JediMaster

I've heard it's been strengthened, not least because of being able to drop the sonobouys and having the weapons bays, but I doubt that P-8s will get as many decades as a P-3 in that regime. Not without major, regular SLEPs. However, it's also possible by the time the P-8s need it everyone will just use marine UAVs anyway.

FC2 =/= DCS. Not even close.

The A-10A in Flaming Cliffs (any version) is closer to TK's A-10 in SF2:E than it is to DCS. I can fly like Luke Skywalker in FC in the A-10, killing an entire tank column in one pass between all the weapons I have, and landing on a runway with battle damage after approaching it at 90 degrees and making a hard turn over the landing spot! Same with TW's sims. The A-10C will have none of that crap.

You can ease up the DCS level to about SF2's, yes. For me the one problem with DCS is the scalability is rather extreme. It's there, yes. But you basically have Falcon 4 on steroids or you have SF2. That LOMAC/Flaming Cliffs level is skipped over unfortunately, as I think I'd rather fly the A-10C that way. To date I have more kills with the gun in A-10C than all other weapons combined because even the Maverick is a PITA compared to every other sim I've used it in except Falcon 4, and there the difficulty was the graphics making ID hard.

As for graphical differences between FC2/Black Shark and A-10C/Black Shark 2/P-51D/CA/DCS World, they're pretty minor. The major difference is FC2/BS1 work just fine on 32 bit systems at max level, while starting with A-10C you need a 64-bit system and 4GB of RAM to run max levels.

Differences between the Ka-50 and A-10C: while the Ka-50's weapons systems are easy to learn use, the helo is not easy to fly and flying and fighting is even harder (especially as you have to point the nose just so to hit anything, whether firing rockets, missiles, or guns). Beware getting your trimmer out of whack! Ctrl-Enter is your friend! Conversely the A-10C is pretty easy to fly and point the nose wherever, whenever, with no worries while the systems are really convoluted to the point that I can get several guns kills in the time it takes me to line up one Maverick shot!

Of course, I have like 10 hrs in A-10C and like 70 in the Ka-50, so that's part of it. But the A-10A in LOMAC/FC is closer to TK's A-10 than the DCS A-10C. So I can even T/O and land the Ka-50 with more ease than I can the A-10C (and landing the 50 with battle damage is a hair-raising experience, especially with rotor damage).

I'll bet the core temperature never gets that high, and the pressure ratio must be like 1:1 with how much air leaks between those blocks!!

That's one thing I found about Vista and 7...don't install it on a single-core CPU. XP is always best with 1 core. With 2, 7 runs best.

Faster booting is nice, but really how often do you boot? Work PCs boot once a day unless they're left running all night for patch/antivirus management. Home PCs probably the same, unless you use it in the morning before work and again after, so maybe twice. You can always let it sleep instead if you want faster startup. Honestly, 7's start was never too bad for me. Maybe 30 seconds?

I want a faster OS in execution of everything, not just starting. Shutdown is the worst. For most of Window's history it's been slow closing everything.

You have to admit military paint schemes for large birds are never very inspiring. I think the last good ones were the SEA B-52s in the early 70s.

I wonder if the P-8 is actually supposed to fly as low as the P-3 or if it's only going to be flying low for a Boeing.

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?