Do335

Agreed Beach, seems that TK played pretty close to heart like it's his baby. One can say he never wanted to be big. Or can say he didn't because he didn't want to. But I'm thinking coming from his early Jane's days when big budgets plummeted all for nothing, his experience was the former. And having spent thousands and thousands of hours on Falcon4 I tend to agree with him. Those devs rocked hard, made an awesome and extremely in-depth sim that dwarfed everything else even to date, but rocked themselves out in the process. To think selling that to average gamers who mostly just want to play point and shoot games with 40 bucks a pop... nan. I think my second/third college year was spent like a ghost coz was reading Falcon manuals all night, testing, flying and modding it and still having information overload learning it 6 years later, they surely are dreaming to ask a middle-class career/family man for that who make up the bulk of gamers revenue wise.(?) At the end of day we are armchair pilots and not real fighter jocks, otherwise we'd joined the air force!... So I reckon maybe TK thought he figured it out and decided to do his own thing by setting up TW and keeping it small and low budget. With benefit of hindsight with DCS being successful and all, as said there could be something he miscalculated. He supported campaign engine, mission generator, AI and modding. These things don't sell. But they cost big time development resources wise. Perhaps it's still his old Jane's self playing a part, or the business model evolutions hadn't come to that point yet as SF1 was 2003 after all, or geniuses like Wags just invented them along the way, or just like Beach said it's TK's personal goal.... Anyway what if he dropped those and kept pumping out DLC addon planes, plane pack bundles, SF3.0/4/5 graphics engine updates with a few other changes mixed in? Most ppl mainly loves shiny new planes and nice gfx. And for missions god knows there're them and campaigns being uploaded to CombatAce all the time, like DCS and other games are leveraging nowadays: community or "volunteer based content contributors", which, doesn't incur dev cost at all. And heck aren't the fans all too enthusiastic and willing to contribute. Ironic that when asked to do some DLC planes TK mentioned along the lines that "There's no campaign for them." Or put it another way, at 2012 he was still doing the same thing he did 10 years ago based on basically the same engine. Some changes had to happen for business to continue and thrive. (Maybe mobile is the answer there?...) If one's read Kodak and related stories recently that could be the same principle. But... heck if TK had went just for the money grabbing route myself wouldn't be flying it though. My thought at this point. Sorry for another wall of text as ya old timers probably have more to say and it probably doesn't comfort the disgruntled PC fans any but it's my honest thought atm and writing it out is for myself as well.

Yah Beach ask them to make out of fuel AI not crash and/or give them a speed bonus to stay in formation easier like TK did, so your wingman won't crash in the next AAR:p If they're willing to take time off making switchology so it sells better to the "realism" stereotypes that is!

http://bbs.thirdwire.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5752&p=35278#p35278

Mark pg 530

^Yeah that's a (internal?) question only TK can answer I suppose. If ventured a guess he wasn't hiring. http://bbs.thirdwire.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7664&p=48249&hilit=coder#p48249 http://bbs.thirdwire.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7303&p=45532&hilit=months+artwork+behind#p45532 ... He is the only coder and apparently the only tech support. But there could be merit in his thinking. Flight simming, wargaming etc, like many other hobbies actually, are niche of niche. A company can throw $$$ outta for ads and get minimal returns. I've seen other game buiz owners with same line of thinking. I think Tk's focus market is even smaller due to nature of his game. And heck Stary, TW is around for more than a decade. And it's still around for mobile. TK hasn't had a bad run at all I reckon.

Same here about 4 years... Perhaps twas indeed a bit long now.. Never knew what happened, one day stopped and just never went back. Maybe finally got everything outta her. Anyway..

lol...2 weeks eh. Anyway Im sorry mate. Take care Stary. As for TK well, perhaps he's tired of the old big budget days and just wanna do his own thing. Open modding support are something that games that wanna profit rarely do now. Neither is a robust AI and mission/campaign system. TK did them all and very well and devoutly supported modding. Perhaps he didn't wanna go big at all but just something he liked. ...Then perhaps along the way he got tired of doing his own thing, as if the lack of funds and workload placed on him finally got too much. Anyway that's the impression I got reading his posts thus far.

eh hey Eole2 what was your username at BMS/FF? I flew Falcon a lot and coulda probably saw you on the forums:) As for FF yeah iirc they disbanded shortly after BMS got released and the github project apparently hasn't been updated for half a year.. Not a coder here ofc but did get into the BMS dev forums eventually and realised it was indeed very very slow (to begin with...)

Stary, yes CFS and IL2 does much better as ww2 dedicated sims with much larger budgets, but my point is with proper marketing the campaign engine can differentiate SF enough to get a slice. In fact with source code and resource available I suppose one can enhance the lacking areas enough to a proper sim (or at least one that'll look good in feature list and poster screenshots) to any era like TK supposedly wished the things he'd done but never did, and it'd be hard not to make a good game due to the underlying campaign engine and gameplay features, just technically guestimating that probably it'd be easiest with Korea, while missile and ww2 era more complicated. Otoh every game has its intricacies... it's 99% away from the full blown matrix after all but with enough exposure ppl would know it. Exactly why TW games never got enough of that I'm not clear and guess you guys have a better idea of it. I just know atm that these games are hugely undersold, and one reason I suspect is due to the fact that gamers are generally unwilling to, pay, for a good AI, missions and campaign engines. LOL that's also the reason I'm sometimes tempted to buying to use it as reference material. ... Which cockpit?!!!...

Oh a WW2 title made out of SF/FE can differentiate itself I think so. WW2 is a large cake like modern and the other ww2 titles has shortcomings. Il2 is a bit old, lacks dynamic campaign and I fear right now with SAS making most content is the issue of stability, as in every other open source-ish projects. The lack of campaign functions in IL2BoS is apparently criticized as well. IL2Clod is almost multiplayer/virtual squadrons only. War thunder focuses entirely on casual gamers and online types. However! The problem is are the ppl favoring campaigns just a few individuals congregating on SimHQ or is there a larger demand potential. Korea YES. I'm trying to mod but certainly if I can buy it and spend my free time flying then superb so personally wanna see it more. The problem much like Mig Alley and the later BDG group that never gained much popularity with MA is that how many ppl will care about the forgotten war on the western side or if they're willing to expand to the treacherous Russian/Chinese market... DCS is comfortable with it due to, I reckon strong DRM and geopolitics.

Steam and Iron @Eole2 FreeFalcon What happened after they moved source code to github?....

Streakeagle I'm still having a hard time justifying forking out money for the vintage birds in DCS without the assorted theater and aircrafts in their time, let alone non-scripted missions and campaigns. Someone said it best perhaps that DCS is an airplane simulation and not battlefield simulation thus it suits certain kind of playstyles and not others so each to his own I guess. Its business model is really great for sure IMO, a friend of mine knew Wags and said he's genius buiz wise... What I miss as a player/simmer from DCS is what any other successful commercial venture at its peak builds which is a dedicated user base. But then when checking Belsimtek's F-86/Mig-15 forums it's about 1 new post per day so I digress.

And hey Stary what's happening to these... WIP? (assume Starfire and Tigercat cockpits, and assume it doesn't hurt to ask ) img00258.jpg img00569.jpg

Nan, come to think of it you guys have learnt all you need via dealings with TK but I'm still topping up here, like game mechanisms and what ini callouts means what, it's just there're so many.

Team Super Hornet worked mostly without source and just exe hex editing (or at least that's what they say to the public). Improvements are for sure relatively minimal and community following rather small, but the patches were sufficient to keep it alive due to the original awesomeness of Jane's F18... I really feel WW2, Korea and other pre-60 combat is the way forward for SF if there is any. If one look at the missile era, DCS, Falcon and other sims have SF beat hands down. SF can live within the "alternate" casual community but the line gets really blurred between it and other flight or non-flight games. Otoh TK has done a tremendous job supporting guns only combat. The damage modelling and AI is excellent, surpassing even the sims, which is very important for guns only. The flight modelling if not hardcore is not bad at all. The lack of avionics (and some other features for modern like air refueling) in SF instantly vaporizes for this era since there is none. The dynamic campaign blows War thunder, IL2 and whatnot other ww2 game/sims right out. The graphics while not AAA quality still is much better than BoB2, Mig Alley, CFS3 and other vintage but quality ww2 sims. Sim-game, sim-lite or gamulation or whatever the concept didn't work that well but it becomes less relevant or, more of an advantage for this era. But of course, it all doesn't matter, I agree with Baffmeister that this needs some entrepreneurial individual(s) to be realized perhaps in private, if there is any. As for an organized community group it's I guess like others said unlikely, apparently SF does not have a dedicated user base to begin with due to the lack of Multiplayer and marketing.

Hi Stary, I have bumped them up exactly for infantry vs tanks combat. Apparently in korea the US inf Divisions all have organic tank battalions but the NK/Chinese have very little. (At beginning of war the NK 105th armor bde had some 120 T-34s but later expended them all on the Pusan perimeter and later the Chinese 1/2/3rd armor divs distributed all among inf units for support.) I have contemplated using all armor ground units like TK's stock campaigns, but it would appear a bit funny I reckon if the red side gets hordes of Tanks. Plus.. Korea has lots of hills, means even fewer tanks. So to give infantry a chance they now have relatively quick move speed and very small hitbox, thus it becomes quite hard for tanks or aircraft to hit them. For example strafing aircraft do not lead, if the squad is moving there's good chance to avoid the strafe. The weapon system etc is ofc revamped so they actually shoot their guns unlike before. The result is they're still mostly hapless when attacking but can give tanks a run for money when defending. On the campaign level this is largely irrelevant ofc as the strategic node joust mainly depends on player mission score, but tank units will have fewer objects than Infantry divisions so the latter can afford more losses just to compensate. (In turn the small hitbox of inf squad irrevocably required precision of strafing CAS aircraft, especially those with wing mounted guns that simply have to score hits at gun convergence point. So I've spent some time testing and adjusting strafingAI and rocketattackAI values which works now.) The catch is how such a prolonged large volumn of bullet trajectory calculations will affect FPS in campaign mode, like we've experienced with bomber formations and maybe to a lesser extent anti-air machinguns. It'll have to be tested after I finish saving TK's posts on the TW forums...

Mark page 250. (just a note to self)

eh.. thanks for the sticky, Dave.

Thanks Brain32. I confirm the proggy works, used it to capture a small forum just to test. But apparently TW bbs disabled these kind of saving. "Warning: Note: due to bbs.thirdwire.com remote robots.txt rules, links beginning with these path will be forbidden: / (see in the options to disable this)" so only the TW forum index page was saved.

OK a search of posts by "thirdwire" turns up 681 pages. Gone through the first 100 pages so hopefully get this done in a week. (TK if you're reading this hang tight a bit!:))

Yeah, suppose I'll save as much as I can. Hopefully there'll be others besides me and I'll see if I can make a thread to collect/sort the saved pages when the time comes. Really come to think of it it's more like a knowledge base there.

eh.... oh well. Commencing manual saving it is.

The Thirdwire forum is back up, but I have an inkling that its time is limited. I am not a web expert at all, so wondering if there's any way to "batch" save a forum data? (Instead of manually opening each page and save it via browser). TK has shared loads of info on it and it takes too long to go thru them one by one. I've seen many flight sim forums come and go, and when they go the data is always lost. I feel the TW fora is kinda unique as no other developer has shared so much game info with the community via it.

Ran outta likes today, so THANK YOU mue.

I don't believe it will happen to SF either.... But I think it is good spirit anyway. Personally I've stopped playing games that can't be modded....