JediMaster

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?

Columbia broke the sound barrier directly over my head once, at ~30,000 ft. At that distance the double boom was enough to suck the air from your lungs, although no windows were broken because the area had long ago been hardened to such things. Had it been at low alt, though, like under 1000 ft, it would've shattered everything and possibly induced cardiac arrest in frail people!

My guess is that's actually a mockup where the wings aren't so easily removable, perhaps for RCS testing or other fittings.

Frankly, I'm not sure where TK can go with SF2.

Since SF2's first release dropping MP came out, I've been calling for a SF2.5/SF3/SF Online that had limited (if any) modding support but had MP with a little more ability than SF1 series had.

I liked the random missions, although I didn't like not being able to fly against AI-only planes. If there's no human in that slot, why can't it be a nonflyable? I also wished for single mission support, and with release of the mission editor making it so simple I felt its absence more.

I thought the campaigns lent themselves to it perfectly as well, but obviously TK never had it in his plan.

Forget mobile gaming, the games I like on my phone are nothing like SF and never will be. If TK needs to diversify to pay the bills, so be it. He'd probably need to have a larger team for it, of course, but enough profits in that arena could possibly fund development of "SF3" with better graphics and MP even if modding is lost.

More recently there's EECH with its great mods, but even that is pretty old now.

He was one of those rare actors who never failed to entertain, even when what he was in did not.

However, it's obvious he greatly enjoyed his life and we shouldn't feel too bad it's ended. I'm sure he wouldn't have wanted any other life.

With all the releases, I do find myself playing more stock than I used to, up to 50% of the time even. I still play the mods more, partly for the planes/terrains available that are NOT stock, partly for the more accurate way they're generally done, but that used to be almost NO time flown stock.

Ironically, the mods are a victim of their own success. Other than my total conversion mods like ODS, Vietnam+, and NF4+, I just have one modded install (SF2 in this case) with EVERYTHING. Partly for simplicity (post-patch), and partly so I don't have to remember where each mod lies. However, with that mod folder nearing 70GB now, loading times are a big PITA! Plus some of the mods don't seem to work right with recent patches (many date from the early days of SF2 or even are ported from SF1), so I never know if I'm going to get a CTD or some other odd behavior...so if I only have a few minutes to fly, I usually pick stock.

I first read this thread as "surrounded by lasers" and thought it was going to be something REALLY cool.

Ah well, disappointments abound.

I get irked by big pay for crappy job performance, like that woman who ran HP into the ground but was given like $40m just to GO AWAY and let the company recover. I mean literally anyone else in that position could've done no worse, yet they picked HER. They could've spent 1/10 of that money on someone else from inside the company and I bet it would likely be in BETTER shape than it is now.

Not to mention if the answer is too easily Googled and then it just becomes reaction-time testing.

No, no chance I'd forget mine! It's always the day AFTER the fireworks, how can you forget that?

Eh...hard luck is very subjective. We need something a little more objective I think.

No idea WHAT though.

The fish must suck.

!

I remember in the mid-90s there was this big "oh, the Russians have bistatic radar, stealth is useless" dustup that happened.

Just because theoretically or in a lab you can do something doesn't mean it's easily done in the field by troops. Besides, even today I think bistatic radar is mroe search-only, not track. A stealth plane that can be seen on search but not tracked is almost as good as not seen at all. It's still immune to ADA for the most part, just have to watch for interceptors closing in using guns or IRMs.

I was almost born on the 4th. Labor started a bit too late for it.

Plasma stealth should likely be called "active stealth" while what the US has used to this point is "passive stealth".

The problem with plasma is...what happens if it breaks? Real fighter pilots have tons of stories about planes aborting because of a bad radar, screwed up HUD, fuel flow problem, etc. What are the odds your plasma generator is going to work that reliably? Would you necessarily know if it is or not? Might you fly into enemy ADA thinking you're invisible but your generator is fritzing and you show up just fine?

I don't know that I'd trust it that far.

Well, I skipped May and went right to June albeit with some trepidation. No issues so far for me, no studders with any aviation60 planes I can see. Missiles seem fine, 3rd party and stock.

No, democracy worked just fine over there. The mistake was in the correlation "Democracy = Love the West".

If a majority of the population hates the West, and the elections are fair, then the majority of the gov't will hate the West! Simple!

While it looked good, I think it represented a good gen 4.5 design at best. It wasn't very stealthy and I can't see resources being put into that design anymore when it was still so far from production.

Instead, they've been updating the Fulcrum as it's just as (un)stealthy but at least is proven and known. It will need a replacement at some point, however, and if the PAK FA represents the Flanker replacement, they will need one for the Fulcrum as well eventually.

Yes, in "real life" they'd not be conducting cat launches and traps simultaneously, but that's part of the problem of having the limited carrier ops modeling.