Sherlock

Screw it, let's keep it going. Do you know if had force feedback rudder pedals if BS would use them? Do the pedals use the say trim scheme in the real ship as the sim?

lol, well how often does a helicopter pilot fly into combat and get shot at- with missles? My friend did a tour in Afhganistan and was shot at by small arms once. Says the scariest part was the terrain. He flies blackhawks and ferries special forces dudes around. It would be fair to point out that I turned him onto iRacing :)

You said that. Right there. And it's wrong in terms of both technology and learning curve. Driving a car is easy. Flying a plane is easy (I soloed in 14 hours and passed my checkride at 54). Driving a car at world class level is no easier than flying an airplane in combat (which would be the only logical equivilent). They're both dangerous and require pinpoint precision and unwavering concentration. You can solo an airplane at 16, same as you can get a license. So your statement has zero supporting evidence. That's all. Not trying to start a war, but it's a bit of a slap in the face to some very talented developers and highly skilled drivers out there. I wouldn't lump iRacing in with Sonic the Hedgehog.

So what is your argument that they are so different? There are hundreds of other drivers that use it that DON'T get paid. I can say from my experience that driving a Formula 2000 in iRacing is a hell of a lot more realistic than flying a 172 in FSX.

LOL no totally wrong. I have my PPL (+complex) and done quite a bit of amateur racing. Each is easy on it's own- but flying in combat is no more difficult physically and mentally than say, winning a GT1 race. Knowing how to drive a car doesn't mean you've mastered it. You need to learn all about weigh transfer and how it affects grip, throttle-on and liftoff oversteer, heel-and-toe shifting, apexing, suspension types, brake biases, camber, toe-in, etc. For a sweet racing sim, check out iRacing. In the same vein Ed Macy loves BS, Earnhardt Jr and Danica Patrick both play iRacing and speak volumes about it's authenticity. Keep in mind any good racing sim has EASILY as complex a physics engine as most flight sims. iRacing has a full 6DOF of freedom physics model with complex suspension modelling, grip and temperature, gearbox, downforce, torque, blah blah. It's not a simple 2D thing by any stretch.

Dude... You did not say that... GTA4 is not a sim in any way. lol! Also, you don't really have to program for a bunch of different hardware on PC. Between the HAL, WFC, and DirectX everything is pretty automatic. There are things that directx doesn't inherently do though- like binary space partitions. The developer has to write their own based on their own graphics engine, so some do this better than others. Who knows- either way this game cranks on my PC. I have an i7 920, 6 gigs, and GTX 280. I don't imagine i've seen less than 50 fps ever- I think it's generally much, much higher.

I love steam. Best thing ever. I've had trouble with it only a handful of times.

Wow, thanks for clarifying that actually. I always wondered why I would have to fight the controls.

I love helos. I was a fixed wing nut my whole life, starting with Flight Simulator 2 on the Apple in the early 80s. What changed? I got my pilot's license! For some reason, once I could fly real planes, it was kinda "meh" with the flight simulators. But I am still fascinated with helicopters. Would love to add a rotary license in real life, but very, very expensive. So yeah, I'm sticking with Black Shark- bought Lock On years ago, but haven't played it in ages and probably won't.

Thought you guys might be interested if you havent seen this yet. http://assets.logitech.com/external/logitech/index.cfm?pageid=224&optionid=90&vpath=Flight%20Systems%20G940 Looks sweet, shipping September. Pedals are not force feedback however.

I suspect this problem has something to do with 64bit OSes. You could try to dual boot the 32bit version and see if works better.

Interesting! Yeah, have to agree, use Teamspeak- It's meant for gaming. Skype is a POS. I used to have a Teamspeak server, but when I left my job I had to shut it down. Are there any public TS servers for BS?

One more thing, is your hard drive set to basic or dynamic? Are you using any type of drive compression or encryption?

I've been married once so I can perfectly understand that women just don't understand. Now that I've been single a couple years, it's funny to see how differently girlfriends react. "I'm playing my helicopter sim, I'll be a bit late" is generally met with the "aw, you're cute" response instead of "You know what, forget it- I'll just call Heather and go to dinner with her!". And not to rib you married guys too much, but if you think they act differently toward simming, you forget the difference in their opinion of sex!

Actually I think maybe you are on ground A/C and don't have the batteries turned on or maybe the the generators. When you take off the A/C disconnects and there goes your power. I did this the other day.

beugnan knows his stuff. I've done lots of multi-threaded stuff, and there is definitely a huge advantage to using it, but depending on the original design it can be a major rework. Most multi-player engines nowadays are multi-threaded which is fairly easy to do because the sockets are inherently multi-threaded for ansync I/O, but who knows about the physics(s) engines. I'm sure putting the player's ship in it's own thread is feasible, but what about the campaign engine etc? And you have to have some marshalling for all the different threads, so with an app as complex as this I'm guessing it would be a bit of a nightmare. I honetly don't miss working in game development- the atmosphere was fun, but more often than not you're tasked with extremely daunting problems such as this.

lol, yes the ejecting goes off without a hitch, but the little man is quite unresponsive after his chute doesn't seem to slow him very well. You can test it, just turn on the batteries and the ejection seat and let her rip.

To make matters worse, if you eject while on the ground, you die. It would be good to have a way to jump out the door and run away, just to avoid the "death" being racked against you.

I read about this problem, and just wanted to mention I have the DVD version and it loads very quickly. I am running RAID 1, but I have seperate OS/Program partitions. I installed BS on the program partition. My system partition was defragged recently. I have 4 gigs of RAM. Being an IT guy I would definitely recommend defragging your partition(s) and see if that helps. It could also be the swap file. Don't use a fixed size swap file- that's not necessary any more. I am running 32 bit XP, not sure if 64 would make a difference. I have a dual-boot Vista system but haven't tried it on that. Like was mentioned above, open task manager and check the CPU, swap file, and disk access when loading a mission. I don't think Starforce has anything to do with it. *I realized it's not installed on my RAID, it's on a seperate 500 gig SATA drive. I have read more and it seems defragging doesn't help most people. Someone mentioned a program called cacheman that helped. It seems alot of people are experiencing the problem on x64 bit OSes. Could that be the issue?

haha, that's because of your joystick. You can move forward/back and sideways with the joystick, and turn with the rudder. You can use first person or external views. It's not exactly Quake, but it's neat to hoof it around the BS world.

I like walking around after an ejection. Wish you could do this under better circumstances...

The problem is not the trim though. If pull the stick back to full deflection it barely crosses the neutral line. BS is for some reason messing up the joystick motion range in Instant Action. I've resigned it to being a bug. I would be more than happy to work with ED if they wanted to fix it. I think you need a trim reset for non-FFB sticks and rudder pedals. If you did have FFB pedals, would BS be smart enough to know that?

I should note that if I start cold/dark, then the Trim Reset button centers the joystick perfectly over the cross-hairs.

Just tried that setting- didn't work. Here's a screencap of instant action when I press "Trim reset". It starts in this position. For some reason, it thinks it's centered. Note, the joystick IS centered, something in BS is confused...

Ok, then, that makes sense, although I don't understand the flight director. So am I using it correctly then? i.e. hold the trim button when manuevering, and letting go when in the desired attitude?