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 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.
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.
Hey folks, huge news for my humble blog, page views have doubled in three months... Yes, from an all time high of 62,000 views since July we've had double that number of viewers over again, and our total count is now 124,000 views...
You know if every view gave me £1 I could pay off my mortgage!
Anyway, what have I been up to?... Well, I've been trying to extol the virtues of redirecting TCP/IP connections from one server accepting and validating them to a secondary server to process the data remote clients are trying to dump... And I've been wholly unsuccessful because the other technologist who's working on this project doesn't want to really do as I'm asking... Which is very frustrating.
I'm also trying to avoid buying/playing Elite Dangerous, I'm interested, but I stand by my pledge not to play it... For now...
WarThunder, been playing lots of Simulated Battles and I even got one of my replays used by the magnificent Jingles.
You can find my full coverage of it here:
My old Seitek X45 joystick is showing its age, so once the new house move is done and a few debts paid I maybe going into the market for a new joystick.
Coding projects, I have a tutorial I want to put up about BCD or Binary Coded Decimal, unfortunately some developers believe just using the value int x = 0; means X is in BCD... its not folks its just binary... I'll explain in the tutorial I think...
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....
