kylania

I never knew how much I wanted rain on my windshield in games till I saw this. :cry:

OTM probably means "On the money", as in "that's accurate!" but it might also mean "Obliterated Tomato Mist", that thin red mist you get when you smash a tomato with a sledgehammer.

I love you! :)

Exactly. Steam does not give you a cd-key you can use to activate Black Shark via DCS download. It only gives you some random key to activate itself only on Steam.

Sadly, though you might have purchased your PC within a year the processor and graphics card are "old" and "slow" by now. :) The ATI HD 5870 came out more than two years ago. It's quite a bit slower than the latest ATI HD 6990. Your i7-920 was originally released in 2008. If you wanted a recent one you'd have to get something like the i7-980 or one of the 2nd generation i7s like the i7-2600K. Sadly, when it comes to PC, unless you're dropping several grand on the latest and greatest, everything we buy is obsolete when we get it.

Like good ol' Advanced Squad Leader. Each new product included new pages for the 3 ring binder rulebook, each page with smaller and smaller print because they added new rules but couldn't renumber the rest of the pages! :)

Steam never gave you an actual cd-key so you can't use it for the download version unfortunately. That's one of the reasons I got it on Steam when it was on sale, but alas not. Once they have the installer fix in place you should be able to buy BS2 and install it using your Steam BS1 install.

We never paid for Ka-50 + A-10. We paid for Ka-50 and we paid for A-10. We were told that ED hoped to be able to get the two to play together, but nothing was promised. We never paid for compatibility guaranteed in any way. There is DCS: Black Shark 1.02 which can play with FC2. Then there is DCS: Black Shark 2 and DCS: A-10C which can play together. Black Shark 1.02 cannot fly with A-10C. The $20 upgrade for Black Shark 1.0 is so much more than just the ability to fly together, you should read more about what's included in the upgrades, Black Shark 2 is a completely different game now compared to what Black Shark 1 was. If you want to fly alongside DCS A-10C, get the upgrade. If you want to fly Black Shark at the A-10C level of quality, graphics, features and technology get the upgrade. If you want to keep flying with FC2, you don't have to get anything. If you want to fly with FC2 and A-10C, get the upgrade (you'll end up with two installs, BS and BS2).

Other than helping ED out, that's one of the reasons I bought the full version even though I already had both retail and steam versions of BS1. To reinstall the game I wanted one product and one install, not a series of multi-gig installs for one game, it's patch and it's upgrade. :) Definitely worth the extra $20 to not have to deal with any of that.

The training missions in Black Shark were essentially just tracks with text in them. The change from 1.0 to 1.02 broke track playback, so ED provided us with Wags wonderful series of videos that covers all the same things that the in game training did. There never was the interactive level of training missions you find in A-10C however, so you're not "missing" anything by using the training videos over in game training.

It's a professional business, not some shady here-today-gone-tomorrow discount website. :thumbup: The payment processing is via Sage Pay and you can show your parents these links (features and press release) to show that it's a reputable business to buy from. Here's two more links (1, 2) about people with concerns about Sage Pay and if they are safe.

Here's a quick and sadly dark after processing video of the in cockpit shadows:

It's listed as a command in the Options, but no body appears when you press RShift+P.

Why are people flying into trees!? :)

The video I linked above has some airport flybys in it. I've made a quick cockpit video I'm uploading now.

Probably depends on how well A-10C does retail. However, since it's been announced that BS2 won't be on Steam, it's a good bet you're not going to get it retail either. Then again, everything is subject to change. :)

Umm.. that's exactly the point of the $20. Adding those features to Black Shark wasn't easy. A lot of work had to go into BS to make it as "DCS" as A-10C is now. However, we now have two aircraft at the same base technology level so presumably patches for one should apply to the other? Hopefully? That's really the kicker here. If ED can keep the code base for A-10C and BS compatible, then when we add the next module maybe we won't have to pay? If the EDGE expansion works for BS2 will be the next big milestone in the DCS project. If we have to pay for that to work with BS2, then yeah, all this paranoid rambling will have been justified. If not, then we're sitting pretty for the next DCS aircraft.

A few more screen shots: http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3424393/BlackShark2.html#Post3424393

What we really need is side by side video/pics showing that this upgrade isn't merely the "can fly with A-10C" patch people are confused about.

I'd make a video for ya, but I can't fly the Ka-50 worth a damn. If you want to see a 30 minute long startup followed by flipping over on to your rotors, I can certainly film myself doing that again for you though. :)

Screens: http://gamingshogun.com/2011/11/02/dcs-black-shark-2-released/ Video:

From a link Wags posted earlier: http://gamingshogun.com/2011/11/02/dcs-black-shark-2-released/ There's also a handful of pictures and a in the Released thread.

It probably depends on if the basic DCS engine has changed appreciably from DCS A-10C to DCS F-18 or whatever the next one is. Black Shark was hugely behind the curve in graphics, features and codebase. Three years of advancement meant that to make it work with A-10C you had a LOT of effort needed to bring the two products equal. That's why it's $20 to upgrade. Since there's a ton more to the upgrade than simply flying in the same sky. So really the question isn't "Will I have to pay $20 per previous product for every new product" but instead should be "Will EDGE and the Nevada map, which we're going to pay for* with the Nevada upgrade, be included for Black Shark 2 as a patch?" That will be the next big technology upgrade. Then there's the question of a dynamic campaign system and some blatantly missing features in the Mission Editor. Now that BS2 and A-10C have the same editor will those features be able to be added as a patch? Have the DCS modules been synchronized sufficiently for future addons to work with both products? If so then I'm sure we'll just pay $60 per module and they'll "just work" instead of the irrational fear of $20 each previous product + $60 per expansion. You're not being made to pay for anything you already have. You have BS1, it works just fine and plays with FC2 just fine. You're being asked to pay $20 for a drastically improved BS2 product which also includes the ability to fly alongside A-10C. That you don't have.

You should just add "ninja'd" to your sig! :megalol: :music_whistling:

There is no Steam Key. Patching the Steam version is still a work in progress, as Steam always seems to be.