Recent air combat sim recommendations?

I have the original EDTracker and am very happy with it.

I have a TrackIR3 I don’t use anymore. Free to a good home if P&P from .nl isn’t prohibitive.

I checked but it seems sadly (but quite logically) limited to the newer versions of Il-2. Would have been great, as I long for extended time controls in the Il-2 replays!

I’d also have gladly paid the transport for the TrackIR but, yet another tragedy, they only work natively in Windows.

I downed my two first (averagely piloted…) zeros aboard my P-40. It was quite awesome to really feel the difference in performance on a “physical” level between my plane and theirs, as I had very little hope to catching up on them if they tried to run away.
I find the padlock view not convenient in Il-2. The powerful graphic engine makes scanning around the cockpit using the mouselook much more intuitive and convenient, in my early experience.

I’m a little surprised nobody has made a joystick with a touchpad at the top for looking around, kinda like the touchpad on the steam controller. The mouse/touchpad really is the most natural and efficient way to look around, and mouselook is what’s made shooters so big on PC.

There was such a thing on the thrust controller of my previous Saitek HOTAS, but it was super sensitive and prone to drifting, and unusable in the end…

A head mounted display combined with 1:1 head tracking is far more natural ;)

I hear that. :) At the same time, consider how natural shooters feel without requiring VR. The key ingredient is allowing you instantaneous turning via mouse, which is (a little unrealistically) married to your gun sights shifting. When you’re in a vehicle, you don’t have the same ability to turn on a dime, but a joystick/wheel with a good touchpad would probably be a fairly similar experience.

Can’t people use the hat on a joystick to look around any more?

That’s the old way of doing things, but it’s very lacking. Imagine playing a shooter with a D-Pad. At the very least you’d want the gradual controls of a stick, but even better would be to have the movement of a touchpad/mouse, where you can immediately control not the rate of movement, but how much to move at a time.

Considering the probable size of what it would be and the fact you would be using your thumb to use it just like the hat, or where else would they be putting the touchpad on the joystick, I don’t see it really being an improvement. Neither one will come close to a tracker like TrackIR or EDTracker.

Can’t know until you try, right? I didn’t think touchpads would work on the Steam controller, but now I love it.

Well there isn’t any place for it really on a throttle, and the only place that would seem to make sense would be the top of the joystick where the hat currently is because it would have to be someplace that you are constantly in contact with. It could possibly replace one of the hats on the throttle, but that would seem awkward as well.

How big is the pad on the steam controller?

Diameter is about 1.5 inches.

What I think would be ok for me is a trackball on a throttle control, but nobody’s ever gonna make that.

If they widen the top of the joystick out on this T16000M they might be able to fit it there.

They… if this is gonna be done, its gonna be a DIY hackjob.

I was searching the web for a wacky mouse-stick I remember from the extravaganza joystick period of the 90s, and I stumbled accross this.

No doubt that Star Citizen’s only goal is trying to reenact a whole period of time!

Edit: ha, found what I was looking for and it was called the Cyberman, but it’s actually a lot less interesting than it was in my mind.
Turns out Logitech released a spawn, called the Cyberman 2 too.

Glorious MiG of glorious revolutionary design has flown all through Museum Relic Campaign. My heart is full of both happiness about glorious victory and sadness about end of masterfully written and built campaign.

Free to play ww2 flight sim is being released on 7th january

DCS F-14 press copies went out recently, and the videos are starting to pop up.