ZoltanTheHun

I recorded a complete MiG-21F-13 intercept over Egypt, 1963. The aggressors were a flight of Mystere. After flying against later model Phantoms over Germany in the 1980s I was a bit paranoid about any kind of intercepts in the Fishbed, so I ordered the whole squadron to the sky against the nimble fighter bombers. I took some circles around the airfield so at least parts of the squadron was in the air, but I decided to continue the intercept, because I was afraid of being late from the party. I had the idea to engage the afterburners, which I soon to be recognized to be a bad idea. Too big distance to cover and the too small fuel tank of the Balalaika wouldn't let me do a quick intercept. It took 15 minutes to reach the target area, fortunately most of my squadron was able to catch up by the meeting point. The engagement didn't start well. The approach was great, but most of my mates just failed to move to the right position behind the target. I failed too in being calm enough to shoot any of missiles in the correct positions. The first one was close but the second was a shameful waste of ammunition. The worst part of the situation that this led to some easy kill to the enemy, I was close to being shot down too. However from this point I managed to get into a turning fight and to score a kill. Over the radio, the control center announced that the mission was successful, There was no enemy in immediate range, and the fuel was low, I decided to return home. Looking for problem never ends good, I thought. So... 35 minutes of flight, I sped up the return, because I was not sure if i can record the whole length. The engagement starts at 15:25, unfortunately Youtube compression removed the flights at that distance. I use paulopanz's Mig-21F-13 mod, the other that I tried, ataribaby's mod, being too wobbly for some reason. I will never understand what the soviet's thought when they installed those guns with 30 rounds,sure it has the punch against the bombers, but good luck with that in a dogfight. the K-13 missile is fine, difficult to use, but it is no excuse to make stupid mistakes like I did. The first was quite a mistake, wrong position and the enemy clearly starts the defensive turn before I fire. The second, let's not talk about the second... From that point I wasted some ammunition from the distance, but the Mystere did not really have a chance, so I got him with a pretty nice shot imho. I had the ammo to continue and I had the fuel, but I was shot down too many times because of my own foolishness. Without proper support, and my squadron did not really have any ammo at this point, it is easy to get between multiple enemies... paulopanz's version of the Fishbed is great. I modified the camera yaw and pitch a bit, allowing for more. The handling is a bit on the easy side compared to other versions i had a chance to fly with. I haven't had a stall so far, the landings were smooth, which is uncommon for the type afaik. The general flight experience is good, and it is very good feeling to chase those yankees over Vietnam. However atarybaby's MiG feels more realistic, but I never managed to tame the roll damping characteristics, which is way out of control. edit1:Just to highlight again, engagement starts at 15:25 edit2: when i say that after the mission was accomplished there was no enemy around, actually there was one lurking around clearly visible around 18:30, which reminded me that it is not worth fighting after the mission is complete.

Though I screwed up the cockpit with the effects, I still think with some extra post-processing the game could look a generation younger

I tried out video recording today. The recording went smoothly, unlike my flying, which ended badly, thanks to not paying enough attention to the enemy... 1977, Israel: Il-28 intercept with Kfir

Hi guys, it has been a while since I last posted anything on the forum, I had quite few things to do, but hey, i am still playing, and the game is still awesome. Let me share my post processed Meteor here. This plane is far from being my favorite, I don't like the way it flies, I don't like the way it looks(though I have to admit, the instruments are beautiful), but hey, what can I do when I need to defend the skies of Israel? I jump in the cockpit and go Vampire hunting!

I am also truly thankful to all you people that you created all these wonderful mods!!! This site and forum is spectacular!

Hi guys, I have been away for a while... summer holiday and etwas, but I am back and... I loaded up the game again, and ohh, this was my most amazing random mission ever... the only issue is that I was too stupid to make screenshots. Vietnam, 1964, Intruder close air support far in the north. I had to fly over 200 miles to get there in the beautiful night sky with darkness below. The mission started out nicely, packed with bombs I climbed up to 35000 feet. The journey was calm, about 80 miles from the target the radio operator informed us about a few migs, but we passed them without any issues. This way we traveled until about 20 miles to the final checkpoint before the target, when I started a descent with a right bank which was pretty steep, I descended with a speed slightly under the sound barrier, and the others are followed, and I don't remember taking any sudden motions. Then an explosion happened, and the master caution lit up. And I just wondered what happened, what hit me. I didn't hear the beeping sound, actually I think there isn't any RWR in the A-6 early versions, also I have a habit of listening to music while flying. So I turned my head left, and I saw the other plane banking left in flames, and my plane was still intact. The engine seemed to work, and I switched to outside view to see what happend. Plane intact, or no... dammit, half of the elevator is missing, I am going to be reported dead. And there is a a very bad smoke trail behind me... Yeah, the other bird is falling down, ok, nice, looks beatiful, but what happened... The enemy was quite far behind, and it was just impossible to be hit by them. AA? Is it possible? I am not sure, but It can't be that I crashed with my wingman, the AI, it can never happen... Ok, let's concentrate on flying, because I fly now in the wrong direction. Let's see, target is about 20 miles, and I am still 16000 feet up in the air, a bit too much. Let's see, engine seem to be OK, even if the master caution is up. Controls? Fine, it looks like I can climb and I can turn, so let's see what we can do.... A quick turn to the left, around 140 degrees, right on track, steep decline. About 10 miles closer and 10000 feet lower, I start to worry If I can see the target... the ground is incredibly dark, I thought even much higher that I am going to crash, now maybe it is really time to worry about that... I checked the distance again on the navigation system, getting close... Let's cheat a little bit, I pushed the targeting button for land targets, let's see if I can select it already, but it didn't work. Ahhh, that cannot be, It should be close enough, let's cheat again, I bring up the HUD, and I try to select the target again pushing the number several times. And then... I just lost tracking my height, but I suddenly realize that I am much closer to the ground then I would expect, and there is a hill opposite to me... I grab the joy, but no avail, with half the elevator missing, the plane responds slowly. The angle of attack increases, but my velocity vector does not follow up quickly, my engine power was kept low to keep the speed low on the descent, I push the throttle but it is late, soon it is only a burning metal skeleton showing my presence in the dark night. Mission report. Failure. 2 Intruders down. They killed each other. Strike Fighters always has surprises.

No need to apologize. I think with this frequency the collisions are acceptable, I never paid attention to the formations, because I thought the AI is 'too perfect' to collide. It was a very nice lesson.

It is not a problem that happens, it was very cool and totally unexpected. I did not experienced such thing in a hundred flights and it was a very pleasant surprise.

Thanks for the comments. Maybe I did not express myself clearly, but it was a midair collision with the wingman (it was an 8 plane formation though). I don't know how it happened, I think I banked to the right, and the guy was on my left... My plan was not to go directly to the waypoint, but to take a turn, about 30 degrees, and I just started that turn, and I was watching the compass....then there was just a big boom and I was just looking around and saw the wingman going down, and my plane was stable but the master caution was already red... I was too stupid to not to make any screenshots, but I myself did not believe that it was a mid air collision, until the aar did not show that Eiswhatever was killed by Zoltan. And the next line: Zoltan was killed by Eiswhatever... the only kills during the whole flight :D

May be he didn't want to... The problem is that the multiplayer is the hardest part of them all. I read about implementing multiplayer in strategy games and probably the same implies here. There are 2 basic architectures when it comes to multiplayer: Client-server systems where clients send their input to the server, and the server sends back the gamestate to the player. So in a shooting game, you send your input to the server, and the server sends back the location of everyone in a given step. Now in a shooting game you have a very small gamestate, think about the position of the players and where they look, you can basically simulate the game on your computer based on this information. There might be small differences, if someone is slower, than it appears lagging, but to you the game is always fluid. If there is a lag, then someone just jumps in position, it is no big deal. The problem with this approach, that the gamestate grows very fast with each game element, which results in larger and more packets to send. As a result, it takes more time to send the data through the network, and if you want to send it the fastest way, you will send it through UDP, which is a fast protocol, but it is less reliable than TCP. This might result in packet loss, the more data you send the more often it can happen. In shooting games it is no real problem, because the enemy jumps ahead or backward, and maybe you lose a frag, but if it does not happen often, you can live with it. So, we have a simulation here, there are tanks marching on the ground, AI and player planes flying around. Rockets chasing bandits, whom throw flares and chaff all around while engaging in precision bombing. It is quite easy to understand, that we will have a huge gamestate and if we want to have a networking game, than we need to limit our packet size. How can be done? Well, the answer is easy, the implementation is not: let's simulate the games synchronously, and share the inputs the player give. This way our packet size depends on the player only. We can send a data to a server, which is an overhead, or just share between each other directly. This last method is called peer-to-peer lockstep. It sounds cool, even the name of it, but in reality this is a big pain in the ass. The problems are twofold: first, the simulation needs to be deterministic. Not fully deterministic, but the more the better. If 2 games simulate the same input and they are not deterministic, than you will see two different games to play, and the players won't necessary notice it, actually they can both win, and be surprised on the end results. But hey, it is a computer, it cannot generate even random numbers, so sure it is deterministic. Unfortunately they are not. The problem is afaik is with floating point numbers, which we love so much when we implement physics and 3d transformations. All those nice vectors are made of very nice floating point numbers, and they have an ugly tendency of not being accurate. This is caused by the way the computer stores them. They have a finite mantissa and a limited precision and when you work with them you always introduce bigger and smaller rounding errors, which in sever cases can zero a number out. To make the simulation deterministic, we can use integer math throughout our program and handle this manually, but that would be incredibly slow, so other techniques, very careful programming and lot of testing needed which is truly a huge amount of work, depending the current state of the engine, it could be almost the size of a full rewrite, especially in AI and physics. There is one more drawback to this model: input cannot be lost to keep perfect sync, so the speed of the simulation is slowed down by the individual computers and the network. For example in an RTS the tick rate(how often physics, gamestate, AI updates per second) can be 20, even if the FPS is updated more often. This ensures that every computer can simulate a current step and receive the next input for the next step. These 2 things: simulating deterministically, yet fast enough makes it a very big challenge, especially if you want to support mods too. . However if the first thing is done, we have the playback function basically. Which is half of the multiplayer. It is fun to look at long playbacks in Il2... mine is usually completely wrong after a while. Playback in games is done by recording the player input and feeding that to the computer to replay the game. If the engine is not deterministic enough, it will fail after a while. I hope this helps understand it. Here is 2 links on the topic which is more accurate than my explanation: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3094/1500_archers_on_a_288_network_.php http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/what-every-programmer-needs-to-know-about-game-networking/

I think what is stated here is quite obvious and it is a fully legal approach: to mod/hack a game you have all the rights from the very beginning, you can do whatever with the files on your hard drive you want, but you cannot distribute any original files/file parts. A patch is always a legal way doing this, if it was done through reverse engineering. So redistributing lods or parts of lods is a big no-no, but creating new lods is fine. I think there was never a legal problem to do any modifications to the game, it quite easy to comply with law in this regard. Reverse engineering afaik was always supported in most western countries. The problem is that it is way easier to create a program which injects the required bytes into an existing dll, then to reverse engineer the dll itself. So the problems are two fold: who would do it, and what is possible within reasonable resources(which is mostly time)? Anyway, there are two welcome things in this: TK responded and he is not denying that future patches are possible. Again, I truly think he must be in love with flight if he worked on this series so far, and everybody needs a break and think about their financials sometime... and honestly, I am sure, if he would be done with Strike Fighters for life, he would release it for the community as open source...(though probably part of the source code is reused on mobile)

I am a coder in an Eastern European country(HUN), and I several times played with the idea of going solo and start my own company, not necessarily a gaming company, because that is probably the most volatile option out there. Without the security of some kind of corporate backing you need to think about future savings as well, because you never know when you get into the situation that you cannot work for month(s), without any paid holiday or insurance. I calculated about this several times, but I think If I want to get the same kind of options with the paid holidays that I live on now, I must make at least twice as much as I earn at the moment. Just think about that companies need to keep up all kind of different not money making facilities like HR next to the pay of the real moneymakers. Even if TK is just solo, and works with contractors maybe, a lawyer and a bookkeeper is a must. So 100k might look good on paper, but if you start to spend that money on all Maybe I am wrong, but I do not think that TK is greedy, I rather think that he is just trying to survive, and he found some more profitable opportunities in the mobile business. And if that is truly profitable, that doesn't mean that SF3 sees the light one day. I say this, because he is a simmer, hack, I cannot imagine someone working on a sim for more than a decade, if he is not a simmer himself. So I would expect him, that if he is financially satisfied he can spend more time on what he enjoy: making flying games.

Till there are people like me whom buy the pieces individually (I spent more than 150 bucks in the last 5 month on the series), it is worth more to sell the individual pieces for a higher price. The series can be quite addicting. The rather big problem is availability. Like I mentioned before, I know about this game because Strategy First decided to discount Wings over Europe on Steam, and I learned only from the comment section that this is someone else's intellectual property. Steam would make it easier to manage the DLC-s and the merged installs by the way, and it would give us Steam Workshop. Like it was mentioned in some of the reports for the Cities: Skyline game, Steam Workshop is the best copy protection, because you receive all the fun through the copy protection method. Next, instead of flyables, which are costly to develop, If I were TK I would rather concentrate on the coding stuff and let the community to do the rest of it. Just get the code ready for the ejection seat, the HUD-based RADAR(Mig-23), fix the HUD flowing out of the glass and a few other minor things, and release it as SF3. If development is well communicated, modders would be ready with the assets by the time it is needed. (The changes I listed are biased to my taste, but my point is that I think coding is more important and valuable in this series than the assets)

I do not necessarily think that the graphics of the series matter that much. Yeah, the ground was not that great in most parts of the series, but in my opinion, in the air, it still can look really gorgeous. One problem though that the engine is old and it could push more on modern architectures, so a new engine would be welcome. I often wonder what would it be if the game had the graphics of the Wargame series, that would be great, but.... Smaller and cheaper improvements could be easily made in my opinion. Like: 1. Get the MiG-23 HUD working. (In addition I never understood why TK never made Red campaigns available by default, a WoV Red campaign would have been fantastic and hugely challenging) 2. Campaign extensions. These again do not require that much effort I think, you do not need new models or anything, Simply what if you could be in charge of the Air Command? What if you could organize the campaign? Let's expand on the concept of the mercenary campaign, and have a campaign where you have a mission with goals like bomb this and that, than you have to select all the aircraft involved(though maybe it is interesting only in the heart of the more strategic minded people). 3. We need a mod central(similar to steam workshop). This is again good, because it is a single programmers job, so no additional people involved. The great thing for TK was, that all the things here are fan made. He should just ask the money for the coding, all else is basically provided by the community. Now mods would be stored at one place and people could up-vote planes on accuracy, and we could integrate all the weapons and terrains into packages. (Actually this can be done right now, without any TK involvement, maybe there is already some software like partially providing this functionality, it is just that I am not aware of it) 4. Get back multiplay. This is a tough one because of the coding difficulties involved with that. However, with my previous 2 points together, imagine a dynamic campaign system, where people can select certain aircraft and fly the missions all over together and against each other with a persistent online map. That would be great.(I am not sure if any game has this on the market right now without some kind of community made tools, probably yes, but here the point is making it convenient for people to join one) 5. More radio commands, like cancelling mission. Custom voices(maybe it is already possible). I think the community could put together some really great stuff in this regard. Maybe some of this is already there(esp sound mods), I am new to the community...

Hi guys, I have never written to this forum before, but I actively followed it for the last few months. I purchased Wings over Europe from Steam in last November when it was on sale for 5 Euros or 1 Euro maybe. I did not expect much from the game, especially because it had only 60% of positive reviews. However this game made me fell in love with the series. I was continuously playing the game for months now, and I know that it has a lot of limitations, yet, I think that it is on par with the current best simulators on the PC market, especially if you have a merged install for SF2. It might not be the most accurate sim out there, but one of the most entertaining and hack, you can basically fly anything in this game. Since I started to play the game I subscribed to this site, and I purchasedall SF2 games and expansions aside from the DSL from TKs website. I planned to purchase 1 game a month, but last month I was so addicted that I grabbed almost everything I wanted. And I am glad I did because I am afraid the game will disappear from the TK store sooner or later, a thing which I did not expect before. To start the more serious stuff, let me say that TK is a strange company. This is, because they chase a very interesting strategy. Let's just see a couple of questions about the whole series. Like can anyone wonder that Strike Fighters do not make any sales if the franchise is virtually unavailable? I didn't know about the franchise, though I love flightsims, and I bumped into it accidentally during a Steam sale. And how many more people like that can be there? I am sure if I have heard about a game simulation the mighty F14 I would have bought it in an instant. But even with googleing, it is very difficult to find the game. And it is not just that. One could say that it is pirates who killed the game, but hey, you know what? It is difficult to find even pirated copies. And I just don't get why on Earth this is not on GoG and Steam, where during the sales it could generate revenue easily for TK, without too much extra effort. I am really glad of the development of SF2:NA, because it is really an excellent game, though it has its issues... , but I would like to ask TK, what did he expect with that game? How did he expect sales if there is no news getting out about it? Was he solely developing for the combatace forum and maybe to the fellows on SimHQ? If he is not interested in getting any money from the game, why does he keep it closed sourced? Is this new website a joke? I would like to see TK developing a new entry to the series... and I am sure if he would make it more open, if community could code to it(I could do), it could be really popular. And if it had multiplayer and a good modding framework like a support for SteamWorkshop, I am sure, it wouldn't be a problem to get good sales. Not the enormous revenues he might have reached on mobiles, but he could get the money. The mobile games are horrible unfortunately, and I get that there is the money now, and that it is important. I wholly agree. But I have concerns about the long term success there... And even if that it is a success, the PC series shouldn't die. It is unique. it is the proper legacy of the old Jane's games, and it could be more. But I clearly feel that it is not something that TK was ever aiming for.