A blog about my rantings, including Games, Game Development, Gaming, Consoles, PC Gaming, Role Playing Games, People, Gaming tips & cheats, Game Programming and a plethora of other stuff.
Last night I decided to take a look at come add-ons for Arma 3, notably the ACE3 pack, I was unfortunately disappointed with the pack, it seems to obfuscate so much of the learned functionality and change so much as to make it feel alien rather than a helper. One notable problem was, no matter what I did, I could not lock nor fire an AT missile from a Titan Compact launcher, even dropping into the editor, sitting a target in the open and trying to fire point blank it'd not lock on.
Reboot and try without Ace, everything was fine, and this leads to a problem Dyslexi has passed the mantle of his excellent looking grenade mod over to Ace, if that grenade mod ends up mixed into the mash up within ace then it maybe impossible to separate it back out and run it without the perceived confusion Ace has caused me.
The other thing I looked at in the edit, as one can see from the above screenshot, was wind direction and it's affect on the battlefield. Primarily I looked at this because I've been continually gravitating on the Zeus Community Server, however, their server seems to never have any weather other than the occasional splatter of rain. So seeing wind make smoke drift was interesting.
Don't forget, you can find highlights and full streams of my adventures in Arma 3 on youtube now.
Last night, I spent a fair amount of time setting up my new X55 Rhino some more, firstly I spent time sorting out the wires, as I need to be able to insert and remove the sticks depending on how I want to play different games.
But once that was done, it was into various games to set up the controls... Elite Dangerous was one, as we saw in the sneak peak I had no joystick inserted playing the other night. This was interrupted somewhat by having to download and install the new beta.
However, I also went to set up my full controls in WarThunder for flight... And I needed to do something different than before, as I'd found the stick really twitchy in the elevator and somewhat sluggish in the roll.... This is just for loading the X55 profile in the game itself.
Luckily, I did spot this video....
And it gave me a couple of tips, the first was to change the sensativity of the rudder (yaw) and the elevator (pitch).
I also changed how I was doing the trimming.
But the biggest change, and it really made a difference - at least in test flight - was to raise the seat. I had never spotted those controls before, but I've attached them to the X55's throttle onto one of the lovely silver switches. I raise it just as we see in the video, so the cross hair is just a touch inside the glass.
Even resetting the Track IR, I do raise the head position up.
With these new settings, and the lightest spring in the X55, test flights were excellent, the standard BF109 loop I do, under the bridges, through the rails of other things and then through the chimneys in the town was brilliantly light to the touch.
My next challenge is going to be to improve some of my pilot's spotting skills, and taking flight to fight.
Played a lot of WarThunder over the weekend, and I have to thank my friend Craig for signing up to WarThunder and reaching Rank 2 so very quickly... Was great fun introducing a new player to the game.
I was only a little jealous of how good his first few battles went, and it was very interesting watching how his account was reduced to just one Nation and then slowly opened up...
But the tutorials are still terrible. Improved since I started, but still terrible, and whoever their narrator is... Christ what an annoying voice, and his pronunciation is shite!
I spent much of the weekend however playing with Craig, and his low level Brits, so we spent a lot of time with me acing out planes - since I started playing before there were half as many modifications as there are now. My British Ace aircraft swelled from two to thirteen by the time we were done, and when Craig unlocked his Hurricane IIB I received a nice 50,000 Lion bonus :)
He's determined to get to Rank 3 now on his own and earn me my 100 gold, as he says he likes the game so much...
I however spotted this problem:
Take a British bi-plane, so we're talking Nimrod I or II, Fury I or II or the Swordfish above their max speed in Arcade, so you get the "Reduce Speed" message and the flutter sound from the rigging... Jump out or die and get into a Gladiator, and you start off with the aircraft well below the max speed of the Gladiator, but you still have the warning and sounds playing!
It also felt like my Gladiator was responding to motion like my Swordfish, but that's hard to tell for sure with the Arcade flight model.
I reported this, but Gaijin don't seem impressed...
For the rejected one I have two Videos, and they are different situations, but I don't see the point of allowing for trimming in the test flight models... Surely it will result in NOT comparing like for like... I felt very much as it I'd been given the brush off, despite making the post, making it informative, I obviously see this as a bug, eve the original responder must because he didn't know the policy was to have trimming in the test flight models, so not a 100% match up there and very much not testing what is happening in the game for real.
The code may behave differently with or without trimming...
And certainly for pilot training - which was why I noted the problem - it made for a false impression, in the FW190, I used the Aileron trimming on take off to stabalise the torque... I used it and was very thrown after traning for 4+ hours to go into a full real battle and suddenly not have it available!
So, available in test....
Not in simulator battle...
I dunno, I just get the impression that as excellent as the code and ideas from Gaijin are, their development style and especially testing is very much "We Do As We Want, You Follow"... I dunno, maybe it's a Russian thing?
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....
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...
