DTWD

That's great, I should be in a good position to play it at a decent FPS. Many thanks. Regards Paul

Ah good to hear. On what kind of hardware is that? Regards Paul

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.1c.ru%2Fgames%2Fgame%2F3311585%2F&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=ru&tl=en Well I never! Regards Paul

Is it? Do you mean the "download version" or the download version? Regards Paul

As far as I am aware you can import a copy as long as you pay all the appropriate charges and taxes. What your talking about is the downloadable version and it's been said that at the moment NO downloadable version is going to be available. ED aren't forced to sell you there product, they don't have to sell it to anyone they don't want too. As the letter says they need to secure the product for release onto the western market as well as the world via download. That letter was written about a week ago if I remember correctly it says everything you need to know. I know it's tempting to think that "maybe something has changed", but in such a short time I don't think anything of significance will have done so. I am not really expecting any new news (is that gramitically correct?) until december time, if something comes along before then so be it. All that said though, fingers crossed we get a demo for christmas! Regards Pail

Is there much point in it being a helecopter if your operating over 500ft? Regards Paul

You can tweak the tree's slightly (well you can in FC so I assume it will work in BS) by installing some comunity mods. I currently have an opacity mod and texture replacements. Makes the tree's look a lot better...still doesn't stop you flying through them though! Then again if you were a tree would you honestly want to stop a KA-50 that was bearing down on you? No your likely to phase shift into another dimension for a few seconds until it's flown past/through. ED knows this is what is likely to happen and have moddled it accordingly. Regards Paul

This is the problem people like ED (developers) have all the time. The community wants to see movement and preferably a title to play/use ASAP. So the developers think they are being nice and give an estimate, that date comes and goes. Most people don't understand how these kind of deadlines/estimates really work, I work in the creative industry and I don't think I have ever hit my estimated completion date...ever. The problem is people have the "well it's been two weeks and still nothing!" attitude and it just doesn't work like that. If your making coins, and you know your machine takes 2 seconds to make a coin you can give a fairly accurate estimate on delivery of a thousand coins. When ever creativity comes into the equasion your estimating on your experience but even that is increadibly fluffy at best. The problem is made worse by ED themselves probably. They aren't tied to people like Ubi or EA who want it released on a date and that's it. ED seem to taking my aproach which is "it's ready when it's ready", but that can be bad as well, as something is never really finished, you can always polish it a bit more, tweak this, alter that etc. Just be patient, when ED is ready for us to play it we will be able to play it. On the scale of things it's a few months and it's not like there are no other games out at the moment, try something a bit different and see if you enjoy it. Regards Paul

It's not so much the water and the shadowing I was talking about. Dx 8 is old, very old in relative terms. Since it's release the DX libraries have moved on and newer graphics cards, and the more powerfull GPU's that have come out, can take advantage of these features on card. I am not a games programmer so I can't say what's changed in the back end, but from a point of view of a games player I can tell you what I see on screen. Playing FC on my machine seemingly doesn't seem to hamper my graphics card too much, but my CPU is hammered (well one core is), and when I am flying around and the game is rendering buildings (cities, towns etc) the CPU use goes up and the whole game slows down where as the GPU seems to be just ticking over. I am assuming that at the point in time when DX8 came out the libraries for shadowing tended to rely on the CPU as GPU's weren't that great at the time. Now GPU's are storming ahead on the pure calculating power front and so more modern games take advantage of that (and probably with a bit of help from the DX libraries). You can see any number of modern day games that seem to take shadows in there stride, even dynamic ones that are being produced from individual leafs on a tree, but yet FC seems to have problems with a square shadow with only basic lighting going on. This to me suggests that the old method of doing shadows is the biggest problem over the cities, this coupled with the reflections/shadowing onto the sea. I am assuming DX 9 has improved things a little and if the shadowing is the only thing done in DX 9 (and there must be a reason for this!) in BS AND if it's offloading it onto the GPU completely then that leaves the CPU to do other things. This isn't a critisim at ED, FC is an oldish game based on an ageing engine, yes it still looks good today but that isn't what we are talking about. As GPU's get more powerfull, and graphics cards handle more DX effects without any need for external processing then the CPU load can be reduced, or re-distributed to do other things like more simulation modeling. The new DCS engine, when it comes out, I would hope would be brand spanking new and take advantage of all the new fancy things that can be done, as well as any speed improvements that can be made by giving the GPU the graphics job and leaving the CPU to other things. I would also hope it's modular and can be upgraded as the DCS modules come out to take advantage of new ways of doing things and new graphics card features. But the question remains, does the DX9 handing of shadows improve FPS over towns and cities? Regards Paul

Water still being under the cities may not be the end of the story though. If the "new" shadow engine that someone mentioned works in DX9 (apparantly the only part of the new code that does, the rest still works in DX8 ) there is a good chance that it's off loaded onto the GPU and not the CPU. This may not sound like much, but it would mean the CPU doesn't have to work as hard and the GPU can do what it was made to do. In theory this *could* bring up the FPS by a significant amount as apparantly one of the biggest problems with the cities is the shadows (and reflections in some cases) of all those buildings being mapped onto the sea, even though it's not visible. Regards Paul

Get yourself LoCFG, set it to delete your trackir.ini file upon launch. You can also setup other usefull settings that you can't get to in the normal settings that will help with TrackIR. It's also increadilby usefull for other setting up pretty much everything else in FC. Regards Paul

Hey whenever I can pun a cartoon from my childhood I will do it :D So from the lack of responses can we take it that either no one knows, people have there heads in the sand and don't want to know, or in fact it's still slow? Regards Paul

Does anyone know if the sea/cities slow down issues from FC is still present in BS? I am hoping the new DX9 shaddowing has improved things a little. I am worried because we are going to a lot lower than in FC and so more prone to the FPS hit that cities tend to give us. Then again we are also a lot slower so it might not be as apparant, but still I would be interested to know. Regards Paul

Nobody is really going to stop piracy, the only thing you can do is to try and minimise it. As far as I am aware FC is pretty secure, which is about all you can hope for and to be honest ED and/or publisher dropped the ball a bit here. I personally would have had a simultaneous world release and protected it the same way as FC. Starforce is fairly good, has had some bad press but touch wood I haven't had any issues with it. Releasing it first into, and I am sorry if I offenend anyone here, one of the hottest areas on the planet for piracy and hoping the language barrier would stop it being widespread is was a little silly, especially when there was that "bug" in it. Suggesting ID'ing everyone who purchases the game is both unworkable and probably against quite a few laws, both international and domestic, in fact you sound like certain western governments do at the moment "quick while everyone is running scared lets erode some civil liberties". My plan of action for this would be to get everyone to get a riggle on, I mean really work there arses off and either get a finished game or decent multilingual demo out the door ASAP and forgo full testing (it should have been tested in full for the CIS release anyway), you would hope language changes should pose a problem for the code. Get at least the same Starforce protection as FC has installed on all new content and set the DRM install level to 3(!) temporarily. Once it's out do your full testing in each language and listen to all the customer feed back on it (releasing a product is the best test phase anyway), release hot fixes for all problems and once a month or so release a proper patch. Do not release a PDF manual publically, require a valid email address and serial to download it. Maybe thing about also requiring people to post on the forum. After a few months pop the install limit up/remove it. If you get any geniune requests for the install increases then take them on a case by case basis. The majority of games get pirated the installed/played within a few months of release, after that it all dies down. At this point anyone playing the game is chances someone who is geniunly wanting to play it/pay for it. If the worst comes to the worst us geniune people prop up the game until the next parts of the DCS come out, as each individual piece comes out and the older parts of the DCS have cycled from being available through piracy the harder it becomes for someone to get a "full" product and they are forced to purchase it if the are geniune fans. Basically BS becomes a loss leader and hopefully brings new people/fans into the fold. Well that's just my idea anyway. Regards Paul

The new CS4 versions of a few Adobe programs have it built in for the NV's, not sure about the ATI's. Apparantly a 30 hour video render can be reduced to 2-3 hours...can't be bad! Regards Paul

The SST software is the programming software that comes with the x52, it should be on the original CD, but it's always best to get the latest drivers and software anyway: http://www.saitek.com/uk/down/drivers.htm Regards Paul

LOL I wasn't advising you to try and map all the controls, I don't personally think you need to. I too split my config for FC into 3 modes: Start up/Shutdown/Take Off/Landing/Navigation/Refuling A/A A/G I will plan on doing something similar for BS, but seeing as it's a clickable cockpit I will be using the mouse/mouse mini joystick to use a lot of the on screen buttons as well. The full start up procedure appears to take about five minutes, that isn't something you need to do while your flying so that doesn't need to go on the HOTAS. The only reason I have such a large variety of keys mapped on my FC profiles is because it doesn't have a clickable cockpit. Besides clicking the virtual buttons and seeing them animate will be part of the fun. Only the items that are required to be actioned quickly in the heat of battle (or an emergancy) will be bound to my x52, everything else will stay in the VC. I just can't see the point in buying a brand new keyboard if all your going to use it for is binds, you might as well be using your x52 if your going to do that as it will feel more real that way. Regards Paul

Cheers guys I will try some of these out over the weekend...although Far Cry 2 is also installed...and my girlfriend is bringing me home Fable 2...decisions decisions... Regards Paul

Go on...explain then :smartass: Sochi-Adler sounds interesting, could make a nice replay aproach if it's in the hills. Regards Paul

Hopefully the Harrier...take that learning curve vertical people! :D Regards Paul

I was just wondering which airbases you guys prefered flying into/out of the most? I am still trying to practice all my different skills and take off's and landings usually are the top and tale of a practice session so I was after mixing it up a bit. My current take off airbase is (can't remember the name) is towards the right of the overall map, on the coast near a horse shoe bay (with sailing boats etc) on it's right (if you are looking from the sea). I tend to land at an airbase a few miles to the left inland, you aproach from the sea and go over a town (can't remember that name either). I could do with some longer runways if possible to practice late landings, or ones with more interesting aproaches. I tend to use ILS (on the hud) as a guide but usually trust my instincts with the visual aproach (probably explains the wrecks at the end of the runway) so it doesn't have to have ILS. Regards Paul

You do realise that there are a very large number of keys and combinations that can be configured onto the x52 platform don't you? I mean it must be quite easily over a hundred. Regards Paul

Quick question chaps, hows the sim running over cities/cities on the coast/water? Is it as bad as in LOMAC/FC or is it now "fixed"? Regards Paul

Don't worry, I have your back if they are crap. Regards Paul

LOMAC/FC doesn't have a 6dof cockpit, it's 3 I think...I can never count them correctly. BS is 6dof. Regards Paul