Safari Ken

Got my copy installed. That part went nice and smooth, but the registration on their site is down currently. Since you have to do the online authentication to play the game, I can't play the game yet. Fantastic! Anticipation is the best part, right? :thumbup: What I've seen has been pretty good though. The settings panel, I mean. Lots of options in there. I have everything set to high except the Landscape setting. The panel gives you a readout of your video memory usage with the various settings. With Landscape on medium, I read 76% used video memory. Setting Landscape to high made that number jump to 150%! Now I really want to see the Landscape on high. Frankly, I'd kinda like to see the Landscape on medium, at this point... Grrr... Edit: The registration is working again. Woohoo!

Mine shipped yesterday, so I'm crossing my fingers and doing the pee-pee dance that it gets here by the weekend! :bounce:

...and then some! IL-2 is a good-looking game, but it's (finally) starting to look a bit dated compared with some recent entries. Lucky for us, Storm of War: Battle of Britain looks to be getting close to release. And it looks pretty phenomenal. Rise of Flight also looks pretty phenomenal. My point? RoF and SoW should hopefully make great companions for one another, and at that point, IL-2 may just leave my hard drive for the first time since 2001, when it originally came out. :pilotfly:

I had BS for a little while before I got the TrackIR. It's still worth it (you're probably used to using the joystick hat for your view already), but TrackIR definitely adds to the experience tremendously. Same deal for the rudder pedals; not necessary, but real nice anyway!

Could TrackIR be paused maybe? That tripped me up a few times when I first got it. What colors are the LED's on the camera?

woot!

:lol::megalol: :thumbup:

I've noticed that whenever I update my graphics drivers, things that use custom fonts (like my LCD profile on my G15) go all crazy and illegible, and I have to piece them back together again. It's very annoying, but I've never had it happen within an application like you're describing...

Yeah, Operation Flashpoint and Arma (same game) are infantry "simulators" that do very well in that respect, but the vehicles are mostly throwaways. I remember it was fun to jump into an M113 Vulcan and raise hell, though. :D

Okay, forget what I said before... Now that the release is so close, the waiting is killing me!!! :crazy:

Oh well, we've waited awhile for this one, so I guess it'll keep another week. Thank goodness it's a production issue, and not something with the game itself!

Very intriguing!

Actually, yeah, I'd say it did. My Black Shark installation is the direct-downloaded English version, and I'm told there's DRM attached, but it's all in the background as far as I'm concerned. That's what I love about digital distribution: no disc to insert. Other than the initial activation, which was smooth like silk, I just click and play. That said, and trying my best to stay on topic, after reading about the neat-o stuff in the Rise of Flight box, most notably a large map, I guess I'll have to buy a physical copy of that game. Neat-o stuff in game boxes is the only real downside to digital distribution, but that's becoming more of a rarity anyway...

Well, okay, maybe draconian is overstating it for most DRM. Slightly. Perhaps "wildly irritating" is a better term. Then again, even needing the disc in the drive is pretty irritating for me. I suppose there's no perfect answer for piracy, but certainly the current strategy with DRM is not working all that well. When I say pirates are unaffected by DRM, I'm thinking of a buddy of mine at work who likes to download games. He tells me that pretty much any game is available, often ahead of the retail release, complete with a crack that gets him around any installation limits or other copy protection. The way he talks about it, DRM is a non-issue, at least for him, the end user. The guys cracking the games may have more trouble, but it doesn't sound like they have a LOT of trouble, if you know what I mean. Sorry, didn't mean to go OT on this thread. Yay for Rise of Flight!! :thumbup:

I suppose I've gotten used to draconian DRM schemes. I just hope that someday developers will get wise to the idea that only legit users are ever affected by them. Personally, I'm just cautiously stoked that Rise of Flight may actually be released soon! :beer:

Of course it doesn't look its best in a photograph. The color gets all weird and the perspective is messed up. But it says the sharpness is roughly equivalent to 20/40 vision. Pretty damn crisp indeed!

Keep in mind it's not just 120 graphics cards. It's 120 dual-core PC's with graphics cards, running in parallel. It's not just about the graphics. From the blurb: "...according to the company, the 120 networked PCs give you the most complex and accurate flight simulator out there, with high-fidelity environments, actual world destruction and explosions with physics simulation, and up to 10,000 simultaneous entities on screen in urban environments."

At the end of the Gizmodo blurb, there's a link to a more detailed article on military.com.

http://i.gizmodo.com/5285690/ultra+hd-military-f+16-flight-simulator-runs-on-120-pc-graphic-cards Count me in! :thumbup:

I second that about the Zalman. My newest setup has a lot of hardware inside, but with the combination of a Zalman 9700 fan and my Antec 900 case (with its whopper of a 200mm exhaust fan on top), I can't push it above about 38 degrees Celsius. My old box idled at around that temperature. And also I agree about the noise. I have mine set close to full speed, and I can't hear it. I can BARELY hear it at full power, but as the first part of this paragraph illustrates, that's hardly necessary... Once I started using the Zalman, I started to wonder why they even bother putting a stock fan with today's quad-core processors. I wouldn't ever go back to stock...

1. Reverse those. Right pedal should yaw to the right. We've had entire, surprisingly interesting, discussions about that very thing. 2. I have no idea.

Oh, that's just the beginning of the differences between Game mode and Simulation mode! :thumbup:

I just put the throttle on the left of my keyboard, and the joystick on the right, like when I fly fixed-wing sims. I admit it's not the most realistic for a chopper, but it's comfortable for me, which is what I consider most important. Besides, I made a concession to reality when I finally put my rudder pedals on the floor. :P

Indeed! :thumbup: Even not paying attention to the complexity of this game, it's remarkably stable. And as much as I look forward to a patch, it's hardly important enough to jump the gun with it. I have full confidence in ED, so I remain a patient fella. I've seen too many games ruined by subsequent patches that only cause more problems. I'll never forgive EA, for example, for messing up Medal of Honor: Allied Assault with their unrelenting series of terrible patches. They'll never get another dime from me, even though that was like 6 years ago. Patience is a double-edge sword, EA. :music_whistling:

My advice for your joystick is to set the buttons however it makes sense to you. I'm quite sure that my button settings have little resemblance to the real aircraft, but it doesn't matter, because that's how it works for me. The three main autopilot lights (the damper buttons) should always be on, regardless of your flight situation. I'm sure someone can point out times when you'd want to turn them off, but I just leave them on full-time. Trying to land without those turned on would be...interesting...