spiffy
2041
You know what, though? I loved flying into a sky full of fighters and bombers, and the idea that the whole war is actually happening around me, but that’s where the love affair generally ended with me in BoB2. The gfx are understandably ancient, but the damage model was really frustrating. When planes were peppering me, my plane definately felt the effects of severed fuel lines and damaged wing surfaces, but nothing I ever inflicted on other planes ever felt very good. For the most part, I saw little poofs as my bullets hit, but rarely did it look like it made much impact. I had to absolutely bathe a target in lead before they ever went down, which given the jumpiness [of a the realistic flight model], usually depleted my rounds pretty close to completely. Maybe once in a while, a flap would pop off to give me some kind of feedback.
Playing BoB2:CoD (TeamFusionMod) is like light and day… even though most planes still need a good helping of bullets, -but not always!- you really feel and SEE where things are getting hit, pieces snapping off, glass shattering, fuel lines smoking from several places. And I do feel like Brit machine guns do more specific and tangible damage as you would expect, little needles killing from a hundred paper cuts, and not just making notches on a damage bar. I know that’s probably not fair to Bob2, but it’s what it feels like. So yeah, I’m really digging CoD right now, canned campaign missions and all.
I was really impressed when, after a few missions of taking off in my Hurri no problem, I suddenly couldn’t get off the ground anymore. After a while I realized the heavier cross wind was forcing me to apply too much rudder to stay aligned to the runway so that the drag wasn’t let build enough airpspeed, and once I did get there with too much throttle, made me unstable and crash. A light bit of aileron with a light bit of rudder did the trick, a la RoF rotary planes, but it was fun to really understand the forces involved and changing from mission to mission.
i5-2500k, 2x6970s (only one turned on for this), 16gb RAM. The issue seems to be with Win10—for some reason, it crashes with an out-of-memory error in the stack dump while trying to render some effect. I have source access from back in the day (I wanted to fix the 2D-3D transition that someone else ended up fixing), so maybe I’ll see if I can try to fix it.
spiffy, I never had quite the same issue with the DM. I never felt like I was being cheated. (Did you usually fly the Brits or the Germans? The 20mm on the latter makes a big difference; whenever I flew on the British side I’d often find myself frustrated that my guns weren’t doing anything.) I have the modern, fancy flight sim thing going with IL-2: BoS, and while I do quite like it, it just doesn’t have the sense of place and atmosphere that BoB2 does, when you see a giant German raid on the horizon, or when you’re chasing a Spitfire down through your bomber box.
spiffy
2043
Yeah, exactly, the German cannons made all the difference, which struck me as odd since, you know, the Brits did better on the tally sheets, usually… (allowing for home field advantage, etc.).
I’ve read reviews on BoS, and it seems that’s the familiar IL2 cry, that too much attention is spent on the technicals and not on the immersion. Curious, since that was one of my biggest criticisms of RoF, that we never saw a single soldier dude unless he was statically manning an AA gun. I realize making a library of soldiers and animations is a big endeavor, but you could have done it extremely low poly or even with sprites, with some canned attack sequences, and the immersion of a front battle would have quadrupled. Same with Stalingrad… how rad would it be to see a line of infantry alongside the tanks? A few buildings exploding here and there, tracers along the ground…? Even CoD could have ‘faked’ some bomber formations on the horizon for scale of conflict, with some low poly dummy planes (but I guess the whole rabid part of the community would’ve gotten angry at not being allowed to hunt them down…)
Not to pimp my own video here, but… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXh5UM_5xkg
Turn that up to 1080p 60fps and just watch a while. DCS 1.5 is SO GODDAMN GORGEOUS. Seriously. Just like, the shadows in the cockpit and the glare from the sun and the feeling of speed over the terrain and and and… Holy crap. Even after like 10 hours of flying it I still find myself getting distracted from combat by how pretty it is. Maybe it’s just that I’m not used to having a $300 video card in my rig, but damn graphics have come a long way since the early days of flight simming :)
The little “cracks” in the plastic of the cockpit bubble get me every time I glance upward. That just looks SO real.
spiffy
2045
Over the weekend I’ve installed my backlog TakeOn Helicopters and am playing through the campaign missions. It’s sure feels like Arma, with the clunky feeling to the interface, but generally I’m having a decent time. It’s nice to play a modern-era sim with missions that don’t involve getting blown up out of nowhere by someone you can’t see… it’s like Microsoft Flight, but with cheesier dialogue. The graphics feel a bit dated now and I hate how strangely desaturated the ground textures are to the auto-gen, but a healthy helping of Reshade bloom and vibrance helps here.
I am surprised at how hard it is to get a chopper to stay where you want it at a hover. I don’t know if auto-hover is a real system in a chopper, but I’m trying to use it as little as possible. But man, you drift all over the place all the time. Even just a little bank, which is hard to keep track of, especially when you’re looking around with TrackIR, introduces all kinds of slop in your position. In Arma it usually helps since the bullets miss you when you’re careening all over the place, but not so much when someone is trying to attach a bucket to your tow line. But then I see videos like this and I’m like…jesus.
schurem
2046
Gorram that is one sierra hotel stick!!!
Wow! That guy with the chopper and the trees is insane. I hope they’re paying him a ton of money for that :)
Wowsers that’s some impressive helicopter’in!
I don’t know if any of you are big Youtube video watchers, but whenever I see one of Dslyecxi’s Arma helicopter videos and say to myself, “That’s completely impossible,” I remember that video. It may not be plausible, but helicopters are magic, and it makes sense that if you study such sorcery for long enough, you can do some pretty impressive things. I say that as a simulated sorcerer myself, too. :P
Erik, DCS 1.5/2.0 is certainly gorgeous, but the handling of it is once again leaving a sour taste in my mouth as regards Eagle Dynamics. The Ka-50 has a few outstanding bugs now, again, which prevent any inflight navigational changes on the Nevada map. (You can’t enter a west longitude into the PVI-800, although it supports west longitudes, because they never had to worry about it before now.) It’s a known issue, has been reported several times by ED testers, and not just the hoi polloi, but there has been no movement on fixing it in the five or six incremental updates to 1.5 that have been released since.
That helicopter pilot must use the Force or something, because that is… wow. Just wow.
spiffy
2051
Thanks for the bump on Dslyecxi… I hadn’t seen this doozy he posted in a real Little Bird (or its civilian counterpart, my sound ain’t working on my work desktop today.) All I’m thinking as I watch this is “hoohoohooooo!”
Don’t give Dslyecxi any publicity. The guy is a serious grade A douchebag. The attitude/arrogance on that guy is astounding. I speak from personal experience.
Sorry, I’m okay with this. I love his YouTube content.
I started installing DCS World from Steam to check it out and see if I want to keep it on my list for later.
I had to uninstall it as soon as I saw it made a “STEAMVR” category that I didn’t ask for. You do NOT touch my game list, assholes.
I’m downloading the 2.0 alpha from their website. Can I really fly around the NTTR for free?
Editer
2056
That’s Steam doing that, not the DCS guys. If you have Elite, it creates a SteamVR category too. Valve touches your game list if it wants to. :)
It’s more fun to overreact, though. I guess.
schurem
2058
ninja’ed. what he said lol
Oh it was just generic rage. I’m happily downloading the client directly from their website.
Thank God I didn’t buy Elite through Steam. That would’ve been awful.
Chamot
2060
I’m not sure but I don’t think you can fly around NTTR without buying the terrain, it is a paid product after all. 1.5.x is the one you want.
