RedTiger

Hey Skypat, any chance that new ModMan will let us tweak the graphics in FC 2.0?

Also, remember that if you notch a fighter launching a SARH like the Flanker or Fulcrum, you've also defeated the missile. It could be me, could be the way the RWR works, but it seems harder now to notch the Su-27. Maybe the Su-27 and F-15 are harder to notch than before. If so, cool. :D

My experience with FC 2.0 is similar to Black Shark (for obvious reasons): better all-around performance, but not quite as bad and good on the extremes. I no longer get extremely high or extremely low framerates, just sorta the same across the board. It seems about the same as the average I would get on old FC. I need to do some tweaking.

I don't think that flight sims are as failure-prone as some might think they are. Flight sims, especially combat ones, have a built-in appeal. You fly around at high speed and you shoot at stuff and blow stuff up. Remember Falcon 4.0 Allied Force? Rumor has it that it sold hand over fist and was quite a succesful product, despite being a study sim with nearly 10 year old graphics. The problem with flight sims is measuring the success in terms of developmental time and money vs. sales. They aren't like the next Call of Duty game that is in developement for 2 years with an unlimited budget and nearly guaranteed sales of millions and millions of copies, thereby returning the investment tenfold. From EvilBivol's signature, "The Parable of Jane's A-10 and Flight Sim Development" http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?p=640612#post640612

Lots of games that have the real-time shadows like this look the same way. I think its just sort of the side effect of them being real-time.

Heh, wow, that does look rather unhealthy to be caught up in. I always found it interesting that the differing philosophies on fighter armament from WWII also found its way into US vs. Soviet planes. Europeans liked cannons because their fighters were just as prone to have to deal with bombers, while US fighters didn't have to worry about that. At the time, machine guns and their volume of fire were considered a much better weapon to employ against fighters. The M61A1 would actually be classified as a cannon, but its still a weapon that relies on volume of fire over pure destructive power per single shell. BTW, does the newest version of TacView work with FC 2.0>

Hey there Beach! Nice screenshots! Something about the updated engine just makes the sim look much better. Could be the upgrade to Dx9, I don't know. Whatever it is, it was worth the wait!

Nice, didn't know one of them would be an F-15 campaign.

Make sure in the nvidia control panel you are using the "simulator.exe" file and not the "launcher.exe" file. Once I set it to simulator.exe, I saw the graphical improvements I had set up in the control panel.

First off...as GG said, the AI isn't the sharpest crayon in the box. Don't take that the wrong way, this is coming from someone who only plays singleplayer. I do like the improvements in how they evade missiles, but there haven't been any changes (that I can tell) to their dogfight capability. They're still fairly bad at it. That being said, the improvements to the F-15C do matter and are very noticeable. The engines are now VERY powerful in comparison to the other jets. In fact, it feels like the MiG-29 and F-15 swapped something from old FC. You can maintain 400+ knots in a turn now seemingly indefinitely if want to. You have smash to spare.

I have disabled zoom and roll altogether in my profile. I typically find roll in a fighter jet sim to be highly disorienting. Besides, the sim already rolls the view a little bit during turns. The way zoom works in FC 2.0 might just be on purpose. In old FC, you could zoom forward with Track IR in a very unrealistic way. Believe it or not, I'm finding zoom to be unneeded, at least so far in air to air, with the new ballistics model.

Whoever at ED is responsible for the ballistics in FC 2.0 needs to be rewarded. I've been trying out the M61A1 and GSH-30 all afternoon. If the ballistics in FC 2.0 are considered to be realistic now, I'm glad, because now they also make more sense. The laser beam bullets in old FC and other sims are not only unrealistic, they make it too damn hard to actually hit anything. It always seemed like all or nothing. You were either all on or all off. Pipper off the bandit one pixel? Sorry, nothing hits. Now I can actually pull the trigger, pull the pipper across the bandit, and not only hit, but usually tear it to pieces. The guns behaves like an actual gun shooting actual projectiles. I no longer have to zoom the view in to this unrealistic HUD-only view to feel confident that I'm actually going to hit something. I especially like the wall of lead you can spit out with the M61A1. ED successfully turned it into the chainsaw of death it is reputed to be. Bravo! :clap:

I kept getting booted back to the main Lock On web page when I'd click on an HTTP link. I think that basically means "Too many *%ing people trying to download. Please try again later". Eventually one set of them worked.

I'm *cough* not using the torrent. *cough* :shifty: I'm downloading from the USA HTTP. I couldn't take the slow download. I guess that makes me a selfish bastard. :yes:

Just to make sure I'm clear, do I still need to install regular Lock On prior to installing FC 2.0?

Paypal charges fees to the vendor for purchases under a certain amount. I'm not sure what that amount is. It could be that *any* such fee will cut into revenue enough to make Paypal unacceptable. Remember the reasons they had to increase the price? I'm with you though on the fact that Paypal would be awesome.

My brain filled in the blanks and concluded that it was due to the E versions being bigger. I suppose that doesn't make much sense. An SA-10 or Patriot is huge, but I've never heard of that being a disadvantage against a fighter.

ZaltysZ beat me to it. :P There's also plenty recent examples of the opposite. Anything from UBI still has their own DRM, AFAIK. Lots of Steam games have Games for Windows attached to them, which is at least a light form of DRM, and a very big form of PITA in my humble opinion. ;) To me, this is all overkill since Steam already offers a reasonable amount of protection with the added aspect that you have to have the client available on the computer AND the software downloaded directly from Steam to actually play. The reason why ED doesn't use steam is probably as EtherealN said, "one more mouth to feed". Games cost more on Steam because a portion of that money Valve keeps (and rightfully so, obviously, considering the convieniet services they provide). Also, I'm certain there's a cost to the developer to get a game "Steam-ready", be it time, money, or both.

I'm late to the thread! I might be the only one on the forum, but I'm glad to see this. To clarify something regarding missiles, there was some discussion a while back about the R-27 vs the "E" versions, information provided by those in the know that the E versions were more for bombers and not as effective vs. fighters as the regular version. Were there any changes to that effect?

No one has yet to mention this, but Lock On is the successor to the Flanker series. ED, as a company, has already long been involved with simulating the Su-27, Su-33, and MiG-29.

Been there, done that. :D I haven't played a flight sim in probably close to a year. Rediscovered playing music and picked that back up. As soon as I found out about FC 2.0, I decided to wait until it came out to pick flight sims back up again. I gotta dust off my HOTAS and pedals, make sure TrackIR still works, and unistall FC and all my mods.

I don't remember reading that. So FC 2.0 is an all-in-one upgrade to Lock On, no need to install FC 1.12 first? EDIT: Nevermind, apparently Wags said this somewhere? Read a quote from him on simhq.

ROFL! :lol: Those "meat chunks" are better known as gibs...as in giblets. "He just gibbed my F-16!" :megalol:

Just thought I'd bump to respond to this. Correct me if I'm wrong... What that switcher does is switch between what is essentially tile sets, textures, and geometric shapes over the same map. You're still flying over the same map. Have you ever gone too far out of the bounds of the Nevada map? It becomes very apparent that its just different stuff pasted on the same virtual environment. No offense meant to the makers of the terrain...I looooooooove the Nevada terrain. DACT vs. aggressor Vipers? Fun! But the suggestion is to make it like Falcon. In F4AF, as far as I can tell, Korea and the Balkans are two completely different virtual environments. FC doesn't have this, and if you note the trend on these types of things, bolting on things to Lock On that seem "easy" in fact appears to be very difficult.

Gentlemen, Why are we feeding a troll?