Tumbleweed

Epic! :)

Funny cos BF3 was also my last FPS. They're all getting too arcadey, churned out full of bugs that are ignored in favor of pay to win content and full of whiney kids complaining about balance for my liking. The last "great" FPS I played and really enjoyed was COD2. I get far more enjoyment buzzing the airfields in my little stang now :)

My contribution. Nothing fancy, no plot, just some scenes taken from two recordings cut together with some ZZ top.:megalol: Added a fair few effects to age the film too. More of an experiment with the software (Vegas) to see how authentic I could get the film quality looking than anything. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHpB3tPJQNo :pilotfly::joystick:

I Think you need to modify the aircraft loadout in the mission editor for Single Player missions and in Multiplayer you load them by way of the ground crew.

I think you may have a bug.... Had half hour to spare to try out the server so I joined, selected an aircraft etc but the cockpit only briefly shows / loads before locking me in to a view centered on the exterior of a mobile anti aircraft vehichle. Tried a different aircraft, same thing. Cockpit briefly loads then I'm locked into an external view of a mobile AA and cannot proceed. Edit: tried again. Closed down DCS and restarted and rejoined on the red team and I'm in fine now. Very strange. After some further testing, it seems that anyone joining Blue is locked into this external Mobile AA view. While anyone joining red is fine. Although, I couldn't actually get any plane on Red to start :S Might have just been me?

As others have said, forget Laptops for gaming, especially for DCS. Build your own Desktop, get a good sized monitor and flight controlls and immerse yourself :) Any respectable shop that sells PC componants will help you match up the parts you need based on your requirements if you're not sure what you're doing and if not, there's plenty of people willing to help steer you right here. You can also find some pretty decent bundles (barebones) on the internet these days too if you look round. If in doubt, just ask here mate and someone will help you out. I'm really out of touch with PC building so I won't make any recommendations personally but I'm sure there are plenty round here that are clued up one what to get, where from and the best prices. Good luck and enjoy your new build! :thumbup:

From the NASA website: Due to the lapse in federal government funding, this website is not available. I see the whitehouse page is still up with a disclaimer on it that says the info might be out of date. Don't see why NASA couldn't have done the same and left the static content online. Talk about overkill. I can appreciate the cost of running media streams, live TV etc. and the manpower behind them but to take the whole site offline is just stupid IMO.

You mean it's not FSX? :joystick: :megalol: :music_whistling: :doh: :pilotfly:

That would be good to see :) :thumbup:

That's really all it is mate. Just make yourself a hard target and wait for him to make a mistake you can exploit. As long as you keep your energy you're ready to make your move as soon as the opportunity presents itself. You'll get there.. It frustrated me for the first few days but after watching some dogfight videos on youtube, I took notes and applied them to what I was doing and now Dora rarely gets the better of me. :pilotfly: Good luck mate :thumbup: Try watching these, they helped me alot. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTvsyCsQP2U

The best bits of advice I can give are: 1. Keep Dora in sight ALWAYS. From the moment he flys past in the head on I've got eyes on. From then on, it's a case of staying orientated and bringing the nose round to the target but never taking eyes off the Dora. You need to keep in mind where you are, what you're doing and what energy / speed you have at all times without looking at the instruments - all the while maintaining visual contact with the enemy. 2. You need to manage your energy well which means thinking about what dora is doing in relation to how much energy you have that way you can plan ahead but it happens quickly. Don't try to out climb or turn the dora cos he'll just make you bleed off energy / speed. Watch what Dora is doing and try to learn to anticipate his next move and then you can plan how you're going to exploit his maneuver to cut into it so you put yourself on his tail. How you do this all depends on where he is and what he's doing. There's no right and wrong way, it's all about practice and predicting the enemy and knowing when he's done or is going to do something you can exploit. 3. Don't be aggressive with the controlls. Nice and gentle into those turns / climbs. Just give the stang what it needs and then try and recover the energy again as soon as possible. The more altitude and energy you have over your enemy the better! If you're following Dora into a steep climb until the point you've bled off all your energy and the plane drops, you've gone too far and this is where you need to anticipate the doras next move and be ready to intercept before he drains your speed / energy. And despite all of this, I can get on Dora's tail 90 - 95% of the time I attempt the FW-190 mission but I still can't kill the little swine LOL After putting a few rounds through the Dora, the pilot decides to climb and head off home LOL That and I think he's made of titanium for the amount of rounds he can take and still not suffer :/

Plenty of training scenarios recorded and uploaded to youtube. I tend to be more of a video watcher than manual reader. I'm a typical "if all else fails, read the manual" type person :)

Best advice ever. I suck at landings but I just tried this out at about 5000 feet and maintained around 100 - 110 MPH. Spent about 1o minutes holding the plane like this and then came in and attempted a landing and did a near perfect 3 point landing first time - although I was slightly off center of the runway. :smartass: :thumbup:

That's probably what it is then :D :thumbup:

Can't seem to connect to any MP servers since the update. They start to load then up comes a Connection Interrupted box.

Sorry to hear you had trouble with FTNOIR. Yes, it can be quite a PITA to get set up and it's not everyone's cup of tea but for a free compromise when you can't afford a true IR system, I personally can't complain. The thing I've found with FTNOIR is that for a start, the pilot must make a concious effort in their head movements to avoid some of the little quirks and flickers which can be minimized to some extent with a few hours spent finely tweaking the curves and playing with the filter settings. Once you've got the best settings you can, it's down to the player to keep all head movements to within those limits. This quickly comes naturally and you don't even notice after a couple of hours. Occasionally I still get those moments where it flickers between two views but it's easy to correct. For the most part, it runs pretty well for me. Then again, I probably have low standards hehehehe.. For me, any kind of FOV movement is acceptible when I have none to begin with ;) The only issue I have with FT is that sometimes, it doesn't terminate correctly and won't terminate from task manager which results in the Cam locking into the powerd on state and FTNOIR will not reconnect to it meaning a PC reboot is required. For those that can't afford a true IR set up, I think if you're prepared to invest the time and effort to work with it, it's worth it given it costs nothing to try. :joystick: Eventually, I'll invest in an IR point system as they are smoother IMO from what I've seen but this'll do for now :thumbup:

FaceTrackNoIR :thumbup:

If you have a webcam you can use FaceTrackNoIR to view around the cockpit and zoom etc. It takes a little bit of setting up to get the views / movements just how you like them but it's free to use and no additional headgear etc. is required.

Just my two cents. The stang is a bit of a b*tch to get used to for a start. I've only had it for about a week and I'm having to really put the time and effort in to master it. The whole prop torque thing was a big issue for me but you'll soon treat it like it was always there and instinctively learnt to trim or compensate for it. For the first few days I was doing nothing but crashing LOL... Now, after a few hours, I've been fooling around in free flight tweaking my joystick settings etc and I have her flying lovely. All I need to do now is some real fine fine tuning to calibrate my JS to be in complete sync with the aircraft. I initially started out by calibrating the joystick until the plane barely responded to joystick inputs and moved on from there. Intially I have set pitch to quite insensitive to avoid bucking around and stalling from pulling back too hard when I get too excited hehehe while I've kept the roll pretty sensitive. This has helped me to not be so fierce with the plane. All in all, it has taken me about 3 - 4 days just to get my JS set up how I want it and to get used to how the plane responds to given situations. The stang is a real beaut to fly once you master her quirks so please don't give up. I felt just like you for a start OP but my sheer stubbornness wouldn't let it beat me and now I'm enjoying every flight.. even though I still wreck the old gal spectacularly at times :) All the best, TeKno