sinelnic

It does! It´s one level above what I´m asking (i.e. the complete program outline) but nevertheless very interesting. Thanks!

Hi, I´m looking for info on real-life fixed-wing (well yes, A-10 or Su-25 why not) training routines. I´ve come up with my own, but I´m looking to improve them if possible. What I´m looking for is a routine for 30 mins / 1 hour weekly flights, of the kind RL pilots use to keep their skills sharp (not necessarily to learn new stuff). Thanks for anything you can send my way!

:megalol:

Another issue is having the image surrounding you with the correct perspective, I don´t know what size your monitors are, but I use three 24" and define two aditional cameras for the side monitors, so I can place them rotated 30 degs towards me while projecting the persepctive correctly (i.e. as if I have a side window instead of a big fisheye lens). I tested with my 40" LED and resolution is ok if you use a narrow, close to RL FOV of about 50-60 deg, which I do prefer. In that setup, I concluded I needed 3 TVs in Portrait to give the surround experience I´d like, of course, in my dreams. Of course everyone has personal tastes...

And who´s gonna complain?? :D

LOL talking about laser recycling... that guy would not care having to wait 30 minutes to use it again... Russian technology is thousands of years ahead of its time :D

Excellent points. From my experience the key part would be if they´d have to start entirely from scratch, making the new engine project basically a 3-yr R&D project + 1 yr for adapting the content to the engine and bug fixing, or if they have already done experiments, prototyping, and/or have gone through the low level design exercise that is required. If they did do the R&D part during the last four years (say since the establishment of the Core technology in the consumer market), I´d wildly guess a 2 year work. I would think that going multicore is not the only benefit of a new engine. DCS could improve fidelity immensely by actually modelling the atmosphere, as a dynamic fluid rather than the current static simplification, allowing for thermal currents, wind deflection in mountains, aircraft induced turbulence, all things that would take the overall flight "model" to the next level on par with high-end systems. Besides that, dynamic modeling of air temperature and humidity would allow for a very realistic weather system. Couple that with the enormous room for improvement in the visual simulation given by the new technologies, with particle-based dynamic clouds, smoke and precipitations; using DX11 tesselator for terrain (maybe going procedural) that could allow, for instance, to have very detailed cities where all non-building objects become 3D instead of textures at close range (i.e. cars, traffic lights, small plants, crops, etc) while at the same time, the long-distance textures are pre-rendered from those objects (so forests don´t pop up from nowhere); using newer techniques for object drawing (i.e. full DX11 geometry instancing); collidable trees (why not); and finally, dynamic terrain lighting with mountain, building and vegetation-casted shadows on all objects plus dynamic higlights in the terrain according to the sun position (so that sun-bathed forests look like a sun-bathed broccoli if you get the picture). So I would think a beefy engine update ED-style, would be quite something, and something I would personally pay for and enjoy as much as a new plane. The level of detail in the plane simulation, at least for me, means that I need to get close to professional standards to fly the machines well, with a true sense of satisfaction, and that takes years, not days, to obtain, so I´m in no hurry for new planes if I´m getting something like I described above instead. Couple that with a more complex and realistic mission evaluation system, career mode, dynamic campaign... hell I´d pay a lot.

My preferences in order: If you can go for a supersonic something with AA capabilities, by all means, go for it. I´d prefer Mig-29 but I´d equally enjoy F-18/16, F-15, Su-27, etc. Naval ops, a big plus. If that´s not feasible, Su-25T, as I love the feeling of raw machine that bird surely has and you´ve reproduced so well in BS. Then Apache, but that´s on par with below. If none of the above, meaning there´s no military contract you can leverage, why not focus on new engine (multithread and full DX11 with new terrain or re-engineered existing terrain, dynamic atmosphere, advanced cloud system) / full career mode / maintenance simulation / dynamic campaign / whatever? I personally would pay for a beefy "back-end" upgrade as I would for a new module.

Are you going to use the Tesselator in DX11? I always thought it was the potential holy grail for LODs in flight simulators...

I´m not sure what you mean, but I can confirm I´m running my G940 on Win 7 x64 no problem at all. Also, VASI. I´m so happy you brought that into the sim, for those early series of visual touch and go´s to get used to the plane.

I´ve succesfully built a C++ program that uses the Logitech API plus LO:FC2 import functions to eliminate the most annoying axis reversal bug from my G940, in a very similar concept to and thanks to the inspiration of Mikkowl´s IL2 program. Currently the program corrects the reversal bug on the throttles, joystick, and rudder. As I´ve not implemented response curves rudder is better left unaffected because it becomes too sensitive. I don´t use rotaries, but it would be very simple to implement those as well. It´s been 2 weeks of a lot of trial and error since I´m not a C++ programmer plus I had to solve a myriad of problems to make sure it works under most normal and not-so-normal circumstances. I´m considering releasing it to the community, which would demand a build from scratch since my code is far from being optimized and completely hard-coded. Also a big mess :) If someone would be interested in beta-testing this new build, please let me know, as that would be tremendously helpful to identify potential compatibility issues. I´d like to have a test at least in Win XP, Win Vista and Win 7 (I developed in Win 7 x64). Also if you are interested in using this and/or have any special request please let me know, of course this is done in my free time and motivation is always welcome!

Mastiff, they need to make a profit. Any project like this with a lot of R&D involved, requires a lot of financing either internal or external. Financing is cheaper the sooner you pay it back and the smaller it is (due to inherent risk). Add to that the cost (financed) of manufacture for the initial lot, and you´re beginning to get closer to a business plan. The initial sales must cover for the production of the thing plus the financing of the development and marketing of the product. Plus some profit. Only then you can move on to volume sales where the equation is more along the lines of income-total sales cost-total production cost=profit AMMOUNT, when you´re hopefully debt free and can self-finance with your own sales; and you have much more certainty about product reception. There´s a limited market for this things, so selling a million units for 15 bucks a piece is probably not an option. They surely found the demand sweetspot for quickly selling the required ammount of units that would give them back their investment and initial profit at the USD 400 level. More expensive, and they might run short on unit sales. Cheaper, and they might saturate the market before the required ammount of money came in. Steam does exactly this, initial prices are high, then they go for volume.

I tried BlackShark with the red and blue glasses, the 3D effect is nice, when flying low the surrounding scenery gets alive, and when flying high you get 'somewhat' the sensation of being high. Headaches and eye strain are common though, depends on the person. Too much money right now to make it interesting with multiple monitors right now, so not my personal interest ATM.

Hello ED, fellow forumites, I´ve always had issues with coordinated turns, mainly because doing it right demands looking down to the instrument panel, and as I normally fly with a narrow FOV through the HUD, glancing down means I loose all other references (roll angle, heading, etc) unless I switch my mind to full instrument flying, which is unnatural. I´ve never piloted an aircraft myself, but I believe (correct me!) that you can feel an uncoordinated turn with your body as lateral force. My suggestion is basically adding that feedback to the FF algorythms. So, in OPTIONAL manner, would it be possible to add a FF force component in the roll joystick axis proportional to the sideslip the aircraft has? The idea is not to make the roll axis FF only for this feedback, but that this feedback is added to the current feedbacks, in order to provide a rough indication of sideslip. You´d still need to check the little bubble for precision, just as in RL I believe. Would this be practical? Does anybody else care? Thanks!

I own a G940 and am very dissapointed with it. Some folk were dissatisfied on release with the way it handled force-feedback, but apparently that was solved with the latest software. I am very dissatisfied with the issue called "Axis Reversal Bug", which basically ruins the excellent precision of the stick, throttle and rotaries. There are other issues around, if you do a search in the forums for G940 you´ll find plenty of comment on the stick Should those issues be corrected though (and they claim they´re "reviewing the issue" and working on new software, without ETA -probably months- nor commitment to what will they solve), it is potentially an outstanding HOTAS. I bought it because of Force Feedback, and can assure you that it added a dimension to my enjoyment.

@KungFuCharlie, I might be misunderstanding your question, but, have you tried contacting Locheed Martin directly? It might take a few mail interchanges between different offices until they find the corresponding one, but maybe worth a try?

Ha! A-10 Tank Killer, an awesome thing. I remember being angrily corrected by the virtual flight instructor (yes!) when going over 15K ft, shouting "This is no F-15, come back down here immediately!!".

Hey I was being modest with the feature set... we could always ask for a ground crew fighting minigame to replace the forms...

Hi Lightning, If you want to land with as low speed as possible, you really want flaps fully extended. Flaps reduce the speed at which the plane stalls, or will at least give you much better control at near stall speeds. Hence you´ll find landing slowly much easier. You should find the way to have them extracted in early final though.

First!

Another question: Besides all the good work on TM Warthog and the apparent (my impression only!) "enthusiasm" ED seems to have on this partnership... are there active, real plans to continue work fropm ED´s part on the G940 to enhance the sim integration with this stick in the FF area? Thanks!

Well from a gameplay perspective, in-flight failures in a combat sim are very tricky to implement, that´s why I concentrated in pre-flight checks. For FSX, it can even be fun to have your engine fail mid-flight, forcing you to apply the correct procedure to perform an emergency landing, fix the problem, and go back to the air, like in the fabulous Do-27 add-on. But in a combat mission, it is a show stopper, you´re failing the mission without doing anything wrong. It is indeed realistic, but from a gameplay perspective, it adds nothing and substracts a lot, at least in my humble opinion.

Hello ED, fellow forumites, I was reviewing the A-10A Flight Manual uploaded by Bwaze (great job!!) and reviewing the systems check procedures, when suddenly came up with a suggestion for a minigame that may give a gameplay incentive to perform those checks correctly, for those who do like such things: The concept is that good aircraft maintenance is like good software maintenance, the pilot or user is actively involved in the process, because some malfunctions cannot be found until the machine is used, as happens with human-made software. The mechanic is called "Grounded Pilot": 1- All flights begin with random failures, to the degree that is expectable from a well maintained aircraft. 1- You perform all pre-flight checks before the mission during startup and until lift-off. 2- At any time during the startup or takeoff run (maybe even until 5 minutes after t/o), you can abort the secuence and contact ground maintenance via a radio command, indicating that you found something that merits aborting the plane. 3- You´re then presented with a form, to indicate the failure(s) you found, which in your opinion makes the aircraft not airworthy. 4- The failures you indicated are evaluated by a technician "algorythm", which will perform the following evaluations: a- If the failure you indicated in the form is really present in the plane, the failure is repaired immediately b- If a failure is present that you did not report, the failure is not repaired c- If any failure you indicated is not really present in the aircraft, you´re grounded and cannot fly the mission, having a CPU pilot take on it with simulated "random" success (this is for campaign purposes). 5- In case "c" does not happen, you´re given back your plane to perform startup again. Failures are still random, except for those which were found in the previous check, which can still be present but with a much lower probability. The idea of "c" is to penalize checking all boxes in the form. I don´t really know what happens to the pilot IRL when his plane is not airworthy, but giving him back his plane automagically repaired (to the extent that he could find the failures) seems a good outcome for a simulation. I believe this is a relatively "simple" addition in that it takes the less effort to integrate with the current state of the software, as it only adds a radio command and an alternative mission end screen (replaced by the form), so a minimal change to the simulator part and one additional screen plus a couple routines in the GUI module. The merit of this mechanic is that it allows you to run the simulation with random failures without the fear that you will not be able to play your mission, while being educative and adding an immersion factor. Hopefully this is considered, opinions are very much welcome!

Hi guys, extremely thankful for your responses. Indeed PeterP, the wgf video you linked is the effect I´m trying to get rid of. The distortion, in DCS or FC2, is present not only in wide FOVs, but in all FOVs, only reduced. As it is my intention to use triple monitors with individual cameras for each, this ruins the alignment at the edges, badly. Funnily enough, ARMA2 shows no edge distorion when using scope zoom, hence the effect CAN be obtained. Source games do show the distortion though. I tried the link m0jo provided to Nthusim but sadly it will not work with my Win 7 64 bit for now. Finally, apparently X-Plane provides the options I asked for, so maybe it´s not that crazy to expect them from DCS. I also remember a post from Wags about 6 months ago, about one of the 3rd party integration tools adding support for "various projection technologies" or similar. En fin, if you have other suggestions I´m happy to try...

Hi ED! Are there any plans to include this features (Cylindrical/Spherical 'Dome' projection) in the rendering engine? If so, can you share them :smilewink:? Thanks!