Frostiken

I think Windows 7 by default uses some combination of lalt / lshift to engage AZERTY for an application - I had this problem with Tribes: Ascend until I figured out how to turn it off. Regarding your problem, beats me, maybe you accidentally turned it off and while trying to turn it back on, toggled AZERTY and thus the keys were different. Just a guess.

Did you, maybe, by chance accidentally turn on AZERTY?

Advantages of donation-ware from the consumer's point of view is that: 1) Life is easier. I don't have to fiddle with (in the case of the payware that's on the site already) registering on another website, installing a suspicious bit of software, sending money to some random goons in Canada, wait for registration to unlock in a week, then plug my serial key in. Usually it's just pay via PayPal, done. 2) Anyone and everyone else is a better judge of your work than you yourself are, and thus the user can decide how much value they've gotten out of it. If your mission is overpriced, I won't buy it and that will be the end of it - you'll probably never see my money. Donationware means everyone is a potential customer. 3) I don't feel ripped off if I download your mission and it's a buggy mess that's totally incompatible with the latest version, and you've since stopped making missions or supporting them altogether. The only real advantage to be had from donation-ware from a production standpoint is that it lets you earn money without introducing the three cons above, and without pissing off angry old men like me who are just too old-school into modding where EVERYTHING was free :D

At the same time, if you look around the App Store, you'll find people's home-grown apps that do minor things but still have strangely outrageous prices on them. I think the fact is that the huge majority of people have never gone to business school and don't understand the proper value of something, thusly I'm more inclined to think that when you can set your own prices in the wonky world of digital economics, you're more than likely going to overvalue your own work, think you're worth more than you really are, and end up charging $30 for an iPad version of Helios. It would be nice if economics weren't a joke on the internet though. In the real world, if I make some knick-knacks and charge a fortune for them, 90% of people might not buy it because it's expensive, but 10% of people might because they have too much money, they're daft, whatever. In order to stop from going out of business (since I wouldn't be able to survive only selling 10% of my stock), I'd be forced to drop prices - that's how competition works. With digital content, there's no overhead (certainly not now that you can host payware on ED's site :D), there's no business to manage, no investors to pay, no inventory to move, no manufacturing costs... and you can't charge for a mission that doesn't already exist, so you've already spent time (the only expense that there is in making missions). So while myself, or 90% of the rest of people might see a $30 pricetag on a campaign and scoff, we might still want to play the campaign but not be willing to pay that ridiculous fee for it... there's no reason to ever drop the price and it probably never will go down, which means we can never play the campaign unless we fork out for it or, well let's be honest this is the internet - commit mild copyright infringement. Maybe, maybe not - the EULA actually forbids using missions and campaigns for commercial gain, so I imagine it's not been more popular mostly because it's technically not been allowed, or people just expect user-generated content to simply be free. This small change shows that ED isn't just turning a blind eye to monetization of UGC, but they're now encouraging it. I think that will be the big change... PS: Complaints about the economics / payware are more a general observation about DLC in general too. Interestingly, I don't think anyone else has ever noticed that while the price of an actual game will go down over time, the price of DLC never does. The reason the price of games drops, even on Steam, is because they want prices to remain stable across all distribution platforms, and they lower the price of new games in brick-and-mortar stores to move excess inventory or to remain competitive with the secondhand market. But DLC doesn't have a secondhand market, nor does it have inventory to move, so you'll notice that you can find games years and years old that have lost 80% of their value, but still charge the same price for DLC as the day it came out.

Are you serious? Is this serious time now? I'm stating my opinion. This place isn't a fascism where only socially acceptable opinions can be voiced. A forum reputation system is there so you can base it on things like, say, personal conduct or maybe being a helpful person (perhaps for free). Not so you can say 'You like potatos? WELL I DON'T, NEGATIVE REP'. So, because you felt the need to not only negative rep me for no reason, but you didn't even have the decency to explain how I offended you so much (your negative rep comment is: "First negative rep I've ever given!"), have a big bag of it in return. Should I go voice politically correct opinions elsewhere to farm some more? I sought to discuss to implications of what ED encouraging people to turn their currently-free offerings into payware would be, and I've voiced my admittedly pessimistic view on it. I think it's one thing to charge for DLC made by a professional team, but another thing entirely to now provide the stamp of approval on monetizing every bit of user-generated content that's been on this forum so far. I don't think it's a great idea. So there.

------------------ ATTENTION! YOU ONLY HAVE A DCS FORUMS BRONZE ACCOUNT! THIS FORUM POST IS NOT VISIBLE WITHOUT A SILVER OR GOLD ACCOUNT! CLICK HERE TO UPGRADE YOUR FORUM ACCOUNT FOR ONLY $14.99 A MONTH! ------------------ But no really, it's because nothing good will ever come of encouraging people to do this. Nothing good ever has. It won't raise the quality of work, it won't guarantee that the missions are worth buying (the flight qualifications missions are buggy and unclear, at best)...

I think you would. Where would any of us be without these forums, without YouTube videos, or without the endless barrage of free information and resources available to us already? Hell, where would the people with the nerve to charge money be? Talk about paying it forward :cry: Ah yes. Brown hangar with wood roof: $0.50. Brown hangar with white roof: $0.50. Hangar collection pack: $0.99. Mission "Hostile Incursion": $3.99 [REQUIRES HANGAR COLLECTION PACK]. All made by the same guy, of course. I find it comical that we as gamers will burn companies and spit on their names for doing this kind of nickle-and-diming but suddenly, because it's USERS, it's cool to do it, and people will stand up and defend the obvious double-standard. Fact is, user-content, especially for this game, will never be as good as official content due to limited access, time, and skills that the users have access to. It's one thing for a team of professionals to sell DLC, because usually DLC is doing things beyond what users with an SDK can do... it's entirely another for amateurs to overvalue their own abilities to do it. You mentioned maps? Nevada was going to be a free map, once upon a time - user generated. It looked fine for a user map, but ED picked it up and wanted to make it a full-blown pay-for map and the quality of the work went through the roof a hundred-fold. You're going to tell me that if you put $12 Nevada made by ED besides $12 Nevada made by Joe Jackass, you'd consider the latter 'reasonable coin'?

Says who? You? $5 is what we pay whole teams of professional developers for a slew of addon content to a game that usually has a lot more going for it than some units and triggers smeared across the same map we all have. Unique weapons, artwork, missions, full voice acting, etc. Companies had to work long and hard to find the 'sweet spot' of DLC, we've come a long way from horse armor. Even iOS apps cost as much as these missions, and compare what it takes to make an iOS app to what it takes to use the mission editor / manually configure some .luas... and usually you get more out of it too. Yeah, and some people have no problem spending $18 to go to a movie theater and buying two tickets, spending $12 on popcorn and drinks, and then watching 15 solid minutes of advertising, when in reality that's incredibly moronic. Some people are broke-ass poor and still can't resist spending all their money on a car that costs way more than they can afford. Some people see 'buy four for $10' deals at the grocery store, and even though they only need two they buy four, think they're saving money, and then end up spoiling / wasting the stuff they didn't need anyway. Basically, one person's idea of what they think is good value is meaningless. The only thing we can compare the payware missions and content to is relative to the cost of the full software package we've already bought, in which case $5 for a few training missions (which I just scooped up for free and recommend everyone else do as well, and quick) is a joke. That's all besides the point. Effectively, monetizing the community's contributions to each other guarantees that to at least some degree this community is going to be split apart and disincentivized to help each other. One guy made an iPad app (iWarthog) for free. And another guy made a huge program to export and display all kinds of instruments whereever you want (Helios), for free. Then some clown comes along, steals both ideas, combined them into his own iPad app, and charged $30 for it. Who does that help? Is his product worth 30x as much as Helios? Are you saying the other two programs were *not* high quality, because they didn't cost money? How ironic that I'm an American say this on a forum for a developer that's chiefly Russian.

By the way, you wouldn't want your jammer to be jamming non-stop. First of all, it makes you a fat target. RF is RF, and spraying it out everywhere is going to make you glow like an EM lighthouse. Secondly, jamming suites, especially Northrop Grumann ones, are NOTORIOUSLY hungry for juice, run EXTREMELY hot and don't exactly have long lives. Spending an entire sortie jamming will almost certainly burn up the TWTs or cause other issues. Pushing it to the limits and forcing it to jam non-stop would probably kill it before your sortie even ended. Just to give you some perspective here, the AN/ALQ-135 ICMS system in the F-15 takes 90% of ECS cooling air provided by both engines to properly cool when operating, and you'll be lucky to get more than a dozen flight-hours out of it before a part has failed.

Hmmm... not sure how I feel about this... we've seen from the HOTAS Warthog that sim aficionados are willing to fork out ridiculous amounts of money for their hobby, and from the iPad app that people are willing to charge moronically disproportionate prices for something that didn't take nearly as much effort to create as the price would imply... *BASIC* flight qualification for the A-10 is already $5. Been offered for months for free, What would a real campaign cost? $15? Are people going to start demanding cash for the 'privilege' of letting you get help? I guess it's good I have all these checklists now, because in a month they're going to cost $20 a .pdf? The real charm of this community is that it's small and we're all willing to help each other out. This is just... bad news for everyone, methinks. :/

Personally I find the implementation of the expendable countermeasures and the programming and dispensing of them to be unbelievably unwieldy and terrible. Are pilots seriously expected to sit there and manually scroll through programs? Do you seriously need 26 permutations of dispensing two types of things with only the serious options of doing so quickly, slowly, and a lot or a little? (To be fair, there are a few different buckets you can plug in there, but I doubt they'd ever mix-and-match more than two types). Unless we're seriously missing something here in the sim, it's so awful I would almost consider it a liability. Why isn't there the ability to program two dispense programs directly to the HOTAS? Who the crap thought this was a good idea? D: My kingdom for replacing the light switch on the throttle with a flappy-paddle that automatically fires program A when pushed back and B when pushed forward - bam, I could then put my two favorite dispense programs right there and have immediate access to both. Engineers. Sheesh.

Unless a complete goon designed the A-10's RWR system, there should be no blind spots.

It grew on me, I admit, but I mostly rejected the AT-802U initially because some people actually thought it was serious and were acting like it was the greatest, most brilliant decision ever made by any company ever and couldn't wait to bury their faces in ED's backside, while being completely oblivious to what a let-down it would have been. This, I don't get. Might as well ask for a smudgy brown blood-on-screen-when-shot modern / near-future FPS game involving terrorists while you're at it. I put together a list in another thread, and the number of WW2 combat flight sims released in the last 8 years outnumbers the list of modern aircraft flight sims by nearly 3:1. To top it off, 80% of the modern aircraft flight sims on that list were made by ED. A high-fidelity WW2 combat flight sim was released less than a year ago, why do you need another modeling the exact same aircraft that have been done over and over? It's not exactly as if ED's P-51 is going to be much different from any other P-51, since they're all the same relatively simple aircraft with pretty well-known flight profiles and physics. Like I said, I'm not offended that they're doing the P-51, but I see it as an opportunity to do something special and unique that is going sort of wasted. Making the bog-standard P-51 makes it no different from IL-2's Mustangs, and frankly I see WW2 as being even more a blight on the simulator genre than it was on the FPS genre - every aircraft ever imagined that flew in WW2 has been done in other games. Given how small the flight simulator genre actually is, that most of it is clogged with WW2 combat sim after WW2 combat sim makes the whole thing kind of distressing, and I don't see how doing "Yet Another WW2 Sim" makes it any different from being excited about the next Gears of Bore game. I love the Black Shark (even if I never did learn to properly fly it) and the Warthog sims because of their incredible attention to detail. Flipping switches and pushing buttons is always its own reward, having all kinds of neat things to keep you busy is why I want more modern (or mostly modern) aircraft. Thus why I said it would be really cool if ED put their own twist on the P-51 and modeled a fictional version of it that combines the flight simplicity of a prop-job with some snazzy new updates. There's literally nothing they can add to the vanilla P-51 that hasn't been done in other sims and that's why I'm ambivalent about the whole thing. I doubt I will buy it.

I think I may know what Leroy is talking about. I've seen them fly and not deice with frost on the wings. Not really 'ice', I suppose. I've wondered about it myself but I've seen the de-icer truck *not* used more than it was used. At least at Lakenheath. In Mountain Home ice and cold is such a problem they deice no matter what. I'm actually pretty sure they just deice simply to melt everything around the aircraft. If it's really bad in winter you'll literally be standing in an inch of deicer fluid. Chock ropes are acting like sponges... ugh.

I have no idea what any of that means. I only was reminded of Tribes 2 that let you adjust speed and pitch of your chose voice for your player if only for purposes of not having everyone sound the same.

I don't mind the P-51, but I don't want them to 'move to WW2'. I thought it would be cute to have the P-51 be a fictional 'modernized' version with some enhanced radios, a rudimentary multipurpose display, and the ability to employ a small selection of weapons, maybe some unique, some not. A basic INS system, maybe a TV targeting device, a more functional HUD... Sort of an AT-802U light. Something to make it not feel so out-of-place in the DCS world.

1) Major redo on infantry - less clunky (they're basically vehicles), more of them (no Javelin crews?), better (meaning 'any') AI handling, unique movement and tactics (bounding, moving via cover, lying prone, etc.). 2) Ground crews assigned to a parking space that marshal you in and out and signal you to start engines (could be done via the radio menu for ground crew by saying 'request engine start #1 / #2'). Bonus points if a fuel truck or ammo trailer shows up when called for too :) 3) Localized weather effects - raining here or there, foggy in others, and so forth. 4) MOAR FAILURES! MOOOOAAAAAAARRRRRRR! 5) Voice acting overhaul - more 'fluid' talking (record several lines for saying the same thing to make it a little less robotic), chatter to other flights, randomly assigned pitch and tone modulation to distinguish between various voices. 6) Civilian casualty counter / tracker built in for logbook and mission purposes. Dropping CBUs on villages to blow up a tank should be highly discouraged.

You are correct, but I just wanted to stress that it's important to understand that they're aren't quite JDAMs.

Also, the CBU-107 / 97 isn't ideal for hitting TIGHTLY packed groups. The intelligent 'pucks' are thrown outwards at pretty high velocity, so you'd get much better results dropping them on well-dispersed targets. This also depends on your HOF. PS: I love CBU-87s, just because the two hundred and two submunitions gets me every time. Seriously. "and two"? Why didn't they just say '200 is a good number, let's do that'.

You're a CREW CHIEF, saying it's strange that a pilot isn't going step-by-step through his TO? :D A real pilot would've moaned for a red ball and then either stepped to the spare or say "Oh it just started working"

Many a memory of shoving heater hoses down the intakes of -15s in Mountain Home :D

Not really, they're 100% inertial with nothing else, so they're guiding to a POINT, not necessarily to coordinates.

Fly-by-wire is such a generic term it's nearly meaningless to use... technically any aircraft that uses flight control computers to calculate and move the surfaces for you without your express intent to move them based on maneuvers is fly-by-wire (ie: aileron/rudder interconnects that move the rudders to aid in turns), which would mean just about every aircraft made during and ever since the Cold War. You don't have to have a force-sensing stick, which from what I understand is extremely rare to the extent that I can't even think of an aircraft besides the F-16 that has one.

Unrelated, but Big Beautiful Doll's combat record makes it all that much more sad that some French doucher took it out :(