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[Fly On] DCS A-10C / DCS Black Shark / LOMAC: FC2 - Combat Flight Simulation!
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This is actually the best way to see how good the flight engine is. If you can't slip a little, the flight engine is wrong. On the other hand, you shouldn't be slipping too much.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slip_(aerodynamic)
<--- Bad Pilot in Il-2.
Lol... how did you manage that one? It's even a double key.
I checked this old forum (where I original got into these missions) and they have a couple online we could borrow. I'm try to search around some more to see if I can find anything else. The idea would be that we all join the same multiplayer session and talk via the in-game radio while looking around. Kinda casual, but fun competition seeing who finds it first. Usually people will find it, take a screenshot, then leave and announce their find once they're out of the area so they don't spoil it for the rest. Obviously name tags and shit are turned off, and some other server options.
Anyway, I've been wanting to fire up FSX lately (probably cause strider has been playing) and this is usually a good time. All the missions I've done have been in or around Alaska. So bush planes or helicopters are best. Let me know!
This is the sim, I thought it was a real video ha:
edit: more from the main site - http://www.x-plane.com/desktop/multimedia/
And yeah, seems they have a pretty robust ATC system now. Filing a flight plan, different radios for clearance, ground, and tower (depending on airport) and AI planes also using ATC.
I think this may have been true, but then the civil aviation genre pretty much...ate itself, or something. Given how long FSX has been out, and that X-Plane is still getting updated, tables may have turned.
Well, with MS, I think they realized they shouldn't just keep updating the same shitty graphics engine year after year. Well, that and the horrible failure (mostly on their end) of their DLC model (and if we're going to nitpick, the lack of multiplayer and other non-static objects to make it not feel as lonely). Maybe? I don't know. MSF is just another pretty graphical update to the same shitty graphics engine that MSFS has had forever.
I could really use another civilian flight sim too.
You and the other 0.005% of Microsoft's market that plays flight simulators. Myself included, though graphics were the least of my problems. When FSX came out, people weren't going "Oh, man, this game looks like ass! Boo!" People were clamoring over to transfer their huge mod libraries over to FSX from FS9. Graphics were not going to make or break FSX (it looked better than X-Plane did back then). Now, come MSF...differen't story. Coincidentally, six years later. The genre was suffering well before FSX came out, now, I'm flat out shocked they even tried it.
Don't get me wrong: I wish I were playing FS11 right now. But even the modern military aviation genre is far smaller than it used to be (and mostly dominated by decade-old Falcon 4.0 and developers from Russia). Modern civil aviation? It's probably about as popular as the "commercial boating" genre. A tiny, dedicated fanbase does not a genre make, in reality. Especially given that FSX still works--nothing is stopping you from playing it, except for the fact that, like every single other civil aviation game, the engine is getting long in the tooth.
Actually, I bet Gamersgate has one.
Not to be too shallow, but I think horrible graphics is part of the problem. Flight sims, we know, is a very tiny, niche market. For whatever reason, they always have been. Maybe it's because it's somewhat complex, and requires a bit of external knowledge and research. Call of Dudebro II: The Awakening Revengeance doesn't require anything more than picking up a controller and pressing the shoot butan.
I think the improvements from FS1998/2002 to FS2004/FSX was huge, graphically and flight-sims-physics-wise. I believe the graphical improvement was a huge selling point. Everyone wants to fly over their home city and be able to see the sights from above, or the Grand Canyon, or Mt. Rushmore, or Hong Kong. Well, most everyone. It's a bad thing when you're flying over NYC, and there are about 12 giant buildings making up downtown, two of which got removed in a patch later. But consider that's still twice as many buildings, plus dynamic trees and more traffic than previous years' had, that's saying something.
As for why flight sims are getting smaller, I don't know. Maybe it's fragmentation. IL-2 vs BMS vs DCS vs Combat Flight Sim (lol) vs Take Off vs X-Plane vs MS FS#/FSX. Maybe it's complexity. Maybe it's the knowledge needed. Or maybe even the price of entry ($60+ for the game, then $100+ for a decent controller, some kind of head-motion tracker; just to get the basic experience. Not including the pedal which make it even better, or any of the MFDs or other controllers).
That's pretty much how MSFS has done it for years. It's a matter of immersion, I think. The more I read about X-Plane, the more I think I'm going to buy it. It sounds like everything I want from a civil flight simulator. Except a P-51 Mustang.
Pretty sure you do all kinds of stuff, from scenarios (guide a large container ship into a tiny harbor) to missions (intercept a whaler in a Greenpeace boat by launching a zodiac and spraying it with a water hose).
Complete with awful dubstep music.
And yeah, my point in posting up that X-Plane vid was to show that we have a nice contender for a civ flight sim that fully takes advantage of modern gaming rig system resources. It's written to support multiple cpus, cores, GPUs, all your VRAM etc. I really like FSX, but it still runs like shit and requires terrain mods if you like flying under 30k feet. I'm hoping that X-Plane weighs in at 50-100 gigs because all the textures are fucking sick. (And the videos I watched make me believe that it is the case)
Anyway, I'll probably order it myself cause I'm impulsive like that
edit: also
Also, being able to fly the X-15 or Space Shuttle would be awesome.
I see it for sale for $40, so I'm tempted.
Just fyi the 'sale' you are seeing is probably the regional version. It does not contain all the world scenery. It can be upgraded tot he global.
edit: Also, what do you mean by the dlc model? Do they even sell planes? I though those were pretty much third party things.
Yeah, if he's referring to the site I linked, those are 3rd party.
It may be their business strategy. They might be looking at why FSX didn't make Microsoft a profit versus the very large investment they put into making it (well, that, and the genre being more dead than disco, but there's nothing the X-Plane folks can do about that).
I take it the Endeavor is X-Plane's token "older, very cool, technically impressive deathtrap aircraft."?
Fixed that for you. We're not in the '90s anymore, and even then, people wanted to be racing or ramming or shooting other people while they did it. People were impressed by FSX's visuals to varying degrees--it was a very early DirectX 10 supported game, for example, with experimental shaders and the like. And while running on the same engine for six years in the meantime is a problem, if you think somehow throwing in better visuals would have made FS11 a totally viable game the same was Flight Simulator '94 was, you're mistaken. Even if you could literally offer people the option to buzz every childhood home of theirs with a Cessna, in beautiful detail, you wouldn't convince the huge chunk of Microsoft's market that has very little to no interest in learning even basic flight mechanics beyond something like Ace Combat (and even then, you're pushing it) while limiting yourself to the people who actually have machines that could run that. CoD runs on a lot of PCs. Some sort of hyperdetailed worldwide flight simulation? Unless your plan is to the state of Rhode Island your entire world, yeah, not as many PCs.
The thing is, I would pay for it. But I'm also part of a very small market, just like the rest of the people in this thread. Fragmentation is part of the problem, but only so much as "The audience for these games is now tiny, and the number of games is shrinking slower than the audience is."