Starlight

I totally agree with EricJ! It makes no sense keeping the insignia detached from the skin. The only reason should be if really a lot of countries used exactly the same skin with different roundels... but that is not the common case. Mergin the insignia on the skin would also automatically have the insignia of the same res of the skin. Today we often see high-res skins with poor-res roundels. and of course, having the same hobby as EricJ, I support this thing because makes job easier for skinners. roundels should be treated only at template level ;)

links not working ;)

I think you need to be added to the active contributors. I had the same "problem" until I was cleared by the admin

Mr. Radar and Mr. Coffee :) sure that helmet looks like something taken from Spaceballs!

agree we're all easy at pulling 9G turns. this thing weighs 3 Kilos, about the same as a common helmet (an HGU-55 is about 2,5 kilos), at 1.0G, that is level flight (or on the ground). Pulling 9G a pilot would feel about 9 times that weight, not easy to imagine...

maybe, but there are some "shortcuts" X-Plane uses an implementation of the Finite Element Method (FEM) applied to aerodynamic surfaces. The FEM is obviously an aproximation of the "real thing" but the fact that is used in many engeneering applications explains how well it works. Basically it's an aproximation of the problem that it's going to be modelled and also the mathematical equations are brought in a simple and finite form. This allows a easier computation and also, finite calculus is much more appreciated by computers than symbolic calculus.

Falcon Patrol (on C64, not really a sim) F/A-18 Interceptor (Amiga) --- hehe 1994... seemed long to come in 1989! Combat Pilot (Amiga) ---- great campaigns, damages, repair and great immersion Fighter Bomber (Amiga) ---- lots of aircraft to choose from! F-29 retaliator (PC) ---- "Crash and burn commander!" Falcon A.T. (PC) ----- "You can't fly this bird upside down!" It made me discover things like BFM, ACM and Sierra Hotel. great duels even Vs 3 migs! Flight Simulator (3? Can't remember) ---- great flying around Hoare unknown sim, maybe battle of midway? (PC) about pacific air war, never played beyond a "kill em all" phase F-15 Strike Eagle II ----- great missions F-19 Stealth Fighter ---- pucker factor! F-117 ----- great game better graphics that F-19 but not the same appeal A-10 tank killer ----- scripted wingman missions! :) Red baron or Blue Max: can't remember which one. never liked ww1 flight sims. SWOTL (Secret weapons of the Luftwaffe): great game, lots of fun even as B-17 gunner... after all t'was just a game, not the real thing! Falcon 3 ------- still one of the best out there! Tornado ------- again, one of the best ever! Gunship 2000 ----- good game, lots of fun! TFX ------ great graphics. it still played decently on some 486 dx 100 (with water explosions and 3D cockpit!) F-22 Raptor ------- good game, good graphics, really arcadish F-16 Multirole fighter ---- see above :) Falcon 4.0 ---- The box said "benchmark of flight sims" it was true. still some of the best campaigns out there. unmatched immersion! IL-2 Sturmovik: great sim, lots of fun, great immersion LockOn ---- one of the best sims ever, spoiled by some trivial flaws Gunship! ---- discovered late, but great game Flaming Cliffs ---- same flavor as lomac. great sim but still retains trivial flaws Hope I don't forget anything... one that I regret I never played with is Strike Commander. From the reviews it had to be a great sim. But 40 MB of HD space at that time was simply too much! It was like if today a sim needed 300 Gigs of HD space!!! but it had great graphics, great sounds and a thrilling storyline! (and pretty girls too)

amen

could you post a link? I'd be quite interested in watching it. thx agree.

at least here I shouldn't be hijacking anything.... otherwise FBI would put me in their "most wanted" list :) well, the problem is quite clear. there are some serious flaws that go on from Lomac 1.0 through 1.02 and till FC 1.12b... BS is said not to solve any of them, so the gameplay is still heavily affected. The problem is, IMHO, that most of the lomac community hasn't ever played with Falcon series sims... The best they do is a 4 vs 4 AA mission recording their track to show it to their friends, or they take out a bunch of shilkas with a flight of mav-laden hogs. well that's not realistic. I did set up a lot of single player missions, and every time I try to build something a bit more realistic, something goes astray... Sometimes only 50% of the aircraft get airborne, the other half get stuck on the ground because AI pilots sometimes just CAN'T taxi. No simulated malfunction (if it was we should need a simulated spare flight too), simply put AI pilots are not always able to takeoff from parking. Sometimes, while enroute to the battle area, aircraft collide without flying tight formations and in super-VFR weather. Most of the times my AI teammates hit bingo fuel half an hour before me because they constantly keep adjusting their formation with A/B. SEAD flights don't work either. They should pop up and get the attention of the AD to shoot them down the throat, instead, as soon as they're locked up they jettison their precious SEAD load. The next step is to try to strafe with guns SAM sites. good idea. when sams are dummy. Air defenses, just to keep everything realistic, shoot at incoming missiles. Finally you set up a bomb run against a runway.... what happens? that instead of doing a single fast&low pass, the attackers perform many passes at low speed and medium altitude, depending on the number of buildings assigned from the ATO. High losses are a constant. Ok guys, these are serious flaws. I don't think any military is going to buy your sim in this shape. If they do, well it was true what Dave Mustaine once said "Military intelligence, two words combined that can't make sense" possibly I've seen too much, hangar18, I know too much ;)

are you gonna change the first part of your signature? ;)

there seems to be a misunderstanding.... I don't want ED to cancel new 3D models or things like that because - Every improvement is good - Those models are really cool - Even if I wanted I don't have the power to do it ;) - New 3D models don't have much to deal with my bug list Instead I'm saying that some features which are currently employing programmers a lot, could have been delayed to make some room for some basic and trivial bug hunting. Aircraft not able to take off or to fly in formation IMHO (but I feel it's quite a common thought) are much a nastier problem than having bullets not rebouncing away from the ground.... Having said that, LockOn, FC and BS are ED's work, so they do what they want, I'm just giving advices... maybe you're all much more experienced than me so you don't need my thoughts.... Today LockOn is a good game, but it could be a lot better with some small improvements. I think that modelling a brand new advanced phyisics flight model for a helo is 1000x harder than solving the whole bunch of bugs visible in my screens. Being a programmer myself anyway I understand that sometimes is much more interesting to model something new and hard instead of doing a boring work of trivial bug-fixes, i.e. it looks better to work "on the edge" than doing a routine job... Anyway one should also consider that today LockOn wins because is THE ONLY modern jet sim. Falcon AF is a good game but has 1998-kinda graphics... FighterOPS is still very very WIP. WoE is much more an arcade.... but who knows tomorrow...

Have you ever tried to watch vehicles from something higher than a house? They're dots. In 1991, during the Gulf War, highly skilled Apache pilots using hyper-tech vision systems with night capabilities and high magnification, mis-identified some M2 Bradley for Iraqi IFV... and they killed some friendlies. Could you please tell me which Iraqi IFV looks similar to the M2 Bradley? None. Why did this happen? because APCs and vehicles in general look like boxy dots when flying at 200+ mph, even at low level. In the Kosovo war, NATO aircraft mistakenly bombed a civilian convoy, because (I stand to official declarations, don't want politics here) one of the head tractors was mistakenly identified as an APC. And I could go ahead for hours... I end the post describing what an A-10 pilot (one the Hog drivers who were trained for the "simple task" to defend the Fulda gap) said in an interview: I pop up over a ridge line and there's four things out there - an APC, a ZSU, a tank and a truck - 50% of the time I can't tell which is which because in the heat of the battle I'm not going to sit there and say "Okay, which one is the tank?" To hell with that - if I see something, I'm going to put the cross on it, squeeze the trigger and break off. If it's a tank, great. If it's not a tank, great. The longer time you spend on final, straight and level, the greater the chance of you getting shot down. Is that enough? I recall that the A-10 is a Lomac flyable AC. Do you understand now what I mean for "dots"? For those interested, the book quoted is USAFE: A primer of Modern Air Combat in Europe by Michael Skinner and George Hall (1988 Edition - there is also a 1983 edition, but I think the 1988 is a bit more "modern") :) I bought it maybe for $ 3,00 or 5,00 USD on ebay ;)

if you haven't read it yet.... http://www.f15sim.com/ the website is that of the f-15 cockpit project, and a USAFE pilot tells the author HOW did the wreck become such... (the nose is from the Bitburg Eagle that crashed at Soesterberg airshow, many many many years ago!)

10% warning for thread hijacking or for showing unpleasant things? I recall dozens of hijacked threads none of them with warnings inflicted... If you just used the info to correct bugs it would be 10x better ;)

The problem is that the first screens were made with Lomac 1.02 (a final game, already patched two times..... and it's clearly a bug which slipped through the fixes). The other screens are from FC 1.1 (can't recall which version exactly), two years later after Lomac release, and, same thing, still AI wingmen collide with each other in simple, basic maneuvers (or even on the ground). In the meantime, instead of addressing such flaws, they model the ricochet of bullets, which many people probably didn't even know that existed. Are they relevant flaws? yes they are, because everytime I build a mission with more than one flight on each side, something weird happens.... and I am no bug-hunter, when I play Lomac I just want to play and that things go as smooth as possible..... I agree with you here ;)

sorry for this kinda "hijacking" the thread but I wanted to show my point... I think the issues in the screenshots I posted are far more important that having bullet ricochet modelled or the helo blades moved by the wind... just my point of view. and also from the operational point of view, AI laydown attack runs and SEAD procedures should be really addressed in some patch... they actually suck!

more AI Tu-22 unable to fly in formation (notice that one aircraft below collided with another) AI F-15 unable to taxi (starting from shelters)... and notice the bullet-like damage on the wing! AI Su-24 unable to taxi realistic avionics: AI Il-76 killing with pinpoint precision a ground target, just by adding Mk84 to its weapon loads (just to show that _every_ aircraft has the same bombing capabilities)

just to know what I mean.... AI landing (this happened while trying an old skin) another AI landing while trying carrier ops

First of all I appreciate 3D models, they are hard to do and their skins are also great. But I just wanted to say that LockOn is unbalanced under many aspects. Second, I can't help with code, because it's not like 3D models. I just give my feedback, it's some time that I say these things, but with no results... Still a bunch of people out there seem to prefer Lockon as a sim for shooting videos and screens... not that I don't like'em, but that shouldn't be the "raison d'etre" of a sim. Anyway, my point is that the correct modelling of ricochets, helo engine blades and so on, clashes with some _heavy_ flaws in the AI compartment. Single missions are mostly unrealistic if they are set up in realistic environments.

I already know that 3D models are most by 3rd party, but is true that there are some things that are quite unbalanced in LockOn. EG: Su-25T and (future) Ka-50 have amazingly real flight dynamics, the graphics of the whole sim are really stunning..... yet.... some SAMs engage AGMs... which simply doesn't happen IRL. you can read any report, it just doesn't happen, sometimes it can be done, but it just doesn't happen. STOP. SEAD missions in single player are suicidial, because, ok ARMs are incredible weapons, but AI wingmen are _mad_, they keep on strafin with guns and jettison ARMs as soon as they are locked on... not to talk that EW is not modelled in any way... tell me if IRL you have seen a mission in the last 40 years of air warfare which took place without an EW cover... Aircraft collide on the ground while taxiing or landing... Every strike aircraft has the same precision while bombing (you can also add bombs to transport aircraft, and it will hit the target with the same 100% accuracy of F-16 and Su-24) Strike aircraft do bomb runs with brakes deployed at minimum speed... WTH! I really don't care in a sim if ricochets are correctly modelled (if they are modelled is better) but my wingmen gets stuck on the ground while taxiing... or they hit "bingo" too early because they correct their position with A/B while flying in formation.... LockOn is a great game, but I think there are some general flaws which IMHO should be addressed more quickly than others... just because they heavily affect single player missions. There are older games in which AI was much better and was also integrated in a dynamic campaign... the, as far as the 3D models, there is the Tomcat, just to say an aircraft, that still flies with the same skins and maybe 3D model that there was in Flanker (1998?). New APCs are great, but it's a flight sim, even from a helo you shouldn't be able to appreciate APCs details that much. APCs should just be dots on the screen, waiting to be hit....

If the time that is dedicated to 3D models was diverted to improving AI, today LockOn would speak and would also pass the Turing test. The sad truth is that LockOn is a _beatiful_ sim, but quite a dumb one. SEAD flights are synonims of Kamikaze, aircraft smack into each other while taxiing or landing...

You asked for it, well, you got it! http://cgi.ebay.com/USB-MISSILE-ROCKET-LAUNCHER-AIR-DARTS-OFFICE-TOY_W0QQitemZ150032994033QQihZ005QQcategoryZ50197QQssPageNameZWD2VQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem :D btw, this is no commercial, I just picked the first thing that came up on the search results

http://www.f-15e.hu/photos/ila2006_eng.htm if someone wants to build a 1,000,000,000 polys model of the Strike Eagle, here are the details needed ;) a kinda "online DACO"

strange to see the C-2 Greyhoud still there for COD... isn't there any plan for a CF-18 GreyHornet? (CF stands for Cargo Fighter, not Canadian version) a bulkier Hornet to fullfill the COD task.... :)