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Lots of tracks, thanks!

It would be nice if someone set up a tracks site for the community, I would find it very useful (Lock On Files only has a smattering). Anyway, I'm looking for guns only dogfight tracks, similar or dissimilar aircraft, preferrably human vs. human.

Ah, the tinting is more apparent once you pointed it out. Really need to get my head into this modding thing, seems a lot of cool stuff can be achieved. Thanks for that explanation, I figured as much. Anyway, here is an example of the cockpit glint I was talking about, looks like he has full shadows enabled:

Nice, is that supposed to show the skinned IR sight? pretty cool! Well, I noticed in your shots there is no obvious sun glint, but I've seen it in some other screenshots by other people, but I've never been able to reproduce it, even with full shadows. Might be an ATI thing (I use nvidia), not sure, I'll see if I can find it. BTW, do you know any good sites that explain the file layout/structure for LOMAC? I'm just curious in understanding how the game accesses some stuff. I fooled around with LOMAN cdds browser but it's confusing how there are some textures in the cdds files and others in the temptextures folder. I also downloaded a transparent nomera.tga to get rid of numbers/stars but it only seems to affect the Su aircraft, so that confused me as well.

Good show. The canards really make the aircraft look fierce with that skin. Just curious, how do you get that radar dampening tint on the cockpit glass, is that part of the skin? Also, for me the cockpit never has any sun glint off it from external view, wondering if that's a skin thing or what? I use walmis's f-15 model/skin and I never see it.

Very well done. One small thing was the transition that starts at the center and becomes a widening circle revealing the next screenshot; that one seemed a bit weird, didn't like that transition for some reason, made it seem kind of homemade. All the other transitions were very professional and the theme music fits perfectly. The engine sounds, especially of the su-33 taking off the carrier seemed very thin and distorted, didn't like that. The gun effect where the a-10 is strafing something on the runway (I think) sounded kind of flat. These are obviously very minor points but if you wanted feedback, that was me trying to find every little flaw :P I would love to see you do a movie since just from that simple montage you've displayed some obvious talent. Keep up the good work. BTW, I'm also learning to use the video edit feature in lomac. All you have to do is before you start whatever mission or multiplayer mission you want to record, just hit ctrl+r instead of "Fly!" button. Then after the mission is over, save the track file when it prompts you. Then choose "Open Mission" and choose "track files" and then open the saved track file. Hit Ctrl+E when it opens the map and it will playback the track for you with video editing capabilities. Shift+J enables camera jitter which makes cool, realistic external camera movements when in flight. ctrl+a speeds up track, alt+a slows it down, shift+a puts it back to normal speed. From there you can just fraps different segments of the recorded track as you see fit and put it together to make a video. The only thing I don't like is the fact you can't "rewind" the track but it's an understandable limitation since the track is run real-time with the physics engine.

I use the mouse (or similarly the x52 ministick) to control the targeting cursor in BVR mode. However, assigning the mouse axes to this prevents me from using the mouse axes to pan around my aircraft in external view. Anyone know if it's possible to assign the axes to both?

Well the reason they let you disconnect the wires between the throttle and joy is so that you can disconnect them when storing them away. It also makes it easier to reposition them and then plugging in the connection. I also found most calibration problems can be solved just by unplugging and plugging in the connection between throttle and joy. For me, I consistently have the joystick have a slight left twist input. Whenever I plug it in, I twist the joystick slightly to the right and then plug it in. This usually eliminates the problem.

I'm just curious why people find a stick that is too loose to be undesirable? Does it deviate from what an actual flightstick feels like or does it make it too sensitive? I guess I could also see it helping in making more precise adjustments since there would be more resistance. Anyway, I feel like the responsiveness is more or less fine for me, but since I haven't had experience with many sticks, I'll probably try that washer technique and see if I like it any better.

Well, if you can't figure out how to get mouselook to work in the cockpit, you can always go into the sst programming software and assign the ministick to bands instead of axis. Assign the bands to the respective numpad buttons that pan around the cockpit. I think it's virtually the same result. EDIT: I just remembered, if you want cockpit mouse, open your Lock On\Config\View\View.cfg and find the line MouseCockpit=0 and make it MouseCockpit=1 (remember to uncomment it - delete the '//' before the line). Then open view.lua and set CockpitMouse=true there. I think this will do bad things to TrackIR if you have it, so either you have to disable TrackIR or set it to mouse emulation mode.

LOL I was thinking the same thing.

Ah, yeah you're probably right about that, didn't think about that. Diving at steeper angles makes it much easier, but it forces you to get a little close and you might catch some heat. That's why I was trying for a level toss, but I guess at long ranges this could be hard to do with the pipper. I just assumed my line-up was pretty much on when I thought the pipper was on with the diamond. I guess at longer ranges you can't assume that. I suppose trying the dive-toss method could help keep me at a safer range too.

Well after several more tries, I've finally succeeded. One of the problems it seems is that bombing from level flight on the MiG doesn't work so well, which I was trying to do for awhile. I guess I'll try to set up some scenarios where I can figure out why exactly that happens, unless someone knows of some trajectory physics that I'm not aware of :P

I'm having some real trouble doing the AG bombing run in this mission with the mig-29S. I'm carrying two high-drag unguided bombs. I'm very careful to place the pipper over the designated target, keep myself lined up and the bombs release as expected. However, they almost always tend to overshoot and miss the target completely. I've tried varying altitudes and speeds, but I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. I'm not interested in dive-toss bombing, just a standard dive bomb. Even so, I've checked out some dive-toss bombing tutorials and there's no obvious mistakes when comparing the tutorial method with my own. On another note, in AG mode, the HDD displays a target designator for the primary ground target, and a diamond appears on my HUD (without locking the pipper) even at the start of the mission. This seems strange as I am not sure if the mig-29s' avionics is capable of designating ground targets like that.

Oops, you're right, I wasn't looking at the HDD, hehe

Well perusing the Lock On manual, it states that while the Russian and American fighters have different radar systems, they both employ pulse doppler radar (both the N-019/01 and AN/APG-63 radars were pulse dopplers). That pretty much answers the question, but I have another question. I can understand how CW radar can't tell distance, but it seems that a pulse doppler radar should be able to tell distance simply by observing the time it takes for each pulse to return from a specific source (Of course the antenna would have to be directional to discriminate sources). However, I think only on the F-15 does this information show up (at least I think). Anyone know why?

Just a general avionics question regarding russian vs. US BVR modes. I understand the EM theory behind both CW and pulse-doppler. It makes sense to me that that the US aircraft can alter pulse frequency in BVR mode from HI/low/ILV. However, from my understanding, all the Russian aircraft modeled only operate with CW radar, so how is it that they can alternate pulse frequency if they don't implement pulse doppler? Or do they implement pulse doppler in BVR mode? I've also heard of something called CW pulse doppler but I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean exactly...

TBH I thought the whole game was just buggy. The flight model is a joke, even worse than BF2's (that's saying something.) A lot of people are complaining about the terrible missions, terrible AI, buggy gameplay. It honestly is still in early beta. I was extremely disappointed. Here's a list of ridiculous bugs they should have fixed (they are so obvious they knew they were there when releasing the game!!). My advice is just to wait for US release/reviews. Most German mags have given it around ~75%. Some others, below 60%. http://www.armed-assault-zone.com/forum/viewthread.php?forum_id=22&thread_id=1403

If I turn full shadows off, my FPS does increase above cities, but it's still not low enough for me to want to turn it off, I can generally get 30 fps in most city areas with the current settings so I'm not complaining :)

Actually that was another thing on my mind. Do I set the Fov in the view.lua to 145.0? or 160.0? I tried both but I don't see any difference in view area... I also frequently use trackir recentering, not sure if that zooms in to compensate?

Wow, that did the trick. Didn't think to try turning off mirrors or reducing vsb range. Extremely smooth now, doubled my FPS! Although you're right, seems to have lower fps than what you'd expect for what it has to render (well at least for rendering towns, the buildings are just textured boxes!).

Posted this over on the ubisoft forums but I'll post here to just in case: It seems I have to run LOMAC at medium settings to get playable framerates. This is strange considering the age of the engine and the fact my hardware is relatively new. I can play with everything maxed out, but staring straight ahead, (where the cockpit is rendered) I tend to get about 30fps max. When I swoop down and circle a town, I get as low as 14 fps! This is with the settings on the "max" option. Here are my specs: 2GB RAM eVGA 7900 GTO AMD X2 3800+ (OC'd to 2.8GHz) I play at 1440x900 resolution (I tried various different resolutions, but they only slightly increase performance if lowered) It's playable on medium settings but I can get only about a 30-40fps max on a sparse runway! From what I gathered, my video card should be able to run at this setting smoothly.

Well it's nice to know I'm not the only one. It's actually not that bad once I tone down the slide resistance.

I'm pretty sure you can't. But I know in the BS expansion the Ka-50 is modeled extremely accurately and all the controls/switches can be (and probably should be) manipulated with the mouse. However, I'm not sure if the expansion will add that functionality to existing aircraft cockpits. I hope they do for at least a few of them, especially considering the cockpit controls for them are much simpler than for the Ka-50.

Yeah it's annoying. AA site requires the admin to approve you for posting privileges. It's kind of lame, I know the mod there is kind of a tightwad. I registered one account, then I registered again under another thinking the first registration didn't go through because I wasn't able to post. Only later did I realize I needed to be approved before posting. I thought the admin probably thought that was abusing the forums and never gave me posting privileges. That's only speculation though because I can't even PM the admin to figure out why (talk about the most retarded privilege system ever). Anyway, that forum is full of fanboys anyway. Your probably better off posting on some of the fansites. Another thing was I registered at the time when the forums were down so the mod might have missed it. Oh well, I didn't bother re-registering because it's a pain and the forums suck anyway.