My Week Off & Software Dependencies

I've just had a week off, well when I say off I mean I didn't have to get up and go into the office, instead the house needed tending to... Lots of tending to...

I've laid a new floor, had a wall demolished, removed tonnes (literally) of old fencing, painted life preservers (for by the canal side), cut down (clipped not chopped) tree's to size, visited our second house to check on the tenants, and I've done multiple runs to the tip to get rid of tonnes of this junk.

All in all, I'm exhausted and thankful to be back in the office... So what has software been doing without me?

Well, it seems a quite able chap has been busy looking through the code, and has left a bunch of very good insights into fixes for the code, almost like a peer review, something this project sorely needed.

I've duly sent a rebuild and am now awaiting feedback, but whilst that all goes on I decided to look at some of the support tools I use, to see about sending them to various people in the building.

The first problem was this is that I didn't write half of these tools, they were written pretty much as a stop gap measure, and here they are nearing nine years old and still in use in their flaky, temporary, incarnations.

They rely on libraries people don't have, they use modules which are part of the source - meaning to use it you must have the whole source checked out - and they look terrible.

This reliance on other libraries is something I need to tackle, on some systems - like Linux - you can get away with assuming the user is able to go get the libraries your software needs (if you tell the user which are missing that is) but on windows its unforgivable to leave a piece of software to crash through some mysterious missing library problem.

And this is exactly what we get with these tools at the moment, I know why they're crashing, I know others know why they're crashing, and if other more dense users read the error message they'd know why its crashing and be able to ask for a solution.  But instead I'm met with the continual report that the program is broke, and then a wall of silence as to what's wrong with it.

So, developers out there the world over, if your software needs a library, and that library is only on your machine, let everyone know, make your software check for the presence of it, don't just let it run off the end of its runtime and crash!

Blog Viewer Statistics

Holy moly... I'm in a little bit of shock, I've just taken a look at my blog stats, I've had a new record high number of viewers in the last 30 days, we're up from 10,503 unique impressions (address visits) to 21,606!

Well done all of you for getting here to my lowly little corner of the internet...

Now, I need to find out what you found enjoyable and regurgitate more of it for your viewing pleasure.

WarThunder - Joy Sticks I'm Trying Out

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....

Typhoon Fighters, Old and New

I was doing some research about the Hawker Typhoon Fighter Bomber in World War 2 last night, this was to help feedback against a moderated bug report on the Gaijin forums for War Thunder.

As part of my research I spent a good two hours after that dismal England match against Uruguay reading and checking figures in several books, it took so long because one of the references I wanted to pull out of my archive was from the Imperial War Museum's "Images of War" publication, and I could not find the right edition (there being 52 of them).

Anyway, I did find it in the end, and after checking with Janes, I hit the internet to re-evaluate the original digital source links I'd passed over in the post.

They all married up, roughly, and my observations of the climb performance in game were much higher, so there's clearly something wrong with the flight model.  I don't know if its a bug in how the sustained climb acts, or just a bug in the drop off of engine performance at height... But whatever it is, its not firmly in the hands of their moderators.

I like that they're handling bugs like this in a moderated fashion, it stops the dross of trolling and random posting which was the bane of my life when at the Lordz, trying to figure out what was an actual bug report and what was just people having a go.

I was however interested to see this article from the Telegraph come up, when I was searching online about the climb rate of the Typhoon.

In case you're not aware the Eurofighter as it entered RAF service was christened the Typhoon, unlike its name sake this new generation jet fighter can climb, oh boy can it, I've seen them in the flesh, a diamond formation of four going vertical over the Lincolnshire countryside.

WarThunder - Cross Platform - Linux

I had posted, and had been enquiring over with Gaijin, about how or when the current Test OpenGL Renderer will be shuffled out their fun factory doors to give us WarThunder on Linux...

Well, Gaijin demonstrated WarThunder on Linux at this years e3!

I think this is a very exciting development for Gaming on Linux & Gaijin, and am very interested in where they go with this.

WarThunder - FW190-A1 - Definitely Broken

After my last post from WarThunder world, regarding the FW190-A-1 I had literally dozens... *cough* alright half a dozen... *cough* alright two.. e-mails telling me quite how much of a noob I am.

Thanks to you two for your fine and informative input, don't actually tell me what I'm doing wrong, don't actually help just be fucktards!

But I thought, maybe I am doing something wrong... So I decided to test my energy fighter skills against others, and luckily I wanted to unlock all the modifications on the F4F, the F6F and the Corsair... heavier, meatier, fighters I think you'll agree...

And they worked as expected, I'd climb, dive on a target jink around and climb away... I actually did best in the F4F, the F6F annoys me a little and the Corsair I'm not very good in yet... But everything worked as expected and I made decent progress, and even on the missions I lost, I felt I'd had fun, even if I just came down on a dive ran out of energy so farmed some ground targets.

The FW190-A1 immediately showed another problem at low altitude, and that was combined with the wiggling in turns it has huge ground effect... Literally you can hear the ground effect from around 200-50feet... Other aircraft you only seem to hear the ground effect around 75 feet and down... not from as high as in the 190...

I'd now tried the broken fighter, and then a bunch of really not very comparable crates... What about a stable mate of the 190... The venerable, reliable 109...

I set off on a series of missions, none of which I have screen shots for.  And I compared in my mind the climb rate, the performance in the dive, the ground effect, the turning - when forced - performance and the low level, low speed turning & performance... And you know its not bad, on any of them... Once I was in my 109F4 and the 109F4/Trop they were fine... Apart from having minuscule ammo loads the 109 performed as I expected... They even performed and took punishment quite well....

I therefore stand by my gut reaction, the FW190-A1 is broken.

WarThunder - FW190-A1 - Broken?

Over the weekend past I've been a very busy boy, this was in spite of being ordered to rest by my doctor.  But I did manage to get two sessions flying out in WarThunder...

Mainly to test out the new graphics card, more about which later.

But whilst flying around I levelled up my American planes and I unlocked the F4F-3, the F6F, the P47D-28, the P38 and a bunch of aircobra's.... All Good I thought, I was playing energy fighters and getting somewhere...

This was, until I thought I'd try to fly the new Fw190A1 on the German branch... My first Focke Wolf 190, and to be honest I had very high hopes for it.  Based on its legendary status that is, and the fact that I'm playing realistic battles not the ram fest arcade version of the game.

And... I'm pretty sure its rubbish... The FW190-A1 appears to be the Marmite of the Butcher Bird world, as I've spoken to other players randomly and they either exclaim "No you're flying it wrong!"... or they exclaim "yes its rubbish!"

So, lets just go over it, I fly the 190 as an energy fighter, trying to climb, I keep a steady rise to altitude going, but above 10,000ft it aircraft is sluggish to move into a turn, also it consistently wants to nose down when travelling below 220mph.

When going into a turn, be that a low altitude high speed turn, or a high altitude low speed turn, or anything in between the thing wobbles and widdles around on the flight instructor.

The engine also incessantly overheats, and cutting throttle into a dive it takes an age for the water to cool again, yet if I leave it above 0% throttle it cools quicker, which is totally nuts.

So, I don't like the FW190A1... And though I see people getting up to 15,000ft in it and taking out AI spotter planes I can't get mine to go up there, it simply stalls out, and even in a standard climb the angle of attack to keep in the climb means we're flat planing at altitudes around 10,500-11,000 feet maximum.

I've asked what I'm doing wrong, I've played other planes - both higher and lower in tier... In both the German Tree and others, and the Fw-190-A1 has to be, for me, the most disappointing aircraft in WarThunder.

All this before I even mention the damage model, its almost worse than flying a Japanese plane, because you know they have no armour.  But the Fw190 was build with armour a forethought, it was a fast, light yet rugged machine... Not the delicate thing they're presenting us with in the game.

The 190 was designed to intercept, more than be a fighter, it was to be a jabo... a Fighter Bomber... and a high altitude interceptor.

But its so badly behaved and so brittle.

And I'm not just saying this... Look at a comparable tier aircraft, the P400... Look at the damage mine took, and got me back to base in the very same Ruhr mission which was knocking the Focke Wolf down like a mosquito in rainy season.

One eight of this kind of damage and the 190 bursts into flames, or its wings tear off like a small child is toying with flying ants.

So, I don't like the 190-A1, so much so that I'm not even going to show a picture of it here...