General Update

I've been a busy boy this weekend, I've ordered some new network wire to bring Cat 6 Ethernet directly to the upstairs bedrooms, so I have that to fit out, I've organised all my finances after the house move and everything.

I've retired my two Dell Power Edge servers - just because they were so loud - and I've got a whole bunch of pictures of them for their going on e-bay later this week - they'll be sold as a batch lot, as I basically use one as parts for the other, but they're not shabby, the heavily used on is is ironically one of the cleanest machines I have.

Their replacement is a much more suitable Pentium 4 PC - my old World of Warcraft & Eve-Online machine in fact, it's a massive downgrade in power - we're going from dual 64bit Xeon's on a server chassis to a 32bit 2001 Pentium 4.  But it's all about getting away with leaving the PC running in the front room, where it'll be part of my internet provision of services.

I've also been servicing and modding my Saitek X45 joystick, I've got a friend of a friend sorting out a set of new springs for me, I've looked carefully at modding the handle, and also had the thing in pieces to discover what's inside.  I maybe putting together a whole post on this alone, as there are not many or much good information about this solid old stick on the interwebs.  Mine being 12 years old it's lasted a long time with no intervention.  It's played me through MS Combat Flight Simulator, the original IL2, IL2 Forgotten Battles and IL2 1946.

It started to get a little funky in War Thunder last month, I noted I could not keep my 109's from pulling oddly, I thought it was a trimming issue, but it was actually the lack in my spring.

Anyway, as I say, more about all that later.

In Elite-Dangerous, I've been out and about in the universe, I've taken my pilgrimage to Sol, I arrived there last night, and docked at Abraham Lincolm station just as Australia was coming into view below.  I'm going to take a better look tonight.  However, on the way, though I have a fuel scoop I did decide to stop off and dock at a station, just to update my save at that point.  The Commodity reading software worked a treat, even on the system name it had never been trained on before.  Going forward I need to improve the capturing sequence, as it's a little clunky even for me; and I created it; but data capture is working out really well now.  Capturing and the reading of the commodities, with my myriad of little updates and string swaps is working extremely well.

Aside from changing the capturing to be more, shall we say, slick; I'm also going to be adding threaded operation to the OCR, so as I can leverage some of the multi-core features on machines to speed up the reading process.  There is a notable delay at the moment between the images being captured and the OCR kicking in.  Yes, part of this is writing the images as bitmaps to disk, but the major delay is the serial nature of it going down the list, I may as well go down two different parts of the lists at the same time!

Apart form selling the Dell servers, I'm also going to be selling a really nice 1024x768 resolution CRT monitor, my last CRT monitor.  I'm only selling it because it's being retired along with the servers, it was their heads up display.  But it's one of those crystal clear displays perfect for coding with.

I'm also going to be selling the Samsung CLP-320 laser printer, because... well, despite being only 4 years old it's not survived, it still works, but there are fading in and out on the printing, I've replaced the toners (at a hell of a cost) and so I can only conclude it needs some tinkering with or servicing, which I don't want to do.  So I'll go out the door for spares & repairs on ebay.

If I get a decent price for all these bits of stuff I'm selling, I may be looking to get myself the £160 X55 Rhino flight stick, but this is perhaps a pipe-dream with the financial situation as it is.

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 War Thunder

Please note, this was drafted and scheduled BEFORE the post of the 14th about my Full Real Control headaches... I might be buying a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro soon....


A while back I posted about going into War Thunder with my Track IR and trying Full Real Battles.

Well, that itch is back, but since the move I've been sorting things out and I've found the Track IR and the Flight stick... So the time is now.

I'm going to go through a short series of Full Real flights, I originally flew full real settings in IL2 Forgotten Battles, where my favourite plane was the 109 F-4, but the 109 has terrifying torque problems at take off and landing.

So, I may go with a twin engine aircraft to get used to things and then build up.

I have however been looking at Full Real Battle recordings from PhlyDaily and Kraut...

I think before I go into an actual battle I need to do a lot of take off and landing practice, circuits, touch and go landings and then go into battle.  I plan this to take the form of at least 2-3 hours getting used to the controls, then at least 10 take off and landing cycles in an aircraft, then some practice using the flight stick and Track IR in historical battles and finally going into a full real battle.

I am also wondering whether it might be time to up my graphics card from the single 4xx series to a 6xx or a dual 6xx series...?

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...