Recent air combat sim recommendations?

Fishbreath · 2015-09-26T09:57:18.000Z

A lock is required. How long are you holding the pickle button? It takes about a second and a half for the missile to come off the rail for me.

TimJames · 2015-09-26T10:23:09.000Z

Fishbreath:

How long are you holding the pickle button? It takes about a second and a half for the missile to come off the rail for me.

That’s all it was. Not a single mention of it in the manual or those long Krause tutorial videos.

JMR · 2015-09-26T11:21:01.000Z

Tim James:

Sweet. Anyone made an interactive ramp start checklist?

I found this but I have no idea if it’s relevant for the current incarnation of F4 as I haven’t touched it in ages.

http://www.f-16.net/downloads_file42.html

scharmers · 2015-09-26T11:26:48.000Z

I think I’m going to fire up Fighters Anthology this afternoon in response to all of this switchology nonsense here.

schurem · 2015-09-26T11:46:21.000Z

goddamn now there’s a title that needs remaking!

I remember that having EVERYTHING from weird one-off prototypes such as the MBB X-31 to the AC-130U gunship herky bird. You’d fly slow lazy circles round an airbase say and poom-poom-poom pound the entire thing to dust. great fun. Or see how an F-22 would fare against four MiG-25s supported by 16 MiG-17s (get horribly facepwned is what it did, and irl). Such a fun toybox for an aviation nerd such as us.

Strike fighters came pretty close, and would do fine. It has nice serviceable graphics, hits the sweetspot in systems complexity and if you can still find the nato fighters mod for it has all the planes. If only TK could get his head out of his mobile arse and make strike fighters 3 with VR support built in…

BrianRubin · 2015-09-26T12:17:14.000Z

scharmers:

I think I’m going to fire up Fighters Anthology this afternoon in response to all of this switchology nonsense here.

If you get it to run, let me know. I love, love, love the fuck out of that game as I believe you well know. :)

scharmers · 2015-09-26T16:37:34.000Z

I’ve posted before on how to get it to run. But to recap just because you asked, Brian:

Install from CDs. The install will bitch about disk size and all of that, because in 1997 a 256GB SSD was basically Magic. Install it anyway. Don’t install DX5.
Install the official FA 1.02 patch. Fixes some stuff, most importantly limits FPS to ~58. Otherwise, game runs way too stupidly fast.
Now for the secret sauce. Win7+ hates so many mid-90s DX games. The steps below work for any of these old games that have graphical corruption (like Rollercoaster Tycoon… and JFA). Create a .bat file containing:

@echo off
taskkill /f /im explorer.exe
set /affinity 0 FA.EXE
FA.EXE
pause
start explorer.exe
exit

Save the .bat file. From now on, use it to run JFA. It will work.

It’s also nice that JFA recognizes all axes from a new TM joystick ;)

scharmers · 2015-09-26T16:43:48.000Z

schurem:

Strike fighters came pretty close, and would do fine. It has nice serviceable graphics, hits the sweetspot in systems complexity and if you can still find the nato fighters mod for it has all the planes. If only TK could get his head out of his mobile arse and make strike fighters 3 with VR support built in…

The last NATO Fighters is pretty much the only way to go in Strike Fighters. And yes, it’s close to what USNF-JFA brought to the table, but not quite. JFA: smorgasbord at the MGM Grand; SF2 series: local Golden Corral.

As for any more PC Strike Fighters… I think TK is gone for good out that particular niche. After NA, it was nothing but comments about how expensive everything was to do. Now that TK can cheaply fire up Unity and constantly reuse assets on mobile apps, he’s in his happy spot. Besides, nothing about NA ever made me think that Strike Fighters tech was going to progress beyond some half-hearted shaders tacked on to the SF1 engine any way. The Third Wire forums have tumbling sagebrush now but little else and even pro-SF sites like CombatACE have moved on to DCS.

BrianRubin · 2015-09-26T22:08:27.000Z

scharmers:

I’ve posted before on how to get it to run. But to recap just because you asked, Brian:

Install from CDs. The install will bitch about disk size and all of that, because in 1997 a 256GB SSD was basically Magic. Install it anyway. Don’t install DX5.

Install the official FA 1.02 patch. Fixes some stuff, most importantly limits FPS to ~58. Otherwise, game runs way too stupidly fast.

Now for the secret sauce. Win7+ hates so many mid-90s DX games. The steps below work for any of these old games that have graphical corruption (like Rollercoaster Tycoon… and JFA). Create a .bat file containing:
@echo off
taskkill /f /im explorer.exe
set /affinity 0 FA.EXE
FA.EXE
pause
start explorer.exe
exit 
Save the .bat file. From now on, use it to run JFA. It will work.

It’s also nice that JFA recognizes all axes from a new TM joystick ;)

Delightful, thank you! I shall try this as soon as I can!

TimJames · 2015-09-27T04:37:08.000Z

Okay, there are a lot of switches in Falcon 4. But I got my first gun kill against a jet fighter yesterday!

In each A-A training mission they have a couple lumbering airplanes to shoot down with various weapons, plus this pesky MiG that flies in and gets behind me. Eventually I decided I’d had enough. I got on his tail with some extremely poor maneuvers and he started evading quite a bit. Finally he tried to cllimb over me for some reason and started going right up my gun sight funnel. I pulled up a bit, squeezed the trigger, and boom.

So I got lucky, but it was still pretty satisfying. I can see why you don’t need a ton of ammo for that gun. We’re not in WWII anymore.

Fishbreath · 2015-09-27T05:09:14.000Z

Well done. I’m pretty sure I still don’t have a kill with the gun.

One of the MFD pages has an option for switching between gunsights. (It might be on the FCR radar page.) Gun funnels just don’t work well for me, so I usually go for the LCOS instead.

Fishbreath · 2015-09-29T11:34:10.000Z

DCS releases the patch notes for 1.5 Open Beta. It’s being smoke-tested, and will be released if it passes.

… so I guess it’ll probably hit in about two weeks, but I am an optimist. Maybe it’ll be this week. If it is, I’ll take some screenshots.

schurem · 2015-09-29T11:44:44.000Z

From what I’ve read, in the consumer grade VR sets (HTC vive, Oculus Rift CV) text is actually readable. I am soooooo ready for that :D

I tried DCS with the DK2 but that was unplayable because it was impossible to read anything. Flying on the other hand was [b]AWESOME[/b]. We live in such great times as flight geeks.

scharmers · 2015-09-29T11:48:24.000Z

It’s nice to see these fixes also apply to the various 3rd-party aircraft.

Fishbreath · 2015-09-29T12:19:33.000Z

Yeah. I will happily trash ED’s software development practices casually, but by all accounts, they work very closely with their third-party devs, and are at least in that respect excellent partners.

schurem, I don’t have any of the VR masks coming, but I do have my name on a CastAR, and it’s looking like they’re finally getting close to a release. Fingers crossed flight sim devs will plug it in.

TimJames · 2015-09-29T21:26:20.000Z

Air-to-air refueling: fuck that.

I spent about 30 minutes making zero progress before I realized I needed to open my refueling door and stabilize at the pre-contact position right before the boom to be explicitly cleared in for contact. No mention of either thing in the legacy manual (probably wasn’t implemented at the time) or the 40-fucking-minute tutorial video I decided to skim through. I finally found a helpful text description of what to do for BMS, likely written by someone who was actually born in the 20th century.

I finally make contact and begin fueling. I make tiny corrections to keep up with the director lights. I’m feeling pretty good about myself. Then that cock gobbler in the tanker informs me that he’s about to make a turn. I mean, can’t he wait one damn minute for me to finish? I last about 3 seconds into the turn before the tanker helpfully says “disconnect.” The lack of any effort to capitalize the word is just icing on the cake.

Done with that nonsense.

schurem · 2015-09-30T00:19:48.000Z

Foxtrot Alpha

The Time A Tanker Saved A Fighter That Was Falling Apart Over The Atlantic

On the 5th of September, 1983, 4 USAF F-4E Phantom jets were flying over the Atlantic en route to Europe along with the support of a KC-135 known as “North Star.” These five aircraft were part of a larger number of Phantoms and tankers on a routine...

Fishbreath · 2015-09-30T05:42:09.000Z

Tim James:

Air-to-air refueling: fuck that.

I spent about 30 minutes making zero progress before I realized I needed to open my refueling door and stabilize at the pre-contact position right before the boom to be explicitly cleared in for contact. No mention of either thing in the legacy manual (probably wasn’t implemented at the time) or the 40-fucking-minute tutorial video I decided to skim through. I finally found a helpful text description of what to do for BMS, likely written by someone who was actually born in the 20th century.

I finally make contact and begin fueling. I make tiny corrections to keep up with the director lights. I’m feeling pretty good about myself. Then that cock gobbler in the tanker informs me that he’s about to make a turn. I mean, can’t he wait one damn minute for me to finish? I last about 3 seconds into the turn before the tanker helpfully says “disconnect.” The lack of any effort to capitalize the word is just icing on the cake.

Done with that nonsense.

I feel your pain. Air refueling is the most frustrating thing in the world sometimes, and BMS is rather poorly documented. I think they assume that anyone getting into BMS 4.32 has already internalized things like, “Open the refueling door” and “Hold down the missile launch button” from their hundreds of hours of previous BMS flying, which makes things a little rough on us newcomers.

Fishbreath · 2015-10-01T13:45:00.000Z

To my great surprise, DCS 1.5 is out now, in the Open Beta client, or the Steam beta channel.

Editer · 2015-10-01T14:57:00.000Z

Download details for DCS 1.5 Open Beta here.

Changelog here.

And remember, kids, the base DCS game is free.