WarThunder - Simulated Log

I've been spending time, time after time, trying to get my Track IR set up just right for my new monitor positions on the desk.  Last night, I think I finally cracked it, but the unit does seem to be very quirky.

But, un-phased I went into WarThunder and queued for some Simulated Battle... Long Queue times they were too, 6+ minutes.

I flew out my BF109-G2/Trop three times in all... My take offs were good, handling was good, climbing to altitude and maneuvering all pretty good... I got one burst at a target and got hits, but beyond that my whole flyouts were total disasters, the first flyout, I was hit from below and behind by a Russian i185... This plane was painted bright red, and I simply never saw it, the rear view from the 109G2 is pretty bad with the armour plate, plus he was below me, but I was in a descending left hand turn and he just swiped up and got me, it annoyed me that I was at over 1800 meters, and he must have been at ground level and saw me against the sky, whilst I could not discern him from the ground clutter.

Next, fly out, twice I approached dots only to find they were friendly players, whilst watching in the combat log friendly bombers get slashed from the skies.  Not one of those bombers called out a location for the enemy, so ther was myself and two Fw190's flying from enemy bomb target to target trying to find anything to shoot at.  We finally ended up in a swirling fight around cloud level at 3000 meters, I closed on a target trailing an fw190, if the 190 had just turned or done something else it would have been a better engagement, I fired a burst, it missed, he then split S, and I went into a hi, yoyo turn... and boom, my tail was shot off by a second unseen Russian aircraft, not only did I not see him, but he was at less than 100 meters when he fired, and I didn't hear him... I could hear the other two aircraft, and was recording, I went back and could not hear this guy.

But, even with better look-out I would not have seen him, again because of the G2's armour plate arrangement.

The final flyout, just annoyed me, I flew at near tree top level, against the ground clutter, I circled over brown fields using the brown summer camo the aircraft has to best advantage... I'm there looking all over, I see dot after dot coming from the German direction, finally see a dot coming from the Russian base direction, and move to intercept... As I move... BOOM... one shotted by a Yak.

I just, don't know... It's clearly player skill, or their knowing how to spot me, but I didn't see this guy, and I tried every trick I know to stay low and fast to blend into the ground clutter.

I'm playing the game on Ultra high settings, and I'm figuring I might do better on ultra low, because it's just a case of who see's whom first in Simulator... or of course as GrmlZ pointed out this week, who is in a bomber wins.

My X55 Settings in Elite & War Thunder

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.

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 on Linux

Yes, it is official, WarThunder is available on Linux!  This was a bit of a secret as I had access to the game on Linux with thanks to Gaijin.

http://warthunder.com/en/news/2608-war-thunder-is-now-available-on-linux-en

There were a few bugs, and communication was sadly pretty poor as rather than reviewing the game in any fashion one was simply playing and reporting bugs.

The experience however is identical to the Windows and Mac release, the graphics being rendered in OpenGL (which you can even do on Windows and you always do on Mac all the time) so the porting of the game was essentially down to their moving their implementation.

With libraries like SDL this is an easier task then before, however, WarThunder is now, without doubt, the most complex and detailed game I've seen on Linux. 

And it marks a massively interesting change in the fortunes as game developers look at the platform.

The Witcher 3 and other AAA title games are also appearing for the platform, however, WarThunder with both it's land, air and soon to be sea game modes is far above those scripted screen play type games.

I'm certainly interested in how head-tracking and complex flight stick controls now start to improve on Linux, with this fantastic game now on the platform.

WarThunder - BF110 Great Plane

The other night I finally broke my drought of aerial kills whilst flying out in my BF109E3, taking down two US F6F's and then a Russian Lagg-3... These were unfortunately in Realistic Mode...

I had spent quite a lot of time in Simulator battle, for little reward, I'd flown out in both my 109E3 and E1, had this on several aircraft, notably a P38 with it's obvious planform.

However, in Simulator I've been listening to other people for "improving" visibility of the distant dots... and I can only say its made things worse.  I had dot popping and my spotting levels dropped dramatically.  So I'll be returning to my standard settings tonight.

The switch to realistic mode however came from wanting to grind another plane entirely my BF110C, which I've had aced a very long time, I suddenly spotted I had a skin I could unlock.  Unfortunately for Air Kills, and the 110 is not going to compete for air kills in Simulator... It's definitely going to struggle in Arcade.

Hence, realistic was the middle ground.

Flying out, I was immediately into one of my favourite missions "Malta", with 2 x 250 kilo bombs I expected to make a run on ground targets and then mop up... Needless to say, that's not how things panned out.

Opposing the scratching of Italian MC class fighters myself in the 110 and a single 109 were a ground of 4 spitfires, 2 hurricanes, a gladiator, a Beaufort and a player controlled fury... They clearly had more guns in the air, and more ammo for those guns.

I constituted, by far, the most armed plane, but was - even compared to the Beaufort - the least manoeuvrable, so I took a right hand bent to strafe the beach, drop my bombs and clear the landing for Zone A... Whilst I hoped the other fighters at least found the enemy for me to climb above and pounce on.

However, by the time I got to the beach the 109 was already there, shooting up the artillery, just so he got "First strike".  To add insult to this injury he was then almost immediately shot up by the Beaufort who swooped in behind him and let his gunners set him smoking...

I really couldn't abide the 109 doing this, and told him so, but I pulled up and over the cliffs, used an energy climb (still carrying my bombs) to come out above level and slow behind the Beaufort, unleashing a stream of cannon fire at him I silenced his gunner, but only after taking coolant system damage to my right engine, and then a longer burst I killed the pilot and the British bomber plunged into the waves for my first kill.

Damaged and low, I dropped the bombs into the water and returned to base, complaining bitterly to the 109 who was also on approach.

Repaired and rearmed I was out again and ran my bombs over a light bunker, missing, but taking out the accompanying AA and artillery pieces.

At this point the HE111's on the team were on their return sweep, low and fast they tried to out run the enemy, however, one of the bombers was swooped on by a Hawker Typhoon, turning left and staying below this Typhoon however I avenged the bomber and tore the right wing off of the aircraft.

Using my speed to swing up and yo-yo over I came into a head-on with a Hurricane, who burned, then I switched to my rear gunner to start spraying a Spitfire, who soon spewed black smoke and turned off me, but I had taken heavy damage to my right wing now and the aircraft had a constant list to the right.

Pulling up I took a snatch shot at extreme range towards what was the player controlled Fury coming in on me, tearing off his lower left wing I carried on my turn in a lazy left and then levelled off as another spitfire peeled onto my tail and started to put shots into my left wing.

Both wings beat up I had this spitfire smoking both black and white, but I was doomed, I tried to hit the spit with some fire from my forward machine guns as he over shot below me, but in the now terminal dive I don't know if I got a hit, however both he and I slammed and skidded across the field margins of Malta ending me the game with 5 ground kills, 5 air kills and a big smile on my face for the first time in ages.