Moa

Well, Al Qaeda thought they could fly after playing FSX and look how their landings turned out! (sorry, couldn't resist - please don't lock the thread). Interestingly, a FAA rated version of x-plane (requires rated control hardware) can be logged as flight time. However, this is an adjunct to real flight time, not a pure substitute for it. http://www.x-plane.com/pg_certified.html

Ha, your sharks only have AMRAAMS. Ours have frikken laser beams attached to their heads. (gotta love Slashdot memes).

That limited weapon and aircraft scenario you describe has an incarnation called "Crimean Incident" - produced by 51st Bisons. Currently it is being adapted to FC2.0. Would be nice to see lots of other teams participating in this wonderful campaign.

The literal meaning of 'fracticide' means to 'kill a brother'. It has the same word root as fraternal ('brotherly'). You didn't kill yourself intentionally so your death wasn't 'suicide'. You didn't kill another, so it isn't 'homicide', your bomb killed a peer (you and your aircraft) so it is called 'fracticide'.

Thanks for the cool video McDaniel. Also found this one (Warthog, not BS) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rduAoViiarw&feature=related

sabot is French for 'shoe'. It allows a sub-caliber munition to be fired from a weapon of larger bore. The energy usually in the full bore round is instead imparted to the smaller projectile. Gives it a lot of kinetic energy (despite the losses to the sabot) and less air resistance (smaller aerodynamic cross-section). If the sub-caliber projectile it also very dense (eg. depleted uranium or tungsten) then the momentum is great and has very good penetrating power.

They're there. Try some of the single player missions, especially the A-10 ones.

Thanks RedTiger. Yes, it is a *lot* of work which is why I'm hoping to do it progressively in the stages I mentioned. Plus, I already have some of the parts (a real-time stats system for FC1.1.2). That way people can fiddle with an 'instant action' generator (for both A2A & A2G, since I'm mostly a mud mover) while the real dynamic campaign will take much longer to develop. I'm sure the generation AI will be retarded to begin with but it will evolve to something acceptable with use I'm sure. Incidentally, the dynamic campaign shouldn't affect the smoothness of gameplay in the least. New missions are generated *after* each mission (although the stats are collected in real-time) and dynamic in-mission activity is handled by trigger conditions generated when the mission was created (I'll be picking 3Sqn_Grimes brain further on this as he has many good ideas). I think the original poster was trying to say he's so keen for a mission generator of any kind (not even a dynamic campaign) that'd he'd pay for it and wondered how many others there would be as well - in the hope of inducing someone to produce it (eg. DoctorK). I'm a big believer in Free Software (as in liberty) so don't need the cash to motivate me (although working on it full-time would be awesome!).

Mipmapping control is also known as "linear, bilinear, or tri-linear filtering". It selects (or generates) textures at a lower resolution, used when textures are far away. Something could be wrong if the mip-map texture is used close-in rather than the original texture (opposite of what should happen ordinarily).

Anisotropic filtering is supposed to help textures at a distance, but at a distance they seem fine. If Yoda's suggestion doesn't work you could try changing this setting and seeing whether it has any effect (a long shot, but it could be a problem in the Catalyst driver).

Primo! Thanks Panzertard, Yoda and Acedy.

I've been working on a dynamic campaign software every night for a month (started once I heard BlackShark mission format same as FC2, although it turns out there are some differences) and intend completing in a couple of months. There is a lot to do though, including: 1) read (mostly complete) and write of mission files 2) randomization of existing missions 3) generation of new missions 4) parsing results of battles (stats) 5) generation of new missions as a result of battles (dynamic campaign). This won't be done overnight. RamGen gets to Stage 3 (for FC1.12) of these objectives and I'm sure required a lot of hard work from its creator. I'm hoping that RamGen will continue to be developed in parallel with my own 'dynamiccampaign' software. This gives players a choice of which system they like (I'm sure there's plenty of room for both, and each will cater to different tastes). I already have a stats system running (for FC1.1.2) and you can see the output at http://stallturn.com/scores/. This stats needs to be adjusted for FC2.0 and I'm also working on that. Once the stats software has been adjusted then that solves the 'feedback' part of the dynamic campaign. I'll most likely release my product and source under the GPLv3 license and for no charge. It's written in Java (since I mostly work on Linux and my MacBook, depending on which machine is closer) so will work perfectly on any version of Windows (and every other platform except for XBox360 and iPhone, damn you MS and Apple!). Meanwhile, I suggest some of you learn how to use the mission editor. It's not that hard and it means you'll be able to 'tie your own shoelaces' rather than wait for others to make missions for you. You could even make missions and (gasp!) contribute back to the community. Sorry, I'm being cynical here, harsh maybe, but if I'm willing to spend hundreds of hours of my limited free time making software then perhaps some of you could spend ten hours making a mission and sharing it - just in case the thought of contributing had not crossing your mind. I am interested in hearing about scenarios you would like to play. Personally, I'm more of a sim fan so I don't mind unbalanced missions (the reason I play LockOn rather than HAWX). I realise that not the only way to play though (especially for younger folk getting into the hobby). It also keeps me motivated on developing when I'd much rather be in-game flying :)

Well, with such a low-powered card there's probably not that far your fps can fall :) Just jokes.

Peter22, you need all three files in the same directory, not just the setup.exe Flaming Cliffs 2 is definitely worth the money. The eye candy is worth it. The realism improvements are worth it. Being able to play online with everyone else is also worth it (not many of the larger servers will bother with FC1.12 for much longer I think, since FC2 is a significant improvement).

VRS SuperBug is nice, and awesome for 'switchology'. It doesn't come close to LockOn in terms of combat simulation however. The combination of the two would be sublime (would be cool to 'port' SuperBug to DCS, but probably an impossible task and would be better to start from scratch).

Not a fairy tale Bob (nightmare perhaps). At high speed there's enough lift over body and canopy apparently to keep it airborne long enough to land.

Excellent. I've bought the Russian version to have a look at it, and am eagerly awaiting the English version. Well done ED developers, testers and management - nearly time for you to party!

What would DirectX 10 give you that wouldn't kill performance yet you'd really notice when zooming past blurry scenery at Mach 1+? I'm not sure flight simulators would particularly suit the benefits of geometry shaders etc. I think the benefits of pushing DX9 to its maximum potential would make much more of a difference than the supposed benefits of DX10 - particularly when the market is segmented and all the Windows XP machines out there can't use it (and although Win 7 penetration is growing it is still a minority). I think ED have their eye on the ball by choosing DX9 rather than relying on the marketing cachet of DX10.

Su-25 attacks from medium altitude as earlier posters have said. Attacking from very low doesn't work well at all. Good against insurgents and poorly armed opponents. Against the "most probable opponent" of the Cold War the Frog had very low chances of survival if attacking from medium altitude (everybody did, so all NATO aircraft from B-52 to F-15E were taught to fly low to very low). Fortunately this density of units can't be simulated in LockOn due to the single-thread constraint. So the Frog can do a good job in the game scenarios that can be built (not the same as doing well in The Big War, although plenty of folk don't seem to grok this). Contrast A-10 which can attack also from medium altitude (eg. Gulf War) once (stealth) SEAD has cleared the way, but also works admirably from 100-200 feet as in the Central Europe Cold War scenario. So yes, I see main difference in scenario design between Hog and Frog as employment altitude and targets (tanks for Hog since F-16s get buildings and SAMs, vs light targets for Frog).

I'll buy two (one to fold for my 'flight bag', one to hang on the wall)

Simply amazing work Tomcatz. One more reason to get FC2.0 (as if there weren't enough already). My personal favourite is your F-16. Thanks for all the hours you must have put in.

A mission generator would handle 'randomization' of the mission (in a much more sophisticated way than possible through mere triggers). So triggers aren't needed so much for that. Where triggers are handy is having the mission 'react' to circumstances that have occurred since the mission was started as a result of AI or player actions.

100 flags might be a limitation of the editor. It might even be a limitation of DCS, although I doubt it. It certainly is not a limitation of LUA itself. I've finished parsing the 'options' part of the mission. After trying the ANLTR library I ended up hacking a parser myself in a few hours. I'm able to transform the representation between Lua -> Xml -> Java. (Xml useful for people who don't like to use Lua or Java, plus there are a lot of other tools out there, and you can validate against a schema). For the mission file itself I can do Lua -> Xml conversion, but not yet to a Java object representation (since I haven't built all the objects yet). Once it's in Java manipulating the mission programmatically is possible (although there is more work to read the lua weapons tables etc). Anyway, I'm keen to hear your ideas on how to do more with the triggers.

Hell yes! At the moment I'm working on a mission file parser (among other things). Initially this will be so we can gets stats FC2 (you need to parse the mission file, debrief log and network log to get all the information you used to get in the self-contained mp_log in FC1). Anyway, once we can read and write mission files we can then start to think about (in order of complexity): * mission randomizer * mission generator, and (ultimately) * dynamic campaign. Anyway, just being able to read and write missions is not enough. I noticed the triggers and flags code in the file and noted that I'd have to learn it all one day (once the basics are done). If you could share your wisdom it'd be excellent and move everyone a bit further along in capabilities.

... but the cyberwars are not! You wouldn't believe the number of attacks on the web each day. Unfortunately many computers in Russia seem to be infected with botnet malware (perhaps fewer have access to protection software) - blocking these slightly lowers the chance of DDOS.