Dog Fights, Dye and Death - War Thunder FW190-A1 Simulator Handling

A strange 24 hours have besieged me, first of all, I got to play some WarThunder, I set up Track IR and my flight stick and set off doing touch and go landings in various aircraft under Simulator conditions.  More about that later.

We have had the wife brother visit, all good, except the wife bought a new mat for her room and it was PINK... not Pink, not pink... PINK!... She decided to wash this for the first time, and has promptly dyed a significant number of other articles PINK!... Shesh...

And Death... yes, I was greeted last night with the task of retrieving a dead starling from the flat roof, collecting it up it appeared the poor thing had flown into the window and broke its neck.  But because it has been raining for a couple of days it had been up there at least three days and yesterday was quite sunny... The smell... The Smell of Death... urgh.

Anyway, back to gaming.  I've also been playing Minecraft, lots of Minecraft, my base is coming into some shape, and I've still been doing lots and lots of caving.

But last night my gaming attention was on WarThunder and playing some Simulator battles, not I was not interested in the current furore over bombers flying easy mode in Simulator battles, instead I was out for some fighter action.  Now I'm not an inexperienced online aircraft pilot, having flown lots of IL2 Forgotten Battles, in both personal and squadron time.  My main experience was with the Fw190-D5 and the P51 in IL2.  So I set about flying my American line first.

Whenever I come to Simulator (or Full Real Battle as I still like to call it) I spend a good hours getting myself used to my aircraft, lacking the P51 being unlocked - yet - I took to the P47 my current research focus.  My general practice routine is take-off, three circuits, landing.  Take-off climb to altitude, aerobatics, test nose oscillation (porpoising), test roll, fly inverted, immelman turn, inverted immelman turn, barrel rolls and then rudder turning on hard turns followed by another landing.  And finally a take-off, three circuits, attack the ground target, fly at low-level, usually under a bridge or something else, followed by a landing.

That's pretty much my hours up, of course all this lets me tune my controls, check my seat position with the Track IR and of course get used to the aircraft, its only a pity this difficult flying doesn't get counted on your Pilot log/player card.

Anyway, I did all this practice in the P47, switched to find a battle only to be informed "This Nation is Temporarily Unavailable".

So, I went to my Fw190, unfortunately still only the A1 version but I'm only 5K Xp from the D5... I started off by test flying a take off and I was immediately treated to a wild amount of left hand torque from the prop... A very very strangely high amount of left hand Torque... Now I've read the Bf109 was notorious for this (and experienced that in other simulators), but the Fw190 design was intended to improve on the 109, and they did improve the torque handling... With the wide track undercarriage... I need to recheck my memory against other Sims and perhaps the D5 model.  But the Fw190A1 is very very difficult to control on the ground.

Set on the runway, no problems, Revving up to 25% throttle with the brakes on, and you can move around and taxi effectively.  But the aircraft has a horrible tendency to spin around to the left still.  

If we take a look at the A1's cockpit we can see this indicator

Now, being a game we don't get any Feel for the world, the only feedback is visual and audible, the key visual feedback for the yaw are the two indicators, lets highlight them with a bit of colour

The upper orange line marks where the movement of the impetus we're giving via the rudder, I would love to be an actual pilot and be able to tell you what this control is, but I'm not a pilot so lets call it our "yaw input"... yeah, so our yaw input is telling us how hard against the pedals our legs are working.

The lower purple line marks the current inertial force the aircraft is experiencing in the yaw.  So, if the black dot swings all the way to the left, the aircraft is going to slew its tail left.  To counteract this I need left rudder, to move the upper dot over the lower... Balancing the aircraft whilst on the take-off run is a full time job.

Now, I'm not using pedals, I'm using a finger rudder on the throttle of the Seitek X45 flight stick, reaching this - even with my fairly long typists fingers - Now this makes me immediately scream "Get a pair of rudder pedals", but I can't afford them and I've had precious little WarThunder flight experience.

Here we can see I've put on left rudder, and the aircraft has swung the opposite way...

This series of shots shows us the aircraft swinging around as I test the throttle and rudder together, try this out yourself, taxi around, be patient.  Eventually try some take-off runs.

 

Here we see us in the air in the Fw190A1 just after take off, we've bringing the gear up, but as you can see the aircraft is effectively flying squewed to the left through the yaw.  I'm pulling opposite rudder and trying to stay airborne.  This gives us a very busy take-off procedure in the A1, and something which feels very alien compared to my experience elsewhere.

Landing with the Fw190A1 was far more of a success for me, coming into line with the runway early is important with that radial engine blocking the view forward, drop the gear and landing flaps at 190mph (yes I fly in MPH not KM) when below 500 feet.  Now the practice runway for the Fw190A1 is not brilliant, there are trees at both ends of the runway.

If this were a real airbase I'd have gone out with a saw and chopped all the approach trees down!  As the number of times I find myself brushing their tops and hearing them was very worrying.  But drop the nose and drop the throttle to near idle and flutter into the landing.

Coming in with power on results in the aircraft wanting to swing and roll left once again, the roll to the left naturally makes me want to push right stick to counter act it and the results are always the same:

The left torque is a killer in the Fw190A1.

That all said, don't always take the Test flight experience as a valid representation of the aircraft, with the Fw190A1 I noted that in Test Flight one can use Aileron trimming, there is no such feature on the combat aircraft.  So the flight models may not be the same... I in fact strongly suspect they are not, because jumping into the A1 in a player combat mission resulted in two very different problems.

The first mission I took off, made it to the cloud base, joined combat on the wing of a 109-F4, who took on a Russian I-16.  As the combat broke I got onto the tail of an I-16 myself and made hits, only to have the Fw190A1 simply refuse to nose over and gain speed, it flew inverted with my pulling back on the stick refusing to nose over and dive.

My idea was to do low yo-yo and come into the I-16 on the upward stroke then roll over and come down again, in a high scissor action.  The actual flight ended up with the I-16 turning flay, my 190 failing to gain speed and then I was hit in the left wing... Looking to my left I saw NO marks, nothing... I'd heard the hit noise and been informed by the game my left wing was hit, but looking there was no mark, the control surfaces were all in place, the control surfaces still moved.  But if I took off any of the right stick I simply rolled left... Crippled I thus flew straight for 5 more seconds as I tried to turn with the rudder and the aircraft just went out of control.

Looking at the replay there was no damage shown on the wing... But clearly the aircraft wanted to handle as if there were no wing on the left side!

A shame, and in the aftermath I simply joined the battle queue again and off I went, this time a desert map - don't ask me to be specific - but the take off run went badly wrong... The 190 left hand torque lifted me far left into the dust, I nosed up too early to miss an AA battery and the aircraft yawed left wildly - despite hard left rudder - and it tore the left wing off on the ground.

This torque seems very wrong, murderous, and combined with my finding the test-flight model to be different has me strongly suspecting a bug or fault in the game.

Tonight I intend to get IL2 Forgotten Battles out and try the Fw190 in there and also the D5 in WarThunder, see if they're the same.  A shame, as I had hoped to buy premium time this weekend and the week after next - a holiday from work for me - and play many simulator hours.

Oh, and the final drama of the day, around half eight a knock at the door found me facing a drunk woman asking for Richard and Porscha... No not here... "This is XXX address"... "yes, but there's no Porscha here"... she was very drunk.

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.