BirdDogICT

Olham, I had the same glitch for a while...turned out to be a hardware/OS problem rather than a BHaH glitch. I don't mean to be beating a dead horse here, but the glitch went away when I reset my overclocked memory to SPD timings and reduced my overclocked FSB speed. Of course, your mileage may vary.

Mike, Check Six's post is correct...there is a glitch in the cfsconfig utility. Keep in mind that Homeboy's tweaks are for nVidia. Uncleal is correct that more, faster video memory helps. CPU speed, memory timings, video bus speeds can have an effect, too. I experienced artefacts like yours until I reset overclocked memory to SPD timings. But you can safely ignore Uncleal's comments about ATI. While there are differences in performance between nVidia and ATI, there are many happy ATI users here. If you do in fact have an ATI, the tweaks can be found at http://www.overflandersfields.com/Tips.htm Most users here have reported good performance with the latest 9.7 Catalyst drivers. If you want to set AA and AF through Catalyst, it's a simple process. PM me if you need more info. Good luck

At the homepage, click on Air Comnbat Articles, then Air Combat Reviews. A little hard to find, but a truthful review.

SvK, You'll also need to invest in a throttle and/or assign a "blip" button to your joystick (blipping your throttle is more realistic for some planes in BHaH, like the Nieuport 17, Camel, or DR1). Blipping the throttle can put immediate airflow over a sluggish tail end, especially when landing. And in aggressive maneuvers like the Immelmann, you'll need to cut throttle just before stalling, apply rudder to swing your tail around, and apply throttle again when you're falling in the reverse direction of travel. Takes a lot of practice!! Have fun!

Local laws are usually changed due to the necessity for economic development...a number of years ago, we had "private club" laws in Kansas, much like those in Oklahoma and sections of Texas. It was difficult to entertain visiting businessmen and convince them that the Midwest was such a great place to conduct business when the only place they could drink was the Holiday Inn where they stayed. And forget about getting a decent wine with dinner. Lancer's was considered a fine imported wine. Does chicken fried steak go best with white or red wine? Thankfully it's changed...we can even go to the liquor store on Sundays in some small towns now. As of last month we can have the best wines from around the country delivered to our homes, as long as we don't consume too much.

Mark, I tried to PM you after some of the recent rants about 1.32 appeared here, just to let you know that I appreciate all of your hard work (Understandably, you are not accepting PMs). As my English friend used to say, "Keep your pecker up!" or, if you prefer standard U.S. English, "Don't let the b*st*rds wear you down" Best regards

The 8400 was a very decent machine when it came out in 2004. It looks like you might benefit from a faster GPU...depends on your current performance with BHaH. I was running a similar card and decided to upgrade. Of course, your mileage may vary. Perform all of Rabu & Homeboy's tweaks before you decide. It looks like you already upgraded from the stock x800 card...I'm guessing that you kept the stock 400W power supply. Since the PCI-E slot is still compatible with PCI-E 2.0, consider upgrading to a faster 1MB graphics card like a nVidia GTX 260 or ATI 4870. You'll also need (at least) a 500W power supply (you can do the PSU calculation here: http://www.corsair.com/). The 8400 case was cramped, so make sure that these longer cards will fit in your case (if not, you're out of luck). Let me know if you need any additional help.

Be careful overclocking with the stock cooler that came with your Dell. Why fry your CPU and void your warranty for a small increase in performance? 3.6GHz should be more than plenty for BHaH. Which processor is it exactly? 560? 660? Good luck.

I vote with Bullethead, RickityCrate, & Widowmaker. Couldn't agree more... I applaud the developers for listening to end users, but this is sometimes too much of a good thing. I've worked in market research for the last 20 years, and have to say that the customer isn't always right. It's easy to be misled. When you ask customers to design the perfect fudge brownie, you end up with something with the consistency of a chocolate milkshake. Who really wants that? I urge the developers to stay on the task of developing P4. Cheers

Same here, gameplay DOES seems smoother (not that it was a problem before), but no change in FPS. FPS is very playable (13 min, max 41, avg 25 in 7 plane furrball over airfield, 53455 @ 1600X960, 512Mb ATI 4870 with latest Catalyst 9.7 drivers, 12XAA, 8XAF, XP SP3, 3.0 GHz CPU, workshop density settings on medium). Could easily increase FPS by reducing sliders/workshop settings, but happy with current settings, especially with new eye candy. Love this new patch!!! Your mileage may vary...

Hurricane3, OFF is CPU intensive, and will challenge your memory and GPU, as well. As long as you have good cooling, no worries (e.g., I'm using a Zalman 9700 CPU cooler and 5 case fans). I am able to run very resource intensive games like Crysis without problems, but BHaH found the weakest link my system. I was using "overclocking" memory with aggressive timings, and was getting minor graphics anomalies, but they disappeared when I backed off to SPD timings. Many posters on this board have overclocked CPUs, and don't have any problems as long as they monitor their CPU heat production carefully. Sometimes the minor performance boost isn't worth the effort, though. Keep in mind that overclocking exists because chipmakers' purposely create products with wide variances from specs. Good luck.

Olham, Try this... http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/2837988.html Nice promo.

Olham, Wasn't it really coined by Goethe? Reminds me of something: "Wer reitet so spaet durch Nacht und Wind? Es ist der Olham mit seinem Albatros" Well, it doesn't exactly rhyme...can't type umlauts either Cheers

Mr Lucky, Yeah, I agree...ATI was WAY behind the curve for a while (like during DirectX 7 & DirectX 8) but have been making some great products the last couple of years. As always, you have to shop carefully to get the most bang for the buck. Thanks for the tip...I'll look for Pol's thread. Cheers

Big Jim, Thanks for sharing your approach to suspending TrackIR to reduce head movement and allow use of the hat switch. Useful info, since my CH controllers have so many hats to program. FYI, you can also reduce head movement by mapping the TrackIR "Precision" hotkey to one of your joystick buttons. Holding your head still while shooting definitely increases your kill rate. Cheers

True enough...I like them both. To quote the developers "CFS3 has traditionally not ran [sic] as well on ATI cards." My guess is that the differences between ATI and nVidia is due to CFS3 being written for DirectX 8 (patching it to v3.1 makes it DirectX 8.2, I think). Since the biggest ATI tweaks for BHaH influence the use of vertex and index buffers and force single pass rendering, my guess is that ATI performance is due to CFS3's particular implementation of DirectX and how ATI cards implement the resulting vertex textures. ATI made some major strides in their DirectX 9 cards, and anyone who's interested in optimizing ATI cards for older DirectX 9 applications could read http://ati.amd.com/developer/dx9/ATI-DX9_Optimization.pdf But I'm only guessing here...I haven't noticed appreciable differences between nVidia and ATI cards on most of my games. There are a few instances, though, where the differences are very noticeable (e.g., Half Life 2 code was written to favor ATI in rendering reflections using DirectX9). Since my ATI card works fine with BHaH, I haven't lost any sleep over not having a nVidia card.

Mr. Lucky, I remember a post several months by Winder that mentions that the cloud slider doesn't effect FPS, so I've been running on 5 ever since. Can't tell that it's hurt my performance. The 3850 WAS a little bit of a dog...rushed to market to compete with the nVidia 8800. I considered buying it to upgrade my X1950XTX but couldn't see sending the money for a small performance boost. The 4870 essentially doubled my performance, though, and the new drivers are great. Buying graphics cards takes a lot of patience, especially when sorting through the industry "specmanship" game. There are a number of ATI users on this board (i.e., Sitting Duck, LeBlaque, Redwolf, Olham among others) who are happy to answer questions. The big challenge in building budget PCs is picking components that you can afford that won't bottleneck your performance. I usually buy components that were introduced to market in the previous year, so that the price has dropped and most of the BIOS and driver problems have been resolved. My current rig is several years old now, based on a 939 socket processor. Adding a 4870 was the best and cheapest upgrade I could make, but the CPU and DDR memory bottleneck my performance a little. I'd love to build a new PC, but no telling when I'll be able to...I was cut to half-time in January, so am making do with what I have. At least I have plenty of time to play BHaH. No is disputing the fact that nVidia products work better with BhaH. I'll definitely consider switching to nVidia when I upgrade again.

Au contraire, Uncleal. I'm running a dual core AMD processor (Opteron 185 overclocked to 3.0 GHz) with a 512 Mb Radeon 4870 (stock settings) and am getting avg fps of 27 (min 12, max 47) in 10 plane furrballs over the airfield with sliders at 53455 and 4XAA (Edge Detect, 12X samples) and 8XAF through ATI Catalyst. With the latest Catalyst 9.7 drivers, I don't have to apply ANY tweaks (doesn't seem to make a difference now, although it did with Catalyst 8.6 through 9.3). I also use the AMD Fusion for Gaming utility to free up extra memory resources for the game. I'm not an ATI fanboi, having used both nVidia and ATI cards in my numerous PC builds over the years, and have seldom had problems with either brand. I usually buy AMD processors that are easily overclocked and cheap. Now that AMD owns ATI, I find that their components and utilities (like AMD Overdrive) work together very well. According to the developers and users on this board, nVidia cards supply a higher FPS in BHaH, but my average of 27 is very playable...no artefacts or stuttering at all. According to Winder and others on this forum, the latest nVidia drivers are problematic. Hope this clarifies...

Check Six, I'm running similar graphics card, and no problems, especially with ATI Catalyst 9.7 drivers. OFF is very CPU intensive, runs on a single core, so dual or quad core won't help much. I'd try to get more raw CPU speed, say at least 3GHz (I'm running at 3.0 GHz with decent performance). Your laptop will work fine if you run at lower slider settings. You're falling into the "lower spec system" category. But don't take my word for it, check out the developers' recommendations at http://www.overflandersfields.com/sysreq.htm Good luck.

Anyone here using force feedback headsets? How do they compare to force feedback controllers? I'm asking because I'm not willing to give up my CH controllers but would like to add force feedback to OFF to be able to feel engine vibrations, changing control surfaces, bullet impacts, etc. I'm thinking about buying the eDimensional - AudioFX2 Force Feedback Gaming Headset...anyone have experience with it? How about using TrackClip Pro with it? Thanks, BirdDogICT

The general consensus from the devs and other users has been that BHaH works better with nVidia cards, especially ones with 1 Mb of memory. However, I'm running about the same specs as yours, although with an overclocked socket 939 machine with an ATI 4870. I had to do a lot of graphics tweaking to get a decent framerate wihtout stutters when I installed BHaH back in January running Catalyst 9.1. But I installed the latest Catalyst 9.7 drivers today and am getting a very decent framerate without having to apply any tweaks at all. A 4870 sells for about $150 now, half as much as I paid for it 7 months ago. Any PCIE-2 graphics cards should be backward compatible with your motherboard, although you will lose some bandwidth. Gotta love those ASUS motherboards...I've built 6 PCs with ASUS boards over the past 8 years and all of them are still running great. Cheers

Launchbury, If you'd like to read about the real character that inspired Patrick O'Brian Jack Aubrey and C.S. Forrester's Horatio Hornblower, check out the following: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.p...toryId=14505058 O'Brian is absolutely shameless in basing his books on Cochrane's life story, including Cochrane's political downfall following his unwitting involvement in a stock market scam. Cochrane's true life naval tactics were no less revolutonary and successful than Lord Nelson's and are worth learning about. You might also try Alexander Kent's Richard Bolitho series http://www.sea-room.com/series/kent-series.html I'm big fan of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series. You might also enjoy Bernard Cornwell's Richard Sharpe series, Saxon Chronicles or Starbuck Chronicles. I just finished Jeff Shaara's "To the Last Man: A Novel of the First World War" and am now inspired to read The Red Fighter Pilot: The Autobiography of the Red Baron that I found in a used bookstore. I just read Rick Atkinson's An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943, Volume One of the Liberation Trilogy and The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (Liberation Trilogy) and am anxiously awating Volume 3 to be published next year. I also just finished John Keegan's A History of Warfare. Keegan is top notch. Currently reading Gordon Prange's At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor. Rather dry, but fascinating how the U.S. screwed that one up. Good reading!

Thanks, That gives me a better idea of what to expect. With Voice Buddy, fully programmable CH controllers, and Track IR, I should be able to beat a few more of those pesky AI pilots. Too bad they're so lame (tongue planted firmly in cheek). The devs have made good on their promise that you're lucky to survive beyond 17 hours, so any device that increases immersion and helps me survive longer is worth it. Cheers

Outstanding!!

Have to agree that Corsair products are topnotch, but they private label their PSUs from other manufacturers. This is common practice in the industry: http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/?tag=PSU_Manufacturers Lots of good advice here...best thing you can do is build a system with a little headroom for future upgrades, especially with regards to the GPU, which tends to become "obsolete" within a few months. I haven't seen many recommendations for a case here, but it's important to get one large enough for all of the cooling you'll need. Doesn't have to be fancy, just big, like the Antec 900 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16811129021. I've been pretty happy with my ultra-cheapo $70 Apevia case http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList....eTabStoreType=1. Best of luck