JediMaster

I'm guessing they'll put it where Enterprise is now, so I wonder where they'll put that.

Most certainly the launch was ridiculous. There were people lined up along A1A a good 25 miles south of the Cape!! Frankly, unless you've got a good lens at that distance all you see is the exhaust. You need to be within 10 to see the thing itself.

I was thinking Shlimil.

A 580 is a lot more powerful, I just don't know if you'll need THAT much, especially if you're still just running 12x10 res. A 570 would probably do you just fine. It will also need less from your PSU. Check its rating because nvidia recommends certain wattages for certain cards.

Not compared to that B-36 it doesn't!

That's a big push back from March!

I guess you didn't read what came before. They DID. It was called the A400M.

Due to the contrarotating turboprops, Bears are loud. Intercepting planes from the F-4 to F-14 to F-15 have all noted it's one of the few planes you can hear from inside THEIR plane, over all the noises they already hear. Can subs hear a Bear on ASW patrol? Yes, as was demonstrated in HfRO. Hydrophones, however, are on the ocean floor and can be literally a mile or more below the surface. I don't know how well a surface noise would propagate straight down, but my gut would say unless the plane literally overflew the hydrophone they'd not pick it up. Sort of like a MAD has to be very close to a sub to sense it.

I've often pondered hitching a ride on the shuttle just to make time pass more quickly here, but the airport fees are extravagant. Remember, though, that not only TK's releases operate on this schedule. Other things scheduled to happen in two weeks: A-10C on Steam New career mode in RoF Announcement of next release in DCS series Release of (updated) mod XYZ for SF2 Fixed P67 chipset motherboards for those of us that bought Sandy Bridge processors before Intel's revelation of the bug Half Life 2 Episode 3 (!!?!?!?!?!) Indiana Jones trilogy on bluray (at least we know Star Wars is due in September)

I couldn't help but wonder... is it two weeks yet??

I think starting with BoB makes sense if you plan on releasing titles in WWII order. Then the planes get progressively better, plus you can wait on things like jet engines and you start with fewer maps.

No idea on the first, although I thought there was some good files in the game's directory itself. For the second, I'd just do it the way they say to do it...low, slow, steady, and a big fat target for AAA gunners...THEN drop!

Well...there is some pooping... Anyway, I would recommend FC2 because it pretty much looks like A-10C but isn't as difficult to pick up (aside from the Su-25T which is almost at DCS levels). You'll also get to fly the F-15C, Su-27, 33, MiG-29, and Su-25. It's a great game and it's like half the price of A-10C I think. The Jedi Master

While I have no doubt that under the right circumstances a very low flying aircraft could be heard by hydrophones, the idea of tracking it "across the ocean" is silly because no one would fly at very low level "across the ocean"!

Well, if you're a stock-only guy I'm sure you'll find it the same as other stock-only people! I think most will agree TK has done a better job in the A2A arena than in the A2G one. I call BS on the plane AI in his sims least of all my sims, but I often find the ground attack a bit unsatisfying, especially if it's just "bomb runway/fuel tank/comm building" vs AAA. Only when enemy air units are there putting the pressure on as well does it get good. I don't blow planes out of the sky easily in many sims because of the cheating (I'm looking at you Il-2!!) the AI does along with the stacked damage models (I blow half a wing off a guy, he can still shoot me down, but I get one hit and I lose half my guns, control surfaces, severe engine damage, and maybe even the elevator controls!!) TK makes his AI play fair and that means a lot.

FC2 is the same level engine-wise as Black Shark. A-10C is slightly updated from that, but it is basically the same. As for A-10's level of difficulty, I'm not sure as I have yet to get it. However, I do have a lot of time in Black Shark and I can tell you this--the scaling is a bit of a cliff. It pretty much offers "console-like ease" or "full on realism." That middle road is pretty much nonexistent, which also means if you learn the easy and want to "graduate" to the hard you have to spend just as much time unlearning the old ways as learning the new. So I took the step of just plunging into BS at full real (with the exception of labels because quite frankly every enemy out there seems to have a radar and you're more likely dead than lucky when it comes to evading fire from forces you never saw) and while it took several months I did get into the groove. I still don't understand most of the avionics, though, because I found I really didn't need to learn them! I learned to take off, land, fly the waypoints manually (since the autopilot is hard to learn), and fire the weapons. The Ka-50 has only limited weapons (Vikhrs, unguided rockets, laser-guided rockets, guns, free fall bombs) that are pretty easy to use, the only difficulty being to target the enemy accurately and kill them in less time than it takes them to lock onto you and knock you from the sky! The A-10C has more advanced avionics (although still no radar), so I'm not sure how hard that will be to learn. FC2 has the A-10A with a moderate FM and I can own the battlefield with that thing. If I want a challenge in the A2G role, I take the Su-25 or 25T because I find the A-10A so easy to use (almost as easy as TW's A-10 after all these years of flying it in LOMAC/FC/FC2). BTW, as for free time when the baby comes, believe me--you'll have a lot more free time those first few months than you will once they can walk and talk! When all they do is eat and sleep, it's easy street by comparison.

I just noticed this typo and thought it a rather appropriate Freudian slip.

I think people are crossing the amount of work put into something with the technical capabilities of the underlying engine. OFF P3 has tremendously detailed terrain...in DX7. Water in DX7 looks like crap, plain and simple, they can't change that. That's the result of picking CFS3 as the base. RoF's engine is DX9 (I don't think it supports 10 or 11 directly) so it can look a lot better. Now if you start saying whose textures look better than whom, who put more buildings in town X, color saturation, etc, that's not an engine limitation, that's what was done with it. It's like comparing 2001 and Star Wars. There's no doubt 2001 had that more sophisticated attention to detail, but there's also no doubt that due to the passage of years Star Wars technical capabilities let it do what Kubrick couldn't have even imagined. So, if you like, OFF is 2001 and RoF is Star Wars! As for the difficulty of creating one thing vs another, well, I've never done any of them. All I can do is point at what has been made. In terms of quantity, 3rd party planes are tops. I'm not sure whether there are more 3rd party cockpits or terrains, but the number is pretty close. However, other than some blatantly unfinished cockpits, I'd say on average the 3rd party cockpits that have been done are a better quality than the average 3rd party terrain. That's because there are some lousy looking terrains out there that blow the curve for the good-looking ones. Target placement and all that takes just as much time to create for a poor terrain (although my guess is they simply spent less time doing it, even though it was just as hard), so while I have installed I'd say well over 85% of the 3rd party planes and over 90% of the 3rd party cockpits, I only use maybe just over 50% of the 3rd party terrains. It may simply be the textures are low-res, or there aren't enough of them so you get the repeating tile effect quite glaringly, but it's one of those "instant recognition" things. You might have to spend a couple of hours with a 3rd party plane before you notice all its flaws and lead you to revise downwards your opinion of it vs when you first loaded it up, but a terrain quite often gives you an instant impression of "ugh", that only hours of "putting up with it" to see the work put into target areas or other things might lead you to revise it upwards...hours that I rarely bother to devote. A good looking bunch of planes flying over fugly terrain is an instant immersion killer for me. So, how hard is it to make a really good terrain vs a fugly one with targets and bases sticking half out of the ground? I've no idea, except that the large number of terrains that have those issues by percentage of the whole leads me to believe it's harder than making planes, where only a few have been so fugly that I dumped them. The ones with bad FMs that caused me to dump them is larger (hence why I only use 85% of them when over 95% look good enough), and my tolerance for using an F-4E or A-4 cockpit in the wrong plane just so I can fly it is pretty high, so the lack of a dedicated cockpit or even a flawed one is not usually cause for me to give up a plane. Therefore, from the outside looking in, terrains appear to be the hardest thing to get right for modders. Maybe it's because the flawed cockpits and planes aren't released while the terrains took so much work that they feel they MUST release them because you can at least use most of it?

You know, I think that's just an optical illusion created by him being so close to the camera. I don't think he's REALLY got a head that's larger than that furniture.

And next week iPad 2 is out.

If you get Flaming Cliffs 2 the graphics are improved somewhat over the original LOMAC/FC. The terrain, which is the same one that was updated for DCS: Black Shark, is quite good. I will say IMHO I think the best terrain in any current sim is RoF's, due to the newness of the engine, but the Western Front wasn't the most challenging of terrains so it doesn't really demonstrate how far it might be able to go. No mountains, fjords, deserts, jungles, only small forests and towns, really... It looks better than the ones in First Eagles 2 by a noticeable amount, anyway, especially the bridges which are a blast to fly under, but I've yet to see any tank battles in RoF like I've seen in FE2. Not sure if it can or can't do them, I just have yet to see one.

The other thing is usually releases designated "expansion packs" don't have another terrain in them, with the exception of FE1's expansion. Exp 1 was for SF2:I and 2 was for SF2:E, and I think 3 will be for stock SF2 because it's the F1. As for Tomcat, since it's a full release I WOULD expect to see a new terrain in there. The "terrain engine" thing is more of an internal deal which I suppose is to make things easier for him to make new terrains as opposed to being some dramatic increase in the presentation of terrains we've seen thus far in SF2. Terrain takes a lot more effort to make than a plane (which is why there are 3rd party planes out the kazoo out there while there are only a handful of terrains, and the quality of those varies even more wildly than the planes due to that difficulty).

But didn't TK say in an interview "My customers love me!!" just last week?

I wouldn't assume those units are in degrees or seconds necessarily. TK sometimes uses units of measurement that aren't obvious for these lines. It's quite possible that while scanarc is in degrees, scanbeamangle isn't! Bar elevation could likewise be anything. What I would take from that is that the F-15 radar uses 4 bars in its scan. Also, bars often overlap a bit, so that there's no chance of a plane below one scan bar passing up just as the bar scans down. However, a standard scan will never cover the entire FOV of the radar because that would take too long. It would take a dozen bars or so to cover max down deflection of the dish to max up deflection. That's why in the more hardcore sims like F4 and LOMAC you can manually tilt the scan pattern to look far below or above you, but you do lose the ability to see the other side when you do that because the bar pattern/number of bars is preset for something like RWS or TWS. As for elevation angle, when you lock up a target in STT mode, the radar will try and maintain that lock until the target passes outside the gimbal limits of the radar, which in this case seems to indicate is 60 degrees above or below centerline. It will thus turn the radar to an angle you may not be able to manually adjust it to look with TK's radar controls. Normally the angle a radar can look left and right is referred to as azimuth, but I don't know if that is mentioned in the .ini.