britgliderpilot

Boot camp. It's a free tweak allowing you to boot Windows XP on a Mac, the only other thing you need is a copy of Windows XP ready to install. It's an expensive way of doing things, but you do end up with a Mac to do Mac stuff, and a half-decent PC as well. If you like Macs it's good stuff :) Do it on a Mac Pro and things are better but even more expensive.

I'll take that bet ;) As, I'm sure, with the 504th, the 169th, and a couple of the other big names . . . . . . the thing is PROPERLY addictive.

(copy-paste standard text for "Black Shark is a CHOPPER sim first and foremost . . . . . " here) Blowing up tanks is the key focus of Black Shark, and it's where the effort's going. That aspect of the sim is going to be utterly spectacular ;) While it is an aircraft sim, it's almost as if ED have been contracted to build a hugely detailed helicopter-only flight sim and just happen to have overlaid it onto Lomac. Major air-to-air changes will have to wait until later. Patience. F-16 sim.

Three if you count the one already in-game ;) IIRC, the official position was always that ED wanted to do a new Su27 model themselves - Strikemax's was a voluntary effort. His is rather further along then theirs is, so if it's finished first we can still use it as a more detailed placeholder than the current model until ED's gets here and we can make some kind of comparison :)

IIRC, DX10 is only going to work with Windows Vista and a set of graphics cards that haven't been made yet ;) I'd have to check on Black Shark, but I'm fairly sure the Lomac engine only used up to DX8.1 anyway . . . . . . so you don't need to worry about that. What you WILL need is a very fast CPU, and a lot of video memory. Right now the top of the line is the Core 2 Duo Extreme at 2.93GHz, and if you manage to SLI a pair of Nvidia 7950 GX2's, you will have a barely believable 2Gb of video memory. Yum. Add that in with a pair of 500Gb SATA drives, a 22" TFT screen, 2Gb RAM, and while you'll struggle to fit it all within your £2500 budget (!!!) you'll have a fair shot at playing Black Shark on high settings. Without seeing it run there are no guarantees, but if money really is no object then just buy what you can and see how it goes!

You could probably reduce the AA and AF a bit at 1280*1024 without noticing much difference, for a bit of help. Not much wrong with the graphics card, or the RAM - Google says the Opteron 146 is roughly equivalent to 3.2Ghz or 3200+ so that's where you'd be looking. Unfortunately, that'll also be requiring a new motherboard and hence a new install of Windows. Look around at the prices for the dual-core Athlon 64s and Core 2 Duos.

Depends how you want it - you can Video Edit the track to provide different views, but they'll have to be one after the other. If you want one event from two angles simultaneously, you've got to record it twice anyway, once from each angle. You takes your choice :)

. . . . IIRC, if you use the in-game rendering tool you can set it to record between two set times. Any special reason you prefer using Fraps? Tried time acceleration on the track?

With a card equivalent to a 6600GT, you will not be able to run Lomac smoothly at maximum settings. Take that as read ;) At a mix of medium and high settings it will still look good and be playable - te Core 2 Duo will help, but it's still not going to be maxed out. The Minimum FPS . . . . will depend on the graphics settings you choose, it's as simple as that. If you max it out then expect single-figures FPS over a city with lots of units in the mission. You'll just have to figure out a good compromise for you . . . . .

1. An Airliners.net banner? :P 2. The Test Pilots have been to the paintshop!

Nope, he's right - the control responses are different with the refuelling probe extended. If you've got any control input when you pull the probe in and switch to the different control curve, then it will be magnified - here that's a pitch yup. I've never seen any settings for it, but it's there. Refuelling at the moment could do with tweaking - you might also have noticed that once you extend the probe you get a more precise speed readout on the HUD, too. If you want to test it, go do a handling test on the Su33 in free flight, with and without the probe out - you should see the difference.

Fantastic! :D

Quick tip. Tap "Y" twice. THEN they'd be background material ;)

The one thing I have never, ever thought while flying Black Shark is that it needs better graphics! A number of those screenies are not representative of the way Black Shark actually looks - as you should be able to verify even now if you bother to crank the graphics all the way up on your own machine ;) FSX . . . . . does indeed look droolworthy! Despite those screenies, I don't believe the ground textures are going to be that nice at low level. Zoom in to the point where you can see an individual car on the ground and I reckon they'd be about the same as the last FS. Flight Sim has been useless for NOE flight for as long as I can remember - it's not designed for it, it's designed for navigation at "sensible" altitudes. I don't see it changing here as a result of these screenies. On a similar note, I'd like to see the trees in FSX close up. Lomac's terrain mesh is pointy. Got to grant that. Models - in the process of being updated. Trees - would love them better. Good at high altitude in a forest, not so great right up close. Please remember on the pace of upgrading some of these things that there are some things you can do easily when you're Microsoft, and can't do easily when you're a 30-man game studio in Moscow ;) To be honest, I think Lomac's doing pretty well even without Microsoft's limitless resources taken into account - can it be improved further, yes . . . . . but I have no problems at all with the graphics in Black Shark. edit - a quick note on that FSX city shot. Lens flare effect. Nice. Shiny-rooved buildings. Nice - I haven't seen buildings with rooves that reflect the sun like that, but then they build them differently over the pond. Water on lakes - eerily familar from Lomac. Distant scenery - eerily similar to Lomac. Clouds - eerily similar to Lomac. High level clouds - nice, but there's something wrong and I can't put my finger on it. I think the sky's too deep a blue, and I get the feeling that quantity of cu with that high level stuff doesn't fit. Ground textures - underneath the 3D buildings and trees, satellite photography a la F4. Down low . . . . . ? It's good, it's better - but be serious guys, it's not as enormous a leap over Lomac as some people seem to be suggesting!

There are some on page 5 - here: http://lockon.co.uk/index.php?scr=products&end_pos=982&lang=en&page=5 http://lockon.co.uk/img/products/large/5c1ff8232dbaa883d143219d7fd92230.jpg I just tried my first bit of NVG flying . . . . . fun!

:D MSFS has done gliders for a little while, but I think the last version I had only included a Schweizer - it was an unimpressive aeroplane and the depiction of soaring wasn't stunning either. Looks like they're moving things on a bit - good stuff! Dedicated soaring sims like Condor and Silent Wings are probably going to be better soaring simulators - but voiceover training lessons are good stuff, not sure they stretch that far. Anything that gets more people interested is a good thing! It does puzzle me how they've managed to get that much anhedral on a DG808, though ;)

Depends how closely you can look ;) The "normal" two seat Eagle is an ordinary air-superiority Eagle with a longer canopy, a rear seat, and a very minimal rear cockpit. Flight controls and some dials, that's about it. At a minimum . . . . . the Strike Eagle has bulges for more fuel, different engines which IIRC you can spot at the tail, the LANTIRN targeting pod, and a more more sophisticated rear cockpit including proper MFDs. In general the F-15E just looks chubbier than an F-15D.

Hmmn. British accents. Harrier GR7!! ph34r!!!!

More spaces helps readability ;) All of the above, and a further, more practical reason: ED did make fixes, but they made them to the very same code that they added new features to. It's very, very difficult to separate that out - simple file edits don't work, someone will find a way around it and get the new features for free. Which is unfair - they add something new, you pay for it. Put simply, they don't have the resources to set one mini-team working to bugfix pre-FC versions as well as developing further features and fixes from that point. It has to be rolled up.

Accurate simulation of flight by precisely computing the interaction of the air with the airframe is called Computational Fluid Dynamics - you're probably familiar with it from pretty multicoloured images like this: We're several decades away from being able to do that in real-time ;) IIRC, turbulent flow in CFD is even worse . . . . Properly computed flutter would combine CFD for the airflow with finite element analysis for the airframe - it'd be accurate as long as you had a 100% accurate model of the structure and materials of your aircraft. Otherwise . . . . . it's just much, much easier to use some scripts and assumptions ;)

OK. This guy's funny :D

You're suggesting the Smerch is fuelled by Marijuana resin?!?

There is indeed a famous picture of an F/A-22 in the crosshairs of a Hornet variant during an evaluation flight. It is allegedly the only time a Raptor has ever been in the crosshairs of anything . . . . . . grin. I suspect your numbers are ever-so-slightly off here, which does throw the rest of your, um, story a bit into perspective ;)

They've had the Ultra Tomcat idea. It didn't win any friends. The jigs and tooling for the Tomcat have been destroyed, it has no political friends, it has no funding, it's hugely expensive to maintain due to it's uber swingwing and other stuff, it doesn't have AESA or AMRAAM (yes, I know because it wasn't funded, but that doesn't matter to accountants) . . . . . All that matters to beancounters is that it is expensive to run, would be expensive to upgrade, uses missiles that are beyond their service life, and is generally less financial sense than the Super Hornet. Never mind performance of the airframe - that matters little to an accountant ;)

I think you can, but it fails to register on any gauges. Could perhaps explain this . . . . . . from hereon in, try Shift-L before even attempting to start up, and see what happens.