Andrew_McP

There's a limit to how smooth you can get mouse panning in LOMAC, no matter how much you slow down your mouse. There's something in LOMAC's code which seems to ensure you always end up with steps. This is the best method I've found so far, but it's not perfect... http://forum.lockon.ru/showthread.php?t=15683&highlight=joy2key If you want smoothness you have to stick to the F3 type views built into LOMAC. Andrew McP

I'm sure we've all done things we regret in our lives. Thanks for taking the time to apologise in public. Andrew McP

The local vandals/car thieves gave me a photo opportunity for Easter an hour or so ago. Heard a loud bang outside just after midnight and assumed it was fireworks. It turns out it was "just" someone's insurance premiums rising. http://www.andrew.mcp.dsl.pipex.com/Happy_Easter1.jpg http://www.andrew.mcp.dsl.pipex.com/Happy_Easter2.jpg Andrew McP

I love the guy's blog... "Mon 19th Mar, 2007 - Randomness… You know, some people in this world are real jerks." 'Nuff said, though I suppose it's difficult to kick him too hard if -- assuming it's true -- he lost a child not long ago. That's got to unbalance anyone.... though intellectual theft is still theft, as I often try to explain to people who are less fussy about stealing software via the internet. Andrew McP PS. Well done Drako for flagging this up.

Hind is very well behaved on my XP PC, but I fly using the keyboard. The only thing I had to do is right click on Hind.exe and select properties. On the compatibility tab, tick the box next to Win95 com compatibility. Andrew McP

Nice to see you keeping an eye on us MB. Your IL2 "Ambush" movie is the perfect example of how careful music choice can turn a good movie into something out of this world. I still rate it as my favourite movie of all time for that reason. (It has Mossies in it too, that does no harm :-) Actually I've just got in from trying to photograph the full moon, and I can never see a full moon without seeing the credits sequence from Ambush. The visual and audio combination hits a creative sweet spot which would be impossible to beat IMO. I'd better stop all this gratuitous grovelling. ;-) But if anyone's not familiar with "Ambush", it's available some way down this page... http://www.netwings.org/library/Topsites/ Andrew McP

That is a *superb* first movie. It would be a great second, third, or fourth movie as well! It proves that you don't need expensive software to make movies, just patience, imagination, and the ability to make music work for you. You did that, and did it very well. Thanks for the entertainment! :-) Andrew McP PS spOnge, if you're reading this, you'll learn more studying this movie than spending hours with your head buried in Vegas and After Effects. They're great tools in the hands of experts, but they're not necessary, especially when you're starting out. Don't worry about running until you can walk properly. ;-)

Well done! :-) Andrew McP

April 1st' s tomorrow mate. ;-) Andrew Damn, you beat me to it Lerx! :-)

Mike, that's really impressive stuff! The amazing HD quality really enhances the "being there" feeling, and that must be a pretty expensive camera judging by the lovely way it handles shooting straight into the sun. There are some really nice (ie beautiful looking) sections in there. And of course aerobatic disaplys are always exciting, though perhaps a little more exciting in the flesh than on film, when those people are right there in front of you risking their lives for your entertainment... and theirs. :-) I rarely want to be a fighter pilot in real life (1% danger & excitment, 99% training) and I never want to fly passenger jets (100% bus driving) but watching aerobatic displays always makes me want to learn to fly like that. To have such control over an aircraft (and your own preservation instincts) must be amazing. However I squeal like a frightened girl on roller-coaster rides, so I may not be cut out for aerobatics. :-) Thanks for the movie, and good luck finding a cheap host for the full version (that's a lot of potential bandwidth!) Andrew McP

I think you probably just expect a little too much from your poor, over-worked PC! :-) LOMAC makes PCs cry all on its own. Add Fraps on top of that, which is transferring *huge* amounts of data from the vid card to the HD every second, and even the best PC on the planet will shed tears. That means, as you've discovered, flying at half or quarter speed and setting Fraps to record at a lower frame rate to get anything useful. But the tradeoff is that the files are huge. There's no way round that. And those huge files mean that when editing (another task which makes fast PCs weep) you'll have more problems associated with the amounts of data being worked with. In your position I would be flying at 800x600, 1/2 speed if possible (1/4 if not), with LOMAC details turned down quite a bit and Fraps set to record at 15fps & half resolution (ie 400x300). That will not give you excellent video quality, but you don't have many options with your hardware. You might have some success flying at 1024x768 and recording at half that, but I think you need to learn to walk before you can run, and keeping the file sizes as small as possible will save you some frustration while you're getting used to the movie making process. I've spent far too much money upgrading my PC trying to make movie creation simpler, but no matter how much hardware you throw at this job, it's never enough. :-) Good luck. Andrew McP

If your laptop will run FS9 (DX9) then it should definitely run LOMAC (DX8 ). Have you tried knocking all the graphics settings down to an absolute minimum? If that produces ugly but "non-glitchy" graphics then it might be possible to add features until you find out what feature's causing the problem. I'd suggest messing about with different graphics drivers, but I'm never happy doing that just because one game/sim is misbehaving. I'd certainly be tempted to re-install LOMAC just in case something weird has happened, but all this can get very time consuming. Still, you might be able to claim the time spent as a business expense. :-) Andrew McP

> The integrated graphics processing capability is an Intel 945GM with > up to 128MB of shared memory For 3D acceleration the words "shared memory" should always ring alarm bells. You have a nice laptop with non-gaming oriented graphics capability. However I would still expect LOMAC to run, albeit with a fairly poor frame rate. It might be a driver problem, I suppose, but LOMAC's pretty long in the tooth now. It runs fine (but slowly :-) on my 2 year old laptop, however that has a graphics chip with dedicated video memory rather than the shared architecture you have. I suspect results will always be disappointing with something like LOMAC, which -- while CPU limited in many way -- also puts a lot of strain on weaker video cards/chipsets. I appear to be writing a lot while offering no help whatsoever. Story of my life. ;-) The following page has some general gaming information about the chipset and may lead you in a more helpful direction... http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/cpu/article.php/3261_3513091__2 Andrew McP PS Sounds like you have an interesting job. I don't expect you to discuss it though, obviously. :-)

Interesting. I've been unable to tell any real difference when I forget to set the affinity for each process. I must try again some time and be more scientific about my tests. Andrew McP

Please don't be insulted if I say the actual flying didn't excite me very much. However the movie was *so* well made that I didn't mind at all! The editing, style, and the choice of music really came together well to make a really nice, relaxing movie. Thanks! :-) Andrew McP

If you fly at 1600x1200 anti-aliasing is less important. The lower the resolution, the more important FSAA becomes. For movie making purposes I always run at 800x600, and at that resolution differences in FSAA quality and texture crawling is very obvious indeed. Andrew McP

Have a good search through this and the movie section. I gave up using the LOMAC 'record AVI' a long time ago, but there were plenty of discussions about exactly how to make the thing work. For a free tool it's very nice, but it is rather quirky. Andrew McP

I do find the scattered Nvidia control options rather confusing, but even I can spot when LOMAC is running without FSAA. It makes it looks like a Lego sim. :-) Andrew McP

Thanks Squid. I've discovered that if I crank all the options up to max (and there are a lot of them, some of which show up in some control panels, but not in others.... so confusing!) I can get the quality I'm used to. However it does seem that Nvidia's hardware has to jump through a lot more hoops to get to the quality I'm used to having simply by setting x4fsaa, x8aniso with my ATI card. The good news is that as I spend most of my LOMAC life at 800x600, the frame rate isn't slowed down too much by running with all the bells and whistles on. Andrew McP

Very nice work. Thanks for the movie. Andrew McP

I moved to dual core purely because I was told Fraps would run better on one core, with LOMAC running on the other. However I was completely underwhelmed by the dual core experience and see so real evidence that LOMAC is smoother for having a core all to itself. The various background stuff is called background for a reason... there's not a lot of CPU cycles involved. :-) Andrew McP

I'm more aware than most of every little flaw in each of the... er, 11 (jeez, get a life Andrew!) movies I've made. That's why I nearly always delete all the source files as soon as I decide to release something. Otherwise I'm tempted to go back and tweak things endlessly. But there's more to life than LOMAC movies (so they tell me) and I make so many mistakes I'd be editing forever. The way I look on it, we've got people like GA producing "fast food" movies. When you want a movie Big Mac, nothing else will do, and the experience is always satisfying... for about half an hour. Then you want another one. :-) Then you've got people like me providing something with a bit more substance... a scruffy British transport cafe serving all day breakfasts on dirty plates. You might get food poisoning, but who cares because the food's good and lasts you until supper time (depending on the length of the credits). Finally you've got the Bill et John team who are out there in a class of their own, serving the finest movie haute cuisine on exquisite porcelain from a riverside balcony overlooking la Tour d'Eiffel. You might not eat there very often, but the memory stays with you forever. There's a time and a place for everything. Just don't forget to tip the waiter wherever you dine, otherwise next time they might spit in your movie soup. :-) Andrew McP

There's always a trade-off with movies. If I re-shot scenes repeatedly until I got them perfect (or as near as possible given the limitations of LOMAC, Fraps, and my PC), movies like that would take me 600 hours instead of more like 300. Actually 300's probably very conservative. Designng the mission alone for that movie took me probably 20 hours of flying and tweaking to get the AI to do what I wanted, and that's the easy part! :-) GA's movies tend not to require that kind of design effort. His expertise is in the editing department, and there he's the undisputed master. Personally I'm more in awe of the Bill & John movies though. Those movies have everything I aspire to... from technical quality to plot details. I've no idea how they manage to get it all right and stay sane! I swear they have a team of cheap Asian workers doing the leg work for them in a movie sweatshop somewhere. :-) http://billetjohn.free.fr/ Andrew McP

http://rapidshare.com/files/17669387/mcp11_97mb.wmv.html I haven't tested it, but it should be ok. Andrew McP

I'm off to work soon but when I get back I can upload it to Rapidshare again, if that'd help. Andrew McP