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 - 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.

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 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...