OpenBroadcaster - x264

I spent a bit of time last night messing around with OpenBroadcaster, capturing some of my Simulated Battles in WarThunder...

As you can see I've got my name, the game and what I'm up to added as text legends, I've included the track IR window and the game itself.

It worked, I've captured like an hour of game play, including three air kills (which was good going in the Italian G50 I was flying).

My main challenge is playing about with the settings... So I have an EVGA 770 GTX SC graphics card, so not a slouch... And my CPU is a Core i7 (8 threads) running at 3Ghz (I can over clock it, but its not at present)... and I've got fast cooled DDR3 RAM...

However, the x264 encoder really sucked the life out of my machine, making flight hard, but the video very poor quality.

After that I set about looking at using NVENC, but it came out as this very strange sort of effect where as things moved the screen recording was fuzzy, as the screen stopped changing so much it would spring up into perfect detail, and then slowly degenerate again.. Pulse of detail, then blurr... over and over... so it was strange.

Tonight, I am intending to mess about with my settings some more, and if all else fails I'm going to revert to capturing the game with nVidia Shadow Play and using an editor to overlay text.

WarThunder - Simulator Battles

I've spent a lot of time playing WarThunder, I've in fact only played WarThunder this weekend.  Importantly however, I've almost exclusively been playing Simulator battles... Not with any luck, I hasten to add...

I've spent a lot of time looking at clouds and seeing nothing, but I have been flying well enough and getting used to take-off and landing procedures.

I have to give a big shout out to "Viper" a nice chap I met in the Simulator Battles room... And whom took me up in a battle - where he absolutely owned - in ME109E3's... And where I ended up hit by flak and returned to base just as the wife started shouting me... She didn't care I was fighting a war... But hey ho...

Later I flew out in my P47 and was immediately bounced from above, out the sun, by Hayabashi's...

Even later still I flew out in my HE112, and saw nothing but got killed by AI - yes I could not even out fly AI..

And finally I flew out in my FW190A1 again, saw no-one... Finally spotted a target, dove on it and got a couple of hits, pulling out however I suddenly saw above me two La5's... And they tore me to shreds.

I think I'm okay at flying... I'm below average at spotting.. and I'm utterly useless at manoeuvring.

Now I have lots of screen shots, however, I can't find the memory stick they're saved on, so trust me they were stunning.

But later on Sunday night I came back to play again and my funds are exceedingly down on WarThunder,  so I played a few Realistic Battles, made 100,000 credits and called it a day.

I've unlocked two aircraft this weekend - the upgraded P47 and the Fw190-A5... Neither of which I can afford...

But I'm determined to play more Simulator battles.

WarThunder - Experiments - Fw190-A1 Taxi Handling

http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/fw190/eb-104.html

Having read this page we have the following snippet...

"The tail wheel is freely pivoting but can be locked by holding the control column back as on the P51B"

This leads me to want to experiment with my Fw190 take off procedure, which right now is:

1. Apply Brakes.

2. Start Engine.

3. Check Rudder trim is neutral.

4. Apply 25% power.

5. Release brakes.

6. Apply slight right rudder.

7. Progressively increase power and right rudder until rolling.

8. Allow the tail to rise at 70 mph.

9. Rotate and pull up at 110mph.

10. Retract gear.

11 At 130mph and climbing raise flaps.

It may have to become:

1. Apply Brakes.

2. Start Engine.

3. Check Rudder trim is neutral.

4. Apply 25% power.

5. Release brakes.

6. Apply slight right rudder.

** As the airframe straightens, pull the stick full back to lock the tail wheel **

7. Progressively increase power and right rudder until rolling.

8. Allow the tail to rise at 70 mph.

9. Rotate and pull up at 110mph.

10. Retract gear.

11 At 130mph and climbing raise flaps.

We can also make use of this, if in the game on the landing, as we flutter on near zero power and touch down, pull the stick full back to keep the tail down and lock the straight running tail wheel.

----

Addendum

I've just found this item on DCS handling of the Fw190-D9... You can clearly see that the rudder use is not violent here, and the pilot talks of gentle use of the rudder.

I will be experimenting with the brake stearing in WarThunder later this evening (written Friday before posting, so there maybe another Addendum).

WarThunder - Joy Sticks I'm Trying Out

I've been waiting for sometime to get a chance to go over to my parents and collect a load of stuff they say they have of mine... I moved out 19 years ago, so I'm a bit baffled as to what of mine they have.

The only things I know of mine they have, which I want back, are all my old Atari ST games and software - which my Dad has promised he'd sort out from his junk and bring over for about 4 years...

With that wait in mind I asked him to get his finger out, because I can't just turn up and go through my own stuff, I think because if I do go over and collect it all he'll not have anything to moan at me about, so he's stalling me as best he can.

But in talking to him about it I did ask "What apart from the Atari stuff is there?"... He fumbled and came up with some papers... no idea what they are, some book, just one book... And a joystick...

A Joystick for the Atari's?... "No" he says "A dead fancy one with loads of buttons"...

This isn't a joystick for storage, this was a joystick I lent him to play his own games on... its a Cybord 3D...

Which I lent him when I got my Seitek X45 set...

You see, I used to play FlightSims a lot, I loved MS Combat Flight Simulator (which was the game I bought the cyborg for) and when my World Of Warcraft crew got bored we played a little bit of IL2 Forgotten Battles, which is what I bought the X45 for...

Now I had used the X45 in WarThunder but not been completely comfortable... I'm wondering now whether to go pick up the cyborg and give it a go....

WarThunder - FW190-A1 - Definitely Broken

After my last post from WarThunder world, regarding the FW190-A-1 I had literally dozens... *cough* alright half a dozen... *cough* alright two.. e-mails telling me quite how much of a noob I am.

Thanks to you two for your fine and informative input, don't actually tell me what I'm doing wrong, don't actually help just be fucktards!

But I thought, maybe I am doing something wrong... So I decided to test my energy fighter skills against others, and luckily I wanted to unlock all the modifications on the F4F, the F6F and the Corsair... heavier, meatier, fighters I think you'll agree...

And they worked as expected, I'd climb, dive on a target jink around and climb away... I actually did best in the F4F, the F6F annoys me a little and the Corsair I'm not very good in yet... But everything worked as expected and I made decent progress, and even on the missions I lost, I felt I'd had fun, even if I just came down on a dive ran out of energy so farmed some ground targets.

The FW190-A1 immediately showed another problem at low altitude, and that was combined with the wiggling in turns it has huge ground effect... Literally you can hear the ground effect from around 200-50feet... Other aircraft you only seem to hear the ground effect around 75 feet and down... not from as high as in the 190...

I'd now tried the broken fighter, and then a bunch of really not very comparable crates... What about a stable mate of the 190... The venerable, reliable 109...

I set off on a series of missions, none of which I have screen shots for.  And I compared in my mind the climb rate, the performance in the dive, the ground effect, the turning - when forced - performance and the low level, low speed turning & performance... And you know its not bad, on any of them... Once I was in my 109F4 and the 109F4/Trop they were fine... Apart from having minuscule ammo loads the 109 performed as I expected... They even performed and took punishment quite well....

I therefore stand by my gut reaction, the FW190-A1 is broken.

WarThunder - FW190-A1 - Broken?

Over the weekend past I've been a very busy boy, this was in spite of being ordered to rest by my doctor.  But I did manage to get two sessions flying out in WarThunder...

Mainly to test out the new graphics card, more about which later.

But whilst flying around I levelled up my American planes and I unlocked the F4F-3, the F6F, the P47D-28, the P38 and a bunch of aircobra's.... All Good I thought, I was playing energy fighters and getting somewhere...

This was, until I thought I'd try to fly the new Fw190A1 on the German branch... My first Focke Wolf 190, and to be honest I had very high hopes for it.  Based on its legendary status that is, and the fact that I'm playing realistic battles not the ram fest arcade version of the game.

And... I'm pretty sure its rubbish... The FW190-A1 appears to be the Marmite of the Butcher Bird world, as I've spoken to other players randomly and they either exclaim "No you're flying it wrong!"... or they exclaim "yes its rubbish!"

So, lets just go over it, I fly the 190 as an energy fighter, trying to climb, I keep a steady rise to altitude going, but above 10,000ft it aircraft is sluggish to move into a turn, also it consistently wants to nose down when travelling below 220mph.

When going into a turn, be that a low altitude high speed turn, or a high altitude low speed turn, or anything in between the thing wobbles and widdles around on the flight instructor.

The engine also incessantly overheats, and cutting throttle into a dive it takes an age for the water to cool again, yet if I leave it above 0% throttle it cools quicker, which is totally nuts.

So, I don't like the FW190A1... And though I see people getting up to 15,000ft in it and taking out AI spotter planes I can't get mine to go up there, it simply stalls out, and even in a standard climb the angle of attack to keep in the climb means we're flat planing at altitudes around 10,500-11,000 feet maximum.

I've asked what I'm doing wrong, I've played other planes - both higher and lower in tier... In both the German Tree and others, and the Fw-190-A1 has to be, for me, the most disappointing aircraft in WarThunder.

All this before I even mention the damage model, its almost worse than flying a Japanese plane, because you know they have no armour.  But the Fw190 was build with armour a forethought, it was a fast, light yet rugged machine... Not the delicate thing they're presenting us with in the game.

The 190 was designed to intercept, more than be a fighter, it was to be a jabo... a Fighter Bomber... and a high altitude interceptor.

But its so badly behaved and so brittle.

And I'm not just saying this... Look at a comparable tier aircraft, the P400... Look at the damage mine took, and got me back to base in the very same Ruhr mission which was knocking the Focke Wolf down like a mosquito in rainy season.

One eight of this kind of damage and the 190 bursts into flames, or its wings tear off like a small child is toying with flying ants.

So, I don't like the 190-A1, so much so that I'm not even going to show a picture of it here...

WarThunder - OpenGL Performance Discussed

In the final of my series regarding WarThunder this week, I've taken a look at the performance of the OpenGL rendering options.

I've tried this on two machines, with different graphics cards, but very similar specifications otherwise, the two machines are:

Core i7 - 950 - 3.07Ghz

16GB 1600Mhz DDR3 RAM

NVidia GeForce 260 GTX 896MB DDR3

Core i7 - 3770 - 3.01Ghz

8GB 1600Mhz DDR3 RAM

Nvidia GeForce 540 2GB DDR5

Clearly one machine has the superior graphics performance on DirectX mode, yes the 540 out does the 260, just... Though my 260 is a really good superclocked edition, so much so its proving hard to find an economical replacement (pushing me to have to buy a 770 GTX just to see a significant improvement).

Most all the screen shots you see of WarThunder on this blog come from the machine with the 260 in it as well.

But so far all the screen shots have been from the Direct3D renderer.

Now, however I'm testing the OpenGL renderer, the option is listed as Test and I've also tried to collaborate my observations with other players... My overall impression is:

Half the FPS, if I got 60fps in a situation in a plane in Direct3D, I'd get 30 in the near same situation in OpenGL.  This is a rough and ready measurement taken by eye from the FPS reading given on screen in the client.

I've purposefully NOT recorded my game play, I've not run other programs nor over reached things - that is I've not thrown clouds of AI aircraft into formation within a custom battle and flown through them.  I've stuck to playing the regular game in the regular way.

Lets take a look at some screen shots:

It looks the same, I've not noticed any surface level differences, the game looks just as good.

Only when one scrutinizes things do you find the differences, if we jump into a cockpit and look around, we can see where in Direct3D we'd get smooth textures things can look quite odd:

This is the seat over my pilot's left shoulder in the Fw190 A1, as you can see there's this square stippling going on, also along the window rail you can see a darker indication that is actually a shadow from the wind shield surround.

This isn't the only odd thing noted, in the 540 card, not on the 260, I took the Fw190 into a twilight flight.  You can change this yourself in your settings under the Graphics options you need to select the Texture type of "Night as Day" (or something like that)...

When I flew the plane out on the 540 GTX, I saw this strange halow effect around the periphery:

The effect persisted against the clouds, from any angle, or against the ground.  But it did not show against clear sky.

Switching back to Direct3D no such halow was present on either card's output.

Performance wise I've already mentioned the lower frame rate, however, at one point during a pursuit in Historical battle in the Me410 I took out an enemy aircraft, with the explosion close I suddenly had a frame rate reduction down to 2FPS.  Literally slide show mode...

I used a little back stick to bring my nose up and came through it, but I'd moved around 1km before the frame rate returned to above 20 and allowed me to have some semblance of control.

I checked my logging, there was no hard drive activity, no appreciable network lag, no dropped packets, I could type into the client and ask "Anyone else getting lag", which was a reply of "nope" from a fair few players.  Yet I was at 2FPS 50 meters off of the hard deck struggling.

The optimisation of the Direct3D code being used by Gaijin is really good, they get performance out of my rigs other less intensive, less pretty, games get... So perhaps we can chalk this massive red blot on the performance of the OpenGL implementation to a lack of development/optimisation and of course the code being "Test".

But, one would assume the Mac client is already using OpenGL, are any Mac players out there able to share their thoughts?

Either way it looks promising that OpenGL does work, and this of course leaves us thinking about Linux/SteamOS.

Is WarThunder coming to Linux?

I've been musing about the future of many of the titles on Steam, and their progress in converting them to Linux; or more specifically the Steam OS.  Valve (the publishers behind Steam) are bit into providing technical talks and information to developers to help assist them in converting titles to OpenGL, so I've taken sometime to look at the games I have on Steam and which ones I'd like to see on Windows.

The first, and most recently played was "WarThunder", and after a little reading and a little looking, I spotted in the launcher the option to use "OpenGL"...

It looks promising therefore that Gaijin are porting the rendering engine to OpenGL, I even went as far as switching to OpenGL an firing up the game, my immediate feedback would be that where I was getting 60FPS+ and even 90 FPS in places, I was suddenly getting an average of 43FPS.  However, the OpenGL rendering is listed as "test" and one would assume its not optimized at all yet.

Performance changes aside it does look like Gaijin could have a Linux operable version soon... I just hope when they fix the annoying team text chat bug soon... What bug is this?  Well, when you crash, or die, you are presented the team chat box; and I often start to type into it information to pass onto my team where I went down, especially if I went down due to enemy fire... You can be midway through typing a message when the screen times out and changes from the view of the opponent who put you down to the "Select a plane" or "Observer" screen... This then re-presents the same (or an identical looking) team chat box, but it has wiped out the input you had just seconds before... This is a bug which has been in the game since I started playing, so it is a very annoying problem and one which either isn't getting reported, or isn't getting noticed and fixed.

Back to Gaijin's development model however, if we search for news or even output regarding their porting to Linux there's little initially to go on, in fact on an unbiased Google search this was the first result.

http://forum.gaijinent.com/index.php?/topic/9346-linux-port/

"At the moment only for Windows. About Mac and Linux we will see in the future."  A comment by a Gaijin Forum Administrator on the 28th July 2012.  So have things changed since then?  The launcher says they have... Pawing through the archives it also appears that OpenGL has been quietly present in the builds since early November 2013.

My question to Gaijin therefore would be, have they been forcing any test clients into OpenGL mode, have they been gathering information, or switching us players to OpenGL to gather rendering information?  Because, it is a setting in a solemn corner of the launcher, but so very important to us Linux-philes, for if they release this game for Linux then I'm down to only three titles needing Windows specifically, I could finally look at just playing their game on a native Linux platform...

Linux is not the first new platform they've targeted with the engine, you can now get the option from the website to download the Mac version of the game client, clearly the Mac version is going to leverage OpenGL, and indeed any Mac based players will be testing the formal OpenGL calls.  Unfortunately that doesn't test for quirks in Linux or Windows with their independent implementations of OpenGL.

Steam OS is also a very new kid on the distro block for Linux, so if they're going to target it surely they're going to also be able to give us tweaks to run it on standard Debian or Ubuntu distro's too.

Excitingly I've spoken to Gaijin, and had a reply from one Alexander Trifonov, his message is short and sweet:

"Linux/SteamOS, please wait a little more and there will be some news"

Thank you for your reply Alexander, we look forward to more news from you soon...

WarThunder V1.37 - Impressed

Had my first flights in WarThunder 1.37 last night... I like the new progression system... Also I noted there's a large increase in the numberof crew skill points one can receive.

I flew every nation, and had wins for them all, plus a loss as Germans and a loss as Americans... So I flew out seven times.

I'm a little preturbed I already own the 109 F3 and F3 Trop...but have to research the new 109 F1's... lol

WarThunder - Earning Crew Skill Points

Earning crew experience points in WarThunder, this has been a pet peeve of mine with the title, as it really seems to be the biggest grind fest in the game, but the one most easily remedied with a cash injection... Now, I have subbed to WarThunder, I have spent money on Golden Eagles, but I've no disposable income, I just moved, I have to decorate, I have issues at work which means we need to keep as much money aside as possible, plus it's Christmas and so we've had to buy gifts for folks.  So Golden eagles are right down there on the priority list.

Now, crew skills are essential in Full Real Battles as I want to play, strangely the vision skills apply differently in FRB & Historical battles.  It seems a tad complex to me, but essentially you still see the enemy dot... right out to infinity, but it has no text/information written around it until the range of your view point perspective... Specifically they call this mechanic "Sighted", and I'm not sure whether the skill applies more importantly in FRB & HB than in Arcade, and arcade just has "Sighted" set to a fixed distance?

Anyway, getting crew skills...

I tried to get skill points in my other planes, I've followed tips by Krebs and others... But I can't play like them, I'm not that good... I mean recommendations like "Get 6-8 kills and then fly out your other planes" is pretty... well unrealistic, in a game where the average player gets between 3 and 5 kills per game, and ground kills still don't count for much - even if you're in a bomber - its so annoying.

For example, I flew out in my reserve and rank 1 Russian planes, got a win, 5 air kills from 3 planes (twice myself being shot down)... plus 9 ground kills... I got 1 crew skill point on one plane, and 2 skill points on the other.... Dismal, for a not bad result.

Next Japanese... I got one skill point on one crew, for a five plane fly out, 8 air kills, 3 ground kills (including a destroyer) in a match we lost... So loosing the match, despite getting a decent result... Indeed in the Japanese match I got Battle Trophies for being in the top 3 on my side, so an extra 1000xp... But no crew skill points.

I just wished I had some idea how/why they were applied/awarded, I might have to read the forums - and their inevitable speculation on the subject - but having a variety of crews only with 30-50 skill points is not cutting it above rank 5...

At least I have one well trained crew on the British - over 250 skill points - so they can access training/expert on the planes and I use them for FRB... but I really want other nations in my FRB, but I can't spare the cash!

WarThunder - Ranks to Tiers in Next Patch

Out with the ranks and in with the tiers... This seems to me to be going under the radar, or maybe its the elephant in the room....

But Gaijin are changing the progression system in WarThunder, from being Ranks, where by I'm like Rank 12 over all, but Rank 9 in the British... Rank 5 in the Americans... etc.... and the Rank in the individual airforces gives me access to certain planes...

Now the system will be to research fully the previous plane and then go up a plane, and the plans are divided by tier, so there maybe two planes to get through at tier 1 to get into tier 2.

Of course I've seen how quickly you can outstrip your crew skills to fly too high a rank aircraft and get your ass handed to you....

But, this new system is not being mentioned anywhere...

We can see it already in the test server.. and others have covered that better then I...

But even on the live server we can see the start of this system in the unlocks of equipment for each plane, you can see on the left as you unlock the rows, each row is a tier of gear.... Well now each tech tree row will be split by tier.

Now the top current rank is 20.  But it appears the top tier is V... that's a lot of compression put onto the planes...

However, over all I'm going to accept this with welcome, because I think I'm one of those players who has out expanded crew skill and equipment unlocks with my rank... making my game play poor.

This new system will make me rethink, and revisit, things.

WarThunder Crew Skills & the New IL2 Game

The other night, I got to enjoy a couple of hours in WarThunder.... Not a terrible successful evening, as I started to try and gain some skill points for my US crews - who are pretty much totally untrained (less than 30 skill points total for each, one crew was zero!) anyway, after two arcade battles I had earned about 11 points per crew and assigned them, so kept going, by the time the evening was over I had about 30 skil points on each crew and over 50 on one of them, and had upgraded my P40E as well as my F4F some.

However, I started to look at the Pilot skills information:

You can view this same information on the warthunder wiki here.  And I noticed the tally, 11472 total points... so to max that out at the rate I was earning them is going to be over 3500 games, per crew... In arcade.

By the number of evenings I get to play, and the number of games I get in on an evening that's over 350 weeks for me... Yes WEEKS... Either I need to vastly up the quality of my play - and so earn more points - or I need to find more time to play?... Neither seem very likely.

However, I could accelerate crew training, but I'm not going to, I'm not going to spend gold on that, I get the feeling many of the really good guys do, but I'm intent on grinding, slogging, my crews up manually... and only spend accelerated crew points once, and I regretted it, because I had one superior crew and the rest boring crews.

WarThunder however is not the only WW2 flight Sim holding my interest though, the old war horse franchise "IL2" is back soon, with their new offering...

The appeal of that Sim is the attention to detail, they're aiming to model bullets passing through aircraft with meticulous detail, not the huge broad strokes of WarThunder's damage model.

Full Real WarThunder

I got two fly outs in Full Real Battles.... and I made two air kills, survived one mission, and was shot down by an Me410 in the latter... So I'm at a 2:1 kill to death ratio... yay me. lol.

The controls are still not fab, big problems with the trim controls at the moment, and I'm also finding the rudder control on the X45 to be a bit of a pain...

The biggest obstacle to getting into Full Real Battles by the way was not actually the controls in the end, once I watched Kreb's video setting up his controls and later PhlyDailys I got it sorted.

No the big obstacle was the actual take-off and landing tutorial, which kept pausing and then starting up again with pressing keys, but by the time you pressed the key one already had to have applied rudder etc, but you hadn't because you'd been paused... and boom crashy crashy.... I fudged it in the end by accelerating to 100% throttle on the brakes, pressing to by pass all those messages up to the rudder... and then fast pressing the rudder before slowing down, taxi'ing back to the start point on the runway and doing the take off without being interrupted in one whole run.

So, Gaijin, your Take Off and Landing Tutorial is utterly shit!

WarThunder - Full Real Control Headaches

I write most of my articles for this in advance of when you actually get to read them, so when I talk about last night, what I actually mean is Wednesday night... For you see, I bided my time, I sorted the man loft out and cleared up a load of junk, and then I coaxed the wife into going to bed and set about sorting out my flight stick and head tracker.

All seemed to be going well, my flight stick is an old - but much loved - Seitek X42 - I wish I had a 52, but a 42 will do (plus its more manual than the 52 and suited to WW2 sims).

Next I launched WarThunder and set about sorting the stick out, and I think I made an immediate mistake, I said to set up Mouse & keyboard - I wanted to keep arcade controls as mouse and keyboard and then just set the Full Real Battle controls to the sticks.... "What a mistaka to maka".

My head tracking worked fine, and after adjusting the centering key it was perfect, but then I set about setting up the controls to the game... Buttons were fine.... but the Axis, oh the axis caused me such trouble.

The roll axis was correct, but pitch was inverted, the throttle was also inverted and it kept zeroing at brakes - which I didn't want and which was not mentioned in the controls chart - and it'd max out at WEP where as I wanted it to max out at 100% and then use a button for WEP!

Eitherway, my first flight ended in a very quick fire ball of death, because I'd not turned off the mouse control, so as I used my sticks the mouse also input controls and the aircraft just did a lazy turn to starboard, dipped it's right wing and flew into the ground.

Once sorted I did a take off and a few circuits at low speed with the gear up, all seemed fine, but then I came into land and the ground effect was terrible eventually I clipped the prop and came to a stop, luckily in one piece and 20 seconds later I was repaired and ready again.

The second flight was better, I performed the take off and circuits and even landed!  But I could tell the aircraft needed those trim controls sorting, also I figured I should set up the radiator to a button on the hotas, because of WEP use and overheating the oil on things like the Hurricane, and Zero expectially.

Well, I don't know what else happened, but between the landing and the tweaking the controls the next flight was near impossible to control, I got up but getting down again I clipped the prop once again.  But this time it was definiately the trim, specifically the elevator trim.

I tried to set the trim controls to a thumb swivel, but no good, the controls go very annoying.

After an hour and a half, I set about playing some Arcade and forgot all about Full Real Controls out of frustration.

Unfortunately arcade brought me a new frustration, loosing my kills as assists!  The most annoying of all was whilst in my Do-217-J1 I put a whole heap of cannon shells into a B25 (not the easiest target to take down) I had his tail ruined, wings shot up, port engine burning, gunner unconscious and leaking fuel... I was still firing my machine guns into him, when a P40 drifts past wafts his wing at the B25 and boom, the B25 is down and he gets the kill... I had thought they'd fixed this!

Later I also upgraded my US aircraft line up to the Rank 5 mainstays (P40, F4F, A20) cost a pretty penny... But I immediately felt how cumbersome the A20 is, not like the Beaufighter at all... And the F4F, what a heavy lumbering beast, how ever did it stand up to Zero's?

The P40 has a superb rolls rate, but it does wallow around the sky a bit, especially when forced to low-level to defend ground targets and it has to turn rather than zoom.  But my overwhelming memory of these new Rank 5 USAF crates is how their controls lock up fast in a dive, I was constantly diving at 0% with flaps to avoid it, but of course everyone else (possibly upgraded) flying arcade UFO flight models just floated away from me.

The best action I did capture, unfortunately its over 2gb of data at the mo and I didn't process it last night - I'm at pains to process it until YouTube gets reverted back and google+ stops being forced upon us.

Addendum: It may not be me, it might be the stick...

Track IR for WarThunder, Bargain PS3 and WarThunder Ground Combat!

Right, so I played IL2 and Forgotten battles loads, I even had an X52 throttle and joystick and a TrakIR4 head tracker...

I've just started to pack my current lab/office up to move, and I found the head tracker and I know where the joy stick set it...

It maybe time to hit "full real battle" on War Thunder...

In other news, I got the first PS3 from t'internet... this one was £14.99... Reportedly its broken... Well, After fiddling with the little wire from the Blueray deck, and resetting it to Factory mode - reflashing - and then starting up again, it seems to be fine.

Then there was coverage out over the weekend (from Gaijin, but reposted in English by Jingles) of the ground combat in WarThunder...

Okay, the physics look dodgy... and the integration with air combat had me a little nervous, but boy did it look gorgeous, and Gaijin already make WarThunder in flight mode look spectacular!

Back to the Future with FlightSims

I still remember the first time I played anything like a Flight Simulator, it was Boxing Day 1989, and I was pawing over box of my brand spanking new Atari 520STFM and inside the "Discovery Pack" there were four games. The last one I came to was mysteriously labeled "Carrier Command", I figured it must have been something to do with this weird yellow bordered screen shot which was on the box.

I placed that diskette in that drive and for the first time in my life I fell in love with a game.

I don't say that lightly, in 1989 I was eleven. There had been computers and even an old console playing "pong" in the house since I was three. But Carrier Command was the first game which had me enthralled. Okay, first time in, and without any instructions, I couldn't make head nor tail of it. But just a few weeks later I was doing some very complex things in there [go on, hands up anyone who remembers making a Manta fly low and slow with a long comms pod, and a flotilla of Walrus chugging along below to take an island far far away from where your carrier is? Good times].

But carrier command was just a gateway for me, it in itself is not really a flight simulator, but soon the road was set out, as I encountered "Armour-Geddon" a game from the Liverpool based "Psygnosis" studios. This latter game picked up in an ill defined genre where Carrier Command left off, certainly the flight mechanics were much more advanced, and they included a helicopter in the air!

However, all that was soon blown away by my scrimping and saving, wheeling and dealing, and eventually affording the massive £48.95 to buy Falcon 1.0. Never in my dreams did I know such a game existed. To my untrained schoolboy eyes it was fantastic eye candy with buttons, switches and gaming galore. The fact it ran like a dog without any legs never really bothered me.

Though through Falcon you can see the strength of the genre, you can still buy versions of Falcon today, and even when the studio closed the modding community took it up and carried on with improving the engine. It deserves it's place as one of, if not the, most long lived flight simulation games out there today.

But is it the best? Certainly Microsoft thought very early on that they could muscle in on the Flight Simulation genre of gaming, with "MS Flight Simulator v1.0" (MSFS) released even before I was aware of computers in 1982! But, it was not until the late 1990's did the MSFS seem to come up to a par with the dedicated gaming machines like the ST and Amiga. Unfortunately, I believe MSFS's biggest contribution to the modern Flight Simulation world was not in reaching the masses, certainly Flight Simulations are always pitched at a very small gaming demographic, but MSFS did prove the PC platform as a decent place to put a Flight Sim. It also took over from games like TFX, which ironically introduced me to much of the Aircraft just entering service with the RAF and USAF all these years later.

Microsoft also pushed me towards a slightly different genre of Flight Sim, towards classic piston engined fighters. The war-birds of World War Two. This started with Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator (MSCFS) and later MSCFS2; which was the first time a game made me go out and build a whole new cutting edge gaming rig.


Unfortunately, the next game which made me go out and build a new gaming rig was not a Flight Simulator, it was an online FPS... but it included flying, or sorts... Battlefield 1942. This game though does have a kinship with Flight Sims, certainly I've met a few people who are playing console games from the likes of Oleg Maddox today, because of Bf1942 (read on).

Finally though, with a powerful enough PC and developers out there with a passion for the topic Flight Sims started to appear which were amazing. The first I came to, which really took over where Carrier Command left off in my desires to simulate flight is IL-2 Sturmovik. No screen shot you'll see for that game [and remember its nearly a decade old now] will ever do that engine justice. With the improvements made to it over time, and even a complete re-write of their game engine for Pacific Fighters the game looked amazing. It still does today!

The offerings in the IL2 series [headed by Oleg Maddox whom I mentioned earlier] are breathtaking in their depth and understanding of the media they are working with.

Worryingly though it seems we may have lived through the best or times and be in the middle of the worst of times. There are worries over the development of the successor to IL2. There has been a complete closure of the Aces Studio, whom write MSFS. Indeed, it seems in the current MMORPG fever within the gaming industry no-one seems willing to put money into developing a Flight Simulator.

Who wants to lay out the costs for a very complex engine, for such a small market share?

And where does this situation leave the future of Flight Simulators... I'd have to say, until we November 2010 we can't say whether there will be a successor to IL2... If there is, I can guarantee I'll be buying it upon release, heck I'd pay for it tomorrow just on a promise of it coming out later. But clearly Microsoft have put MSFS to bed, that's sad for a game once mentioned to me as "Bill Gate's favourite game". But Bill doesn't head up Microsoft anymore, things change and everyone moves on. I just fervently hope that today with the stagnant looking Flight Sim market is a temporary hiatus, my TrackIR & Flight stick are ready to rock and or roll.

Ventertainment....

I suppose I should give some background to this one, there's a chap, by the goings of "Ventertainme", he had a youtube and 1up profile, and I heard of his fine work through the old GFW Radio Podcast (R.I.P The Brodeo). Anyway, this chap has a sound board, be jumps on peoples vent servers, records them and plays it back to them as a joke. And tonight I checked out some of his archive and this one always makes me giggle, it's a pretty good joke, but the guys he's clowning on take it with such warm good humour. Good Stuff.

Link to Ventertainme's YouTube Channel & the very nice folks getting clowned on while they play together.

Anyway, apart from that, I'm also sorting out a new couple of articles, one is about RTS's and where they're going, especially with Starcraft II just around the corner. The second is about the evolution and progression of FlightSims, especially how things are over at MS Flight Simulator since the staff cuts 16 months ago and what Oleg Maddox is really up to with the IL2 franchise.

And of course, I'm busy playing Free to Play MMO's. Both DDO and RoM still going strong... But can they be my methodone hit to keep me away from the draw of Blizzard's Heroine?

The weekend will therefore see a plethora of posts and game play, see you all then.

In other final news, on a personal note, tonight, just three hours ago, I handed over the last payment of all my student debts... that's it... I'm a free man! So I have a little more wonga lying around... what games can I buy with it... Suggestions please...