Caretaker

The most basic air defense is a guy with a Kalashnikow. Useless against planes, but potentially harmful against a chopper. I hope we'll get such a guy similar to the current Igla/Stinger model; doesn't need to run around and seek cover, but at least stand there and fire ;)

I fully understand your motives, but I suggest we take a more "evolutionary" approach here :) As I've already said over there, as long as new users come to the Ubi forums, I will hang around there - and I noticed this seems to happen more in recent weeks than before actually, which is definitely a good sign. Might be because of Ubi's bargain offers with Lock On, or because people's systems are finally catching up with the sim ;) At any rate, an abandoned forum will only hurt the community but not Ubi. Once ED has established their name independent of the original Lock On with further products, I assume this forum will grow more andthe Ubi forums less important. But we're not quite there yet :)

That is apparently correct, although nobody knows how big the step from Lock On to the next engine is. Personally I hope they can reuse a lot of what's already in Lock On, as the engine still has enough life in it for some years, especially with some updates here and there. That should enable them to get a new sim out in the not too distant future - whatever that means in the end ;) I still hope many of the remaining issues that are still present in 1.1 can be dealt with for 1.2 - the fact that the Ka-50 will not require dramatic avionics changes will hopefully free some development resources for other parts. That certainly wouldn't be the case with a Hornet :)

Half Life 3: F/A-18 Su-27 Flanker Episode III: Revenge of the Hornets Jane's F/A-18 (any nice chick on the box named Jane should do! ;)) Alfa and the Flankerheads (when the MiG-29K is also included ;))

Assuming those 5000 people would definitely buy it, they would have to decide if they could develop a Hornet (and the required additional features) within a budget of roughly 175,000$. And they'd have to decide if it's worth the trouble with their Russian publisher that expects them to do a Ka-50 addon first ;)

Count me in. Especially for a helicopter addon such units would be very interesting. The current AAA units (Shilka, Vulcan, Tunguska) should be able to rip any helicopter to shreds that stays in their field of fire for too long.

Aaah come on ;) We all know the Hornet is no option. Would I prefer it? Sure, along with enhanced naval environment and of course a MiG-29K. Hey and throw in a Strike Eagle while we're at it ;) But anyway, not gonna happen this time...

Re: just for the record... Sure but what if you're not allowed to get to the pond? ;) [quote[isn't the US market the largest? why don't they appeal to the US market? No publisher in the US or anywhere outside of the CIS countries. 1C will distribute the two addons there, which should make it the biggest market for now by quite a margin - although I agree that there's probably still more money to be made in the rest of the world, primarily Europe and the US. But only with a publisher that gets it to the market, and after Ubi bugged out there is none. Maybe Battlefront might be interested to publish future ED products, but those will have to carry a different name - Lock On is still Ubi's brand in the west.

Hi benzene31, unfortunately you will indeed get some mix up of both languages. I tested the 1.1 addon with the German version, and it does not update every menu text to English. The encyclopedia and new campaigns are in English, but the menu entries remain in the original language. There are also some minor character misplacements with special German characters that will probably show up similarly in the French version (les lettres avec des accents je pense ;)), but that's nothing serious. And at the moment I'm not sure about the speech files... I understand the French Lock On 1.0 version, just like the German one, had all English & Russian speech deleted by Ubi during "localization". I will have to check if those are now put in by the 1.1 addon, because quite frankly I don't remember at the moment, as I did most of the testing with a purely English version :)

The demo does not include an Su-25T, but only the vanilla Su-25 version. The original demo had various bugs that have been corrected meanwhile, so I think it is a good idea to release an updated version.

Maybe the percentage of gamers in Russia interested in flight sims is still higher relative to the overall market, just like it was 10 years ago in Europe or the US. Doesn't help to have 140 million PCs if people only put "The Sims" on them ;) But it is pointless anyway to discuss whether the US, Western European or Russian markets are bigger. Fact is, ED have a publisher in the CIS countries, and none in the rest of the world.

The hardware capabilities are not a big problem indeed, but the development still is. If you add detail to one area you will have to make more compromises in another one - no way around that. Whether you add detailed ground unit simulation aspects to a flight sim or vice versa doesn't make a difference here. As for FS2004, the absence of weapons is quite a big exception I'd say ;) I'm not the biggest fan of the "electronic battlefield" concept anyway, as it is much harder to provide interesting gameplay to all the different unit types instead of concentrating on limited areas like planes or helicopters. But as far as I understand it, merging Lock On with a tank sim or whatever is certainly not an issue at the moment or for the near future.

I don't think anybody denies that this is possible, but it's far from trivial. While the concept of a "bubble" system is easy to grasp, implementing it has a lot of consequences for various areas of the code like the track system or multiplayer. Also Falcon4 suffered consistency problems for years, where the same encounters outside of the bubble had quite different results to those within the bubble. Adjusting that takes a lot of time, as shown by Falcon4's evolution, or Rowan's BoB with a very similar approach. EECH ran without such a bubble, but in turn had various AI and campaign logic problems that didn't really help my immersion either. I'm with olaleier here - there's a lot of stuff I'd love to have in Lock On, but there is a certain reality about how the engine works that should be taken into account. Don't expect radical rewrites of core parts for an addon, that's just not gonna happen. That still doesn't exclude a dynamic campaign on the scope of Jane's LongbowII, which was much more limited than many other such systems (low number of units, small area, not in realtime), but had one feature that all the others lacked: it worked from day 1! :) If any DC will come out for Lock On it will definitely be similar to that one in many ways.

No chance. Not only are most of these cockpits 2D, even if you could convert the 3D models from F4 or some other sim to Lock On you would still miss the avionics, weapons and of course the flight models. The pure cockpit artwork is a lesser concern when producing a flyable plane.

The exact wording is "...game release is planned..." so this contains a certain amount of estimation :) I have to agree with Stormin... you give no date, then people will assume there are problems or that it's still far away. You give an estimate and people take it for granted. You miss a deadline (no matter how concrete it was) and earn complaints again. And then finally when it's out (soon ;)), we will read about how it was rushed. Been there, done that... ;)

Hmm now I'm a bit confused... from all I know, buildings have always been solid in Lock On and blocked fire? Never seen a town go up in flames because of a few tanks which fired at targets outside of the town? For a helo sim, the LOS problem would be more critical of course - ground units can't hit you behind buildings, but actually they rather shouldn't even see you when you're well covered. As for the trees, you can currently fly through them for two main reasons: 1) the AI doesn't recognize them and could crash over mountain forests where they sometimes get very low 2) they are an option in the graphics settings, and in multiplayer it would be bad to either collide with something that isn't displayed, or make them solid only for the people who see them... so, equal ground for all people regardless of settings. As for the A-10s using towns for cover in Germany, to be honest I have a hard time imagining how this would work... should be rather the other way around, vehicles hiding in towns from A-10s ;)

1.2 ist the next addon project, focussing on a flyable Ka-50 helicopter. No release date yet :)

Actually it does merge missions, but not fliights. And even that more on an "experimental" level, never tested it much... To be honest I had a function in mind since months to replicate flights in one mission. Copying the same flight X times with a client setting for each would be rather trivial if I ever find the time again to dig into my old code. I never pursued this much due to a lack of feedback and time - and currently most of my Lock On time is consumed by testing. But if there is interest I may have a look after 1.1 is out. Skarp, even if it doesn't seem to be what you're looking for I still provide a link to it for the sake of completeness ;) http://www.lockonskins.co.uk/index.php?page=downloads&cat=45

Well, couple this with some probability of appearance options where the success rate of the last mission can influence the chances of certain objects appearing in the next one, and you still have a much more capable system than the current one, but still on a manageable level. Missions in different branches do not have to differ fundamentally - adding one enemy plane here, removing a SAM site there and all mixed up a bit through randomization could make things much more interesting. True persistence however would still be a nightmare, even if not down to individual units. Jane's F/A-18 had some persistence, like when your carrier was damaged or sunk you were relocated to a land base. The overall mission/campaign system is exactly what I'd love to have in Lock On, even though - just like back when Jane's F/A-18 was released - this wouldn't really keep people from demanding a dynamic campaign ;)

Basically this whole F4 code confusion is a leftover from the G2I days. Those had planned to have Falcon4 OIR and then Falcon5 developed from the Falcon code. Then those plans were scrapped, and along came the Fighter Ops project, with new plans independent of Falcon. And then the project team dropped G2I in turn. Complicated stuff indeed... ;)

Well, for the tracks it's the usual deal. They will normally run off towards a different outcome pretty soon - there's just no way to maintain track compatibility across different versions with the system that is used. Missions are a bit more complicated. I've seen a lot of strange things during beta testing, and of course I could never be sure if it was actually such a version problem at all. But I did notice that missions from older versions definitely had a much higher rate of "things going wrong". That included smaller issues like minor texture problems, but also more serious ones. AI flights ignoring mountains for example... As the CLSID values are referenced in the mission files and may change with each compiled version, I could imagine all things can happen when such a value is used in a totally different context, or maybe one that just doesn't exist. At least that's my theory ;) So while I can't be totally sure in the end, my suggestion is clear: don't use missions from older versions even if all looks fine on firs sight :)

Well we've had such discussions before, and to be honest I have no clue why this is such a confrontational topic. For sure there is no easy way for ED to change Lock On's code so fundamentally that the inclusion of new objects would be possible without the source code. Just the way it is. And when talking about flyable planes, things get even more complicated. I haven't seen a sim with similar avionics complexity that allows this. Strike Fighters may be slowly getting there, at least people can configure HUD displays now. But I haven't seen IR displays, LGB functionality or radar guided AG missiles in Strike Fighters yet. And the flight models, well - again this is compiled code, no bunch of coefficients that just need to be changed for each flyable to produce a new flight model. Online compatibility, well certainly a touchy subject too. Again there are no simple ways or easy CRC checks to prevent cheats. Otherwise it wouldn't be such a big issue with many games. Now I personally don't care much about online anyway, and I see the point that the offline players maybe shouldn't be limited in what they can do by online issues. Just saying that, once things are opened up, there will be exploits, and trying to prevent those is complicated. "Stock planes only" for online is also no realistic option in my view. People will demand to use the nice mods online too, and rightfully so. See CFS3 as an example: nearly nobody flies online there because it's either "free for all mods" without limits to what people use, or you're limited to the stock planes which are highly inferior to some 3rd party work and have questionable flight models. Il2 in turn seems to fair pretty well with their closed architecture. I don't think there are many flight sims right now which are more popular. Not that I understand the sometimes religious discussions over there when people ask if it wouldn't be possible to allow some more user-made changes than only skins... ;) I think there's an incredible potential "out there" for flight sim developers to use, and especially now that it's more and more work to produce high-quality models, developers should think how to use this potential. Apparently ED does, and I hope for more options in that area in the future. Areas like static and AI objects, textures or the map are ideal for 3rd party developers. For the flyable planes however, I don't see this happening. Never really happened with Falcon4 either, and people did have full source code access there.

There are no single seat attack helicopters anywhere except for the Ka-50 ;) And yes, the Comanche series is a good example of how not to do a simulation ;) - although in all fairness they were not meant to be sims (although marketed as such), but action games. An Apache or Cobra would be great, no doubt - but it's still not a real possibility for the known reasons, mainly limited development resources. Likewise it will be very hard to develop new flight models for the older planes on the level of the Su-25T's.

Alfa is probably "on tour" :P My understanding is that buddy lasing with this system is not possible in real life, and not featured in FC. However I'm pretty sure someone will come up with a more comprehensive and technical explanation ;)

Skins yes - missions and campaigns you shouldn't count on. They can work, but quite often they don't, and the problems aren't always obvious at first sight. I recommend only using missions and campaigns that were designed with the same version.