mmaruda

I'm not sure, but someone wrote somewhere it's gonna be the A8. Now, from the old and rusty IL-2, I mostly know it as a ground pounder, but performance seems to be close to the Mustang. I would prefer the Dora - my precious - but I think the P-51 would be at a disadvantage here. Whatever ED cooks, it's gonna have cannons, so the P-51 boy are gonna be in some serious trouble, if they don't watch their six. :)

Probably I am nowhere near mastering stuff in Black Shark. As for trim, everyone flies they way they are good with, though the "proper way", while requiring more effort (you always get tempted to hold-release when it's just easier), proves more beneficial for me in the long run. The problem is, the AP gets errors when you do stuff wrong and it's harder to control the chopper after a few of those. Still, I vote Black Shark as the easiest and most accessible study sim ever made, even laid back when you get the hang of things. Basically, from my perspective, ED did one thing in a spectacular way - they made a good entry level study sim. I would have gone nowhere near cockpit clicking, if it wasn't for the Shark. The avionics can be learned in a day, flying can be learned in a week at most, and when you get the hang of it, there is no hustle like all them dogfighting sims where you need to keep your eyes on target, watch your back, or master complicated procedures like in A-10C. I have been trying to learn aerial refuting in BMS lately, and it's a no go, not ever, missions in RoF require pure luck in my opinion mostly, not to become toast, IL-2... everybody's been through this, gets routine too fast. However, Black Shark? Once you get comfortable, there is just something magical in sneaking through the mountains, hovering at the right range, firing some VIKHRs and getting the hell out before anyone notices. Plus, it's damn ugly, just the way any proper ground pounder should be. Anyway, cheers for everyone flying the Shark - it makes hair grow on your chest and your junk gets longer when you use the Russian pit. PS Vodka is mandatory after each completed mission. :) Yes, I was just flying and no, I wasn't drinking... too much. :D

I'll fully support what was written by JHzlwd. However, can't help but add my 5 cents to the mix. First of all: many poelpe seem to have difficulty in trimming. This has been discussed time and again, with some people claiming that the trimmer is broken, tries to kill you etc. Bullshit! The trimmer is your best friend, you only need to understand it. Here is the basic thing, make your curves extreme. You can have hall sensors and whatnot in your stick, but that is not enough. I have mine at 30. What you do is make small and really delicate inputs and TRIM. You will not be able to perform any rapid manoeuvres, but you will avoid the bump. Rudder pedals are a must here, if you do not have them, you will suffer (sim-life is not a beech, it's the other B word). Obviously you can use the hold, move, release trim method - it's cute, but it's wrong! This will mess up your landings and any sort of precision manoeuvres. Remember to press the T button only when you are stable (that is when the pedals come in). If you need some fast manoeuvring done, use the flight director - that is what it's for. Also, collective trim/hold/whatever - there is a button there that helps keep the collective in place. With our HOTAS sets it seems useless as the throttle stays in place, but the button has one major feature - it tells the AP to hold altitude. Real pilots use it, you should to. Remember to set you AP to radar alt when flying low. Once you get around flying properly, you can think about killing stuff. Always use auto turn to target, help yourself with rudder if it's not enough. Engage at a distance, avoid getting in range of AAA and fly calmly. A basic Shark mission is this: take off, fly waypoints, get into the target area, hover, kill people, RTB. If you find it hard to spot targets, use your wingmen to do the dirty work. Kill SAMs and AAA first, avoid infantry (MANPADS are a death sentence), use VIKHR against tanks and AAA, rockets and guns are for soft stuff. Two last tips are: do NOT attack tanks with guns while at slow speed or hover at close range (they will cannon you, I know, WTF?) and in case of hard wind, launch VIKHRs up-wind (ABRIS has the wind info). Once done, RTB and land safely where you need. Try to land up wind and be gentle. Remember to trim and do not use the hold-release method. It will take long, but better slow than dead. A note on the flight director - this is the mode, when the autopilot does not hold course. Use it when you need to get out of a mess fast and for close to ground flying (canyon runs etc.). In general, once you get the hand of things, Black Shark is probably the most relaxing combat study-sim to fly. You take off, fly where you need, hover, blow shit up and RTB. All you need to do is be smart and don't play the hero. I fly a lot of A-10 lately and RoF too, seriously, the Shark is like a comfy couch with scotch and a TV remote. ;)

I am a happy owner of CH stuff for something like 2 months now. Switched from an X-52 and while it was initially hard to get used to, I can say this is the best siming hardware on the market. Sure, CH could use some rotaries and a dual stage trigger, but no HOTAS out there is perfect. If they ever release new stuff, I'm all over it.

I'd check with people on various IL-2 forums (1C, SAS, etc) - there are a few discussion threads there about the 190 and people quote sources and link manuals and such. Some have interesting data straight from the LW. A quick look around the "yellow board" lead me to this: http://www.2shared.com/document/i6A-Pg2P/fw190a8.html It's supposed to be a 190A8 manual translated to English. Looks legit, though I am a layman.

Have you checked if you have force feedback enabled? This might be the problem.

The problem is exactly this DFM stuff. I have this game on X360 and to be honest I never finished it. Mostly because the difficulty is in blowing stuff up quickly not good flying. It's worth mentioning that AC games are to be played on the highest difficulty, if you want to enjoy anything about them. For instance, in the old AC some ground targets needed to be approached from a certain angle to hit them and not kill a mountain. Now you just press a button and the plane turns to target and you are in "bombing mode" or something. With dogfights it's the same, no need to move close to a guy press a button and abracadabra - you are on his tail. The only trick is to fire before he backflips on you. All this game is about is shooting stuff down fast and breaking off when you hear a missile warning. It's fun for an hour or two, but gets dead boring after that. Nobody plays this online on the 360 and the PC version requires Games for Windows Live so I reckon it's gonna be the same. Had this come out at the same time the console version did, we could at least hope that it would raise the interest in the sim market. Now it's just a cash grab.

I have always enjoyed Ace Combat, but with this one, they decided to add an on-rails dogfight mode, where one plane chases the other through a scripted route. Oh, and the guy being chased can escape by doing a backflip... Nothing to see here, move along.

Last time I played a sim with a gamepad, it was IL-2 Sturmovik, and even then I lacked buttons. With DCS I think this is near impossible. Try flying in game mode. The realistic setting really require you to use the A-10 HOTAS and the gamepad just don't have that many buttons. Anyway, thumbs up for the determination.

I think we'll see this at some point in DCS, but ED needs to sort the core engine out first - EDGE and Nevada needs to arrive and 3rd party stuff needs to start getting released. We'll see what 2013 brings.

You need to have BS1 installed and activated to install the Upgrade.

It has been proven numerous times by anthropologists and psychologists that humans are not violent by nature. There are primitive societies in the Amazon jungle, or in Polynesia that do not know violence (no murder, no fighting, no stealing). It's a cultural thing and since most popular culture comes from the US, we have grown accustomed to the concept that humans are highly competitive and individualistic race, because those are "American values". But that is just not true - in the basic, close to nature tribal societies, cooperation and unity is the normal way to go. I never get how in American movies, when there is a killer hunting a group of best friends, it's suddenly every man for himself and they turn on each other. Nobody ever criticises that in US reviews, but in my country most people consider it stupid. It's the media that accustoms us to violence. Movies, news, dumb reality shows. During WWI most British soldiers, though in a war, had difficulty pulling the trigger with an enemy in their sights. So what the army did, was they replaced round target mark in training with human shaped ones, to accustom soldiers with the concept of killing another person. And it worked. An now? We don't even wonder on the concept of killing in a war any more. There used to be anti-war movies, with a pacifist approach, now it's all about the coolnes of killing. I mean look, when WWII ended the German and Japanese war criminals were sent to trial. They did horrible things, yet they still got a fair trial. Now, people actually celebrate killing of Bin Laden. I'm not saying he did not have it coming, but noone opened up champagne bottles after the Nuremberg trial, if it was so important that the WWII war criminals stand trial, so that it would be perceived as justice not retaliation, what changed in our way of thinking? Why are we fed the pulp that killing and brutalising people is acceptable under some conditions more than say 50 years ago? Personally I like to think of humanity as wonderful species, capable of achieving anything, going into space, creating beautiful art, or selfless sacrifice. Saying that we are violent by nature is just denying the responsibility of our societies for their members' violent behaviour.

The Witcher was based on a book, hence some solutions in gameplay/story were done the way they were, as they needed to reflect what was in the book. Cyberpunk on the other hand is an RPG based on a pen and paper RPG and we haven't seen one of these in a while. They have more freedom here, though I guess if they intend to be true to the original, the players will be dying a lot. :)

Click trimming actually works as it is supposed to, without bumps and other unintended behaviour, but you need to use small inputs and trim every time. I had this problem too, but I changed my curves to about 30% and was able to fly without issues. Try manoeuvring and trimming without exceeding a 5 degree angle each time you move the stick, you will see the difference.

I always leave the radiators at auto during startup and have never fried the engine that fast. Maybe it's because I do not use much throttle during take off and lower prop pitch after getting airborne. Still, the weird thing is the only engine failure I suffer is during a continuous climb and there is never any indication in the engine sound that something is about to go wrong and when it does the prop just stops instantly and doesn't budge after that. Not sure if that is the way it's supposed to be (it should at least turn a bit when in a dive?).

I think for this to succeed we would require something new. I mean, DCS is already an established series, a Kickstarter event would have to be for something that people outside of the community would support (we are already supposing ED on all their projects - everything now has a pre-purchase option and most of the community goes for it). Another thing is, ED is not exactly your typical crowd-funded game developer. Most devs that are successful at Kickstarter provide current updates on the development process, show their work, even when it's buggy and not finished and this proves to keep the people interested. With ED it's always hush-hush. Also, you need to raise the required amount of money in a specific time, otherwise, it goes back to the funders. I don't think there is that much interest in flight sims - few people want to play a game that requires expensive controllers, hours of training and reading a 700+ page manual. Look at Ground Branch - they already had lot's of stuff completed when they went to KS, a huge community of realistic shooter enthusiasts behind them and they still failed to raise the required amount. There is less interest in study-sims than in military shooters. For ED to get funds from KS, they would have to introduce an innovative simulation that would be accessible to a wider audience and have some work done already to show they are credible to the people not familiar with their products. My guess, ED would have to start developing the new Strike Commander, or something and show a trailer on the level of Star Citizen to succeed.

Some of the books I have read this month: Burning Chrome by William Gibson - a set of cyberpunk short stories. For all you air combat game nuts, I highly recommend Dogfight. Isaac Asimov - The Gods Themselves and End of Eternity. This is generally the thinking man's sci-fi fix, both very enjoyable reads. If you like some good crime novels, I'd like to recommend something from my own back yard - Death in Breslau by Marek Krajewski and the sequels - some great noir-like crime stories set in pre-WWII Wroclaw.

I don't get the idea of sim being "light" if it does not have clickable pits. Sure, these are great, but with WWII planes, you mostly click stuff only for start up. Even in DCS Mustang I have everything I need for combat mapped to my HOTAS, so once airborne, there isn't really that much need for clicking. 777 knows what they are doing, it's going to be a survey sim, and they probably plan to grab the 1946 crowd, which from what I know are mostly people not too keen on reading several hundred pages of manuals. On the other side, they have shown with RoF, that no clickable pits does not mean easy or unrealistic. As much as I would love a simulator to be "as real as it gets", I'll grab anything WWII that works (CloD doesn't). Though I wish ED would pick up the gauntlet and make more WWII stuff, rather than avoid competition.

We can all agree with this one, question is, how realistic is this thing happening?

We'd still need Lavochkins, Mig-9s, Mig-15s, Sabre's etc. It's an interesting concept for sure, but still far away. Anyway, whatever get the Mustang a descent campaign (none of that flying through gates stuff) has my support.

It's funny how people laugh at the sim technology from 12 years ago because of something so unimportant as start-up procedure, while they fail to realise that before the original IL-2 noone has even done complex engine management in a WWII sim. The reason we still mention this game is because noone has made anything better since - not Jane's, not Gaijin, not Microsoft. And sure DCS is more complex, a very impressive and detailed simulation, but this is just one plane - no WWII units, no WWII maps and with everything awesome about, you won't be able to play bomber escort and tango with a bunch of D-9s. It's not the sim's complexity that is the issue, it's the gameplay potential and compared to IL-2, the DCS Mustang falls short. And in case anyone did not notice, this is a 23-page thread about expanding the WWII potential of DCS. Why are we having this discussion? Simple, because no matter how cool the DCS Mustang is, most of us here would like to have a full theatre to go with it.

So what would happen if someone followed the training mission procedure in a real Mustang? Would it blow up or something?

The idea of having fun is subjective, you know. :) I may not be correct about the engine failures, but the one described is the only one I have encountered, though trying very hard sometimes - maybe just my luck. Anyay going back to my initial point - the P-51 is a dogfighter, what can I dogfight? Other P-51s. How does that feel to me? Boring. Sorry, but I just don't see one of the greatest fighters in history to be flown without wing-tips or with purposely damaged engine, for me this is not entertaining not to mention not realistic - real pilots fly safe. I do understand that a lot of people find pleasure in the details, I do as well, but this is a comabt simulator, and the Mustang does not have many combat options in the current setting.

It would be cool if ED could add a ground units smart scaling option like Falcon has.

All is great but the ballistics modelling, damage modelling, and general flight feel in AH2 are still inferior (you can fly this with a mouse FFS!). As for stall modelling in IL-2, much has changed since 1946, since that version was 4.07 and we're on 4.11.1 now and will probably see 4.12 soon. What I cannot seem to understand is how everyone throws tomatoes at IL-2 and pours gold over the P-51D. It's like this kid mentality "I got my Legoes now, time to start hatin' on wooden blocks". But the truth is, there is only one prop plane in DCS and it stands out. It also has a lot of bugs still. Ground physics has it's weird moments (nothing like going sideways for 200m in a 2 ton plane) and while the engine modelling may be realistic, so far I have seen only one kind of failure - the prop stops and that is it (it should at least spin in a dive), no indication of bad engine performance in the sound, no smoke from the radiator, just this. Now don't get me wrong, I like the Mustang, but it's not flawless and after some time spent in it, it gets boring. There has been numerous hints at other WWII add-ons for DCS, but to be honest, I'm starting to think it's pointless to track the subject. We've seen more from Iris, Razbam, Belsimtek etc, and that was shown long after that first screen with the B-17s and Mustang. Just add to that the release date of any of those projects being around 2014 and we roughly have a time-line for DCS WWII stuff: 202x. And before anything is done, we need at least a new map and the is not coming before Nevada/Edge. Did anyone mention Duke Nukem Forever came out sooner than this? :music_whistling: