Dark_Sceptre

On a completely tangential note.... While watching you use the mouse to interact with the avionics (really looking forward to that clickable pit btw) I realized that having a mouse cursor linked to coordinates on the screen may not be the optimal scheme when trying to hit buttons in a 3D cockpit wearing a head tracker. As a longtime TrackIR user myself I know that it can be very tiring to hold your head completely still. And I imagine that you need to do exactly that while manipulating the buttons in the cockpit - since the mouse cursor is linked to your screen, any head movements will throw you off target and requires a correction of either the mouse your your head position. Add in the fact that you probably have to keep an eye on your other instruments and the ground to boot, and I imagine that us trackir users may be in for some hairy moments. Anyway, this got me thinking that it would make more sense if your cursor movements were interpreted as being relative to the cockpit itself - and not the screen through which you are viewing it. To explain: the cursor ought to stick where you last left it when you pan around with your hat or TrackIR - so that you don't need to hold your head still in order to hit a particular button. Obviously this is not quite trivial to implement in practice, since the cockpit is a three-dimensional object while your mouse only moves on one plane - but imho it might be well worth investing some intellectual capital on it - I am convinced that this will save a lot of stiff necks in the long run :) Oh and ps: Digger video'n din, stikk innom #lomac en dag da :thumbup:

Well.. I was actually being sarcastic there ;) I've long been of the opinion that a combat flight simulator without a good mission / campaign engine is just a highly advanced form of quake. And while I enjoy the great visuals and highly advanced flight model in the game as much as the next guy, to me they are the icing on the cake but not its filling. I suspect that by now, most those who are still regulars on this forum really couldn't care less what type of mission generator or campaign engine the next gen sim has. I've seen too many people argue that it doesn't matter - multiplayer air quake is where the action is - so I guess Eagle will be releasing a product that suits their customer base.

The consensus reality seems to be that campaigns are not necessary at all.. after all, it's a well-known fact that aerial warfare is mostly about the hunt for something to shoot down. So obviously a campaign with lots of ground units fighting their silly wars over who controls which strategic areas is just a silly distraction from the main part of ANY decent combat sim: The fragging bit. Duh! PS: :D

Get both, definitely. Lomac is a fantastic simulator which will bring you hours of enjoyment, and Falcon4:AF is without a doubt the most complex simulator ever made (well some BMS fans might disagree hehe). Since the sims are so different in terms of scope and what is modeled well, you really should aim to keep playing both. There's no question that dogfights and combat air support missions are a lot more fun in Lomac than in Falcon4 due to both the higher degree of FM fidelity and the higher detail in the visuals. And on the opposite side of the coin, flying a campaign mission in Falcon4 with a massive scale war going on everywhere around you has an incredible pucker factor. If you really must concentrate on just one of them.. well frankly I can't say which one, that'll have to be your choice. The good thing is that both Eagle Dynamics and Lead Pursuit are dedicated to keep improving their simulators, so the future holds even more goodness for both sims. Maybe Falcon will one day get a visual facelift to the level of Lomac - and maybe Lomac will get that fabled online dynamic campaign one day. Or maybe they will always be different beasts - we'll see in a year or two.

One issue with 3D clickable cockpits which I didn't really notice until Janes FA18 got TrackIR support (YAY, Kudos to the gang!) is that it's really hard to use the MFDs when the mouse cursor uses your screen coordinates whereas the actual positioning of the instruments is linked to your head movement. With head tracking you are constantly looking around your instruments and outside, but since the mouse cursor moves with your PoV you have to hold your head still in order to use any instruments. This can be a bit tiring and you often wind up losing time in the heat of the moment. A better system (and fairly easily implemented I think) would be to make the cursor a 3D object that moves in relation to the cockpit and not the screen. This way you could place the cursor over the instrument you're using, glance around and look back to find the cursor just where you left it. And no - I don't think having an animated hand or glove really is the solution because it's bound to obscure instruments, and whereas you could just move your head laterally to look behind your hand in real life, you'd have to move the hand away in the sim. Anyway I'm all for clickable cockpits, at least in those airframes that have more than the basic avionics. Oh, and did I mention it would be nice with an online campaign mode? :-D

Yes do ignore everything I said and keep ranting. It seems to be what you're proficient at. I think I'll go away now and leave you sad lot to plot how best to take over the world. Most of the people who had some perspective and the ability to think in a rational fashion seem to have gone on to greener pastures already. Hmm. Is that a grassy meadow I see? Yep. Maybe I should just .. yes.. I think I will head over there instead. Byeee...

If you lot & Eagle wanted an immersive environment, you'd be flying in one today. What you have now is what you asked for - a visually stunning flight simulator. The fact that so few of you are capable of looking beyond the immediate visuals (which btw are far from bad in F4:AF), really says it all. I could tell you that once you take off in a fully simulated war, you don't have the TIME nor the inclination to pay any attention to the visuals, because you are too busy sorting out radar returns and trying to make your assigned target on time and in one piece. But clearly that holds absolutely no value here - cause you simply aren't interested in that type of simulator.

Well, it's probably a combination of many factors, including the season. However there's also the fact that Lock On never was particularily tailored towards multiplayer and this shows in the lack of online games. Most of those who do fly online regularly seem to be doing dogfights, player vs player, and that's the only online game that works particularily well. Those of us who want to fly cooperatively need to constantly make new missions (or refly the same stale old ones) and after a while you just get fed up with the whole thing. It's been said so many times but I'll say it again: Lock On needs a more dynamic universe, and a coop campaign. Otherwise it's all Air Quake, and many of us just aren't into the whole "my missile is bigger than yours" thing. Combat flight simulation is about recreating the feeling and complexity of flying a high performance aircraft, and not about beating the crap out of your friends - although that can be fun, it's not why I enjoy flight sims. Well.. IMHO anyway ;)

Hang on a minute ... people actually fly team deathmatch in the 25T?? Seems pretty pointless to buy an addon featuring a ground attack plane.. and then using it to shoot down other people..

Unfortunately, with VAT & taxes I wound up paying about 2000 NOK for my TIR1 when I bought mine 2 years ago. Pricey indeed, but still cheaper than buying from the only norwegian importer who demanded 2500 plus transportation.. damn monopolists :( Even with the low resolution I must say that the TIR1 has to be *the* best single hardware purchase I ever made. I frankly can't imagine flying any combat sim without trackir - which unfortunately means that my copy of Janes F/A 18 is now officially shelved.

Yes we're all amazed at your incredible memorizing skills, Enigma. Now the rest of us however would find it useful if one could check or change keymappings without exiting a flight. Yes I know, we are all weak untermenschen who do not deserve to play Lock On, but there you have it - most of us simply aren't perfect like you.

Lol! Is that a cigarette lighter I see? You must have had a blast building that desk ;)

Okay just to clear a few things up here. I should probably have stated in my first post that I wasn't really trying to say that the actual Moore's law was in jeopardy - ie, that complexity has come to a standstill. However, in popular press the law has been extended to also include processor speeds, memory capacities, and mass storage. The reason I started the thread was to point out the fact that we may be in for a disappointment in regard to Lock On's performace on future systems. There is still room for growth on the graphics side and the game does seem mostly GPU limited, however there is always a bottleneck and when the CPU becomes the limiting factor, there is currently *no* new technology in the pipeline (that has been publicly announed) which will make Lock on run faster. None. GGTharos: no, lock on is not a multi threaded application. It does not benefit from parallel processing and this has been shown in benchmarks at simhq.com. In order to benefit from the next generation of hardware (be it multi core single die or SMP) a major rewrite of the application would be necessary, probably with redesign of the internal logic to compartmentalize the engine into multiple independent entities that do not share address space, stacks etc. The reason it isn't already written in this fashion (it would certainly make sense from an architectural point of view) already is probably simply that multiprocessing systems has been limited to mid- and high-end enterprise systems so far. I am of course open to the possibility that AMD and/or Intel are two months away from announcing a new line of CPUs that speeds up single thread processing to the next level. However there is absolutely no evidence of this in any publications from either manufacturer, nor does the industry in general expect it either. More probably, the problems that Intel experienced when trying to build a faster Pentium 4 can be explained by the law of diminishing returns. There comes a point in any process where future improvements cost more than you gain - think of it as an asymptotic curve where speed is the Y axis and money spent is on the X axis. Once your expenditure both in R&D and production outweighs your most optimistic sales prediction, there's no point in trying to push harder - you just keep loosing money. AMD never even tried to tackle the problem but moved straight to 'true' 64bit and multiple cores. I would like to be wrong in this matter. I would be very happy if someone announced plans for an i386 CPU that can run a single 32bit thread twice as fast as a P4EE can. But I consider the possibility remote the way things stand. And based on this, I can make the broad but not unfounded statement that there is a very real possibility that Lock on (and most other current games) will not run any faster, 2 years from now, than they already do. Unless, of course, they are rewritten. Hope that makes my point clearer.

Multiprocessor systems never made much sense for gaming purposes. Hardly any games ever have been written with multithreading in mind, and the only benefit you gain by having extra CPUs is that the game can run on a dedicated CPU. If you run many apps in the background that consume CPU, you may notice improvements in speed but if not then buy an FX-55. Your socket 949 mainboard will support dual-core CPUs too, so when there are more games out that benefit from multiprocessing you can get one.

Yes, and new motherboards & HDDs will support command queue reordering which futher improves multi-tasking performance (todays IDE HDDs are abysmal once you get more than one active task requesting data from mass storage); clearly, our systems will keep getting faster one way or another. The whole industy is geared towards growth through obsolescence rather than through spare parts replacement, and as long as it can be done they will keep making systems that are better. The big challenge here is that writing parallel code is exponentially more complex than writing serial code. Any task, when broken into discrete steps of "if - then - else" etc, can be written by practically anyone who's versant in programming. The challenge in single-threaded programming lies in managing complexity and writing fast code. Once your code needs to split into multiple parallel jobs that need to interrelate, you run into the same problems that typically only OS designers have done until now. Quoth BocaBurger at Tek-Tips,