GreyBadger

Thanks Noraf. :thumbup: Actually I haven't done that yet. I guess the switch is pre-armed in the takeoff and landing tutorials I've run through so far. Probably also mentioned in the startup tutorial perhaps? I've only done that once although I fully intend to go thorugh it a good few times and make my own notes. So no auto pilot if I don't flick that switch on startup then? Badger

Many thanks for all your helpful replies and whether I'm quoting you or not below, this was all the exact kind of advice I was looking for. I expect I'll be bending your ears on this matter again come the start of May, when I actually have buttons to press. :) That's a nice idea Jay. As it's a birthday present though I'm not actually buying it myself and I'm pretty sure Mrs Badger has made her own plans. (I will mention it though.) As to the programming advice though.. I might well take you up on your kind offer there if I get stuck. ("If" :lol: Did I really say "If"? ) Thanks for the link d,burnette. I had a quick look at this and I have to admit I found him a little hard to follow. I expect that with it actually in front of me though, a second look at the vid will make more sense. Ah, a bit of speculation eh? Well I am from........... The UK. :) Subtle bit of spotting there on the spelling front by Cookie. Of course they can't spell properly across the other side of the pond. Bless em. :lol: Ok this is my fault, sorry for the confusion. You have a Badger. He's a fake..but you have a Badger. :lol: I, the true Badger, have been "Badger" since I was a small child. When while innocently walking in the forest I was bitten by a radioactive Badger (who leapt out on me from behind a tree! Bast!) and was imbued with the proportionate powers of a Badger. Sadly they amount to little more than poor daylight vision and a great sense of smell. Obviously then all my forum names must be Badger. However, the net is swimming in fake Badgers as it turned out. So I must take what I can get. Sometimes I'm a Badger, Sometimes a GreyBadger. Sometimes a FatBadger. Sometimes I'll even go for Dachs. (That's German for Badger, fact fans.) But my posts are always signed Badger. I'm just drawn that way. :) Many thanks mjeh. :) It's a biggun, though I'll not bore you with an actual number. :) Hence the huge birthday present. Well it's pretty huge here at Badger Towers anyway. All the best folks and thanks again. Badger

Evening All I can't write a short post. Nope, I've tried to, but it's just not in my nature. I start off all good intentions of sitting down to just a sentence or two. But then before you know it, five paragraphs are dancing before my eyes and they're laughing at me..oh yes. So it's a bit of a pain in the neck, to find that once I wrestle enough control to be able to back away from the keyboard, the DCS Forums have logged me off! Is there some profile setting I can change? I mean my last post only took me ten minutes and that doesn't seem too long to be logged on without causing the forum to come over all discombobulated. At least I think it was ten minutes... I'm pretty sure it was.. sometimes it's a bit of a blur I admit. Badger PS: I seem to have lost a sock. I don't suppose you know where it might be?

Hi all. Second post today! I'll be wearing out my keyboard. Some of you will already know that I'm not the sharpest tack in the box when it comes to tech and the reason I'm mentioning this here is that....... well my birthday's coming up in May and Mrs Badger has offered to buy me something I've wanted for I don't know how long, but never wanted to ask about as frankly we're not rolling in dough. A "TrackIR" ("TrackIR 5" I suppose?) Not only that, but a "Saitek X52 Pro" to go with it. (Though I'd hate to be the one to tell Logitech Doris that she's being replaced!) Thing is, as exiting as that sounds I'm more than a little worried about things like Win 7 compatibility, setting the system up etc. I read a thread somewhere here, which I seem to have misplaced, which asked how easy it was to set "TrackIR" up and the first few posts seemed to suggest it was a piece of cake. But then someone started talking about "TrackIR" being a 32 bit thing, where Win 7 is 64bit. (or at least I think you can choose and mine is 64bit) But that it worked anyway...? See that's just the kind of thing that brings my inner Luddite screaming to the fore. he sits squarely on my left shoulder and whispers in my ear.."See? You shouldn't try that because when God was giving out brains, you thought he said Trains and asked for a big slow one!" Anyway, I guess what I'm asking is whether there are forumites here who aren't especially technical. But who on setting up a "TrackIR" thought.. "Hey..that was so easy! Pass me a white coat because clearly now I am a scientist!" Badger

Thanks all. I've said it before and I'll say it again... this is such a great place to ask a question. Badger

Morning Folks Make yourselves a nice cuppa before reading on, because I give fair warning I am going to ramble. :lol: (Please skip right to the end if you want to get straight to the questions.) For todays brain picking session I'd like to bend your ears about auto pilot if that's alright. But just before I get to the meat of it, I wanted to ask you a related question about the official landing tutorial. Having twice run through the navigation tutorial and stared blankly at the screen with a muttered "huh??" I've decided to shelve it for the moment and concentrate on the landing tutorial instead. In any case it seems more logical to me to tackle things in this order. I mean what's the point of knowing how to get from A-B, if you can't land when you get there, right? Anyway, much of the tutorial is spent flying with autopilot on, but at the point of turning to a final approach for the ILS landing, we really don't seem to be in the place where the instructor thinks we are. Sure, we're over the sea and the coast (and therefor the airfield) are behind us. But when the instructor is saying you can now see the airfield, we're really pointing the wrong way. Anyway... onto the main question. Finding which key press does what is proving to be a bit of an ongoing adventure for me. I'd like to do it all with legitimate switch interaction in the cockpit, but realistically my old fashioned joystick and no track IR type device, means I'm going to be better accepting a compromise of some controls via the cockpit and some via the keyboard. I'm quite happy about this and it's not a problem. Still it does lead to an ongoing fight to find keys in that immense control list as and when I need them and autopilot was one such key. In the end I simply couldn't find it and only through the search function here at the forum, was I able to suss out that perhaps predictably it was "A". Then armed with this I went back to the keyboard layout and looked for "A" instead, which then gave me; LAAP Altitude Bank Hold 4 LAAP Altitude Heading Hold 3 LAAP Path Hold 2 LAAP Engage / Disengage A Are you still with me guys? I didn't send you to sleep yet did I? Ok well here's a bit more. :music_whistling: In the meantime while I was looking for keyboard shortcuts, I also managed to find the autopilot panel in the cockpit, on the left hand side on a panel with LASTE written on it. (It's always in the LASTE place you look right?... no?...Ok suit yourselves.) it's pretty easy to get at and has a toggle for Path, ALT/HDG & Alt, which clearly correspond to the keyboard shortcuts I found. So it seems as though I can choose which method I like best to use.... except that trying all three toggle positions and pressing the engage button didn't really seem to do anything. It produces a nice chime which I have learned to associate with autopilot being engaged, but nothing physically seemed to change. Right that's all the info I think, so here are the actual questions oh patient ones. 1/ Before finding the "LAAP" keyboard shortcuts, I found a section of about ten or eleven marked simply "AAP". Noe of them were assigned to a key press and I assumed at first that they were the various auto pilot controls. What are they actually? 2/ If I used the LASTE panel to control autopilot, I would presumably choose a toggle position and then hit the engage switch. So if I go the keyboard route, would I first press "4","3" or "2" and then press "A"? 3/ What is engaging the autopilot actually doing. Because other than the nice chime, it seems not a whole lot. :lol: 4/ None of the toggle settings suggest to me a mode in which the autopilot will follow your flight waypoints. Is there such a setting? Or am I watching too much StarTrek. 5/ And finally.... I notice that I have a little leeway in joystick movement before the autopilot disengages. (Or at least I assume it does. A nice lady says "Warning, AutoPilot." But doesn't actually go on to say what about it.) Is this a feature? Or is it a limitation of my aged but trusty Logitech joystick, Doris. (She's long in the tooth, but Doris and I have seen many sims together.) Thanks for any advice chaps. Badger

Thankyou everyone for your speedy and excellent help. Warthog is now installed into DCS World and activated. I've had a quick refresh of the first tutorial and run an instant action to see how things are looking and am thrilled to say it seems to run even more smoothly than I remember! :) Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but my curiosity means I have to ask.... I don't understand how that little exe file installed the game! I mean where did it get the files from and how did it install it so quickly! It took seconds, where my original install from the disk took "x" number of minutes and the 1.1.1 download I just did in error also took "x" number of minutes. Oh, speaking of curiosity. Has the instructor in the tutorials changed? From memory I think he used to sound like Barack Obama, but now not so much. :) Badger

Thanks for such a quick reply. :) The "DCS World" I downloaded is already at v1.2.3, so that's a good start. it looks as though I downloaded the wrong "A-10C" then? That's explain why it said v1.1.1 on the dl page and your link says v1.2.3. I notice though that unlike the other dl page, this one has no BIN files? But it does have an EXE file and the expected option for BitTorrent. Are the BIN files in the BitTorrent? So do I have to use that option? I've never used one of those before. Will I also need the EXE file separately? Assuming that I do have to use the BitTorrent option, does that know where to go automatically? or do I have to do something else with it once I downloaded it. Finally (he says, tempting fate) I'd like to keep the one I downloaded already on my HD until I know that this new one is up and running. Will that hurt anything? Sorry for the flood of questions and thanks again for any help. Badger

Hi All I'm hoping that you'll be able to point me in the right direction here as I seem to have got myself into a bit of a mess and to make matters worse I'm not very technical so although I'm sure this is a stupid question and I've tried to find the answer myself, the more I read on different threads the more confused I'm getting. :( I bought a retail boxed copy of "A-10C Warthog" a little after it's original release and ever since then it's been a fixture on my hard drive. Recently though I had a bad problem and lost everything on that hard drive. So on re installing "Warthog", I read that the only way to have the very latest version, was to have it as a plugin for "DCS World" and the idea seemed quite exiting anyway, so I decided to go for it. I wouldn't have paid again for a program I already bought, but I saw that my existing serial number covered me and so having now successfully installed "DCS World" I went ahead and downloaded the digital version. I noticed that the version being downloaded was V1.1.1.1, but guessed that once installed as a module for DCS World, this would be updated to the latest version. Well it's downloaded, but firstly I expected it to appear in the "DCS World" program and it hasn't. Secondly it's running right off the bat without asking me for an activation. Now because I lost it suddenly before it was never de-activated. So is that why? Anyway it's obviously not properly connected to DCS world and I'm at a loss. Can anyopne help me out? Many thanks Badger

Thanks for the advice Rusty & Greg. I've never really had anything to do with "torrents" and if I'm honest I'm not really sure I know exactly what they are about. Something to do with an alternative way of downloading large files.... but for some reason a niggling feeling in the back of my mind is telling me that they are either dodgy, or used for dodgy purposes. Praps I've got it all wrong. :) At any rate "Warthog" arrived today so I don't need to look in that direction. I'd have installed it already except that I'm determined to have at least an evening of trying out this new machine properly! The last two days I have shot myself in the foot by installing games I wanted to see, which turned out to have huge installations and even bigger patch/updates! :lol: Tomorrow though I have a date with a Hog! (Well it won't be the first time I guess. :lol: ) Thanks again all Badger

Thankyou again for the replies all. It's nice to know that this is such a friendly community. Particularly since I have no doubt I'll be a Badger with many questions as time goes on. :) New PC has arrived, in fact I'm using it to write this. So all I need to do now is wait for a thud on my doormat. though I'm not holding my breath just yet as I've yet to have a dispatch email for it, even though I already got one for another item I ordered at the same time and both were "in stock". Anyway.. thanks again and now it's back to play testing this beastie. :) Badger

Actually... now I check it says "Add to Basket", sorry to disappoint. Part artistic licence, part addled brain. Oh dear.. this doesn't bode too well for remembering WartHog controls if I can't even remember the phrase Amazon used to sell it to me! :lol: Badger

Nah, I watched a simple fun and highly unrealistic clip (of A-10's on a carrier) and checked with the experts (ie you blokes) to make sure that the clipping and hovering on show did not represent the state of the code while playing the actual game. Try to keep up there fella. :lol: ( I can't ram the trees though you say?? D'oh!!) Hey sarge. No, that was how things started out. With my saving up for a PC capable or running "LOMAC" in bells and whistles mode. But in the age it's taken me to do so, "LOMAC" is no longer my aim. As my new PC is capable of so much more than my original plan, so my target game has changed to "A-10C Warthog." (Well...between you and me.. my target game is actually "Arma 3" But I'll enjoy the Warthog in the meantime.) Thanks for the heads up though mate. Thanks all for your replies, they've been helpful and interesting and I've just ordered my "A-10C" See you up there Badger

Hello Smokey, thank you for such a quick reply. Ahhhhhhh... I did wonder how you found the right video so quickly until I read this bit. :lol: It does look like you were having loads of fun there and I was chuckling watching it. I was concerned for the code only because in this day and age with so many games being released in an unfinished state and enthusiasts seemingly happy to lap them up with a spoon rather than send developers the message that as a buying public we actually should be sending them, you just can't be too careful. Glad to hear all is well though and I think I'm almost certainly going to click on the "Add to Trolley" button. My only moments pause now is the complexity of the thing. I'm not generally scared of a program like this. I'll have fun I know. I'll nibble at it until I get as far as I get, having long since accepted the limitations of my butterfly mind syndrome. But times they are a changing and looking at it I wonder how much of a disadvantage I'm going to be at with no HOTAS thingie and no ..erm...what's that thing called you stick on your hat and very little possibility in investing in such. Just me and my trusty Logitech Extreme 3D Pro. :lol: Then there's the pdf manual. (I'm assuming) 700 odd pages of techno drooliness in a format I hate to use to read. And here's me just persuaded my better half to print off the 500 page "Dangerous Waters" manual for me on the printer at work. (Ours at home he went boom!) Talk about bad timing! :) Forgive me sounding like Badger the Luddite. I still badly missed the times when "A-10 Warthog" would have come with a manual you could use as a doorstop! I had games which included manuals for which the sacrifice of a small tree was required. Hell my games shelf probably meant the death of a forest somewhere and I said.. "keep on cutting em down boys! Never mind the whole "lungs of the world" thing, I want a manual I can beat a Camel to death with!" Okay I might have spent a little too much time sniffing the pages (wait.. did I say that or just think it) but so what, it's not done me any harm I can still finish a sentence and that's the main thi... Oh ok, well my technospeak is extremely limited Smokey. what is it actually called then? Badger

Hi All For years I have been waiting for the chance to buy a PC capable of running "Lock On Gold" with all of its bells and whistles in play. So that day is finally here (Or will be later this week :thumbup:) and......well, a funny thing happened on the way to the aerodrome. In the time it took me to get the right PC, "LOMAC" became the wrong flight sim. :lol: A new shiny and sexy sim has caught my eye and it's name is "A-10C Warthog". Admittedly the complexity of the thing looks pretty daunting to a country Badger like myself and there's certainly a danger that it'll become another "Falcon 4", which saw re-installation more times than any other sim I ever owned (Even "IL2 1946"!) only to be taken back off again once it made me feel sufficiently stupid! To get yet another re-installation every time we sat down to watch "Top Gun"! Damn you Maverick & Goose!!! Despite this I feel the need to rise to the challenge of the Warty one and am poised on the verge of clicking "Add to Trolley" at Amazon. Except............ Well I saw this video yesterday when I was surfing around to whet my appetite some more and I've been trying to find it again this morning in order to show it to you all, but I can't seem to see the bugger! The long and short of it though, was that it was a video showing a group of chaps messing about with carrier landings in multi-player and what I saw, well I have to admit it put me off slightly. A-10's were sinking into the deck as they landed. (Is the term "clipping"?) Other landings seemed to me to not quite be touching the deck and to add insult to injury, as more of the players came in to land, the A-10's of their friends who had already landed, were levitating! Floating up and down on the spot! Now don't get me wrong, I've no objection to the having of fun, these lads certainly seemed to be enjoying themselves and more power to them. But I have to ask you, were they doing something screwy with the sim for a laugh? Or is that the actual state of the multi-player (and God forbid the single player) code. All the best Badger