Andrew_McP

I think you may have unrealistic expectations about how long it'll take to produce LOMAC2 (or whatever it'll be called). The steady drip of patches and paid upgrades for LOMAC has perhaps spoiled us. Andrew McP

New terrain would probably mean new radar code, a *lot* more CPU power to calculate terrain masking, and a lot of dev time. I don't expect to see that for a loooong time yet. Those triangular hills are starting to look a little dated though. Maybe ED could get sponsored by the makers of Toblerone? That might pay for some improvements. ;-) Andrew McP

That's the problem. Anyone who cares enough about LOMAC enough to hang around here is probably going to buy anything ED produce anyway. If we could raise $10,000 each ED might be surprisingly flexible. Until then, we're just a small number of hardcore sim-geeks who represent a very small portion of the sales needed to pay for updates. And Joe(sephine) Public isn't going to pay just to be able to do one-wheel landings in the Su-27... even though it'd make my sad little life almost complete. :-> I did say *almost*. I'll take a lottery win and Keira Knightly as well if they're available. Then I could sell Keira Knightly and pay for the Su-27 AFM. There might even be some change left to pay for the F-15. ;-) Andrew McP

Missiles exploding quickly after launch seems to be fairly common in my experience, from a variety of launch systems on all sides. I've not bothered being scientific in my observations though. If I kept a record of everything weird that happened in LOMAC I'd never do any flying ;-) Andrew McP

Last I heard, the movie would only get on the disk if there's nothing more interesting to use the space for. I'm a gap filler. :-) Still, it's an interesting opportunity even if it's not my best work. The movie suffered badly from losing the copyrighted material that used to form its foundations, and introducing something homemade to fill the silence wasn't easy or particularly successful. I'm no Hans Zimmerman, that's for sure. Besides, he has an unfair advantage. He only has to write the music, not make the movies as well. Easy job! ;-) Now I find myself a bit trapped though. The fun of making movies is taking inspirational music and using that music to add life to our favourite sim. I can play back endless well-known tunes in my head, searching for useful sections and ideas for movies. But I don't have a repertoire of copyright-free material in my head to do that. So it makes the creative side of things very tricky. The positive side to this is that using poorer soundtracks means the action has to work even harder. Which is why I'm currently trying to justify a x2 3800 or Opteron 165 CPU purchase to myself. My brain says it's silly to buy a dual core processor *just* so Fraps can have its own core to play with when recording movies. But my heart's quite taken by the idea! Unfortunately it's my arms and legs currently doing the overtime at work to pay for the possible upgrade, and I'm not sure my heart can keep inspiring them. They're more interested in lying in bed than making movies. ;-) Andrew McP http://forum.lockon.ru/showthread.php?t=13716&highlight=tornado

Thanks for that Brit. Mmm... can't think "Brit" without adding Ekland. Let's try that again. Thanks for that BRD, I'd forgotten about the placing things on buildings addition. It would appear to be a rather problematic feature though, judging by this... :-) Andrew McP

I was trying to position the tank between the legs of the electricty pylon in the mission editor. I was confused for a while because I could see the shadow of the tank, but not the tank. Then I looked up. :-) Andrew McP

Andrew McP

Some royalty free music is quite good. Much of it is quite poor though (I've searched a lot of sites). And all of it is pretty expensive! :-) Andrew McP

I'm amazed at your dedication to the community, Birdy. Thanks for your hard work! Andrew McP

I've been inching towards an upgrade, planning on a highly overclockable San Diego 3700 in a cheap AGP/PCI-E motherboard to make use of my great AGP vid card. But it's Fraps recording where my PC struggles most, and so I asked the creator, Rod Maher whether dual core would *really* make a big difference. Aparently it does. And he added something which means life might get even more expensive. > You'll definitely see a big improvement with a DualCore/Hyperthreading > CPU as Fraps is able to do the encoding on one processor while the > game runs on the other. Most modern 7200rpm hard drives are capable > of capturing hi-def video (1280x720) without too much trouble so this > isn't often a bottleneck. The biggest speed gains come from > PCI-Express and DualCore/HT CPUs with Fraps. I've been unimpressed by PCI-E cards so far. A lot of promise for the future, but no significant benefits right now over AGP. However the extra bandwidth can by utilised by Fraps because it's ripping data off the video memory very quickly indeed to record on the fly. So... so I'm sort of resigned to "having" to buy a dual core processor instead, and they don't overclock so well (not that I want to try too hard with such an expensive CPU!) It boils down to do I want the best possible frame rate in LOMAC (fast single core) or best possible performance with Fraps? Ah, spending money is so complicated. Maybe I should just buy Vegas instead and work with the painfully slow, but very capable avi-maker? :-) Of course if I bought Vegas then I'd have even more reason to get a dual core processor! Mmm... maybe I should just get a PS2 instead and forget this stupid, complicated hobby. Either that or win the lottery... which might be tricky, because I've never bought a ticket in my life. We call it "the stupid tax" round here, because the odds are 14,000,000 to 1 in the UK lottery, which is a pretty stupid bet! I'd get better odds betting on a flyable Harrier in LOMAC. ;-) Andrew McP

Nice tip. There are so many different settings to tweak, and it's such a pain changing them, loading up LOMAC, wondering why it didn't do what you thought it ought to, then quitting & starting the cycle again. I usually end up forgetting what I was trying to do in the first place, and give up. :-) Andrew McP

Nice first effort, with some really good close up shots. Fraps can be difficult to use though, and I recognise some of the jitters well. :-) I'm beginning to feel inedequate though. It looks like I'm the only person in the whole world who can't afford Vegas 6! Maybe I need a new job? :-) Andrew McP PS The small file is prettyy high quality for anyone looking to save themselves a large DL and a chunk of HD space.

Great work EB. I like a nicely developed "plot", and I can see a lot of work went into getting those scenes. Well done. Your Movie Maker's Club membership pack will be in the post as soon as we start the club, steal some funds, design a membership pack, and buy some stamps. So it'll arrive some time soon after the Su-27 AFM. ;-) Andrew McP

1) Google for alparysoft. Their codec works well. The files are fairly lossless and rather large unless you set it to minimum. But that gives you great quality rendering to load into an editor and compress to a final format there. http://www.alparysoft.com/products.php?id=9&allthetime 2) Don't use highly compressed formats. When you edit these clips later into a movie the editor has to waste a lot of CPU decompressing them "on the fly". Better to use no compression or something like alparysoft. 3) No idea :-) 4) Open up your sound icon (speaker) on the system tray. Select options/properties, then select recording, ok. You're now looking at the various channels the pC can record from. Chances are you'll need to swap the tick from something like microphone to one of the ones right on the left hand side... stereo mix or something like that. It seems to be different on many PCs. 720x576 is one of the .wmv formats which comes out of Windows Movie Maker2, and probably others as well. I make my movies in *huge* (1+Gb) format using alparysoft with little compression, then put the end result into Movie Maker which has a nice option to choose (roughly) the output size. Whether that's how ED did it I've no idea, but 25fps 720x576 is normal enough. The trick is getting decent raw material in the first place. Using the LOMAC avi-maker you can run the LOMAC settings at absolute max, remember, and record at 25fps (or more if you want). The only limit there seems to be screensize. I don't think it'll let you render a movie bigger than your current desktop size. Ok, enough from me. Hope some of that helps. Andrew McP

If I remember correctly, this usually means you have a codec installed that LOMAC really doesn't like for some reason. The only solution is to uninstall any optional codecs you have installed. Or it might just be that the codec you're choosing in 'render to avi' is causing the problem. Try 'no compression' instead to see if it still crashes. If so then the first part of this answer might be the problem after all Willy's problem may well be the same thing. Andrew McP

It is *totally*, 100% illegal to use copyrighted music in any form without permission from and/or payment to the various people involved (publisher, composer & performer). It's as simple as that. People say that if there's no money involved it doesn't matter. But that's simply not true. You could say the same thing about people swapping mp3 files with each other, and we all know what the music industry thinks about that! Apart from the money side of things, one thing we often forget is that many artists may object strongly to having their work used in movies which glorify acts of war. There are probably fewer who would object to being used for backing aerobatic movies though, so you're probably in safer territory. :-) In general though we are *probably* safe as long as we're not very popular. If our movies broke out to a wider audience we might run a higher risk of getting caught and fined just like some music file sharers have been. Andrew McP http://digg.com/music/RIAA_Shuts_Down_MMORPG_Movie_Site http://desktopvideo.about.com/od/audio/a/musicrights_RO_2.htm http://www.sonnyboo.com/downloads/indiemusic.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_licensing http://www.pdinfo.com/copyrt.htm

I agree. It looked like someone having fun with the flight model rather than trying text-book manoeuvres. As for the dust, I'd be happy with it as it is. Making it too realistic could make hovering a nightmare. Frame rates would suffer, and when flying a helicopter that's the last thing you need. Andrew McP

I'm sure ED care. But they have to make changes which will make them money, and I don't think enough people care about individual aircraft to justify the effort at this time. We just have to be patient... very patient. :-) Andrew McP

You're right Erdem. But even when LOMAC was at the peak of its popularity, in the Ubi forums few people checked the movie section regularly. Threads in the main forum would always draw a lot more hits than those just in the movie section. Maybe it's different here. Either way, the good news is that movies are like buses. You get none for months and then lots come along at the same time. On average they're very rare. Andrew McP

Hehe. Yes, that's very good advice. Maybe one day, but probably not before I retire in about 25 years' time and have arthritis so bad I can't fly any more. ;-) Andrew McP

Very nice movie with some very well composed clips. I like the tight, compact format (I could learn something ;-), and it's very well edited. I particularly like that "slightly out of focus" effect, it makes it look very professional. Well done. Andrew McP

I've always wanted complete flexibility in which aircraft I can use and where. If it's physically possible for something to happen (ie I'm not talking about launching a B-52 from the Kuznetsov... though it might be fun to try a landing ;-) then I'd like to be able to make it happen. It'd give us a lot more options in the quest to make unusual and involving missions. Duplicating real world deployments etc. is one line to take in sims, but I've always prefered to have the option of doing unusual things with realistically modelled hardware. Perhaps I've just never recovered from not being able to afford a PC fast enough to run Strike Commander. :-) Andrew McP

Very good :-) Andrew McP

Wrong. :-) If something is copyrighted, then officially you have to pay for using it, or -- at the very least -- get permission from the creators & performers for using it. That's why ED/Ubi never used community movies for official promotion. So far, movies made from games have been ignored by music companies. But the industry is now prosecuting people who share music files and there is *no* legal difference between sharing an mp3 and an avi containing that mp3. It's still illegal, and one day Sony or someone else will start to look at this problem. Until then though we stick our heads in the sand and hope it'll never happen to us. ;-) Anyway, as I said above, this movie might go onto a magazine cover disk. So the copyrighted music had to go. So did the Google and Falcon4 clips because I hadn't got permission to use them. Ok, Google Earth is free for personal use, but once you start to use that software for something which isn't in the EULA, you're on a rocky road! I think that's enough on the subject for now. Sorry for being so boring. :-) Andrew McP PS > I love the vid. Thanks. I prefer the original, but that's because I always start with the music in my head, then build the movie around the music. The new version suffers because the music binding it all together has changed, and the two no longer work together as a team in quite the same way. Oh, and I don't use a lot of special effects in my movies because I make movies to show what LOMAC can do, rather than what *I* can do. I also don't have the same skill that GA and LOC have when it comes to special effects. Maybe if I did I might use more effects. :-) Having saids that, this version of the movie does use a little sharpening, a tiny bit of "glow", and some HSV tweaking to boost the colours. This is the first time I've used such things because I only just realised I could apply them to the whole movie at once rather than applying them to each of the many scenes.