FOD

The thing I would like most in BS is improved pilot skill. Thats not anything ED can provide, its down to stick time! I am very happy with it as is, more than enough to keep me busy and in the wifes bad books!

Hehhe so true :thumbup: Welcome to the madhouse! Just like having kids you won't regret buying Black Shark . There will be frustrating times, lots of crying and plenty of bedtime reading (especially if you print out the manual) and maybe a cranky wife too, but overall its a pretty good experience! Good luck!

Page 2-20 = Barometric altimeter First paragraph stated scale is factor of 10 high, long hand is in 100m not 1000m increments short hand is in 1000's not 10,000m increments

Thanks ED, had been really struggling with BS with everything in russian! The documentation is superbly done, looks very polished. Looking forward to the international release, Visa card waiting patiently.

hmmm, might want to put an "i" in that sentence Matt! Congratulations on a great product, having a great time familiarising until the western version is available. Just wish I could understand Russian.

This wasn't the case for me, I told them how much I wanted put on the voucher and they punched that into the paypoint machine. I should have used less that £12. I also have rubles left over, seriously we should all donate them to some charity in russia, someone mentioned orphans before jokingly, but it's a good idea. Does anyone know of a LEGITIMATE webmoney based charity? Sounds unlikely to me. It won't amount to much individually, but if we all combine our stashes :) Can't get the theme music out of my head.........

Another success story here, it's all been worth it. One of my co-workers is fluent in russian, so that and babelfish helped. You do need to be patient though, everything takes a fair amount of time to go through. Its taken me 3 days in all, but its worked. Ukash -> Webmoney ->1C -> :) I would have been a little lost as to the settings if it had not been for the screenshots that Wags posted; http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=32091 Thanks Matt!

Making progress, but stuck trying to transfer money between euro purse and russian purse. I have exchanged it using the standard option and all my credit has disappeared, hopefully it will come back soon! This is all very strange. Edit: I was trying to transfer the lot, and you need to leave enough to pay the commission for the exchange (0.08E) OK, just be patient, it takes a few minutes to come through...... WOOOOT! Payment to 1C accepted, hehehehehe Arrghh, getting a "you are in wrong country" error message...

Sorry guys, I didn't notice that you HAVE to be registered as a formal passport to put Ukash into purses and transfer money, getting close now! State side people, it has been said early in the thread,should be able to use paypal directly, but it doesn't work in the UK so far.

HELP!!!! I have bought a UKASH voucher (a little print out from the paypoint machine) and now I am trying to add the value to my euro purse in webmoney, but I cannot see where the option for "add with ukash" is, can anyone who has succeded give me a pointer please (using webmoney keeper classic eng download. Thanks! Also its so funny when you walk into a shop and ask for Ukash when they have never heard of it, one shop directed me to their cash machine, must be my NZ accent!

Superb, looking forward to more info! Keep it coming.. The touchscreen start up video was cool too.

Excellent info, I was going to go the DVD route but this sounds much better, maybe not as cost effective but certainly seems more time effective, +1 rep for you! As far as sourcing the game for use in a country outside the CIS I expect that as long as you are ordering from a legitimate source and are not having to falsify any information that ED/TFC would have no grounds to object, especially as all of us attempting to do this will buy the proper version that comes out in our regions, probably 2 minutes after it becomes available!! As long as our actions are not designed to harm ED I think we will all be fine. This thread just proves how dedicated we are to supporting this product, and would have been locked a long time ago if there was anything dubious being suggested. I was always looking forward to learning how the fly the KA50 in russian, since I will be learning from scratch anyway, I didn't think that it would add to much more complexity. More info please on the download steps, did you have to register? I am registered at 1C but the russian 1C site doesn't seem to recognise me. Cheers.

I don't want to ruin everyone's fun, but how safe do you feel giving your credit card details out? I contacted my bank to see if I could place any restrictions on the use of my card after such a purchase and it is pretty much giving them the authority to max out your card, they did not recommend it unless I was familar with the company. I hope you guys don't have a problem, but searching to find out how reputable the companies are is really hard, and any problems will be very difficult to sort through. Just pitching in a word of caution, not a criticism of anyone OK? Good luck!

Thanks for the update, the funny thing for me is to see this all happening over and over again. Very similar reactions on the boards when LO/IL2 Sturmo series was ready to come out. Emotions run high with all the excitement, but in the end the dedicated members just have to endure these manic blips. Everyone goes home alive at the end of the day (except perhaps for the time Oleg was nearly killed in a bad car crash of course!) Really looking forward to the release whenever it is, appreciate the effort to bring the demo forward, but I am so busy at work at the moment that I can't devote any time to learning to fly the chopper, any chance of releasing BS some time in April 2009 to suit my schedule? Thanks also for the excellent and levelheaded moderation on these forums EvilB, your efforts are appreciated.

yup, all the above. Am really looking forward to printing out that manual in one lunchtime blitz.:smilewink:

Its looking more and more polished, impressive detail. Watching the video is great training and also very enjoyable, especially the moment when Matt nearly hits the ground at 17:36. I take it you hit the test button on the audible alarms after to see if they were actually working!hehehe. Gave me a "look out Wags!" moment. And another one at 25:36 when you are approaching the fence. Would love to see a blooper reel if it exists (go on, call it the damage modelling video). I have a feeling that my family will not being seeing much of me at night once this thing is released.....sleep is for the weak anyway. Cheers!

A good point, the creator points this out in his blog. The way they would get around it is to have polarized glasses and the software to display each eyes viewpoint relative to the 3D world. They said it would give them DARPA levels of realism. However he is on a budget so the first cut experiment had to be compromised. The distance of your head relative to the screen is critical since the parallax next to a monitor or small screen would be huge, however standing back from a large plasma TV would give a very good effect. Trouble is the FOV will be so limited. Its just a cool technology, not so relevent for flight sims maybe, but you watch how popular it becomes. Probably an ideal first port will be for a game such as "wipeout".

Hey Weta, how is it having ears on your legs? (kiwi joke, ignore us). Yes I agree that the 6DOF that Track IR gives in BS a very interactive and realistic view of the 3D world objects that form the cockpit and external environment, and the result looks very similar. Yet TrackIR is just a fancy way of moving your point of view around the cockpit. This point of view of the 3D world is then projected onto your 2D screen. However the video I posted is fundamentally different from the 1st producers note. The key difference is the way the 3d world image is projected onto the 2D screen relative to the viewers head position to that screen. Thats the cool thing about this idea, it tracks your head position to determine your place in the 3D world and then projects this view onto the 2D screen. This is very different than moving a POV around a 3D world, since it gives a real perception of depth. Correct me if I am wrong but the views in BS will be contained within a bounding box, and the TIR will move your "camera" around inside this box. Thats not what this new idea shows. However you lose the ability to rotate vertically and horizontally as the degrees of freedom are "traded" for monitoring you head position. No programmer wants to see 8 degrees of freedom I can assure you!! Hence this idea would be great for say the fixed forward view out of the aircraft only. He is using a Wii because he is a research student and won't have a huge budget, he is being very resourceful. Cheers.

I have gone back and had a good look at the first producers notes, and utterly agree that the 6DOF with track IR gives you this sort of effect. I am going to go out on a flaming limb here now...... however I think most of you are missing the point of this post. True "world" 3D perspective is based purely on the position of your head relative to the screen. The 3D effect shown in the video will only work on a very narrow field of view (which would severly hamper situational awareness in BS). This is unlike the track IR implementation that will be in BS because that (luckily) includes rotation around the three main axes. The video in my link has the vertical axis and horizontal axis rotational degrees of freedom locked, with only 1 vanishing point for the perspective projection. This gives it the ability to acurately "spoof" depth perception, relative to your heads position in front of the screen. I work with 3D technology so I do have some idea what I am talking about here. Humour me and have another careful watch of the video that I included in the first post. Hopefully you will understand the concept that I am trying to explain. It would be mind blowing if it was available in the forward view only for instance. Actually to prove the difference, please observe how the guy moves around in front of the screen and how the 2D image on the screen wildly pivots about his co-ordinates, yet from his camera view things look truly 3D. With track IR in BS, an observer standing behind the virtual pilot will see the same displacements, i.e they share the same 2D snapshot view of a (fantastic) 3d world.

My mistake!

Is the perspective shifted with the 6 DOF headtracking??? I didn't think so, which is why I posted the video link. From the producers notes videos it appears only the view from a single point changes according to the headtracking position, rather than the perspective view from that point. I hope I am wrong!

I was shown this vid last night and am really impressed by how well it works, wouldn't it be cool if ED could implement this technique on all future releases; The immersion factor would be huge, but I guess so would the computation. Cheers!

Snap! its my birthday too! I was hoping for Black Shark but will have to wait..... Cheers Wags! :drink:

They are called missiles and not hittiles for a reason! Most of mine seem to miss the intended target, but I don't think thats down to modelling issues. Fragmentation would be helpful but for now I am happy to keep practicing at improving my aiming.

Could someone please comment on the effect of crosswinds and gusts on take off and landing, I haven't seen it mentioned yet. I would like to know if these are settings that could be adjusted. I love landing the SU25T in huge crosswinds, and can see hours of fun to be had trying to land the KA50 if there is a random disturbance to the aircraft stability (other than my own ineptitude!) Cheers!