Happy New Year...

Yes, this is my first post of the year, I've had some posts scheduled for a while but they were written in 2014, this is the first time I've come to my keyboard to post out to you all in this new spangley fresh year.

So what have I been up to over Christmas, well I'd like to say I've been doing a lot of relaxing, but I've not really... I've been quite stressed with the house sale going on, it's now fixed and finalised for a hand over on the 16th but that means (despite arranging a buyer who wanted to complete before Christmas) we're completing in the New Year and so our ability to spend anything for Christmas has been paralysed, simply because we've been paying two mortgages.

Programming wise, I've done no programming, not a stitch... But this does not mean I've been idle in that area, I've spent an amount of time re-reading my C++11 references and resources, I've watched a couple of the talks given by Bjarne Stroustrop during 2014 and with a lovely gift of an Amazon Voucher I ordered Scott Meyers new book.

Gaming wise, well I had had to reinstall my Windows 7 Machine (my main gaming machine) so I started a new Minecraft world and dug a new base, set up the basic food and cow farming, collected diamonds and then started caving.  Settling on a good couple of evenings digging out a bedrock tunnel with a rail-road and supply centre, then set about digging out three tiers of mining tunnels to basically check every block for diamonds and other resources.

All great fun, and it gave me time to re-watch the Lord of the Rings Trilogy whilst playing.

WarThunder had a little love early in the break, but I could not run any Simulator Battles my elderly X45 stick is getting too slack for accurate aircraft handling, I'm considering doing a spring replacement upon it, or just buying a new stick when the house is complete.  However, I did jump into a bunch of Arcade and Realistic Battles in the hopes of acing out some units, which I did in both the Japanese and Russian lines.  Earning me over a million lions and opening up (I think four) new planes.

Grmlz also gives me hope for bettering my skills with his excellent example of Simulator Flying in the BF109-F1.

DayZ has also been played, I really wish they'd get on and finish that title, they keep saying "it's early access, it's early access", but it's just broken.  And whilst ever everyone is paying the £20 odd on steam for early access they have no interest in finishing the game!  Rocket has left, the Mod is in better shape than the real game... It's all a mess.

And not a surprise, Rockets departure was expected, the moment he stopped working and started climbing mountains I figured he had too much money or time on his hands, and was riding the gravey train of success and has now jumped ship without completing the job.

Elite Dangerous has also had some time, still a lot of bugs in there, there are some lock ups, some system freezes, and many little AI annoyances, but I'm playing it none-the-less and enjoying it, I may soon be buying a new, nicer, ship besides my Sidewinder & Hauler.

I already own an Eagle, but I have no idea where it is, one can see it in the ship locations, but then getting to that system the GUI doesn't help you locate the ship, and I can't be bothered to fly from station to station to station in a 15 station/landing system just to find a ship I'm not overly interested in at the moment.

I'm making money in Elite taking on the "Go Find Stuff in Space" style missions, and taking out the pirates who jump in on me.  With the limited snippets of time I get to play these suit me better than anything else at the moment.  And I'm taking on larger fish than many in my very basically kitted out Sidewinder.

My Sidewinder fitting is the base starter set up, everyone starts with this, remove the basic discovery scanner and then add an extra cargo pack (you can get 2 extra and 4 extra slots, just watch your jump range).  I flew like this for a while, but found I needed a little more punch in fights against Cobra Mk III vessels, so swapped one of the pulse lasers for a gimballed Cannon.

I easily destroy sidewinders and eagles, I also cope well with Cobra's (my only problem with Cobra's is if they run I can't hit them hard at long range), I have (along with a pair of Security Vessels) taken out an Anaconda in this fitting... That netted me 80,000 odd credits and made my night just last night.

So, new or repair joystick, tweak with new installation a bit more, new C++ book, and at some point more programming... Welcome to my New Year Schedule.

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...