Moa

Excellent news ALF7. Did you have to designate the ships as targets in the mission editor, or does the Harpoon pick it up by itself? Do you need any pods to do this?

Note that RAM often reports speeds that are not the same as the speed the RAM will run at. I have some RAM that reports itself (SPD table) as running at 800 MHz but is rated (and sold) for running at 1066 MHz. Given enough power from your power supply (correct voltage and sufficient current) and a motherboard that can adjust voltages correctly and you can run RAM ok at the (higher) rated speed than the value reported by the SPD table. Actually, I got stability issues running this RAM at 1066 until I got a better power supply. Once I got a new supply I found that the increase in RAM speed from 800 to 1066 made a disproportionate difference to my FC2 and A-10C experience - clearly these games are starved for memory bus transfers and getting faster RAM is a worthy goal (note: I have an 'old' Q6600 and Radeon HD 5970 and both were starved by the RAM - getting a i7 2600k won't always make a difference unless you also have very fast RAM). All sticks of RAM must be able to run at the same clock speed. Even if they are rated at the same speed you can still get intermittent problems. To avoid these I try not to mix RAM from different manufacturers on the same machine if I can help it. Using RAM of the exactly same type from the same manufacturer contributes to the stability of your system.

You are a legend igormk! I'm looking forward to purchasing the new map (your FC2 version is beautiful).

Hi Yoda. Another amazing project from you, as always. There is a Java library that amalgamates Joysticks, keyboards etc. On Windows it uses DirectInput http://java.net/projects/jinput/ (think this might be the old site) Forums about jinput: http://www.java-gaming.org/index.php?board=27.0 This library used to be rubbish (would throw NullPointerException on start) but a few months ago I tried it again and it worked with my Cougar. I don't think it would work fully with a Warthog as the Warthog has more buttons than DirectInput could enumerate (although this may have changed) - which I think is why LockOn couldn't see some of the buttons last time I tried setting them in-game (perhaps I'm wrong here, it was a while since I tried).

Thanks for the link Crunch. Shame the reviewer can't tell the difference between Crimea (Ukraine) and Georgia - but still a favorable review (as it should be).

Copyright is only an issue if you copied the files of someone else's design. If you produce an identical design by yourself from scratch that is known as "re-engineering" and is not copyright infringement. If you do it without reference to their design it is known as "clean room re-engineering" and is not copyright infringement. A patent on the design would not be enforceable if there were any 'prior art' of similar designs that were published to the public domain. I'm not a lawyer, but I wouldn't be too worried. Peter_Pilot you are right to raise these as possible issues to always consider, but I don't think they'd be a realistic problem in this case.

LockOn will run on that laptop, but A-10C (with 3D) requires a minimum of 512MB video RAM to run. This mod appears to fix that particular limitation (although it doesn't run for me in a virtualized environment, as follows ...). I have tried running A-10C in server mode in a Parallels virtual machine (as a WinXP 32 client VM hosted on Mac OS X 10.6.7). Parallels limits its virtualized graphics card to 256MB so this no-3D change was essential. Unfortunately the server mode doesn't seem to work under Parallels. I can select a mission but when it finishes loading I get the "Select A/C" screen but the game is paused (I cannot unpause it) and the loading graphic (a head on aspect A-10C with orange smoke background) is still visible. The game server appears hung at that point :( I do have other (intermittent) problems with keyboard input (eg. logging in to ED Net) where A-10C doesn't accept input (must be an interaction of DirectInput with virtualization?), but other times it works ok. I have not had these input problems with other programs running in Parallels, so it may be specific to the way A-10C is accepting input. Now, I'll try VMWare (I purchased a VMWare Workstation license some time ago) and see if that makes any difference ... Note: (I have posted before) I'm in a similar situation where I have a dedicated server (stallturn.com) and my own dedicated client but starting A-10C on the client stops the version on the server (!). Thanks Tyger for highlighting there is a work in progress.

Thanks for the instructions Panzertard. Thanks also to ED for the effort to untangle the 3D and make this mode work. I'll test to see whether the A-10C server can be run using the basic 3D acceleration in Parallels (my work 'desktop' is a 17" MacBook Pro) and VM Ware (I'll try under Linux!). Will be fantastic if we can run A-10C servers in virtualized environments (which would mean we could hire hosting at a location without having to supply a 3D-equipped computer ourselves [ie. 'co-locating']).

Kia Ora metalnwood. If you do replace the motherboard get the fastest RAM you can. Past a certain point it's diminishing returns for CPU and GPU with LockOn/DCS. They do move a lot of textures around so having fast memory seems to make a big difference. LockOn/DCS is 'multithreaded' in the sense that the game runs on a single thread while sound runs on another thread. Work is underway to make DCS fully multi-threaded but in the mean time the main difference comes down to relative improvements on a single core (in contrast to something like Arma2 that just loves four cores). I have a 5970 and it has a design where one of the GPUs gets exhaust air from the other so runs a few degrees hotter. Even worse, the video RAM is relatively poorly cooled. Unless something has changed the 6970 probably has the same design - so you may have to monitor several components on the board (one may be fine while another is red-lining). You probably already have the free 'GPUZ' program (or equivalent), but grab it if you don't - they provide a wealth of information of what is going on under that big fan. By the way, your rig sounds pretty flash, eh? At the current exchange rate of the $kiwi I hope it didn't cost more than your Holden :)

In X-Plane 9 you see a splat on the windscreen when you're hit.

Crunch, have you looked at the open-source Vega Strike? Some nice mods for it too: http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/

Thanks for the tip aaron886. Please note that 'view.lua' is optional. Only *required* files in FC2 and A-10C missions (zip archives) are: * mission, and * options. All other files are optional, but can be included to override the client's defaults.

There isn't an adjustable option within the "options" files (embedded in missions). Perhaps the G-Effect settings does something in addition to control the onset (speculating here)? Aside from that, someone might know a LUA customization ... Incidentally, pilots wear helmets for a reason. Their heads routinely hit the canopy during maneuvering in fighters. There is a great story (video actually) of a guy who was practicing in an A4 (IIRC) and he was looking behind and maneuvering when his helmet got stuck between the ejection seat and canopy. Had to concede the fight, call a "knock it off" and took him around ten thousand feet to get it unstuck (with not too many to spare before the ejection floor). A few more Gs involved there than a race car I guess.

+1 Would also like to be able to run a server instance of the game and a separate client instance using the *same* ED net logon, if possible. Looking forward to whenever the dedicated server software arrives, thanks for saying you'll build one, ED.

FYI: the VNAO (Virtual Naval Air Operations) mod allows carrier ops from CVN-70 Carl Vinson. Unfortunately this mod is incompatible with many Integrity Checked servers - it is useful to make a 'parallel' copy of your LockOn install and install the mod into that parallel directory. Get the VNAO mod from the "Mods" section at the following page: http://www.virtualnavairops.com/

Sorry to be off-topic, but this was hilarious. Nice one hassata. Oh yeah ... +1 rep inbound too (can't do +5 "vorpal" rep here) :)

Note for implementers: A simple MD5 check is not a good idea as space or comments will make the file fail, even if the LUA compiles to the same result. Any MD5/hash checks should be done *after* LUA comments have been stripped out and all whitespace normalized so that all whitespace tokens (space, tab, newline etc) are converted to a single space and *then* the hash is computed. This allows people to leave comments in their LUA scripts and still pass the Integrity Check. For example, it is useful to comment in and comment out the dofile() include for TacView so that you can easily enable and disable TacView depending on whether you want to: * join an Integrity Checked server with exports disabled (eg. 104th, 51st), * or play a track and generate a TacView, or join a server where TacView is enabled (eg stallturn). In fact, I had to modify the latest version of the lottu track playback program to add and remove the TacView include, since commenting it out would cause the Integrity Check to fail. AFAIK Case's track playback script also has the same functionality, so you can use that and still pass Integrity Checks. So: * a bitwise comparison using a hash (eg. MD5, SHA-1 etc) is not good. * a parseable text comparison is good (eg. calculate the hash after stripping comments and normalizing whitespace).

Please try again now dooom.

GG, the F-15 vs Su-27 was 7:1 according to an (unclassified) Pentagon presentation I saw on the web. So your figures stack up (6:1 or 7:1 is pretty much the same: some losses but mostly kickin ass!). This indeed dropped slightly against later Flanker models. I think this information was made available in the push for the F-22 (same reason the 6 F-22s vs regiment of Chinese Flankers study was 'leaked' - so the public outrage could sway Congress to fund more F-22s).

LOL. Nice one. Actually, the problem in this case was Postgresql (written in C) that falls over on Win7 without as much as a SEGFAULT (as would be reported on Linux) or a stack trace (if it was written in Java). For some reason when it falls over it doesn't even log anything in the Windows Event Viewer.

Thanks for the heads up Crunch and dooom. They're visible again now (data is never lost, it's just whether the data is visible or not).

Actually, more advanced physics sees thermal energy in terms of 'statistical mechanics'. An increase in entropy (disorder) in the state of the system (particles) is a result in transfer of energy by photons, and what we notice as macroscopically as 'heat'. The increased disorder may be due to mechanical energy of the system (Brownian motion) or rotational energy around molecular bonds. To understand how temperature affects intensity in the infrared band of the electromagnetic spectrum you can use Planck's Law (if you assume the emitter acts as a 'black body'). Planck's Law gives the spectral radiance at each wavelength for a given temperature. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_law Don't look at the equations (you'll go cross-eyed), look at the graphs of the spectral emission for temperature. Notice how hotter objects emit more overall and have distributions with peaks toward lower wavelengths (higher energies). The difference in the wavelengths of the peaks is what IIR (Imaging Infra-Red) cameras use to discriminate objects (of they emit at different temperatures). These cameras must be sensitive to notice the small wavelength changes for different objects (and also need to be cooled so that the camera itself doesn't emit at the wavelengths of interest, or its own emissions would swamp the signals of interest). Objects with similar temperatures to people emit in different parts of the IR band. Cooler objects may emit with peaks at longer (lower energy) wavelengths. On a very hot day trees may have a similar temperature to the temperature of a human body, which makes it hard to distinguish between them in warm weather. In colder conditions (snow on the ground) the difference between ambient and a human is much higher and discrimination is much better. Hot objects (burning vehicles) may emit in the long wavelength end of the visible spectrum. These objects are 'red hot' (visible) with additional emission past red and in the IR part of the spectrum (which we feel as the heat). Even hotter objects (The Sun's photosphere) can emit with a peak at the shorter wavelength end of the visible spectrum, eg. the Sun's peak emission is in the green (which is why plants work at that wavelength and our eyes are especially sensitive to it), although it produces so much light in other colors we see them mixed together as white. That's the emission spectrum. We don't need to worry about the absorption spectrum for objects in the field of view of the Litening pod. They are opaque so you can't see absorption of the spectra of objects in the background. For A-10C we don't worry about this, but in fields such as astronomy they use the fact that some non-emitting (dark) objects such as nebula can be understood by what light they absorb from emitting objects in the background rather than what they emit. I think ED have done a pretty good job of IIR cameras (I have used a real one on a P3 Orion) - especially within the limits of what can be achieved on PC hardware within a reasonable development time.

The big thing about the 'dedicated server' will hopefully be that a DirectX 9c compatible graphics card is no longer required to host the game. This was not explicitly spelled out, but that's the usual meaning of the phrase 'dedicated game server' software (so, there is a small chance I could be wrong with this assumption). There are companies out there that lease/hire-out space on dedicated game servers. These have the game pre-installed and all you have to do is pay the hosting fee (which means you don't need admin skills, just cash, to host your own game server). Usually these 'dedicated game servers' are actually virtualized machines - which means limited graphics (countered by excellent network bandwidth), so a game requiring a dedicated graphics card can't be hosted under this model. Just last week I was offered free unlimited-traffic 100 Mb/s up & down game hosting from Auckland, New Zealand to move my stallturn LockOn FC2 server instance to (it currently has a 15 Mb/s down-2 Mb/s up link). Unfortunately I had to turn it down since the hosting quad Xeon machine could not mount a graphics card (even a low-profile card would not fit the rack mount). The removal of the requirement for a DX9c graphics card would mean I could host an A-10C server free-of-charge (apart from the one-off-charge of another A-10C license). I'm sure the removal of this requirement means that many other people would also be able to lease a game server, or press an older machine (with inadequate graphics) into service as a game server. So this is great news to me and I'm looking forward to the day the dedicated server is completed (since work on it is in progress). If true, this is completely awesome news Eagle Dynamics & The Fighter Collection. Hats off to you.

Fantastic Yoda! I'm curious as to what technologies you are working with. C++ I guess since that's what the F-22 and F-35 software was written in. OpenGL, or you don't need to go to that level? nb. I'll finally be at home tonight so will send the source I have through - including the mechanical aircraft status mods I made.

VNAO have GBU-12 working.