Bwaze

Now that A-10C is being made to such high standards (A-10C Desk Top Simulator for Air National Guard), must the next DCS instalment match it? Will we have to wait for Eagle Dynamics to make another professional military simulator first? Air National Guard also operates F-15C, F-16C/D (and apparently even F-16E/F, Tucson International Airport, Arizona, for training United Arab Emirates pilots) and... F-22A (Langley Air Force Base, Virginia) and B2 (Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri). Hint, hint, nudge, nudge... :music_whistling: Seriously, can the DCS make another aircraft simulation without military contract, if they want to adhere to such high standards? How did they obtain info for the Ka-50?

Another Warthog sighting on E3: Gaming Nexus - some new photos, description from the layman point of view.

Yeah, I think the area below the "IDLE" detent could be programmed as a keypress in Thrustmaster Advanced pRogramming Graphical EdiTor. :P BTW: Don't they know that T.A.R.G.E.T. and H.E.A.R.T. shaped words are unsearchable in browsers? I hope they change that silly naming convention. Warthog looks great, functions are even better than I hoped them to be. But is it 400 EUR - worthy? That remains to be seen. But at the end I'll still have to trust web reviews, there's very little chance this will come to stores in Slovenia, so I'll have to make my choice without seeing it in person.

SimHQ will shortly publish hands-on reviews of HOTAS Warthog and DCS A-10C from E3. And it looks Warthog will be a little late, September 2010. Unless that's a date of DCS release. :-)

Yeah, but I think it should say: "To avoid information...". That's a silly way to release a piece of hardware. Unless there are really problems and it has been delayed.

This page lists them as one of the companies on E3 with racing sim stuff: http://www.racesimcentral.com/news/lang/it/2010/06/inside-sim-racing-e3-2010/ But that's the only mention of Thrustmaster I could find, I guess they are just "guests" at some larger vendor. According to my search it's usual for the Thrustmaster to unveil new hardware at E3, and people were surprised when they showed their "GT cockpit" a month before. P.S.: Oh, and the thread on SimHQ where the James Hallows said "Go to the E3 gents!" apparently disappeared. So we really don' know absolutely nothing. It's all the work of "HOTAS Warthog attack group in final approach phase" I guess...

"10 years from now..." DCS will be in a pre-beta of the third aircraft (after Ka-50 and A-10C). And Storm of War: Battle of Britain will be just 2 weeks 'till release! ;) Sorry, but sim market is sooo slow I really lost all my high hopes in waiting for the new releases. I guess making games has become too complicated.

Yeah they change fast. That's why I did this: Direct link to the album with pictures (if You can't see them here): http://s84.photobucket.com/albums/k26/Bwaze/Thrustmaster%20Hotas%20Warthog/

Technically if they release it at E3 it's still spring. And if they just show the prototype there... Well, nVidia mislead their customers for half a year, and they are in much more fluid market than HOTAS. So anything can happen. But E3 is almost a month away, I hope we will get some new Flash animations before that. :P

It looks it will be unveiled at E3 convention in LA, June 15 -17. On SimHq James 'Nutty' Hallows wrote just: 'Go to the E3 gents...', when people complained about lack of information. He has some insider info, he wrote already in March that prototypes are in the hands of several people from community. Anyone here has one? ;-)

They removed the date from the product description page, so it looks that button description is all we got for this update. It doesn't really tell us how close to the release we are - could be soon, but it could also be delayed by months, since the 'Available: Spring 2010' announcement is gone...

I would guess same as permanent switches on Cougar. You can have keypress for every state of the button, and keypress for return to the neutral state, so assigning things is very flexible. It helps if the keypress is "one way" - one key for "airbrake out" and another for "airbrake in" (when switch returns to neutral position). Otherwise it can happen that switch position doesn't reflect the current state in the game.

Haha, yeah, I went two times through that, and wondered how can they design such a thing, and not be able to count. Until I realised I'm the one that can't read. :D Hm... But I miss some axis... es... Axises. But I guess they're doing the replica. Kind of a shame, since they could do them with Hall technology now, I bet it's as cheap for them as potentiometers, or even cheaper.

For all the Flash challenged people, and it's easier to read that way: I sincerely doubt they will tie the Warthog to the DCS. Direct link to the album with pictures (if You can't see them here): http://s84.photobucket.com/albums/k26/Bwaze/Thrustmaster%20Hotas%20Warthog/

Yeah, a bit more info on type of buttons used. Programming all that permanent switches is going to be fun. :P But they deleted the "Available: Spring 2010" statement. :(

After some quick search I finally found the way to disable Driver Signature in Windows 7 64 bit: I ran Command prompt (cmd.exe) with Administrative privileges. Then typed these two commands: bcdedit -set loadoptions DISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS bcdedit -set TESTSIGNING ON After restart SSAA tool run without problems, it shows under processes as: enable_SSAA_Tool64.exe

It would be great if it worked in Win7 64bit without annoying "Disable Driver Signature" dance at every restart of Windows. It's really annoying. Other than that it works, at least SSAA, vsync and triple buffering.

I hope Thrustmaster will do something about the customer support - right now they have no Forum, and Tehnical Support has very little usable info. Most of really usable stuff is on a (mostly) community driven Cougar World, although FurgalsWorld forums are apparently gone for good (and with them most of the modding community?)...

Could they be even more cryptic? :D I really don't need a new stick right away, but this HOTAS really looks impressive. And compared to other my hobbies*, even 400 EUR isn't that expensive, because it's an once-in-a-few-years thing. *(15th century reenactment, and photography. Both expensive as hell.)

Thank you ED!!! Although I'm eagerly awaiting the next DCS. And I really hope the graphic engine will get a revamp, there's now tons of stuff that worked properly several years ago and are now broken (full shadows, flickering cloud shadows, flickering coastlines, lower frame rates without any visual improvement...).

Yeah, that's an option too, remaking the Cougar to cockpit panels is just a step forward. :) Although I couldn't do that to mine, it still works like new (that is - has some centre play, but otherwise ok).

SIMPED F16/C. COnnected through Cougar, hall effect rudder and load cell brakes. I guess Thrustmaster Warthog wont' have the rudder connector, so I don't know what will I do. They are perfect, I don't intend to sell them, so I hope DHS - electronic will come up with the USB connector. The other option is to make one myself, but I haven't looked yet how that could be achieved (Leo Bodnar's USB controllers perhaps). And there's always an option to make a controller box from the Cougar - I could buy a broken one, and use the insides to make a panel with switches and pots, and rudder connector. But I'll deal with that once the Warthog comes out. Right now my Cougar and Simped are working ok.

There are several entries for this HOTAS on Dutch pages, one of them had a (now removed) pre-order date (or is that release date?): Levertijdindicatie: Pre-order tot 01-06-2010 And price: € 312,00, € 262,18 ex BTW That's around $350 + tax, could be less in USA. And tax here is unavoidable, unlike in some other parts of the world. Link to the Google cache of the print version of the page: Salland Automatisering B.V.

Well, it just seems like a rendered picture. I'm not 100% convinced it is, maybe the lighting and image processing is fooling me, and the small resolution also doesn't help. About the realism of rendering - somebody really took the time to model the HOTAS with lots of little details, chamfered edges, 3D screws (but they are aligned, that's not really usual)... Even the texture of the throttle grips looks like a brushed metal. But I have seen such renderings of a products that were already available, used in advertising. Why? I don't know, to give the product a perfect look that is usually hard to achieve with the real world object, especially with the large size photos of a relatively small object? The image might not be just for the flash banner, maybe it was done for other advertisements as well. A company that makes CGI advertisements would have little problem with making a render such as this. All the "advanced" techniques such as realistic materials, life like lighting, ray-traced reflections... Would be just in their day's work. I don't think the greyed and blurred part is there to hide the "production plate", since the plate looks empty, and blurring and greying extends above the plate and looks like it's a part of a pattern - like it was cut from another advertisement which extends beyond that point. http://forums.eagle.ru/attachment.php?attachmentid=33753&d=1259394928

What for? Well, you have to make a design in a CAD program before you even begin thinking about doing the prototype, and making a CGI from that is very simple. I could be wrong, but especially edges on "Flaps" button, stick nut and that lever thing are way too sharp for a real usable object, and the "Flaps" button shaft is also very unconvincing (it reflects a bright highlight even where it's surrounded by a black material all around).