firesoldier845

Trop, I had some computer issues and took a break from LockOn for over a year. I got a new compuer last month and just started playing again. I flew Mig-29/vanilla SU-25 for years and recently about 2 weeks ago when I started playing again I decided to switch to 27. Man, I got pwned first few times but it just takes practice. I'm starting to get kills now and surviving, u just gotta practice and learn keep on trying. Read the forums and get tips most of all just keep playing. No, people that fly the F-15 are not noobs and it's not easy mode either. Just keep on playing you'll get the hang of things. Just try to enjoy the game experience and don't base your happyiness on how many kills you got online. There are always going to be people playing that are more experienced than u and you've only been playing 2 weeks man. I'll try to look for you in hyperlobby and maybe we can team up now and then, just have fun man, it's just a game and don't be one those people who get caught up in all this realism trap cause the game is not realistic and it's still sold in walmart next to grand theft auto. It's all about having fun and you won't have fun argueing with people on the forums or game chat so get in game and practice - don't take things too serious. cheers firesoldier845

I had the pleasure once of flying with a squad on one of the nights where they closed their hyperlobby server to the public and it was downright the best time I ever had playing. Believe it or not all they did was fight a huge battle against the AI, no human controlled opponents but it was still a blast and a memorable event for me. They setup a mission to attack a SAM site defended by AI aircraft and it was a ton of fun. I think there might have been about a dozen of us online and it was just a lot of fun. Too bad I don't have more free time otherwise I would join a squad but due to family life and stuff I just can't dedicate the needed time to be there for matches and stuff like that.

I had a 4000+ and I wasn't that impressed with the performance jump from a 3.2 P4. That was over a year ago I made that upgrade. Last month I bought a E6700 Core Duo2 and right now LockOn runs fabulous. I can run just about everything maxed out except for vis range at MEDIUM and WATER at HIGH and I get min. 30 fps solid. Over the huge towns fps is 24-27fps. I'm finally happy with LockOn performance. It's hard to believe I started out with a P4 2.4 and Radeon 9800 and could barely run the game on MEDIUM to LOW settings and had to turn most all of the effects down to LOW.

A big problem is that I don't think a lot of people realize how much work goes into making simulations. They want a realistic sim, but their expectations need to be realistic too. I'm about a hard core simmer as they come and have practically every title out there but I think people like myself as well as others like me are a big problem with the genre. Trust me I want everything as close to reality as possible in physics, modeling and systems management. But the true "reality" is the development costs need to be taken into consideration as well as the economics or business aspect of designing flight sims. The majority of potential customers don't want to click through 10 buttons or wait 10 minutes on the runway to start up a plane before flying a mission. Maybe that's fine for a lot of us here but we represent a small niche of the overall potential sales. The fact is that combat flight sims are not highly profitable or very lucrative to software publishers. Anyone who isn't blind and can look down the game aisle of any store that sells computer software knows this. When people slam ED they truely are biteing the hand that feeds cause I tell you we are all lucky that ED is making flight sims instead of cutting their losses and designing the next fps game or shoot'em up title.

I'm fortunate enough to have both a nice PC and pretty nice laptop too and I would recommend not buying a laptop for sim gaming. Some laptops do put up some impressive numbers but at least IMHO the cost to benefit ratio is not there. I'm not saying laptops can't play games if spec'ed out correctly, it's just that a nice gaming laptop is close to $3000 if not more. You can get some nice laptops in the $2000-$2500 range that will also play games decently but that's still a lot of stitch. For the most part laptops come with slower HD, slower memory and even the video cards are usually under clocked as compared to their PC equal to save battery power and reduce heat. My laptop was $1000 more than my home PC and my home pC is almost twice as fast as the laptop in real word performance. For the price of a nice gaming laptop $3000 (some are even $4000) , you can build a decent desktop PC $1500 and get a middle of the road $1500 laptop. I will NEVER ever again spend $2500+ on a laptop for gaming, it's a complete WASTE of money because they still suxor compared to a desktop PC. If u game a lot and are a serious hard core PC gamer get a desktop - or at least think about it. Or try to swing both of them. I play CERTAIN games all the time on my laptop and it's great inspite of what I said before and the mobility is awesome, but the experience is definitley NOT as good as on my desktop and I would never consider using a laptop as my main computer for sim gaming. As specifically for your questions: 1> I don't run Lock On on my laptop cause it sucks on my laptop as compared to my MUCH MUCH cheaper desktop. 2> My laptops specs are Core Duo 2.16, X1600 Radeon mobility, 1 gig RAM. If your going hardcore laptop which I really think is a waste of money - I wouldn't settle for any video card less than a 7900 or X1800 series or I think your will be dissappointed with LockOn. The x1600 and nivdia 7600 chipsets are adequate for most gaming other than sims. Watch out for integrated video/shared video on the laptop. Lots of laptops come with either Intel integrated 950 video, Nvidia 3d chip with shared memory, or an ATI video chip with hypermemory (shared memory). Stay away froom those if you do any gaming they all suxor big time. YOu want a dedicated 3d chip with it's own dedicated VRAM if you want to do ANY gaming. This is very debatable but take note of the NATIVE resolution of the LCD. LCD displays really should be run at the native resolution to avoid pixelation of the image. A higher resolution LCD isn't always as better as one would think for gaming because your sorta LOCKED in to that resolution if you want to have the nicest image quality. You can lower it but you will get some pixelation even with FSAA. So a 15 inch screen at 1440X900 means you have to run at that rez and your going to have lower fps than a 15 inch screen that is 1280X720. I would go for the lower resolution screen to increase performance BUT that's just my opinion. Some people would like the higher resolution and take the performance hit anyway. The decision is yours. 3> As for upgrading... some of the alienware and dell xps laptops as well as some other brands have video cards that can be upgrading but I think it is very expensive to do and it's only an option on their expensive models. I hope I answered some of your questions and help u to make a better informed decision. I hope I don't seem to sound like a "know it all" or anything it's just that I spent a lot of money on nice laptop and it was kinda a waste of money and if I can help fellow simmer out not to make bad decision I feel better. Ultimately u are the one buying so it's up to you what you want and need and what feels your computer needs and your budget. good luck and make sure to come back and tell us all what you bought. cheers fs845

I've always had a Mac and a Pc, well mostly at least both platforms at the same time. I love Apple, man they are really nice laptops. I have a Macbook Pro and love it, but I will say from experience I would never recommend Apple laptop as a single computer to have if you are into flight simming. I run both OSX and Windows on my Apple which u can do nowadays and I tell u, my MBP laptop is really nice but it is not great for gaming. It's marginal for other gaming but totally inadequate for simming of any kind. Apple's problem is they never have option to buy high end video card in their laptop line. Right now X1600 is best u can get and I tell u it is better than some chipsets but really still subpar for any kind of gaming. On OS X side you will be sorely missing a lot of games because their really is a lack of games for Mac other than a handful of decent ones. You can load Windows on your laptop but I tell you it is a lot of hassle as well on small HD running 2 OS. I speak from experience because I own MBP and am avid flight sim fan. Thankfully, I can afford both PC @ home that is for flight simming and gaming and have laptop for most of my work. Now for future I can't say much, if Apple would ever put 7900 or X1800 class 3d chipset in laptop line as option I would buy and never look back. My friend has Toshiba laptop with 7900 and even slower processor than mine and he plays games at settings I could never even think of trying. He paid close to $1000 less than I did for my MBP. I'm not Mac bashing or trying to change your mind, just wanted to give u some advice so u not waste money or be dissappointed. If your a gamer I would look elsewhere like alienware or another vendor that has higher end video cards than what Apple uses in their professional laptop line. cheers fs845

yes this is a great movie, one of the best. cheers

I upload this video in wmv format now so it should work in windows media player. The new link is: http://www.virtual-jabog32.de/index.php?section=downloads&subcat=28&file=516&lang=en

http://www.virtual-jabog32.de/index.php?section=downloads&subcat=28&file=516&lang=en uploaded my latest video creation to jabo32 website today. It's now in windows media format instead of quicktime so it should play fine in windows media player. cheers firesoldier845

Thank you very much for responding to my question. I will pass this information onto my squad. cheers

I am not a big racing sim fan but I am in a squad where we play WWIIOL and we used to also have Nascar 2003 racing league one night a week. Well, Nascar 2003 is sorta getting a bit old now and we are talking about branching out to a new racing game GTR2, rFactor, netkar Pro, etc, etc. The only problem is we can't all go out and buy copies of all 3 games so we are trying to decide which one is the best for us to start up our league with? any recommendations? anything arcadish is definitley out of the question cause these guys are pretty hard core for physics and realism when it comes to racing. cheers and thanks

I'm not hijacking thread but was playing offline last night doing the SU-25 night strike mission that comes with the game. That's the mission where you have to take out the C-17s while they takeoff. Well, the AI fired a stinger at @ me and I dodged it and it hit the C-17 instead. I've been playing Lock On for years and never seen that happen in game before. cheers

I too have been playing with FSX and the graphics are amazing, but they come at a heavy price in performance. I hope DX10 gives it a boost but I'm not expecting any miracles. Have u seen the commercial on TV for FS X? THe sim looks like it's a slideshow in the commercial, you can easily see that the fps is terrible in the commerical. I got a good laugh out of it. The graphics though in LockOn are nice and I'm happy with them for now. cheers

Well it doesn't top your story Pilotasso but a bunch of my buddies @ work we liked to play computer sims. I work as a firefighter\paramedic but I used to do computer repair and web design long before I started work in the fire service. We wanted to get online and play IL2 and WWIIOL but we were unable to do so at work because we didn't have internet access. The network @ work was a secure network so we were unable to plug in and get online. Well, I was able to bypass the security and make it appear that our computers were part of the network and we could get online and fly together. It was a lot of fun. LAN party's @ work every day in the evening. A funny thing happened though one day we got a call in the middle of flying and of course we ran to the trucks. I assure you that all of our gaming never interfered with us getting to a call in time. We are very serious about our jobs but just wanted something to do in our offtime. We'll needless to say we jumped up to get a call and the chief shows up on our call and basically asked about the hats we were all wearing and why they were not department issue hats? We'll the funny thing is we forgot to change our hats and we were all wearing our TrackIr hats on - LOL :) It was very funny but u kinda had to be there. anyway, we finally got wireless internet access at work so we don't have to go about sneaking into the network to get online and all is good. cheers firesoldier845

FWIW - I went with high performance value. Core2DUO 6700, NvidiaGT7900, 2 gigs of RAM and Asus P5 motherboard. If u got the cash sure get all top of the line components. But I probably saved an easy $1000 just by going down 1 notch from top of the line components and maybe I get less than 10-15% performance then a top of the line $3000 rig. A word of caution and I'm not referring to any of the posts specifically in this thread, but be "weary" of people that claim they run everything maxed out and get solid fps. I've got near top of the line components and get solid fps in most instances but still an occasional fps hit anywhere near the large cities. FPS over the 2 or 3 large cities I'll drop down to around 26fps which is acceptable compared to the teens I was getting on my old system. The hardware is very close to catching up to this sim but it's still not there in terms of being able to run everything on high and get completely smooth fps under all cirumstances. People who say they run with everything turned up all the way either have their the config files tweaked (which reduces graphic quality or reduces the number of objects), they are using some mods that reduce image quality for performance increase or they are just plain stretching the truth a bit. With that said, I am sure you will enjoy the sim if you buy new CPU, video card but just don't get your expectations too far out of reality by any claims from the threads that will soon follow. I'm very pleased with the game experience I get with Lock On with my system specs though. cheers

Yeah it happened to me so that's why I posted. I used to run LOCKON @ 1024X768 on my 19" CRT and my video card had no problem keeping up with the 1024X768 resolution. Then my wife bought me a nice 17" flat screen LCD that had a default resolution of 1280X1024. When I tried running at 1280X1024 my video card couldn't keep up with that and I had stutters and I was really disappointed. If I tried to run at 1024X768 on the LCD the game looked like crap, it was very noticeable image quality loss due to pixelation in the LCD. Now 3 years later I have a new compuer and a 7900GTX and I have no problems running at 1280X1024. The game looks great and I am very happy with the image quality\performance. But I wouldn't want to go out and buy a bigger screen and have a huge loss in performance if I had to try and run at 1600+ resolution. Truth is I don't know, maybe my card could run higher resolution without much of a performance loss but I'm happy with the resolution I have now and image quality. I don't want to spend the $$$ on a bigger monitor and find out I made another bad decision. cheers

Here are just some things to think about as well. Most everything everyone else said makes sense but some other things to consider: With LCD you want to run at native resolution or your image will look subpar. I'm not saying the image will be terrible but to get the best looking image you want to run at the native resolution. Just remember that bigger higher resolution monitors mean your probably going to have to run your games at higher resolution so make sure you have the other hardware to do that. I ran into that problem when I bought my first LCD. I had to run LockON at 1280X1024 and at the time (like 3 years ago) my vid card just had trouble pushing that high a resolution and getting any decent fps. Now it's not a problem. But FYI, even some of the newest vid cards are gonna take a pretty steep fps hit running at 1600+ resolutions. It's just something to consider. As far as widescreen vs regular. Well my home PC that I run LockOn is regular 4:3 and my laptop is widescreen. Everything is pretty much going widescreen but there are a lot of games that don't support the widescreen format and it's pretty annoying to me. I definitley like the widescreen better when I can actually find games that run natively widescreen it's really nice. I have mixed feelings really - I like WS better for sure - but there are so many games that just look like crap on it cause they are formatted for 4:3. I'd like a WS for my home PC as well, but I've kinda held off until it's the standards for everything. That's why I just haven't felt the urge to run out and get a new monitor for my home PC. BUt if your in the position that you have to get a monitor right now I don't think you could go wrong with either a WS or a 4:3. You'll probably get a longer life out of the WS cause I think eventually 4:3 will be phased out but that's still going to be a long long time before it is. Just a few things to consider that might help you out with your decision. But I would definitley say that if you don't have a top notch video card you might be better off with a smaller lower resolution LCD. In other words IMHO a 17" LCD that runs at 1280X1024 is going to look better than a 21" LCD that could run at 2560X2048 but you have to run it out 1280X1024 cause your video card can't push the 2560X2048 at a decent fps. Just my two cents. good luck

I don't know if it really counts as a "combat" flight sim, but does anyone remember the sublogic flight simulator for Atari 2600? It had those WWI biplanes you could dogfight?. That was my first sim, god that had to be either real late 70's or early 80's. I think I've probably bought or played just about every flight sim title for Atari, Apple, C64 and IBM PC since the late 70's\early 80s - hope that doesn't make me too old :) Man, reading the other posts brings back a lot of great memories. cheers

Just wondered if anyone had a skin template for the plain SU-25, it's my favorite plane in the game? I wanted to make some skins for it and I've checked all the usual Lock On download sites and can't find a template for it anywhere. Even a 1024 template would be fine and I could resize it and do a new one from scratch. cheers

My daughter broke my HOTAS and I gave my TRACKIR2 to a friend and sold my PC about a year ago and got a laptop. I just recently build a new PC for LockON. I ran short on cash and had to choose between a HOTAS and TrackIR and TRACKIR was first, easily hands down decision. I get the HOTAS on payday this Friday coming up - I already had rudder pedals. Definitley my vote is for TRACKIR. cheers

i just got back into Lock On after taking about a year off so I haven't played online that much. But I used to have a similar problem. I could play for 10-20-30 min or even an hour and then all of a sudden BAM! it was like slow motion stutters. I seem to remember a patch coming out that did something with the network settings and that fixed it for me. But this was years ago I had this issue. What are you connecting at and what is your connection - DSL, Dialup or Cable? I mean could it be an intermittent problem with your ISP? It could be so many things. I remember reading somewhere to always connect at a lower speed to the server than your internet connection really is. For example even if you have a 5.0 mbps internt connection - set your connection rate in LockOn to like 129kps or even 33kbps (dialup). I have to admit though I just got back into LockOn and I mean my online time playing is less than maybe 3 hours in the last week or so. Someone here though will be able to help you. good luck cheers

This picture is a few years old but I was looking at some pics on my computer and found this one and thought you guys might like it. I was working fire rescue at the airport during the Stuart Air Show and a Sabre was doing mock attacks on the airfield with pyrotechnics. Either he got too close to the explosion or the guy set off the pyrotechnics at the wrong time or it was some type of malfunction. Anyway, some chunks flew off the plane and he lost some hydraulics and made an incredible landing at Pratt and Whitney airfield which is probably 10 miles or so south of where the airshow was. I don't have the other pics in my posession, but our fire department rescue helicopter flew into Pratt and Whitney when the guy landed and took a lot of pictures of the damage. I can get them off the computer at work so I'll post those later. There was also an F-16 at the airshow and he escorted the Sabre into Pratt and Whitney. It's quite and old picture though and old news. I was standing right next to my buddy when he snapped this picture. Anyway, it's only 1 shot. I'll post the others when I get access to them later if you guys are interested. cheers firesoldier845

I have windows on my home PC and I also have Windows and OS X on my laptop. The laptop can dual boot to either. I don't think I can import quicktime movies into windows movie maker. I am 99.9% sure. Also the free windows media maker I don't think does HD even if it would import I think the resolution is limited to 1024X768. The Vista Media Maker will do HD though. There are a lot of converters out there for free but I'm just probably going to buy the quicktime one - it's like $50.00 or so. It will come in handy anyway. I could covert to AVI or MPG2 or MPG4 that will play on windows but then I gotta use a different codec and even then it might not play on windows if the downloader doesn't have the codec. So if I just buy the crap and use microsoft's codecs it's guaranteed to play on 100% of the windows machines and the quicktime will play on all Macs. On the other hand quicktime player is free download and will play on any PC too. A lot of people won't want to dl quicktime but it's pretty nice player. I've had zero problems with quicktime on my PC or Mac. I put an iPOD version up too for those who have iPODS. It will also play in quicktime but it's lower resolution and size for those who don't want to DL the 180mb version. cheers

I'll buy the windows media converter for quicktime Pro when I get the cash probably in a month. Payday is tommorrow but I have to buy a HOTAS cause my daughter broke mine. It's been killing me playing LockOn on a cheap stick. At least I have pedals but I miss HOTAS. Gonna get HOTAS and next payday probably buy the WMV converter. cheers

I put my Lock On Movie site up - there is one video on there in iPod format if you have an iPod and want to watch it and then I also have it in HD H264 format. You need quicktime to watch either one. Sorry but I do most of my work on my Mac and all my play on my Windows box. :) Eventually, I'll get around to buying the WMV converter for quicktime pro so I can export to Windows Media format for you guys. Anyway, let me know what u guys think. I'm going to host high definition videos I make as much as I can. I got a lot of transfer bandwidth but 200meg videos can soak up my balance pretty quickly. So I'll see how the first month goes but in the meantime check out LockON in 720p HD and let me know what you guys think. site link is http://www.firesoldier845.com cheers firesoldier845