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,

I think you're missing my point entirely. True, performance is not measured in MHz - only a benchmark is really a valid performance measure. However, this is how traditionally speed gains have been made and the primary way by which old apps have been made to run faster. Obviously, you can also redesign your CPU architecture and make it run faster, per CPU cycle, than your old ones did. This is not necessarily of any benefit to Lomac however - quite possibly the game would not even run. Also I am not saying that dual core is something new in any way - massively MP systems have been here since the dawn of the computer age, and both Cray and Silicon Graphics were able to achieve their stellar (by that day's standards) performance through the combination of large amounts of CPU cores and clever programming to utilize these in an intelligent fashion. What IS new however is the fact that you will not be able to buy a CPU, 2 years from now, that will run your existing games faster than they already do on a high-end CPU. This is totally unprecedented in the IBM PC world. Up until now, we have been spoiled with an architecture that has continually evolved from the 8080 processor all the way up to P4EE with total backwards compatibility. You can install MS-DOS and run a game from 1988 on your PC and it will run - only about a thousand times faster than it did back then. This is what I mean by Moore's law no longer applying - future gains in performance will happen through architectural design and increasing parallelism, and not through single thread performance improvements. For a more indepth look on what's going on, I suggest the following article; http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm it explains what I'm trying to get across better than I can ;)

As most of you will know, both Intel and AMD are now officially on record saying that future performance gains on the CPU front will be achieved through the use of multiple cores. This is a big change that will affect the industry in many ways, and given that simulators are amongst the most CPU intensive apps in use, it would be interesting to hear what Eagle feel about the subject. Now, the background probably needs some explaining. Up until now, Moore's law has applied to CPUs as well as to mass storage - we've had an exponential increase in CPU frequency and on-die parallelism with the net effect that applications would run at roughly twice the speed every second year. Many times, people have predicted that this trend would stop - but until recently, these predictions have proben to be wrong. Or rather, the chip designers have found ways to circumvent various pitfalls that have allowed them to adhere to Moore's law. However if you look at the last 2-3 years, CPU speeds have not been increasing at the same pace that they used to, 4 years ago. According to initial predictions, the P4 should have hit 4GHz several years ago, but it still hasn't and now Intel have even given up their plans for ever releasing this chip. We will probably get a 4GHz CPU in the not-so-distant future, but it will probably not be a Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon. Obviously, neither AMD nor Intel can afford to nor would they want to, stop selling new chips so they must find a way to keep pushing performance to new levels so people will keep upgrading their systems. The average lifetime of a CPU that is kept cooled and within nominal limits is anywhere between 4-8 years so obviously there's little incentive for CPU upgrades if you can't buy something that will run faster. So if you can't (yet) increase the raw performance of your CPU core, the only solution is to increase the level of parallelism by adding a second CPU core to the solution. And this is exactly what they are doing. And it's not only the wintel part of the industry - Sun have beat both AMD & Intel and released a dual-core SPARC cpu that's on sale now (I have four of them being prepared for a SyBase cluster as we speak). Then there's the Cell CPU that's been making headlines for some months now - not a dual-core CPU as such, but designed for multiple core interaction from scratch and is supposed to scale easily to hundreds of Cell cores working in parallel through onboard and WAN interconnects. Unfortunately, the big drawback of parallel processing is that, obviously, only parallel threads benefit. And what's more, to keep heat emissions in check both Intel and AMD have been forced to throttle back the performance of each core slightly - so single-threaded apps will actually run *slower* on a dual core than on a similar single-core CPU. Furthermore, making a single-threaded app run reliably as multiple threads is far from easy. It's nothing short of a paradigm shift, comparable to the early 90ies move from traditional procedural programming to object-orientation. Once you have multiple threads doing parallel processing of data that must be ready before yet another thread can continue execution, you run into all sorts of esoteric race conditions and just plain weird behaviour. At a bare minimum, you need a highly structured and planned approach to your programming - always Good Thing, but essential once you move to parallel threads. The bottom line is that for the foreseeable future, the performance Free Ride is over. A year from now, old games will not run any faster than they already do. Only new games, written to be parallel, can ever benefit from the presence of a second (or fourth) CPU core. We'll have flashier graphics processors, sure, but that only helps increase framerates for games that aren't CPU bound - and unfortunately, Combat Flight Simulators are very CPU bound due to the massive amounts of ongoing ballistics, flight & AI calculations. On the flip side though, I personally would say that a CFS is a good example of a game that lends itself to parallel processing exactly because of all the various tasks that are continually being performed. Let's say that you divide your game into multiple engines that run more or less independently - weather, Flight Mechanics, user interaction, avionics modelling, and graphics engine are all tasks that seem sufficiently discrete to be running in a thread of their own with occasional (on a human scale) synch using a defined API. And each instance of AI or human (for multiplayer) objects could/should spawn a separate thread that interact with each other and the global environment - possibly using an event driven interface that wakes up a thread whenever something changes that requires attention. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is essentially that Lock On won't run much faster than it already does, ever, unless the engine is rewritten as a multithreaded application. This would involve a lot of work, but I suspect that the end result would be worth it. The process itself would force a design that is both more robust and better performing, and definitely more scalable.

The sim doesn't have an F18 flyable. Even if you can get an F-18 skin by hacking the meinit.xml file, it's still not a real F-18 and none of the specifics will work - such as for instance the arrestor hook. IMHO, the whole excersise is just a waste of time. If you want to do carrier ops, fly the Su-33 - the meinit hack won't give you a functional plane anyhow. Sorry :-/

I wish they also included the BFG3000 to better suit the quake theme - and hey, let's not forget rocket jumping. Yeah. Give us rocket jumps in Lock On. Screw those misogynous so-called "flight simmers" - we want arcade, baby!

Personally I only have two good things to say about LCD screens, namely that they are small and they consume very little power. CRTs are bulky, heavy and power hungry. They also have better contrast, colour rendition and response times than any competing imaging technology. And they can offer better resolution - both in pixels per image and pixels per inch - than either plasma or LCD can today or in the near future. Their primary technical drawback is that the front screen becomes very expensive and heavy once you move past 32" and this is where LCD, Plasma and back-projection screens can beat CRTs - large screen viewing. That being said, my 21" CRT eats up a huge amount of desk space, and I risk back injury every time I move it. If I had lived in a warm country I'd probably also be wasting quite a bit of money on wasted heat emanating from it, but living in the arctics all the heat it radiates becomes ambient heat I don't need to generate in my wall-mounted electic heaters so that's actually a zero-sum game.

Yeah, game EULAs have been limited to one computer at a time pretty much since the dawn of computer games, but before starforce you could at least have multiple installs and move the CD around - which having no kids myself I still suspect was a *must* if you want to avoid huge fights over who gets to install a copy on their computer. The lack of a dedicated server is a big omission in the product as it stands today, but it always was primarily a single-player product with some multiplayer support. Yes, what functionality there is works quite well but it's still fairly bare-bones. Hopefully this may eventually get some much needed attention, but it seems that new flyables is what sells, so maybe not until the next standalone sim.

SK, I noticed that the forum is running on port 8811. You may want to change this to 80 (assuming that you're webmaster of course). Anyone surfing in from a corporate network may run into problems since most firewalls these days also filter outgoing connections and only allow a small number of ports. If you need to run multiple sites on the same host, you can do this on the same port using the ServerName directive in apache or HostHeader Value in IIS. (Yes, I was blocked hehe)

Sorry, my mistake. I was refering to the Tunguska but somehow my brain got crosswired. The testing I did was with a tunguska in a column that did not illuminate me with radar until I was very close, and which would fire on me almost immediately after showing up on my RWR.

So far I've mostly played around with the TV guided missiles, but I thought I'd get some training in SEAD next. One thing that strikes me as very different in 1.1 is the behaviour of the various SAM radars - for instance, whereas the Strela used to light up like a christmas tree a long time before actually firing, I now have to be almost within its engagement envelope before it shows up on my RWR. This is smarter AI than then old one, but it does pose a problem; the radar takes just a couple of seconds from switching on before it fires on me - the transition is almost instantaneous. So in just a couple of seconds I must acquire, lock and fire at the target then dive like crazy (can't turn this behemoth around fast enough to drag the missile) to survive. I guess that SEAD is one of the most dangerous missions you can be tasked with, but can a Strela really go from cold to missile launch in just 2-3 seconds? I wasn't able to test any of the long range, stationary SAMs last night (actually I tried, but was unable to build a functional patriot or HAWK site hehe) but I'm curious about other people's findings.

The fact that StarForce operates partially at the driver/OS level to enforce its security means that any change in the hardware or software level may potentially break the product, even if the game itself can still run. A lot of us will be upgrading to XP 64bit when the release version is done, and I'm really curious to see how well the starforce protected games will handle this transition - if the drivers are broken they will have to release a patch for every game that uses SF, so I suspect that their production line is about to be tested ;)