MackTheKnight

Amazing work, man. Very impressive. Most of us can only dream of having such a pit at home. You must have a very understanding better half! ;)

Unfortunatly cheap and reliable don't go together. I too had an X52 Pro that suffered a similar fate and I tried a few other cheap joysticks in the past but none lasted. I saved my pennies and bought CH gear and I'll never regret it. In hind-sight if I'd bought CH from day 1, I woulda saved myself alot of money... -Mack

Hi Gang, I gave BoB 2 a try today and to be honest my first impression was rather bad. The initial installation took me a couple of tries on Win7. The first time around I thought I'd got it all working, but it turns out the patch 2.11 didn't apply properly, thus leaving me with an un-patched game. This is what led to my initial bad impression. So off to the forums I went to figure out what all the fuss was about. I figured I must have been missing something as everyone on the forums was giving BoB rave reviews.... So I removed the entire install and started over and got it up to version 2.11. Okay, new impression.... Wow. Excellent flight models. Amazing AI. Graphics are much improved over the vanilla install and are an improvement over IL2. Love the clickable cockpit and manual starts of these old craft. The only thing that I'm a bit disappointed with are the damage models. They are seriously lacking when compared to IL2. Other than that, it is a rather impressive simulator which appears to have a very active dev. team. If you try it, make sure you get it patched to 2.11 and try to ignore the annoying UI as much as possible, as it also needs an overhaul. I hope the devs keep improving this gem, as it is indeed a diamond in the rough. -Mack

I was going to mention that one as well - I have a creative audigy ZS sound card and when I originally switched to windows 7 64 bit, the drivers from creative caused alot of stuttering issues in all my games, especially DCS. I installed the latest beta drivers and it's been smooth as silk, ever since... -Mack

EST here and active on and off due to work/life schedule... -Mack

Wow, this is amazing work! I think I speak for all of us here when I say that ED needs to give Mustang a job in their texture department, stat!!!! :smartass: -Mack

There is a flag you can set in the touchbudy config file that forces the profiles to scale to the size of the screen you're running it on. It works well for me but I'm scaling up as opposed to down. My touch screens run at 1920 X 1080, so I'm not sure how well it'd work scaling down to a 7" screen. Read through the touch-buddy config file. The setting is documented in there somewhere... I'd find it but I don't have my sim machine in front of me at the moment. -Mack

I had one and was using it in blackshark as the Shkval, but it died after only 2 weeks of use, sadly. And the vendor had none left in stock when I tried to get another. :( It worked really well as a shkval for those 2 weeks, though. -Mack

Best wishes and good luck with the surgery, Wags!

! Wow, very impressive. Great job on note #2 - Looking forward to the next installment. :) Nevada does look great, indeed. :) Not to mention everything else! Great attention to detail (adjustable seat height).:pilotfly: It'd be hilarious to see the pit builders link that in via lua somehow... :P -Mack

@thereminqblank: The screen quality is fair to good. About what I'd expect from any Acer brand monitor. Not as good as a Samsung by any stretch but very acceptable. I tried an Elo touch screen and the display quality of those was not nearly as good as the Acer. And the Acer is much much cheaper than any Elo display.... and bigger. Hope this helps, Mack

hehe, Russian holiday?

hehe, I say that every week... Does DCS see the eyefinity setup as 1 screen or 3? If it sees it as 3, I wonder if there's a way to fool DCS into thinking you're running one really big monitor with very high res and can get it to scale your main screen accordingly. If that were possible, perhaps in this way you could get the other 2 screens to work... Just brainstorming here... -Mack

I don't know if it helps or not but I was running one of those 7" Mimo displays with blackshark and using it as a Shkval display. Sadly my Mimo screen was faulty and died after a week, so I'm awaiting RMA. It worked well until the unit failed on me. Caveat is I only use a single touch screen for my main display at 1920 X 1080 and then the 7" for my Shkval. On the other hand this does prove that those Mimo USB Monitors can handle the 3d render of the Shkval. -Mack

Special thanks Mastiff for posting these instructions. I've setup a Shkval on a 7" USB monitor just as you, thanks to your steps. One thing I discovered by accident, and perhaps this is a result of patch 1.02. When modifying the Briefing.res, Select-as-window-multiplayer.res & main-screen.res, the files are now located in KA50\FUI\resourcesbs\multiplayer \resources is still there but modifying the files in there didn't do anything for me. The same files exist in \resourcesbs and modifying them did the trick for me. Cheers, Mack

Same deal here - For a while I thought I was mistakenly telling him to engage friendlies, but then they start shooting....

Since you folks have been talking about touch screens, I thought I'd share my experiance. I recently purchased 2 23" Acer touch screen monitors and set them up. Rather than use the abris and shkval on a separate display, I just use my main 23" for blackshark and the 2nd 23" for touch-buddy. (Although I have to build a new touch-buddy profile as all the one's available in the forums are for small 800X600 displays.) The touch buddy profile I plan to create will only have buttons for things I can't physically click in the pit. Such as radio comms to my wingman, etc. Essentially this allows my entire clickable cockpit available with the touch of my screen. It works well for me. Also, since I'm not running blackshark on more than one screen, I suffer no FPS loss. The Acer touch screens were fairly cheap in comparison to some of the Elo touch screens I'd priced out before. (19" for $800.00+ seemed outrageous to me) If any of you are interested in finding these screens the model is Acer T230H. I picked mine up for $333.00 a piece. Now if only the SU25-T had a clickable pit, I'd be in heaven. Still, Touch-Buddy does the trick. :) -Mack

Hi Guys, Thought I'd chirp in with my humble opinion. I have had a very similar experiance with an X52 Pro, as Vekig had. I dropped almost $300.00 on an X52 pro only to have the X & Y axis get extremely spikey and sloppy about 2 months in. Saitek support was terrible in my experiance and wanted around $60.00 in shipping cost to send the unit in for repair. I had a buddy that went through the same thing and he recommend I try some CH Products gear. I was skeptical due to the fact that CH hasn't released any updated gear in quite some time, but I visited his house and tried his out and they were very solid products and the Fighter Stick he had was very precise. At the time I tested them his setup was 3 years old and worked just as well the day he took them out of the boxes. And these didn't sit idle - he's an avid flight simmer. So I went on the hunt and purchased a CH Pro Throttle, Fighter Stick and Pro Pedals. The Saitek went to recycle land. I'm extremely satisfied with my decision and this kit is rock-solid and still works like new after a year of abuse in blackshark and IL-2. I don't think you'll ever find a more durable product than the CH line. I admit I find myself wishing for an updated dual throttle and some trim wheels and I'm really looking forward to a consumer version of the CH Products A10C Hotas. So for what it's worth as far as quality and durability go. I look to CH Products. If only they can turn up the innovation a little, they'd be perfect. The Saitek X65 looks impressive and I'm tempted to try one out as it's so much more advanced and up to date. But I'm just as aprehensive as you are, Vekiq. If you end up taking the plunge, please share your experances. If you decide on CH gear, I'd be interested in hearing your opinion, too. I'd imagine a CH Stick, throttle & pedals would run you around a similar price point to the X65. @M31 - Impressive setup you have there. :) -Mack

I'd buy 2 or 3 option 3, provided shipping to Canada isn't outlandish... -Mack

Hey Clutter, We had a good run with your campaign on the SharkAttack server this evening, with 4 other players. Very enjoyable maps, you have folks have made here. We made it to DoW_Mission_03 Extend Reach To KRY'MSK and played it through and successfully managed to get the troop carriers to land, however mission success and map-rotation never happened. Did we do something wrong? We scanned the area and could find no more resistance, and every single troop transport made it safely to the airport, landed & shutdown their engines. Should we RTB to the Alpha/Beta Farp, for the mission to be a success? In any case, we had a great time playing through your maps and up until that point all triggers worked perfectly. :) Kudos to a job well done. -Mack

Good work on the campaign, Clutter & team. I gave it a quick try last night on my new server that I'm testing. It's called SharkAttack in case anyone is interested in trying it out and right now I have the Dogs Of War Campaign running on it. I have it limited to 4 players to see how the bandwidth works out, as my upload speed is limited. When I tried the first mission last night, I must have landed on the wrong farp, as I too received no messages or map rotation. I'll give it a try again tonight. If any of you want to try it out, feel free. It's open and mission voting is enabled. The server is sitting in Canada, so keep that in mind as far as pings go. Should be decent for my fellow Canucks. :) -Mack

No worries - Turns out I've been stuck at work for the past 25 hours and have another 12 to go... :noexpression:

Thanks, Rusty. Provided I don't get called into work, I'll be at the Saturday event. -Mack

Does anybody else think Saturday at 2 PM would be a better time than Sundays? Most of my Sundays are booked with family stuff... :) -Mack

I'd like to join you guys this Sunday but I believe the g/f and I are going to see Avatar in 3D. Will catch you guys next round though. :) -Mack