several million sales just to break even. Where are the devs with $1m game budgets? Or even $500k? TK makes it sound like $500k would fund him for SEVERAL years. Everyone agrees SF2x is looking dated now (at least it was contemporary enough when SF2 itself came out, but there have been only minor changes since), but the underlying code for the rest works well enough. Hiring outside people just to make things look nice is easy, modelers and painters abound and they just need to be good at that, not coding. I mean, you have places like 38 Studios imploding with tens of millions of dollars lost for ZERO output, but TK is shy of asking for a $500k loan? Maybe that's the problem, maybe he SHOULD ask for a $10m loan. Seems like those are somehow easier to get???

Yes, Georgia requires some suspension of disbelief for some of those planes, but the terrain itself is not too dissimilar from parts of Europe so you can "imagine" you're actually there instead. The missions have been a weak point since Flanker 1.0, but the community makes lots of SP missions and campaigns to fill your time. If only they made MP missions that weren't locked to THEIR servers, and put them out on sites for DL.

My only concern is the MiG being too limited. Hopefully it will be useful in the A2G role as well (not just a token bomb lifter) since A2A is of rather short duration (between 4 AAMs, limited gun ammo, and short endurance).

Yup, I picked it up last night, $5 US. For that price, even if I only put a few hours into it, it's worth it.

DX11 titles are supposed to have FSAA built-in. DX10 may or may not, but it's not a "must". However, regardless of that, you can just use FXAA. nvidia has it in its drivers now for any game, no restrictions, I think AMD has something similar?

So...why were the silver Viggens bad? Was this the Swedish version of Iron Eagle or something?