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Very cool eagle video. Sorry if its a repost.

..and let's not forget ED folks have families and life to live before implementing all our wet dreams into FC3. Untill they get replaced by robots, we need to tune down on our expectations.. :D

Have a look. The first one is my personalized one. The second one the one for our squadron. Each member will get the opportunity to personalize the standard JG11 skin with Name and symbol blow the canopy at the sides of the plane. Hope you like em Winger

Well ErichVon, don't make the mistake of thinking that more work = more source code. In fact, if programmers were paid in the way freelance journalists are (by lines) you'd get crap software - more is usually not better. The goal in programming is to do as much as possible with as little as possible. Where the size of the codebase comes in is that whenever you want to change something, you need to deal with a huge amount of code where no single individual can ever know what all of it does. So getting the right man to the right job is important - you can think of it like a major industry; no engineer will be intimately familiar with every step of the process. This also means that if you have a LOT of work to do on one machine, but nothing on the others, you can't just take all the other guys you have and have them help - they'd first have to be trained. (In a sense it can be illustrated with the question: making a woman pregnant means she'll give birth in 9 months, but making 9 women pregnant doesn't mean one of them will give birth every month for 9 months...)

Люблю не люблю, устроил тут ромашку. С твоими тараканами, ты сам себе выбирай комплетуху.

there you have it written between the lines, multiplatform. I am going through my second decade as a developer having worked on both C++ and on Java almost equally. And its my personal expirience that just as an organization will ask you to develop in C++ because all their codebase is there, programmers will also boost the appeal of the language they are using just because they already have invested so much time and effort in mastering it and its a nightmare to pay the emotional cost to "re learn". Yes I know that you don't restart from scratch, but you do loose some years of experience when you go to a new language just because you can't use any more the tricks and libraries you got to know so well in the past. Just my 2 cents.

I found it really hard to co-op in FC2. No datalink, no moving map... the difficulty of keeping tabs on where your allies are makes you just want to say "!@#$ it" and go off and do something by yourself. You can stay in the same general area as your multiplayer buddy, but damn it's hard to really do anything together. At least, without LEAVU. I did have a few nice co-op experiences on the 104th server as a Ka-50 working with fixed wing until it got ruined (IMO) by airquaking... after that, the Su-25/A-10-Ka-50s folks could never work together for more than a few mins before one of them (usually the fixed wing) would get blasted. One of the last times I was on it though, I teamed up with some Su-25 pilot at like 4AM in the morning. We were the only guys on the server so there weren't any fighter jocks to come grief us or ignore the CAP mission they were supposed to be doing. It was night, and I "sent" him targets by firing tracers at them :D Good fun. IMO, I think that "balanced" head-to-head maps with multiple aircraft types are probably a mistake. Especially when you mix fighters into the mix. IRL, you just don't throw attack helos and ground support aircraft into the mix when air superiority is so contested. A more ideal head-to-head scenario that would probably lead to more fun gameplay would involve an unbalanced scenario. Pit F-15Cs, Ka-50s and A-10s against a smaller Russian fighter force. Throw in some AI aircraft for the Russians as well. It is very possible to balance such a scenario, you just have to give up the idea that the two sides need to have the same objectives. Give the red side some well defended airspace they can retreat back into. Give the blue side some widely spaced defense objectives. Give the red some some mountainous coverage they can sneak through to make surprise attacks. Maybe it would even be possible to use the new AI tasking system to make some of the Russian fighters invisible to AWACs.

So, you know the code the ED/TFC uses then and you are a coder yourself... If it's that easy then why don't you do it..

To my knowledge... yes you are right, but this presents no obstruction to a more complete/accurate simulation of flight physics. Most flight simulators work in this way, using simplified equations that use multiple inputs to calculate one vector output for the entire aircraft. While simplified, this can produce a competitive model and can be a very convincing. With all the preferred equations on hand from the AFM code, I don't think it would be desperately difficult to simplify/average their inputs and rewrite SFMs to be somewhat enjoyable to fly. The lack of even the most basic accepted level of flight modeling in a relaxed-realism simulator is just... depressing. Takes all the fun out of flying in Flaming Cliffs 2, which would otherwise still be a very engaging experience. I think some additions would be prudent/necessary, mostly in the region of stability and controllability. Modeling of control surfaces and input scaling instead of assuming them would make a big difference in perceived handling qualities. NOPENOPENOPE. :D Think of it this way... one section of the wing from the A-10 would/should count as the entire simulation of lift/induced drag for the airframe. (Two would be even better!) Very few inputs: alpha, beta (if you want to get fancy schmancy,) velocity, air density. Specific to the aircraft, just need an approximation of lifting surface area and table of values for the surface's coefficient of lift. This is no different than the current inputs the SFM uses. I actually (with all respect to the challenges of the profession that I've only barely seen,) think it would not be that difficult to use the code written for AFMs in DCS to create simplified flight models in FC3. The primary difference would be in the format of input data, otherwise I would think the AFM simulation can just take the inputs, do the necessary math, and present the necessary output. With the rest of the environment from DCS already being used (and knowing how the part of the program related to SFMs had to be updated for FC2,) I really cannot imagine it being a big leap. At this point, without a major overhaul to flight characteristics (and for that reason only) I wouldn't shell out for FC3.

Not that it matters anyway, its an F-15 deep down inside, thus we couldn't use the mod for anything more than as a pure fighter.

The co-op scene never really took off with FC2 for whatever reason, however I think Dragon added some FC2 aircraft to a few of his BS1 Ka-50 missions, so you could try that. Alternatively a quick and easy way to get a co-op is to take single player missions, either standalone or campaign, and add the needed "client" aircraft manually into the mission editor to convert the mission to a co-op.

AV8B Harrier II would be amazing given the DCS touch?

Batman and Robin are already discussing about it!