Safari Ken

Flight Sim X is actually pretty good, now that hardware has caught up a little. There are some add-ons, both free and premium, that can really add to the experience, depending on the experience to which you want to add. There's a message somewhere on Microsoft's site which says that even though the whole team was let go, they still plan to release further flight sim titles... whatever that means, I guess we'll find out. MS Flight Sim has been around since the beginning, although the first edition was pretty much a pixel-for-pixel theft of a previous sim. Now that I'm typing about it, I can't recall who made that other sim; was it MicroProse, Sierra, anyone remember? News of a Korean add-on for SoW is the best news I've heard all year!! :pilotfly: If it's slated to arrive about a year after SoW, we'll get it around 2012, by my rough calculations. I didn't mean to dump on casual games completely. Games like Hawx have an audience. I play casual games too. But I also remember the days when you could find plenty of reasonably realistic sims at a time on the shelves. And not just flight sims - anyone else here old enough to remember tank sims? :)

If you search around the Tubes, you can find a press release for Battle of Britain, announcing a June, 2003 release. :doh: The Russian developers, and other developers from that area of the world, seem to be the only ones who give us any credit for wanting complexity and realism. Every time I see a game like Hawx, I die a little inside... This is a little OT, but why can't someone make another good Korean sim? It's such a fun era for air combat, and MiG Alley has not aged very well, imo. I can't think of a single other sim for that war. Everything is either modern(ish) or WWII. I think that's why I'm so intrigued by Rise of Flight; it'll be a refreshing change of pace.

I love digital distribution. My single biggest annoyance with PC gaming has been having to swap discs to play another game. Games that don't require the disc in the drive always get more playtime from me. Frankly, I'd buy all my games on Steam, if I could. It was a little rocky when it first came out, but that service has really blossomed into something terrific.

Well, when an American developer manages to make a good flight sim, I'll be more than happy to support that too. :music_whistling: Right now it feels like the market is cornered between ED and Oleg Maddox (c'mon Oleg, show us that BoB!)

LOL! Yeah, I suppose I oughtta be out there. It's been awhile since I haven't had to wear a coat outside. :P

Cuz this way I support them twice! :) That's how happy I am to have an actual good combat sim again. We need to encourage this kind of behavior... Well, I couldn't do those things either, before I tried. ;) It's true that it's not for everyone. People who say "yeah I love flight sims, I play Ace Combat all the time!" probably wouldn't like it. But I have a bunch of friends who love the IL-2 series (many of whom learned of it from me, in just this same sort of way, actually). I just make sure to let them know that it's much more complex than IL-2, but that the rewards are well worth the practice!

I got pretty significant performance improvements in many games, upgrading from 182.08. A few games that were on the fence with me (I hate to turn down graphics settings, even in the face of middlin performance) suddenly run great. That was going to the 182.46 beta release; I didn't actually know 182.50 was final until I just read this thread. :D

I think it might be even longer than that. Maybe it's my imagination, but in general, games aren't becoming as much more advanced from year to year as they used to. I think simply having a multiple-core system, in a 64-bit environment, is the key to longevity, at least for the next few years. At least, I hope so! :music_whistling: Naturally the i7's are better, but isn't it the case with all electronics, that there's always a new model on the horizon that's better.. :) My rule of thumb is to buy second-to-top-of-the-line products. That way, you get a great product, but you don't have to pay the premium for the flagship products. That's especially true with computer equipment.

I downloaded Black Shark, and I am glad I did. However, I might buy a DVD copy as well, just to support the team a little. I want to do everything I can to encourage this kind of sim, which is why I've been talking it up to everyone I know who would even might be interested. Screenshots and enthusiasm are great sales tools. :thumbsup:

The i7's are terrific, and definitely the way of the future, but they just came out, so their value for the money is still a little lacking. Maybe the best thing about them right now, for the average Joe, is how prices on the Core 2's dropped as soon as the i7 came out. Core 2 is still the way to go, I think. The dual-core models especially are very affordable, and on non-multi core applications, they often outperform the quad-cores (fewer cores but higher clock speed). Of course, as time goes by, more and more applications are multi-core, so that advantage is a diminishing one...

Because I didn't want the fps number in all of my movies! Does it not show up? If that's the case, I definitely feel a little dopey... Since my LCD can show me my FPS constantly (even right now, I'm getting between 6 and a cool 10fps while typing this message), I never bothered with the onscreen display. I can always see the tray icon, because my taskbar is on my second monitor, which I do so I can always see stuff like that (the clock was my main reason, admittedly).

Yeah, the fps counter changes color, but I never turn that on. Another win for the G15 LCD. :thumbsup:

My problem was that I'd lose track of whether it was recording, then still hit the hotkey to toggle it on and off. The end result being me recording everything EXCEPT what I was trying for. :doh: I think I saw that the latest version adds a feature where the tray icon turns red while you're recording (long overdue!), but I haven't gotten around to upgrading yet. Turns out the Fraps module on the G15 keyboard LCD has a little icon that shows when you're recording... thank goodness. Saves me a lot of trouble!

I like my Antec 900 case very much. Lots and lots of airflow, but the fans are so big (the one on top is a 200mm I think), that the case is extremely quiet, yet keeps every nice and cool. In fact, my high-end PC runs cooler under load than my old computer ran idle, and I attribute that to the case more than anything..

I'm not sure what the conversion rate between dollars and pounds is currently, nor do I know what prices you guys pay for stuff over there, but here's my two cents. There is quite an improvement in overall performance with Core i7. However, being as new as it is, it's not quite yet cost effective for a gaming-specific machine (not only are the i7 components more expensive, but you have other considerations, such as requiring DDR3 memory). The prices will drop soon enough, however, and it's not an insignificant boost in speed. If you don't want to wait for prices to come down a bit, I'd stick with a Core2Duo or Core2Quad. I run a C2Q 9300, and it's freakin excellent (like Hitman above me, Fraps records video so well for me that I sometimes forget I'm even recording). Much more affordable than a Core i7 system, as well. Basically, stick with Intel, get plenty of RAM, run Vista64, and I'm sure you'll be quite happy.

Core 2 Quad 9300 on X45 chipset 4gb RAM Vista64 Ultimate 22" Samsung eVGA 9800 GTX+ Saitek X52 (pedals soon :)) TrackIR 4, using the regular clip on a baseball cap

There's a really good chance (if not 100%) that you'll have to reinstall your OS with a mobo/CPU swap. When I did it, I was able to boot and access my files and whatnot, but I could tell immediately that the OS was not at all happy with what I'd done, so a reinstall was necessary. However, you have a certain number of activations for your XP, so you probably wouldn't have to purchase a new copy, just reinstall. Of course, if you were to upgrade your whole system (which it sounds like you won't be doing), I'd recommend bumping up to Vista at the same time...

Don't think of it as being for just one sim, think of all those future games as well. :smilewink: That said, the 3850 would be a nice upgrade for you, if not revolutionary. But the charts on Tom's are the best research, in my opinion.

Speaker placement has nothing to do with FPS. The computer has no idea where those speakers are, though it expects them to be all around you. If you have a 7.1 sound card, you don't necessarily need to fill up all those speaker slots. I have 5.1 speakers and it's just fine. If you already have an Audigy, but only have 2 speakers, I'd recommend you save money for surround speakers first, and then upgrade the sound card, since the AudigySE is 5.1 (7.1?) already, and not too bad a card either. Just keep the X-Fi in mind for down the road. It WILL improve your music, movies, and games (doubly so if you wear headphones a lot). I was skeptical when I bought mine, being the X-Fi Platinum was $180, and my Audigy was only $45 (and that was years ago), but it turns out the X-Fi was one of the best computer upgrades I've ever bought. My buyer's remorse disappeared the moment I first tried it. :)

Thanks! :thumbsup: That's frightening!

I thought the ALchemy mod is only necessary to get EAX out of certain specific older titles. For any new game it should work right out of the box. At least, that's how I interpreted the description on Creative's site. You're right PoleCat, the lowest X-Fi is actually Audigy 2 hardware (last I looked anyway, they might now have a new lowest model). I hate that Creative did that, but all the other X-Fi's are terrific. I bought an X-Fi Platinum when they first came out, and my sheer enthusiasm for it caused a bunch of my friends to upgrade, and they all love it too!

Well, yeah, I haven't had Ubuntu installed for more than a year. At the time there were NO drivers for the X-Fi (and a lot of other stuff too). A buddy told me there were nowadays, but I'm not surprised to hear you say that they're not impressive.

Seriously! I just recently decided I want to put together a cockpit, but it turns out I had totally underestimated what's possible! Looking through this thread, and others here, my plans are changing drastically. :pilotfly:

It seems like if a customer computer builder didn't put a sound card in your computer, perhaps you should have asked for one ("custom"). And boutique builders have other priorities to deal with, like competition and profit margins and whatnot. A sound card is not all that glamorous, and certainly isn't going to sell a system for them like the newest video card or CPU will, so why not just charge the same price and leave it out? When I built this computer, I gave into the hype of my nice motherboard, and thought I'd save some cash and use the onboard sound. It had been a few years, I figured, so maybe the quality had improved. That experiment lasted for about 6 hours (until I booted up iTunes, basically) before I dug an old PC out of the closet and grabbed the Audigy inside. Massive improvement. I used the Audigy until I got my new X-Fi (I decided to leave the old X-Fi in its current computer, which is now hooked up in the living room as a media server, making movies sound delicious), and the new X-Fi is a further great improvement over the Audigy. Frankly, I'm stunned that anyone could listen to pretty much ANY sound card next to onboard sound, and actually choose the onboard. And I mean, I'm not even what you'd call an audiophile, but the sound quality isn't even close, at least on the two or three mobos I've tried onboard. It seems analogous to telling someone "You like movies? Ah, just go for VHS, it's fine. Same movie, right?" or "Go ahead and use the onboard video. That's what it's there for!" :smilewink: But to each his own; I'm not trying to argue with you. I would just never, ever suggest to anyone to use onboard sound, at least for quality reasons. There may be other factors, like a lack of PCI or PCI-E slots, or maybe they can't afford the extra cash right away, or something.

I disagree wholeheartedly. Even my Creative Audigy Gamer, circa 2001, sounds drastically better than the onboard sound on either of my current motherboards (circa 2006 and 2008 respectively). I don't care how "HD" the marketing hype says the sound is, onboard sound sucks noodles. That said, that Audigy is 8 years old . The only good sound card solution right now, at least the one that blows everything else out of the water, is Creative X-Fi. Just don't get the cheapest one (the one under $100), and you'll love the sound. Especially with headphones; it's stunning how good the surround sound through normal headphones is. It used to be that X-Fi cards didn't work too well under Linux or Vista. Now the Vista problems have been sorted out, and I understand there are decent Linux drivers as well. X-Fi ftw, no question. Makes my headphones sound like my 5.1 computer speakers; makes my computer speakers sound like my big home theater speakers; makes my home theater speakers sound so good that I can't even come up with a good analogy to describe it. :music_whistling: