topdog

LED, unless it's OLED (typically rare for large displays at this time and used more commonly on smaller electronic display panels) is just a reference to the backlighting of the LCD monitors. Which are pretty much all LED backlit anyway. Those branded/sold as 'LED monitors' usually mean they're just using a newer and higher quality design pattern for how they're doing it. For general use, you'd not really notice much of a difference if at all between traditional LCD backlit and 'LED' branded ones, so long as the monitor itself is a reasonable build quality in the first place anyway. 2ms vs. 5ms = marketing terms. No real difference since the way they do the measurements aren't standardized anyway (it may be 2ms to go from a bright red to a slightly less bright red, or it may be 8ms to go from distinctly different shades of grey, or it might be anything inbetween). Just avoid anything that's even daring to report anything higher than 8ms (commonly you'll see the values 12, 15-16, and 25 used). Those ones are typically cheaper/older tech and did genuinely suffer noticably more from 'ghosting artifacts' with fast moving objects. Even grabbing an open folder or empty web browser window on the desktop with the mouse and moving it rapidly around the screen would produce quite undesirable ghosting with these older monitors (and usually a good test to do since the contrast of a white folder window against the typically darker background wallpaper makes the LCD work a bit to keep up). Fine having something like this for bashing out Word documents though of course, but not multimedia/games. The only glossy screen I have (out of 5) is on my netbook. Doesn't cause any problems there for me if I'm honest, but looking at it and using that at different angles, I think for a main desktop usage the reflections it catches would tick me off (I can see some that stand out more than I'd like), but it's up to the environment you use it in. At your stage I would actually best suggest you to get down to a store or two and do some 'window shopping' just to see how they are when on display. Usually stores setup the monitors for 'display conditions' (that means max brightness settings and slightly oversaturated colours for vividness) to catch the eye, but for the comparisons you're after it'll work if they have demo systems setup you can try different things on. Try playing back movies / videoclips or a game if you can, as plain Windows Desktop usage with a mostly static non-moving screen will only give you one perspective. Compare glossy vs. non-glossy ones that way.

Auto-updating Vista 32-bit here. The game has only crashed on me one time only (and for the record I only have experience with DCS:BS v1.0.1c). Iconically, it was right at the end of my first successful mission run and just when I'd hover-taxi'd over to my spot from the runway to land and was just about to descend from my hover to finish up :D Many games would crash on me when using NVidia's "Forceware" motherboard drivers, so as a rule I blacklist the use of those from now on, but otherwise the rest is relatively well behaved in my experience. No overclocking (though this doesn't necessarily cause any problems, it pushes your computer threshold closer to its break point and a bit more risk generally for exceeding that). Only more common issue I face with DCS:BS myself is with the launcher / options app, quite often the UI slows to a crawl or neglects to draw portions of it at all. Flicking to/from Windows desktop and killing FRAPS if I have it running usually cures it, and doesn't cause me any issues once I pick a mission and in-game itself. I'm no expert DCS:BS troubleshooter but looking in that log, I don't see anything that would stand out to me as being a "ah, that looks bad enough to be a probable cause and worth investigating further". Most of the stuff it says it can't find looks fairly normal for a debug log of an app like this, sometimes those messages just get reported regardless of them contributing to any problem or not.

I was happy with this terrain engine back at the time :) http://www.mobygames.com/game/atari-8-bit/flight-simulator-ii/screenshots Was that really 26 years ago.. :shocking:

The trees are sprites, a higher resolution of the trick used in Doom originally. They're densely enough packed and distant here that you can easily forget this whilst cruising around, but if they placed you in front of one and strafed around it, it would be immediately apparent - like being on a merry-go-round where the tree is a pole at the center of the ride rotating around at the same speed with you, not appearing to move. As such, they can look pretty decent where the situations fits, but actually are way less computationally complex (no back-faces to render, only 2 dimensions, etc.) than even the cross-cut trees in Lockon. Edit: They're nice enough to talk about their engine and cover it here actually: http://www.outerra.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=15

Make sure the files that would have been output to your \temp folder didn't get redirected under UAC babysitting procedures to the virtual store. Mine hasn't created a folder (yet) for anything I do in DCS:BS but it did some for my playing in Lockon so look in a similar location to see if you're getting output there. E.g. C:\Users\Topdog\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Eagle Dynamics\Lock On - Flaming Cliffs 1.2\Temp>dir Volume in drive C is bringit Volume Serial Number is C8EE-2179 Directory of C:\Users\Topdog\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Eagle Dynamics\Lock On - Flaming Cliffs 1.2\Temp 23/01/2010 09:21 PM <DIR> . 23/01/2010 09:21 PM <DIR> .. 05/02/2010 10:27 PM 0 AsyncNet.log 05/02/2010 11:46 PM 4,328 Error.log 05/02/2010 10:32 PM 96 errors.log 05/02/2010 10:27 PM 0 mp_log.txt 05/02/2010 10:27 PM 7,739 System.log 23/01/2010 09:16 PM 2,010,238 Tacview-20100123-211114.txt.acmi 23/01/2010 10:03 PM 8,616,722 Tacview-20100123-212119.txt.acmi 05/02/2010 10:32 PM 0 Voice.log 05/02/2010 10:32 PM 0 VoiceText.log 9 File(s) 10,639,123 bytes 2 Dir(s) 135,824,138,240 bytes free C:\Users\Topdog\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Eagle Dynamics\Lock On - Flaming Cliffs 1.2\Temp> (Instead of ...\Program Files\yaddayadda yours would follow your own installation path for BS)

Take a look at some of Ironhand's videos at Flanker Training: http://flankertraining.com/ironhand/flightbasics.htm Specifically the one on that page which would help you is the one called "Flying Online: A Beginner's Guide to Getting There". Short answers include using Hyperlobby or Ubisoft's game lobby software, or just knowing the direct server IP you want to enter into Lockon itself, but the video helps cover in more detail what you want to do and how.

The lever / button is this thing, you'll see when it changes position in-game when clicking on it more clearly:

It looks to me like each small cross is placed 1 minute apart and each large cross is 15 minutes (so every 4 large crosses = 1 degree long or lat). Notice that the placement of them creates rectangles with the longer sides running north/south and the shorter sides east/west. So I doubt it's any fixed distance metric.

I appreciate your sentiments Bob, but I'm still 'reading' and haven't got to that part yet. I trust I'm not required to read every page before I am allowed to ask a question. Forum searches - I did a few - came up empty on this (searching on things like 'pilot graphic' and 'missing pilot' etc.). My main mistake was just (wrongly) expecting to find this to be a graphics performance type option, rather than an in-game keypress toggle. Basically looking in the wrong place, so would never find what I was after. Thanks to those who helped.

Woohoo, I have arms and legs again. Thank you :) Edit: Lol.. I'm assuming there's no fix for this one (not a serious question) - imagine my surprise when looking in the mirror, I've gone from being a poltergeist to the headless horseman of the apocalypse. :D

Relatively new to BS.. doing my dues in learning and reading and watching lots.. I don't think my observation of flight technique is going to solve this one though so I'm going to ask directly :) Where is my pilot?! :helpsmilie: All my helo controls are waving around and moving by themselves, I've seen in other vids etc. that inside the cockpit there's a full pilot graphic with hands on the cyclic and feet on the pedals. I'm used to the 'ghost rider' mode in lock-on but having seen a seated pilot in DCS:BS I'd like to have that too. Just wondering if this is something I can toggle on/off, or was it modded in, or what? In case it's important, I have altered vid settings to almost all max, have a TrackIR device, and a freshly installed patched to 1.0.1c BS, flying various tutorials.

I got it just fine thanks :) Would be hard for me to lag someone else's game if I was taking screenshots in single player after all ! It's good to know these etiquette things though, it's the first time (as a relative newcomer) that I'd heard of this one, and I certainly wouldn't have assumed it would have that effect otherwise. I'm looking for and consuming exactly this kind of info at the moment (seen ironhand vids for multiplayer, advising no taking off on taxiways, examine the briefing for house rules, etc.). :book: I'll search further for such a beast, but if anyone already has a link to a good lomac/dcs multiplayer faq containing common ground rules / etiquette that would be great.

Ohh ok, makes perfect sense now, cheers!

Forever humiliated I may be, but I must know.. what's with the screenprint thing, I don't get it? :surrender:

For other apps, or if you need to play an older patch version because of some compatibility issue, you can still semi-automatically have affinity set without having to do the task manager trick every time. I'm a LockOn flyer and don't have Blackshark just yet but if DCS:BS uses a batch file to launch the main .exe like lockon does this is even easier to just modify the existing game .bat file. Basically, any batch file that has a "start <someapp>.exe" command in Vista can be modified to let you pick which core (or cores) the app uses with "start /affinity 3 <someapp>.exe" -- now it's using cores 0 and 1. The value is a bit-mask in hex, so: 1 = core0 2 = core1 3 = core0 and core1 4 = core2 5 = core0 and core2 ... F = core0 and core1 and core2 and core3 The whole point of doing this, is simply to separate resources from hungry apps.. don't want something kicking off and ruining your framerates, make it run on a different core than your game. As others have mentioned, it's a 'play nice' load balancing operation, useful if some other app decides not to play nice and hogs a specific core and you can't control it from doing that. To try it out, test it with something simple and fast to launch like calc.exe. start /affinity <1, 2, or 3> calc.exe Check in task manager for the results. Close the Calculator app. Hope this helps with any CPU scheduling woes and optimization, even if the latest DCS:BS patch is already doing an equivalent /affinity 3 or /affinity F for you. I use this in other games where I run multiple copies at once, or they have multi-core timing issues/bugs, so I don't have to remember each one each time.