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Then watch the training or the developer's notes. Heck, watch the training from Leading Edge. Knowing how to start the bird up, gives you knowledge of how to react to certain system failures in flight :)

I haven't found any to date. If you check the very first post of this thread though, I did a 3 part video review of it. Sorry that my narration isn't loud enough. Just upgraded to Win 7 and getting used to the new sound panel interface and the x64 Fraps.

WoP has a good foundation to build upon. Anyone who played IL-2 when it first came out can agree that it wasn't completely accurate in it's flight models either, yet we played it like mad :D Besides, WoP, if nothing else, is a good interim until SoW:BoB comes out in 2008 I mean 2009 crap, I mean possibly 2010

Ensure your climb/descent gauge is on 0, you're in level flight (using the SAI), and keep your collective constant. When trimmed in, you can let go of the stick and maintain course and speed.

Nice vid and nice fights earlier :)

The spit's wider wings (spoons as one ex-pilot I met called them) made it a very stable aircraft.

I use an nvidia GTX260 Core 216 and do not experience that. What driver version are you running?

Well, there was one player online last night who picked the game up cuz he sw it on the awards poll. Nothing like giving assistance via typing to someone while trying to save my own butt lol!

But even the more recent Fedora cores are over-infalted to make it more like Winblows....so what's one to do lol! The biggest difference between Vista and Win 7 is they fixed a good portion of the compatibility issues and those blasted widgets don't still take background resources even when turned off.

I haven't been having the sun problems people have been referring to. What video card are you running? As far as trimming, it does take finding that sweet spot, but I have a hard time trimming in LockOn (aka not using Alt Hold and such). The visual warfare as pect of it is what I always enjoyed about the nostalgia sims. With modern fighters, much of it is using the electronics at hand to fight the battle and that's an enjoyable learning curve all to it's own right. On the old side, putting it down to the old AN/RDR-1 (aka eyeballs) is an enjoyable learning curve in it's own right. I tend to look at a game as it's own stand alone release instead of comparing it to everything else out there. If I did that, nothing would be worth it except maybe DCS Blackshark LOL!

I will agree that ArmA was a horrid release. The demo for ArmA crashed my machine and had me reformat. ArmA2's release was much smoother though. The developers said early on and kept saying that ArmA2 was being designed around XP and DX9 since that's what the bulk of their customer base was using. As an XP user at the time of release, I had no problems with ArmA2. I was also running the Win 7 beta and had no problem. I simply did not install it into the x86 Program Files directory and it worked flawlessly. I never did run Vista. I ran the beta for that and it was doomed from the start. I always thought of it as a 64 bit version of Win ME. An OS that ate itself everytime it was turned on. After all of the patches and service packs, Vista is almost stable. You are right though, DCS Blackshark was one of the most stable and feature packed releases I have ever seen. But, ED was also in a position to take their time with it. ArmA2 has the RTS elements already there. It just depends on the mission being played. Domination and Evolution can offer some good squad coordination, but Warfare missions and the likes offer a good bit more. Combine the RTS elemts of Warfare with the infantry and machanized infantry capabilities of ArmA (enviroment as well) along with the flight dynamics of the DCS engine and throw in the Naval warfare element....... hehe, it's a heckuva thought isn't it? :D

And, as I have said in my video review and other posts - This is IL-2 Birds Of Prey modified for the PC. They did not release the straight port over. Changes were made to make take advantage of the greater processing power of the PC. Is it perfect? No But is a very good foundation. If they released a game with great flight models, but lack luster terrain - people would have complained. If they released excellent terrain and lack luster flight models - people would have complained. So, they released it in the middle and are relying on community feedback to tweak it from there. They made 10 updates in 25 days during the beta. Since release, there's been two updates. In online play last night, I was having a devil of a time finding the enemy planes if they were at a lower altitude than myself. With detailed terrain like that, it kicks up the challenge when there's no radar or TEWS to track you to the target. Of course, since it was Axis vs Allies, I not only had to find a plane, but get close enough to identify it before potentiall firing on a friendly. With IFF's turned off, it's all visual detetection. Video footage can only go so far at showing off a game. The same as with LockOn. 90% of the videos out there are from exterior views and do nothing as far as showing the actions taken in the cockpit or the skill it takes to achieve what's in the video. Only those who play the sim can appreciate everything it takes to get that single Amraam up the enemy's exhaust successfully. Same with WoP. There's a demo out now. I don't know what all the demo has in it or if sim mode is accessible in it. It's free tho and worth a download if you enjoy engine control, speed management, and visual only detection in dogfights :D

That's the pilot who was not in a dive. The arcade feel was due to the replay track (the saved track replay only shows replays from a fixed-zoom exterior view at the moment - one of the things in the dev's list to change). Myself, I would have dived although "skipping bombs" across the water by flying in horizontally was a known tactic in WWII and, in IL-2, even the AI use the tactic when ship running. I never could do it with great consistancy myself lol! As far as the 500lb bombs..... On my first ship, we crossed Lybia's "Line Of Death" as our Navy does often. There's a nice area in the water that's rather shallow out there. It's a good place to drop some extra ordanance. our AV-8B's were out there dropping 500lb bombs on the shallow flat. The plume of water from a 500lb bomb going off is actually very impressive. Definitely enough to cover 1/3 the stern of a small ship like a destroyer. Here's a decent vid of a 500lb bomb going off on land. That explosion would definitely look very sizeable if you stuck a DDG destoryer beside it. Destroyers are actually very small ships in the grand scheme of things.

Yes, there was another thread that debated this. Alot of people in the flight sim community bust on BIS because of their (lack of) flight models. The fact is that, when it comes to a ground warfare tactical simulator from the first person perspective, nothing gets as close as the BIS products have. A five time combat veteran myself, I can say they've done a bang up job considering it's a computer sim. There are those who say that the character movement in COD4 is more realistic because it's smoother. That's true if you were fighting in spandex within an air conditioned enviroment. Movement in full combat gear is not that fluid and you generally don't move that fast in a combat enviroment. The character movements and ballistics in the BIS products (of which COD4 and other titles in that genre had zilch for ballistics) have been amazingly close to reality. In the end, nothing on a computer can trully replicate reality. Only simulate. Then there are those that complain of the bugs. Well, if bugs were such a turn off, then why are we even here at these forums. Look at the bug fix requests in the 1.13 thread in the LockOn discussion. It's difficult to release a complex sim without bugs. Actually, it's almost impossible. You can only push a sim/game engine so far before you compromise performance and have a product that the majority cannot even get to run smooth at low settings. ArmA2's biggest flaw at the moment is in it's data transfer from the HDD (reference THIS THREAD) Eventually though, I would hope that an air & ground simulator will come out. The question is though, "Would it be worth the development cost?" Such an endeavor to combine the ground physics and enviroment suitable for large scal ground combat combine with the physics and flight models of a flight sim would be a major undertaking for any development studio. Of course, the goal is to make enough money to live on. So, would such a game sell enough to recupe the costs of development and further support? With the console market eating the majority of the gaming industry, I don't know if any studio would see that as a cost positive endeavor. No matter how much they really wanted to do it for the sake of conquering such a feat, losing money is not a prime goal in any business.

Video links are added to the first post of this thread :) Remember, I'm not Ironhand or Glowing Amraam and I also put these together in quite a hurry lol!

Check your PM Bert :)

Starting the uploads now. There will be three parts: GUI Basic Handling and Enviroment Dogfight Performance between a P-51 and two BF-109's

Very true. The flight models in any of the series (OFP, ArmA, ArmA2) have never been realistic. Better FM's than the BF series, but definitely not simulator realism at all. Think of ArmA2 as a first person, real time strategy game most often played in simgle player or online coop. The infantry gound pounding is what the overall game focuses on. It really shines when you are playing online missions with no or limited respawns and fixed loadouts.

For those who are looking at youtube vids and still wondering yay or nay, I am in process of making a two part video review of WoP. Part 1 will be exploring the GUI of WoP (it's rendering now as I type). Part 2 will be inflight footage from the cockpit in simulation mode (no external views, no HUD info, etc). I put a couple of aircraft through the paces and explore the overall look, feel, and immersion of the game. These should be up on youtube (or vimeo - still deciding) within the next 12 hours or so. Be advised though, I am not the expert pilot/narrator that Ironhand is nor do I possess the gifted video editing of Glowing Amraam. Just trying to give some info to the community. A community that, since I am part of, I know is a bit timid on new titles. Especially when the title seemingly appeared out of nowhere like WoP did. Hopefully these two videos will give you some of the info you've been looking for :)

ROFL! Very nice find :D

I just had to click on the Game Update option in TIR5 and it worked. Falcon, I think CC is the only way to pay right now.

From oneof the developers:

which is why I was up way too late and slept in later than I wanted to today LOL!

Just played for about 20 minutes (single player). One can generally get an idea of the quality of a sim by looking at the interface options, GUI setup, and the intial feel of the aircraft in flight. Mind you, I said an "idea". That, by no means, insinuates that I can make a solid opinion on the game yet ;) Initial impressions: I put it into simulator mode (why bother with any other!). Stalls, spinouts, etc all are there. Flight Models feel like IL-2, but with a little more feel to them. That may be because the enviroment has a much better depth of field than IL-2 did. I was an IL-2 junkie for years (still am - love my P-38!), but I am approaching this game like I do every game. As its pwn title! I'm not going to compare it to IL-2 from here on out. IL-2 is a reference point, but that's all. WoP is it's own title and therefor should be looked at as it's own game. I will continue to play IL-2...and FC....and BS....and ArmA2....and Starcraft2 when it comes out. Damn, I'm gonna be busy LOL!! The overall look and sound of the game is much better than IL-2, but that should have been a given due to tech advances. The cockpits are gorgeous. It's fully compatible with my triplehead2go and TrackIR5 already has it as a game update. Also - for those wondering if trees are collision objects, the answer is yes. that was one of the first things I checked. Then I checked to see if the flight dynamics were sim or BF42-style. I immediately went into a flat spin that I did not recover out of, but I also did not have my flaps mapped to my stick yet either lol! The one con I can find so far is that it appears that additional planes and such are purchased. The upswing, they're not overly expensive like many of the pay to fly planes in some other sims. The P-40 is a whopping $3. I have not explored the editor or online play as of yet. Still mapping controls and such. I'll post some vids of the interface and some flight time over the weekend.

In my recording studio, circumstance had me running my project files (50+ tracks of 24b/96KHz audio) from the same drive my OS was on. There was a point where the system had all it could take and the audio engine would drop unless I turned up the lateny (non-desired). I was finally able to put my project files back onto a seperate drive. No dropouts and back down to 128 max on the latency (that's with 12 audio channels in and 12 channels out with a stereo monitor). When you keep your OS and your files (ie games in this case) on seperate drives, then you are going to have less of a problem. In the case of my studio computer, it's an AMD 4200+ dual core with only 2GB of DDR2-667 memory. In the case of my gaming rig, having ArmA2, FC, BS, etc running from my slave drive has a positive impact.