Caretaker

You can't. It may come with 1.2, not sure about that. But it's not available for the current version yet.

Wow... I always assumed there would be more than "just" the Ka-50, but this sounds more than I had dared to hope for... :) Thanks a lot for the info Olgerd - I'm more excited than ever now! ;)

The mission editor/AI area (which are closely related in my view). People have mentioned Jane's F/A-18 above; if we could have the amount of fine-control from that mission system in Lock On then we could build incredibly more complex, interesting and realistic missions. Add a better format for importing/exporting mission data and events on top, and we would get a dynamic campaign. Then we can get back to the flight models :) Hard to say. But in general you will not get publisher support for re-releasing the same game again in a more polished state (i.e. no major funding for those updates to start with). Traditionally Gold releases are collections of all previous developments, but not a big leap ahead in any area compared to what has already been done. There is also a large part of the community which would consider flight model updates a "fix" that should be released for free anyway. I'm pretty sure that overall, without at least a new flyable plane as a prominent feature, it's hard to sell "the same game" again (even if effectively, it's received major upgrades that may very well be more work than adding a single plane). Not that I like that situation ;)

There is no practical way to sustain online compatibility between different versions. Any change to the flight model, avionics, weapons and especially network code will lead to compatibility issues; while some of these could be solved in theory it would require a big pile of additional work and testing that could not be spent on further development. I think it's clear that this is not an option. As for the flight model changes themselves, I understand they can be irritating but to be honest, I find them relatively mild compared to what happened with some planes in Il2-FB for example... just like the respective discussions/complaints here ;) And no, the complaints wouldn't stop except if all planes would be upgraded with AFM & 6DOF cockpits; there will always be enough things left to complain about (personally, I still don't see the FMs as the most pressing issue anyway). I also have my doubts that such an update would be something that could be sold in big scale, unfortunately.

Unfortunately no. Lock On, along with basically all other sims, models anti-radar missiles with much more efficiency than they have in real life; mostly because the SAM sites don't switch off their radar. Already in Vietnam the radar operators found out that this was a good and easy tactic against the early ARMs, and even though modern missiles like the HARM or ALARM try all sorts of tricks to still hit the spot where the last signal was coming from or reacquire the target if it starts emitting again, this is by no means an accurate aim. I've read figures about the HARM over Yugoslavia with a hit rate of <1%; apparently the ALARM worked a bit better. Hard to verify of course. However - and that is the other side - SEAD missions are not meant to destroy enemy SAM systems anyway; rather, it's about suppressing them so they don't pose a threat to other planes. A radar that is switched off is useless after all. So SAM operators have to find ways of minimizing exposure time, but still allowing to fire enemy planes when they're in range. And ideally, luring fighters into a trap where they suddenly find themselves in range of SAM systems that they didn't notice. So it's a complicated issue in real life, much more so than what any flight sim shows. As Lock On's ground units turn on their radar all the time and there's no way to influence that in the mission planner, they are relatively easy to destroy (or at least avoid). Redundancy (placing several search/tracking radars in the group) in turn might just work; I think there were some issues with that but I haven't checked it for a while. Maybe worth a try :)

...except if we'd use a "historical", not-so-modern scenario :) You bet... even with its - by today's standards - primitive graphics, EF2000 still manages to create quite an atmosphere there. Much less populated than central Europe as well, and plenty of ocean for naval operations... my very own theatre of choice.

It is, in fact, the Xvid codec ;) http://www.xvid.org/

The most noticable effect for me is the time between target acquisition and firing. Excellent AI usually fires much faster and at longer distances. Note that this is not always the ideal way, and there are cases where an average AI plane may be more dangerous in the end - most missiles are pretty harmless at max range. Besides, the missile evasion of excellent AI seems to work better. Not sure about the air dogfight capabilities, excellent seems to be better here as well but I can't say what the exact reason is for that. With ground vehicles, the reaction time is even more important (not much maneuvering going on and enough ammo for a faster rate of fire). Excellent AI again fires earlier and faster, and that is usually a definite advantage with those.

Most people (me included) prefer a real-life theatre. Just think about how much flak SF:P1 caught for coming up with a totally fictional desert kingdoms map. But at least people could create new maps for that sim (hint, hint... ;)).

Not according to Microsoft :D The fact that the first Direct3D-compatible games ran faster in software mode was rather embarrassing. DirectX has certainly matured since then, but I'm still curious to see how #10 will turn out.

Yeah the next DX version is always the one where you can get ultimate perfomance with finally no more compatibility issues... been that way since Direct3D 3.0 ;)

It's a forum rules reminder; those rules in turn are also only available in Russian so far, but from what I can gather contain more or less the same as with other forums (no profanity, no flames, no piracy, no spamming... "common sense" I suppose ;)).

Simply air conditioning I guess - nothing like breeze of fresh air at Mach 2. No doubt that many aviation-related movies can be painful to watch... (Sorry for derailing the thread! But I still don't think it's possible to hit even one supersonic missile with the cannon(s) or even less, unguided missiles).

Yup it's on the bottom of the list, like on the screen below - in fact it's not "S-300 Complex", but "S-300 site" (minor language confusion ;))

Pictures don't lie, do they? ;) In fact I just saw that scene for the first time recently, after reading about it in sim forums for several years. Still didn't prepare me for that! ;) It's really true that there are Roadrunner episodes with more realistic missile behaviour than that... and the smoke effects usually look more convincing there, too :icon_mrgr It has actually replaced "Airport '79" as #1 in my unofficial list of "movies with the most horrible missile evasion scene" (where Alain Delon fires a flare gun out of the Concorde's cockpit window...).

With the limited colour space that graphics cards and monitors have to work with, it's simply impossible to capture the low lighting conditions of night correctly. And unless you give everything the same black colour (which isn't realistic either), people can always adjust brightness/contrast/gamma settings. I can still think of some things that would enhance the night feeling (directional light from the moon, more ground/airport lights, or how about clouds being illuminated by city lights), but the brightness issue is more or less impossible to solve ;) At least for the developers, you can of course always try to adjust your settings until it looks fine to you :p

Hi, indeed with the more complex SAMs you need a bunch of vehicles working together in one group. The easiest way is to assign all required vehicles at once: the mission editor has selections available like "S-300 Complex" or "Patriot Complex". If you put one of those on the map, they will include all required vehicles; you can then place and align each of those individually.

He was also known as Konstantin "Tunguska" Pavlyukov :icon_mrgr Yes sounds pretty unlikely, as in, "no way". There are apparently enough remarkable stories about the Su-25 and their pilots in Afghanistan though, as these images show. But chasing Stingers sounds more like something with Owen Wilson involved...

- that Flanker and that Ka-50 model are from different artists - the Ka-50 model is not what will be in 1.2, and I very much doubt ED's model is based on that one - certainly I haven't seen anything suggesting that? - I also don't remember that ED has pointed to that work somewhere... - that Flanker is way above sensible polygon limits. And it doesn't have a damage model yet, which would further increase the complexity Well the plane renders on the FO site are based on models from there, but they are in the 100.000 polygon range, which is still a bit on the high side, but probably less critical by the time FO may come out. Again, adding damage models would only make them more complex. Me too, but in the end all of them have been 3rd party projects that may or may not appear in Lock On one day. So far there is nothing to announce, or it would be announced ;) The Il2/FB development history is full of gorgeous 3D models that unfortunately never made it to a final version that could be imported into the game. Don't count on any of these to become available until they are working in the engine.

The bottom line is that some day, they want to have a new model :) Otherwise, there's nothing confirmed nor definite with it at all.

The mails may say they come from Nigeria but that doesn't mean they do. SMTP protocol relies on the sender to identify himself, which is obviously nothing a spammer would want to do. So you might cause a lot of collateral damage, including your own mailbox, without hitting the target. As for the problem of writing a script that sends a mail thousands of times, that's pretty simple. Just not very useful (except if you want to get a hold in the spamming business yourself ;))

Indeed... "it depends" is quite an accurate answer :p

Not sure how much it costs, but why not use Alphasim's FS2004 addon... ...as the plane is unarmed, there wouldn't be much fun flying it in Lock On anyway :p

I'm afraid there isn't much detail to remove from a six-sided block anymore, which is what nearly all buildings look like...? ;) The ground object LOD addition was certainly one of those "simple and effective" improvements. The F/A-18 model was also without LODs previously, and it was a major problem to have a flight of 4 on the screen, even at several km distance. But that is all solved now. Not sure if there are any obvious changes left to improve performance, or if ED is still touching the inner parts of the engine. I'm waiting myself to see if there have been further changes with 1.2.

If it really has 260.000+ polygons as we were discussing here http://forum.lockon.ru/showthread.php?t=13361 , then forget it - even if you subtract the missiles, that amount is simply too much (five times the Su-25T!) for our poor systems :(