Starlight

The shame is that LOBS will quite surely have SF protection. The other shame is that there are many examples of games which sold very well even without copy protection, Oblivion, for example, or X-plane if you want to stay in the flight-sim community. They just have DVD-checks. Adding Starforce to a game makes the game price rise, because you have to pay Starforce and hire some more people to answer about copy protection issues, since there were a lot of them. My opinion is still that a game with a simple cd-check sells more than a game with a hard and criticized copy protection.

mine too ;) even though the Strike Fighter environment seems a bit outdated and surely this sim can't match LockOn's detail. But it seems to have something like a randomized/"a little bit dynamic" campaign. whoa, that's great!

ok, but I still want my fee on that lomac copy! :)

Today I was looking at the flight simulation shelf on the local mall, when a man came close to me and started to ask questions about flight sims. Then he wanted an advice for a flight simulation with good graphics and which was about the F-15, and with no doubt I answered: "LockOn!". Five minutes later a copy of Lockon was in order at that store. Ok, ED or UBI, it's 5.00 euro plus V.A.T., thanks ;)

I joined with my site ;) cheers

http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=5997&view=findpost&p=48814 and check also the terrain in this video (link to thread) http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=5997&view=findpost&p=49294

Lockon will never have a dynamic campaign, at least until the game engine is rewritten: http://forum.lockon.ru/showthread.php?t=6595 surely a dynamic campaign could be played also with a dozen units (if they are dynamic) BUT a dynamic campaign is fashionable if it has a lot of units moving... well lockon simply can't handle this, even without a campaign engine, i.e. with units following scripted orders. Anyway, the branch-tree algorithm for a campaign is useless because it's inefficient not by a constant, but by an order of magnitude... even if you cut the tree by some constant (i.e. if you find a way to script only 1/4th of the missions) you'd still have an exponential growth of the tree -> number of missions. So it's not a viable option.

It's not a viable option. You should do some maths to understand why. Branching means an exponential growth of the tree. A tree which must me manually compiled, with each mission being human-scripted. You want a 10 mission campaign (quite small), with just a fail/succeed result? well, you need to build about 2^10 missions. Actually the real formula is (I correct it from my previous post) ;) : (b^n) - 1 where n is the number of missions for the campaing, i.e. the depth of the tree, and b is the number of possible outcomes of a mission (typically 2, failure/success), i.e. the branching factor. So for a 10 mission campaign you should build 1023 missions ;) If you plan to use a success/neutral/fail scheme, for a 10 mission campaign you should build 59048 missions ;) you should see that it's quite impossible

You must also consider that missile integration in a weapon system is not always that smooth and that cheap. It may take some time, a lot of money and a lot of bugs. The Amraam took more than 10 years to successfully deploy after its first launch (1983). The APG-71 / Phoenix system was ready and tested (and at $ 1,000,000 each, scrapping one thousand "buffalos" (phoenix) was quite an expensive thing). Anyway it wasn't just the phoenix that made the Tomcat an interceptor. Speed and overall performance made it possible. BARCAPs require speed and endurance, long range AAMs and a powerful radar. It's quite clear that SuperHornets can't do good BARCAPs, unless they fly cheek-to-cheek with tankers. And they still don't have the weapon system tailored for that mission.

nice find!

Probably due to high maintenance cost and lack of spare parts (or high costs to get them). And for the political decision to get a new aircraft. I agree with you that F-14D were definitely good aircraft, one of their few shortcomings being the high rate of maintenance hours for each flight hour, specially if compared to brand-new Super Hornets. The F-14D shares many features with the F-15E - Old original design (60s-70s) adapted for new missions (like air-to-ground) - New airframes built in the early nineties - New powerful avionics and digital control systems Yet the F-15E will serve maybe for a long time in the future, while the Tomcat has already been retired. As I already said in another post, I believe the deeper reason lies in political decisions made in the 90s. The F-14D program funds were cut, Grumman lost a lot of jobs and was nearly shut down. While receiving expensive updates (like digital FCS), the Tomcats were never upgraded to get the latest equipment like Amraam or next generation avionics (Sniper pod, upgraded ECM). So today the Tomcat was not a really modern fighter. Some people say that upgrading and prolonging airframe lifetime was not cheap, but if you look at the current price tag for a new aircraft like the SuperHornet, you see that it was a much cheaper option. Instead USAF had full support for the F-15E, and Boeing today is one of the most active (and government-supported) military companies in the US. Boeing is also the company that builds the SuperHornet. Just a coincidence? With the SuperHornet the USN today will have a more modern fighter, with extreme multirole capabilities, which cope with the "single aircraft" concept adopted some time ago. However it's quite clear that in these years the USN has lost some of its potential capabilities, such as deep strike and long range interception, with the cancelled A-6F and the now retired F-14D.

yes, in the original photo, but I was referring to the one posted by tomcat1974

hehe, they're likely to "bump" if they're not already exploded @ M1 :D the ground attack version of the foxbat is said to fly like the A-10 at low altitudes :D :D At least they could put a screen for the Atarisky 2600 console, just to simulate the modern western equipment of the 70s.

I also remember the Mig-23P was the dedicated interceptor for PVO. Unless here "P" is the russian for "R"... that would explain some things... "R" like recon, for example, like brit already said

mmmm... an interceptor without a radar screen... is that a trainer? I heard that PVO regiments were strictly flying under GCI, but WTF, gimme a radar screen at least! It would really be a manned ground-controlled interceptor, the pilot being there just to get the brick in the air and back.

read the NAVAIR manual. I've printed it (2 pages for sheet, printed front/back) and now I enjoy finding out what does what.... each gauge explained... really cool... just a shame that it's missing the part about radar/weapons system (anyway there are all HUD/MFD modes)

glad to see you again mate ;)

Or maybe we need a starforceless game :D

No problems with SP2 and Lockon here! SP2 adds a lot of security features that are not included in single patches. Those features, like firewall, are no silver bullets, they just *help* non-professional users to keep their systems running amidst the jungle which is the Internet... but if you open virus.exe you get "pwn3d" no matter which security features you're using! AFAIK MS supports its OS's, but they require their users to update with the latest patches... if you have an original/authentic OS this process is fully automated so it doesn't need user input. Just a quick note: I've heard that SP3 is being prepared for the next months (maybe next year) so active support to XP will continue even with Vista out. BTW, are you sure your problems are with XP SP2 and not with drivers, for example... or maybe some other faulty programs?

Were you tortured at Guantanamo to come to this conclusion? :D PS: just kidding, please no flame here ;)

that's the point, mate.... LockOn didn't have starforce before FC :)

There are obviously hardware and software tools to deal with DDoS, but they are far from being perfect, they're not silver bullets. And it's still quite difficult to stop attacks when they come from different directions and with different means. The problem with bugged software at low levels (OS and rootkits) is that it can be exploited as trojan horse, so usually safe computers can be used to start attacks. In this way IP-blocking would be useless. No paranoia, I've read things like that on computer magazines and online articles. Sometimes RL can be more challenging than sci-fi and techno-thrillers. ;) Anyway I understand this may not be the place for such a discussion, it's goin' a bit OT.

great site man, I was astonished from the level of detail I could find there.

Hardware drivers work in a different way. Same level of privileges but different ways. Altering a driver you can alter I/O in HW registers, buffers and buses. Altering *software* that works at low system level can cause some other kinda problems. It's just a matter of fact that security experts have found breaches in operating systems, rootkits but not in device drivers. I don't have anything against SF itself, I'm happy for its devs that it works great. But as a CS student I'm really convinced that they solved the right problem in the wrong way... they took a shortcut that is dangerous. BTW, why do you think that the DHS urged SONY and other companies to avoid rootkits et similia? just because they fear that many people may have their own photo albums "defaced" by some crackers? :) There are impressive numbers of zombie PCs throughout the world, that can be activated for DDoS. While they are in some known countries, they can be somehow isolated, but if they are in your own country they become trojan horses. And cyberwars actually happen IRL. Call them as you like, but a huge hacker attack backed (or at least protected) by a certain country is a "cyberbattle".

As I read it on this and other sources, the problem is that the DHS (Department for Homeland Security) and other Government agencies said that they don't want rootkit-like software running on user machines. The problem is that a bug in that layer of software will be extremely critical and will likely compromise systems' security. That means a higher chance of computer-hijacking, which would easily allow DDoS (distributed denial of service). In today's cyberwars (not Massive Multiplay, I mean cyberwars between countries, they actually happen IRL) it's not very strange that a government enters the scene to ask for more security. A large-scale DDoS would hit todays economies like, if not more than, a terrorist attack. About two weeks ago the U.S. DoD sponsored a huge exercise against hacker attacks Vs main Internet facilities. I'm quite sure that MS's "trusted computing" doctrine and other things like that have something to do with government's concerns. BTW, also Symantec and other companies have been told to change their software which was installed in user PCs. So you see it's not just a matter of DRM or a matter of user-knowledge. It looks like that they don't want such critical software running on user machines. The problem is that if all software producers embedded such low-level features as rootkits, users would have to care about the security of all this hidden software. It's not that trivial.