Dark_Sceptre

Wondering if there are any ways to slow down the maverick cursor when ground stabilized. It's a royal pain in the ass the way they jump around now - you can be trying to lock up a strela in a column and keep jumping back and forth across it before finally locking up the tank behind it, all the time flying straight into its engagement zone.

I would expect that they recorded a raw (uncompressed) AVI file to a fast disk in full quality, and reencoded it using mpeg4 to reduce its size to manageable levels. You can fit an entire 2-hour movie at near-DVD quality in less than 1.5GB with a good mpeg4 codec. Windows Media Encoder can encode to Microsoft's own mpeg4 implementation (WMV) or you can use one of the freeware DiVX codecs.

So you're basically saying that if they bundled the game with all known viruses known to mankind, we should still download and install it? ;) Okay. So basically anyone who doesn't agree with YOU should promptly leave and never say a word again. Hmm.. okay.. but if you really dislike the company of others that much, why don't YOU leave and let the rest of us keep talking to each other ;) Yes, it's just a darn game, and that is precisely the context you should view this in. If I am concerned about potential security issues I might introduce into my system, then the fact that "it's just a darn game" will definitely affect my decision on how to move forward.. and probably not in a favourable direction for THIS particular product.. if you catch my drift.

Well there's a broad sweeping statement if I ever saw one.. There's no doubt that piracy has cost the industry a lot of money over the years but it is also true that the numbers quoted by the industry tend to be a best-case scenario where everyone downloading a pirate copy would have bought the product at full price. The primary reason that PC games have been in decline the last few years is the competition from consoles, both for customer base and also, more importantly, for developers. PC game development is much more complex than for console because of the wide variety of hardware that needs to be supported. A playstation is the same everywhere in the world, with only one variation - the TV format generated. The customer base is also huge - there are a lot more people who own a gaming console than who own a gaming PC (yes there is a difference). From an economical point of view it really makes perfect sense: Developing for consoles costs less and reaches a much larger customer base. Those who still develop primarily for the PC platform must therefore be doing it because the platform offers unique features not found on a console (a keyboard and mouse for instance...) or because of the raw power offered by this platform compared to the cheap and relatively weak components that consoles are built from. So while there is no doubt that piracy is a big part of the picture it is not the primary reason for the decline in PC game sales. Again you make a big sweeping statement with no supporting facts. Personally I work in a large IS Operations department and one of our biggest problems is keeping our farm of windows hosts secure in the face of massive security flaws. I recently had the misfortune to suffer a complete harddrive failure due to a bad drive, and while reinstalling windows I accidentally connected my public interface to the internet before I'd installed a firewall application. Within half an hour I was infected with several worms that eventually forced me to wipe my OS partition and reinstall again. The primary reason this can happen is that the security mechanisms present in both the Operating System itself, and in the applications that run in it, are designed in a fashion that lends itself to being exploited and requires constant attention both from the developers and from the end-user. And to exacerbate the problem we have these wonderful little applications, often so-called "security products", that take it upon themselves to circumvent those measures taken in the OS to protect the system from invasion, and usually end up introducing massive security flaws just waiting to be exploited. StarForce seems to fit nicely in this category - their desire to protect their investment (ie stop you from copying a CD) overrules the end-users need for a secure system, and so you end up paying them to compromise your system. Many of you may know what a DDoS is, and why they are such a huge problem for any internet-connected host. But did you also know that security holes such as the one discovered in StarForce 1.X is exactly the type of loophole that these worms use? Right now, this instant, the probability that someone will write a worm that uses StarForce to propagate itself is rather remote, because the target platform is relatively small compared to the potential host base that an Internet Explorer explit would reach for instance. But if/when StarForce becomes a commonly used standard in PC games, most consumer systems will have this driver installed. If the loophole is easily exploitable, it's fairly certain that someone will write a trojan that actively uses it as part of its suite of known exploits. If this happens, StarForce will have joined the steadily increasing ranks of "Security Companies" that rather than being part of the solution, have become part of the problem. But hey - at least their legitimate customers won't be making illegal copies of THEIR protected software. Nossir. They'll leave it to the long-suffering IT departments, and their competitors who HAVE A CLUE to sort out that particular mess. I'll leave it to you to decide who the uninformed great unwashed masses are - I don't like fingerpointing myself. As for context - you said it. This is a $35 piece of entertainment software, and I had my mind set to buy it until this latest fracas. Now I am pretty much decided not to buy it, for reasons that should be obvious. I am entirely capable of protecting myself against whatever security explits I might be introducing into my own system, however the best protection is to Just Say No. Which I am doing here and now.

The policies you refer to are indeed a subject of some controversy. But microsoft have a monopoly so they can pretty much do as they see fit - even taking them to court hasn't made any big difference. So we all live with it, or run other companies' software when possible. As for Eagle choosing to only develop for the CIS market.. I'm not sure that would be such a great loss any more. *shrug* The sim genre may be dying, but they won't be its saviour that's for damn sure.

The more I read about starforce the more I realize that this is not a piece of software I would willingly install on my computer. No amound of carjoling or attempts at making me out as a computer ignorant will change my opinion on this - and frankly some of you guys who have been posting your "informed opinions" so far strike me as anything BUT experts in computer security. Just because you are a fan of ED doesn't mean that you have to blindly defend their every move. Going to starforce is, in my opinion, basically not defencible from any standpoint. People are paying them for an entertainment product, not for a piece of malware (Yes that is indeed what Starforce is by any definition except probably the manufacturer's). The reinstall limit may or may not be a problem - from the description it sounds like something you can live with, since the counter is reset at the 1st of the month, but this too is not really a morally defensible position. At the very least the license agreement should state in no uncertain terms that you the customer are paying a one-time fee for the LEASE of this software, and not the PURCHASE of it. I was planning to buy Flaming Cliffs, but you just lost a customer Eagle. Sorry. Seeya next time maybe.

What he means is that there are separate input mappings for each combat mode. So what you do is to set the button in Nav mode to CAC, in CAC mode you assign it to BVR, in BVR mode you assign it to GND, in GND you assign it back to NAV. That way, 4 presses will take you through Nav - CAC- BVR- GND and back to NAV again.. which presumably is what you wanted.. right?

*Everything* is hardcoded into the engine - what other type of code is there really? 8) Jokes aside though, this has to be a simple fix or I shudder to think how they must have written the thing..

I guess the timing of when the missile goes active is a direct function of distance, ie at what point the onboard radar is within range of the target. I would not know this for a fact, but my guess would be that the Time to Active depends not only on the range when firing but also the relative velocity of the target - nose hot will close to active range faster than nose cold. And time after aftive will also be shorter in a headon shot than a tail chase. The only comparison I have at hand, F4, has the missiles going active at around 13s before projected impact in a nose-on shot so I agree that 10-13s sounds plausible

Bah I was about to write an intelligent retort, pointing out how much harder it is for a community-based effort to fix a broken sim than the original developers, when I realized that hey - nothing I say can make a difference to those who have already made up their minds, I'm up against religion here. I'll let my parting words be these: Bah!

The Kh25-MP isn't carried by the Su-25? The avionics seem very believable for such a weapon so I've always assumed that the real frog carries them as well - it certainly lengthens the fangs on this particular amphibian.

As you can guess I disagree strongly on that point :-) To me the main reason for having a DC, besides the fact that it's the only way you can achieve anything approaching a realistic wartime setting, is that it provides a level of immersion that canned missions simply can't. I'm refering to other aircraft performing missions all around you; flights being prepared for takeoff or taxiing around you. And the sheer pucker-inducing thrill of flying into the FLOT knowing that there is indeed an ARMY waiting for you on the other side and the only way to survive is to perform your mission as planned, fly the waypoints on time and in formation with your escort. But the regrettable fact remains that there are so many performance-related and other issues that would totally ruin such a campaign, that the conclusion is that it must wait.

True enough. The campaign is actually very similar to the code of a strategy game, making AI decisions on a strategic level and using statistics and a certain level of randomness to wage the war on a 2D map much like wargames do. You could get a pretty good dynamic campaign simply by modifying one of the old board games actually. The main idea is that all this stuff going on in a statistical 2D universe carries into the 3D world when you launch your plane and continues in the background, influencing what you can see and being influenced by your actions. Actually a DC would be worse than useless, it would be a complete disaster. If the AI can't take care of itself worth damn then the war would quickly degenerate into total chaos, with airplanes doing anything BUT their tasked mission. So I guess you are correct that the DC will have to wait until the AI is reasonably competent.

From your description of the problem it's hard to tell wether this is a real issue or the actual normal behaviour of the game. I recently flew a couple of Frogfoot missions after a hiatus of several months, so my flight handling was a bit rusty. Whilst reacquainting myself with the flight controls I noticed that there is indeed a strong tendency towards porpoising which requires a fair amount of training to get accustomed to. There is a natural tendency in an airframe in motion to 'bounce back' after a change in attitude - call it a resistance to change. This is caused by the Angle of Attack being nonzero - the airframe is constructed to be in balance when flying straight ahead, and when you pull back on the stick your velocity vector (ie the direction you are in fact flying towards) will not be the same as your aircraft's pointing direction (the guncross). If you do this and then centre the stick, the aircraft will immediately bounce back towards equilibrium because this is the path of least resistance. However this induces a momentum that actually carries your nose _past_ equilibrium, and causes a bounce back etc. And to make matters worse, the instinctive response to this behaviour is to counteract the motion, which causes another bounce. I belive this is called pilot-induced porpoising. Now, this may not be the problem in your case, but the symptoms sound very similar. In any case, the way to avoid this porpoising is to ease your stick into and out of every maneuvre - pull back and hold until your nose is pointing where you want it, then ease the stick back to neutral. It takes a bit of practice, but once you get used to it you stop thinking about it and it becomes second nature. Incidentally, one reason why this behaviour is so noticeable in Lock On compared to may other sims is that none of the planes modeled are Fly-by-Wire. All airframes will bounce to equilibrium when you let go of your stick, but birds like the F-16 and probably most commercial aircraft (not a pilot, wouldn't know) are computer controlled and will interpret your letting go of the stick as "keep the nose here" and hence maintain aileron deflection until the plane is in equilibrium at the attitude you "dialed in" with your stick. Not so in Lock On; these planes are hardwired to your stick and the only input to the control planes is what you specifically do with your stick and rudder, so the pilot must control this behaviour himself. Or am I barking up the wrong forest here? :o

All this talk about Apaches reminded me of the very first sim I ever played; Microproses Apache AH64H Gunship for ZX Spectrum 48k. Filled vectors aside, it was actually a very realistic simulator considering its constraints. Juggling collectives & cyclics with a rubber keyboard and a digital 8-way joystick while trying to stay in cover with multiple SAMs and even Hinds on the hunt was damn hard and damn fun.. ahh. The game even modeled things like safe zones for autorotation landings - and trust me, you'd done a fair amount of those by the time you'd played through all four campaigns ;) This is how it looked like: The row of letters at the top are the warning lights. The yellow area in the middle is a scrolling map - diamonds are mountains, squares with a smaller square in the upper left corner are airfields or FARPs etc. Primitive but surprisingly functional

Actually I've been using your shaders since you released them and even forgot I had them. They did improve performance noticeably, and this was actually part of the reason why I specifically mentioned shader effects as an area ripe for improvement. In my opinion it would be wrong for Eagle to release your shaders as part of an official hack collection; they should instead devote their resources to rewriting the shaders from scratch and possibly using newer pixel shader APIs when available. It just doesn't make much sense to me for them to take workarounds and downright hacks (such as deleting texture files, sound samples etc) and saying "Here, take this, it'll make our game run faster. Oh and btw, half of the game content is also gone".. in my eyes that's bad bad bad. And it's never going to happen hehe :)

Actually I do not think that it's right for the developers to be gutting their own product by taking hacks and sanctioning them as approved fixes. A better idea would be for them to implement certain FPS improvements as ingame options in a tested and proven manner; removing all water texturing might be a suggestion for something that's probably easy to implement and which has a proven positive impact on slow computers. But what IMHO should really be their first priority for performance improvements is locating bottlenecks and fixing them. Things like rewriting pixel shaders to consume less processing power or using PS 2.0+ shaders when available. That would be the Right Way, rather than stripping away features that were put in there for a good reason. Meanwhile, we are free to create our own hacks, rip gobs of stuff out of the game and generally make a big mess .. on our own, and with clear warnings to the user that these are unsupported fixes that are used only with full knowledge that something might stop working.

Re: re Lol, fighterops is rapidly becoming a competitor to Duke Nukem 4ever for a "Vaporware of the centry" award or a "The Gaming Industrys Biggest Farce" plaque. Don't expect anything productive from that front.

You should try a sim that implements this before jumping to that particular conclusion, my friend ;) The fact is that the avionics modeled in Lock On today are highly simplified compared to the real thing, but an okay promise given that the planes included are somewhat simple in design to begin with. However, we're talking about an F-16CJ simulator here and that is a very different beast indeed. I happen to have flown this plane a lot in Falcon 4 and if Eagle Dynamics are aiming towards a realistic avionics suite on this bird, keyboard control is NOT an option. There are literally hundreds of toggles, dials, MFD buttons etc that would be almost impossible to remember, and using them would be downright anti intuitive. The three MPFDs alone would require 60 unique keypresses to operate (each has 20 push buttons); the ILS & TACAN navigation system would probably take another 20 buttons etc etc. Even if they do not model the *entire cockpit*, operating the basic avionics suite would quickly overload your capacity for accurately remembering and inputting the correct keystrokes. Trust me on this; An interactive cockpit is not only desirable but a fundamental requirement to model real F16 operations. And I am definitely looking forward to seeing this, because Falcon is very long in the tooth and Eagle Dynamics may just be the team that can follow up on Microproses amazing achievement.

dont really give a hoot on the campain, multiplayer is the way to go for this sim, see improvements for that would be better, always room for improvement for more eye candy..... And a campaign for multiplayer would be, what, totally uninteresting? Then I guess you should say "multiplayer deathmatch".

If you live in Canada I am totally convinced that there are a BUNCH of online computer stores you could shop in, if you have a credit card (I don't know your age, but that could be a problem I guess..?). And if all else fails, you could contact Saitek USA and ask them for help - they did offer to ship me an X45 back when it was too new to be available in Norwegian stores, and I'm sure they'd be able to help you out too EDIT: As for the second part of your post; A 3GHz P4 with 1GB mem should run the game just fine. I have a 9800XT myself, and I get decent if not good framerates at 1024x768 with medium-high settings, and I suggest you consider staying there as well. This game looks much better with some AA&AF (even 2x is a big improvement) - better than high res no AA in fact, even on my 21" CRT. The game seems to be mostly CPU bound at those settings, meaning that your framerates drop due to CPU workload and not GPU overload, with some notable exceptions. 1GB of mem is just great and there's certainly no point in getting more, as the game's heap size never goes above 512MB anyway (well that I've seen anyway)

The game has enough eyecandy already, it was designed to run well only on future generation CPUs and adding nonessential workload just doesn't make much sense at this point. It's going to take another year at least before a 'regular' gaming PC runs this game well with all visuals. I think most of us would much rather see them spend their development time on improving the rest of the game - AI has been mentioned and there's certainly room for improvement there, and also pilot <> AI interaction (ie, wingman commands) could use some work. And let's not forget the campaign hehe - any improvement on the one bundled with lockon would be a Good Thing imho 8)

I wasn't aware that the campaign persists damage across the missions, but that doesn't invalidate my request. There are two good reasons why saving missions and editing them is a good idea; 1: There IS NO ONLINE campaign. 2: The campaign is completely static and does not reflect the actions of the player; you either complete a mission objectives and move on to the next campaign stage, or you fail them and have to refly. What I am suggesting is a manual and admittedtly work-intensive, BUT online flyable and non-static camapign through a series of handmade missions that start in the state you left the universe upon exiting the previous mission. This is by no means a perfect solution, but as we all know, there iS no solution forthcoming at all - all work is concentrated on visuals, avionics and flight mechanics, whereas the mission engine remains unchanged. There are many people who stopped flying Lock On a long time ago because of the limitations inherent in the engine, and to be completely honest, lock on is only a great sim for pure head to head aerial engagements. I am suggesting a way to open the sim up _a_little_ to the player so that we can at least orchestrate a multi-stage campaign ourselves, online as well as offline, until such a time comes when (if!) the game's builtin warfare capabilities are improved.

Since the campaign engine won't be updated in the foreseeable future, I have a request for a feature that may improve gameplay for mudmovers off- and online. The biggest flaw in the campaign / mission engine today as I see it is that there's no persistence between missions. While it would be great to have a fully dynamic campaign with an ongoing war being fought across the map, we could achieve a fairly extensive campaign if only we were able to save a mission as it was upon completion and edit it in the mission editor to set up a new mission. A major requirement for this to work would be that the state of all objects must be saved. Any structures destroyed or damaged must be recorded, as well as all vehicles. For moving units, their progress along waypoints must also be there. This may be more data than what the mission file format contains today, but imho the extra work would be well worth it. By allowing the player to snapshot the game universe upon completing one mission, and reimporting this into the mission editor, you can orchestrate anything from a short engagement with a couple of flights to a fullscale limited war. Especially for online cooperative or force on force, such a feature would be invaluable.

I agree totally. While I too would love to see ground mapping radar & proper SEAD capability, I could easily live with what we have today if only two fundamental aspects of the sim were improved; the AI and the war simulator/ campaign. According to Valery, they do not plan to do anything with the campaign engine in the Lock On series, but he has hinted that this may be on the list for future products. It is my opinion that Lock On was a brilliant flight simulator featuring some interesting military aircraft, but not a very good COMBAT flight simulator. I also think that the engine reworking necessary to make it one, would probably be so extensive that in the end you would have a completely new sim anyway. With this in mind, and assuming that Eagle still want to be in the simulator business, I personally feel that it would be best if they tie up the loose ends, release a couple of addons to keep us warm and interested, but move on to the next project as soon as possible. With a little luck they may steer clear of some of the problems that plagued the development of Lock On, and perhaps have something new in a couple of years. But opinions probably differ on the subject ;)