Andrew_McP

Excellent flying, the team's really coming together well. And I'm particularly impressed by the sponsorship, it's nice to have that kind of recognition of your efforts. Andrew McP PS The movie's well edited too. :-)

Personally I very much hope ED keep away from the F-16. For a start I see no point whatsoever in competing with the only other serious sim still out there being worked on... it's not good for a struggling genre. And there is no way on earth -- with the greatest repsect -- ED's small team are going to be able to offer the full compliment of aircraft avionics etc. offered in F4AF. And that's before we get onto the campaign. So there's bound to be some disappointment, especially as -- fingers crossed -- the F4AF project is going to be developing in the years "LOMAC2" is being worked on. Much better for ED to focus on another aircraft or, even better, simply forget another aircraft and "simply" start addressing the mission design, AI, and gameplay features which have held back the Flanker series for so long. This is an old subject though, I should shut up :-) But I really do feel very strongly that competing directly with F4AF would be something very bad for a hobby which brings me a lot of pleasure. So I find it hard to resist sticking my oar in. Andrew McP

Rich, try loading it into Movie Maker 2 and specifying a "Best fit to file size" to trim it down. I find MM2 very useful for this, because other editors don't offer anything comparable. Obviously you'll lose some detail, but I can't believe all of that 671Mb is necessary. Andrew McP

http://rapidshare.de/files/16620222/...rrain.ppt.html Interesting link Lobo, thanks for that. Andrew McP

I think that will be an Nvidia GeForce mx440, and I'm sorry to have to tell you that is a very slow card for gaming, especially something like LOMAC. The following link will depress you. :-) The 9700Pro is still quite a good card, despite the fact it is several years old. However if you look near the bottom of the list you will find your vid card. http://www.tomshardware.com/2002/12/18/vga_charts_ii/page6.html Andrew McP

Sorry I don't have sigs turned on. I come here for conversation, not the pretty pictures. :-) I suspect the 6600GT is probably giving you all the frame rate you're going to get (give or take the odd FPS) at 1024x768 and maybe even 1280x1024. As I advised someone else, if you drop the LOMAC screen size to 800x600 you'll remove your vid card from the equation and be looking at fairly pure CPU limitation. Then move up to 1024x768 to see if frame rates drop noticeably. If they do, you know the vid card can't keep up. But if 1024x768 isn't any slower than 800x600 you can move up to 1280x1024 and look for differences in frame rate, and so on. Then you'll have an idea where you need to spend money first. Andrew McP

In the following newsgroup thread about the Janes F-15 sim you will see this debate is as old as the simulated hills. :-) There are some knowledgeable names in the discussion. http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.flight-sim/browse_frm/thread/b57932620167c851/9ef19dca61ae5d39?lnk=st&q=f-15+vertical+acceleration&rnum=3#9ef19dca61ae5d39 Andy Hollis: http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,979/ CJMartin: http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,21026/ And the following general search will reveal a whole heap of discussion (some relevent, some not) on the subject. http://groups.google.com/groups?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2005-10,GGLD:en&q=f-15%20vertical%20acceleration&sa=N&tab=wg Andrew McP PS While I'm writing, it's always nice to see real pilots and support staff (and there seem to be several in this thread) adding their experience to the forum. In many ways sim flying has very little to do with the real thing, and in order to make a sim immersive for folk sat in front of a monitor, often devs have to do things which aren't very realistic. So it's always nice to be reminded what things are like out there in the real world.

At the moment dual core, like SLI, is mainly about having something just for the sake of having it, so don't get sucked into feeling you're missing out on something. Sure, it probably helps a *little* having background tasks handled by the spare processing power, and it may be more useful in the future if developers manage to make multiple cores work well (it's not easy to get significant improvements from multi-threading, especially in games). But the future's a big place where today's hardware is always cheaper, and nobody with any sense is running software that uses much CPU in the background while flying or playing games. Ok, some of the guys you see on forums go on about burning DVDs in the background, but that's just stupid. Anything running at the same time still takes CPU power from your main application because there are still plenty of shared links in the hardware chain. My recent upgrade was made because I wanted better performance when making movies. Fraps can use the second core (or at least it's supposed to... I'm not sure it's helping much to be honest!) and my movie editor is multithreaded. But in general use I'm finding it very hard to tell I have a dual core processor, so I'm glad I bought the cheapest CPU and overclocked it. Maybe the desktop's a bit "snappier", but that's probably mostly down to the shift to 64-bit architecture. And even if dual core *does* help, spending the same money on a faster single core processor would probably give similar benefits *and* have the bonus of definitely making intensive tasks like LOMAC faster (as long as you have the sense to close down everything unnecessary running in the background). As for your vid card, you don't say what you have at the moment. But in my experience there's one way of proving to yourself whether a vid card upgrade will help you. Run LOMAC at 800x600 and fly for a while. If LOMAC doesn't fly smoothly at that setting, then unless you have a slow vid card (slower than, say, a 9800Pro or similar) spending money on a faster vid card won't help. It will only let you fly at a higher resolution with more fsaa or aniso, but at roughly the same frame rates. Ok, higher res and fsaa is wonderful to have, but LOMAC is more CPU-limited than vid card limited in my experience, and there isn't a PC on the planet which will run LOMAC smoothly all the time. So it comes down to how much you want to pay for your disappointment. ;-) Yes, you can move that disappointment level around a little, but it's possible to spend a lot of money for relatively small gains when chasing the best performance, particularly in in this sim. Andrew McP

Dual vid cards is a *complete* waste of money (unless you have a 3000x2000monitor ;-), especially for LOMAC which won't benefit from the spare graphics power. It's only really useful if you can only afford a cheap vid card now, and then add another cheap vid card later to boost frame rates. Two high end cards is just for bragging rights and very high FPS in the latest games... which is pretty silly when people generally use LCD monitors now which can't refresh at more than about 70Hz. Obviously the faster the processor, the better. But don't expect too much from your very expensive chip. LOMAC will still slow down in busy situations. I prefer to do lots of research and buy a cheaper chip which will overclock a little, but obviously if I was richer I'd just buy a faster chip and forget the messing about. So good luck to you. :-) As for RAM, things have got both more complicated and much simpler. You can now use normal pc3200 (200MHz) memory without it affecting the overall speed too much, because AMD's CPU-based memory controller is *much* more effective. And it's the link between the on-chip memory controller and the CPU core which is running at high speed, not the link from memory controller to your actual RAM. So you might want to try keeping your old RAM, and only updating it if there's an obvious problem. However it sounds like you have a big budget, so in your place I'd just buy 2Gb of the most expensive RAM I could find. Just don't listen too hard or you'll hear the sound of dollar bills being torn up. ;-) You could also try googling around for RAM recommendations. You'll find many, many types of RAM being used without any problems, and it's only overclockers who need to be really careful. Just about any old pc3200 RAM will do if you're not overclocking. I'm using low latency stuff which allows me to run at 240MHz and overclock my x2 3800 to within 400MHz of the fastest chips available at a fraction of the cost. But to be honest this is more down to luck than judgement. It wouldn't even run reliably at 220MHz on my old motherboard, so it's easy to get caught out when overclocking, and there are never any guarantees. I'm not sure any of this has been very helpful, but it might help stimulate some discussion. Andrew McP http://img67.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mcpbench22ko.jpg

I appreciate the Intel/AMD difference (as should anyone else who's been awake for the last five years :-), but if you look at my benchmarks you'll see that in most cases the 64 bit AMD processor isn't significantly faster than older 32-bit AMD processors. LOMAC seems to benefit disproportionately from the new architecture, but MHz is still what matters most, and the basic, 2GHz x2 3800 isn't going to impress anyone unless it's been a few years since they upgraded. Most importantly, my LOMAC "real world use" benchmarks show that even if average benchmarks go up noticeably, they don't go up enough to make minimum frame rates acceptable in busy situations (unless you use the lowest viewing distance). Until LOMAC is rewritten to benefit from the acceleration DX9 can offer, this will always be the case. So we should get used to it. :-) Andrew McP

A dual core 3800 isn't really a high end processor, it only runs at 2GHz. Yes, two cores are nice for some software, but for most it's just a waste of a core (I know, I have one! :-). I overclocked mine from 2.0GHz to 2.4, but LOMAC wants a *lot* more CPU speed to make it run quickly over large towns. This post... http://forum.lockon.ru/showthread.php?t=14757 ...and the benchmarks I carried out at a variety of speeds on my old PC and the new one might help you understand how demanding LOMAC is. Nothing will make LOMAC run smoothly over big towns, not even a 3GHz CPU, I'm sure. Andrew McP

The thing I enjoy most in EECH is letting the battle develop, watching things from the main window, and occasionally jumping into a cockpit to... well, usually lose my side another helicopter. ;-) The Russian cockpit is the most amazing cockpit ever in any sim if you ask me. It's just so immersive having the copilot beside you doing his stuff. I also like the way you can even watch the MFDs from the external views. (Yes, I know, small things please small minds, but sim-god is in the sim-detail. :-) EECH isn't perfect though, and it's a real shame the developers had to move on to racing games. I always hoped they'd do a sequel to squash some bugs and silly behaviour, and to and allow you to actually choose targets for the AI, ie control the way the campaign develops. Then it would've become the Mother of All Sims. Andrew McP PS Slackers, I've been up all night. Mind you, I didn't get up to go to work until 8:30pm ;-)

It's not harsh, it's just my opinion. ;-) I just think in life it's better to do one thing well instead of several things only averagely (is averagely a word?). One of the sad things about LOMAC is that by spreading the workload across multiple aircraft ED avoided addressing the things which were really lacking in the sim. More aircraft was never the problem, that was a marketing-led decision, I'm sure. Still, we have to be grateful for what we get, and I'm grateful for the F-15, A-10, Mig-29, Su-25, 25T, Ka-50 and whatever else they add even if I hardly ever fly them. :-) When I see movies like that it reminds me what we might have had if ED's development had gone a little differently. You youngsters can afford to wait another 20 years for a highly detailed Su-27. But by then I'll probably be pushing up daisies. ;-) Andrew McP

Someone remind me again why ED are wasting their dev time on helicopters and (potentially) stuff like the F-16/18/whatever? Excuse me, I have to unplug this keyboard and dry out all the drool before... <Bzzzzt> Andrew McP PS The cockpit footage in that aerobatic plane really makes you appreciate how hard those people have to work. What a roll rate! It looks tame enough from the outside because we're used to seeing such things. But from the inside... woah, that must hurt! PPS And when all the flares get fired I found myself impressed by the fact the frame rate stayed high. I obviously spend too much time in front of my PC. :-)

It's CPU. SLI is for rich folk chasing rainbows and dual core is virtually worthless. You want MHz and lots of them. As LOMAC is DX8, it can't take advantage of the acceleration offered by more recent vid cards. But what you *can* do is fly at higher resolutions with x4fsaa & x8aniso (or even higher) for "free". When I shifted to an X800Pro from a 9700Pro I saw little frame rate boost, but I can fly at 1600x1200 almost as smoothly as I used to fly at 1024x768. Obviously I'd rather have higher (and especially more consistent!) frame rates in LOMAC. As you'll see from my post earlier on, moving from a 2.2GHz Barton to a x2 3800@2.4GHz has given me quite a nice LOMAC boost. The x2 is only going to be useful in movie making, so just read the benchmarks as if they came from a single core processor running at the same speed. Andrew McP PS I bought an Asrock Dual Sata board which has good AGP support *and* a PCI-E slot. It's also very cheap, and I could re-use my AGP card and RAM. I did also buy a new PSU, but my old Zalman 400W *might* have been ok. The problem is that newer hardware demands more power on the 12V lines, whereas older PSUs may be weighted too far in the 5V direction. And if your PSU struggles to cope you can have all sorts of nasty, unpredictable problems.

I only bought the x2 core for movie making. Otherwise it's a waste of money IMO, and I spent a lot of time researching this upgrade before I came to that conclusion. In the future multithreading may be much more useful, but you should always buy hardware to run today's software. Tomorrow is a big, unpredictable place and mainstream multithreading will take a long time to arrive in a fashion that's more than a token gesture. Potentially you can get 1.8x performance from two cores, but in reality you'll rarely get anywhere *close* to that. So far the PC just seems faster, "snappier" as you'd expect. But I don't go in for burning DVDs while playing Quake4, and there are no benchmarks to prove whether general desktop use is faster with two cores. Besides, who cares about snappier desktop performance? :-) If it wasn't for Fraps and my editor I'd definitely have bought a faster single core, especially for LOMAC. However, as my benchmarks show, there probably isn't a PC on the planet which can overcome the "I haven't fired rockets before, let's go load a lot of stuff up and drop the frame rate to 3FPS" effect. I really wish ED could give us a caching option to improve that. I'd buy more RAM tomorrow if another 1Gb could be used by LOMAC. Andrew McP PS For UK users, I got the processor last week from overclockers.co.uk for £190 inc VAT while it was on offer. It's an OEM chip, but the stock cooler isn't worth having anyway (unlike the stock cooler on the dual core Opterons, which is very good). With a Freezer 64 Pro it runs incredibly cool.

I suppose I should have posted this... http://forum.lockon.ru/showthread.php?p=176626#post176626 ...here. Andrew McP

I just changed from a mobile Barton@2.2GHz to a x2 3800 (just so I can put Fraps on the second core while recording). It was a "cheap" upgrade because I'm using the same 2x512 of Corsair RAM, and my AGP X800Pro(flashed to XT) on the cheap and surprisingly capable Asrock Dual Sata board. To be honest I wasn't expecting a big improvement... MHz is still what matters most. And in many cases the improvement is, as expected, nothing to get excited about. However I was pleasantly surprised to find LOMAC seemed to benefit most from the new architecture. Obviously the CPU's memory controller works well with the wild & whacky Russian code ED are writing. Most of the benchmarks on the attached picture will be self-explanatory. The two LOMAC missions I used are... (1) A straight forward level flight, F2 view from behind, low over Seva with a small tank battle going on in the town. (2) An Su-25T mission where I fired several salvos of rockets (ie brought the frame rate to a crawl) while attacking a base in a valley with several defending radar sources. The only LOMAC settings I changed in my 1280x1024, x4fsaa, x8aniso defaults (maxxed except for medium water) were the viewing distances, as you'll see. Hopefully this will be some use to anyone else wondering if the money's worth spending. Obviously dual core is no good for LOMAC, and I only went dual core for movie making & editing (my "Vegas-lite" editor is multithreaded). If it wasn't for that I'd have chosen a single core 3700 San Diego (1Mb cache, overclock like hell from a nice starting point of 2.2GHz). Oh, you'll see I've only pushed my CPU from its default of 2GHz up to 2.4GHz. But it is rock solid stable and cool as a warm day in Moscow. I ought to be able to make 2.7GHz on this motherboard eventually, if I ever manage to wrap my head around the bios settings. :-) Andrew McP PS In the LOMAC tests the figures reported by Fraps are the Average, Minimum, and Maximum FPS over the first 60 seconds of the mission. The minimum and maximum are probably not too useful, but I find them useful to give a rough idea what to expect in real missions.

Nice idea done very well. My French is good enough to have a rough idea what's happening. The pics help a little as well. ;-) Andrew McP

I've just taken the 2x512Mb RAM out fo my 2.3GHz Barton box and replaced it with an older set of 2x256Mb. (Both running at the same 7,3,3,2.5 speed, nothing in the BIOS has changed at all). I loaded up a LOMAC mission to test the stability, hit FLY and waited. Then I waited a little more. Then I went off and made a cup of coffee. I came back and... waited some more. I'd forgotten just how long a mission can take to start up with only 512Mb onboard. If it wasn't for the fact I'm building a new box with an x2 3800 tomorrow I'd put the 1Gb straight back in. Anyway, just in case anyone out there reading this still has 512Mb, RAM is pretty cheap now, go buy some more! :-) Andrew McP

You might be right. But I honestly don't think the workload thing is a problem. That's why sim-god invented autopilot modes. Mind you, if they turned out to be anything like the modes in the 25T I wouldn't be trusting them much. :-) In Tornado (has to be a benchmark for any 2-seat sim) the multiple autopilot modes meant you could fly whole missions from the back seat if you wanted. Obviously not all aircraft would have such advanced modes, but there should always be room in any sim for a little creativity. If an extra mode or two sneaked onto an aircraft that didnlt have them IRL, then it's a fair swap for not having two heads. Multiplayer two-seat flying is a different kettle of fish though. That'd be tricky. Andrew McP

Well, I've just been looking at ebay pricing up a 9700Pro for my 2nd box. That'd set me back about £55. I suppose I could stretch to £60 for an AGP 6800gt... Sorry, what was that? No need to swear! ;-) Andrew McP PS You have the best collection of spare vid cards I've ever seen! :-)

Personally I've never seen what the big deal is about a second seat. I mean, it's only another view with some different instrumentation. It can't be *that* much of a problem. Mind you, I've never seen LOMAC's source code. I suspect that after all this time it's not very pretty, and no doubt much of the uncommented code will have been written by people who left long ago. So maybe we just have to be grateful for whatever features they shoehorn in. :-) I reckon they should just create an aircraft with the second seat cockpit that can fly "inside" the main aircraft without any collision detection. Then you can just use shift J (or whatever it is) to swap between the aircraft. There you go, problem solved! ;-) Andrew McP

1) Tornado, obviously. But then I'm never happier than when flying 50m off the ground into big trouble. 2) Hercules. Incredibly flexible aircraft. Load it lightly and it can be thrown around the skies amazingly (didn't believe it until I saw it at an airshow... massive power to weight ratio when unloaded). Very varied mission potential in a more developed gameplay engine. Imagine being able to load it up with an APC or a tank and go take over an enemy airfield. Heck, I'd settle for telling the AI to do that while I escort! 3) Harrier. Imagine the AFM applied to that airframe. Mastering that aircraft would be a really satisfying challenge. I'd probably never fight in it, just enjoy the flying. And imagine the formation flying that would be possible without the fear of imminent death. 4) Jaguar would be nice as a real change from the mainstrain, and I do like the Swedish jets... a Gripen or Viggen would be very nice. 5) Anything else except a furking F-16 or F/A-18. Been there, done that, read the book, saw the movie, bought the T-shirt, etc etc etc. Andrew McP

Obviously you're right, I'd pay for those too, particulary the AI stuff. Heck, I'll pay for anything... where do I sign? Are you sure that's London Bridge? But ever since I first flew the Su-27 1.0 DOS demo I've been in love with the Flanker. I didn't really know anything about the real aircraft itself before that, but that demo taught me to care. And ever since then I've been waiting for the chance to just fly around and push that airframe to its limits without meeting holes in the flight model. The 25T is little more than a fluffer for the real deal, and it's frustrating as hell to be so near and yet so far. Of course the biggest problem may not be ED's finances or willpower, but the incredible problems presented by the 27's high AoA performance... particularly the kobra. Without a genuine kobra, the Su-27 will Su-ck. And modelling the flight dynamics well enough to allow that in non-canned form is going to require a whole *heap* of brainpower, and possible a spare processor. The 25 & 25T are far simpler to tackle, which is no doubt why ED started there. And of course if ED do the 27 they'd have to do the F-15 as well or half the folk in Hyperlobby will cry. So that's two big reasons why we might be waiting a very long time. And then a bit longer. Andrew McP