Jammer

FWIW, clouds look fine here... GF go 7800 GTX, mobile 81.94 drivers.

No surprise -- even though the "Bright" textures are 8-bit on disk, they are eventually converted to 8 bits per channel (24/32 total bits per texel) once uploaded to video memory. The only benefit these might give you is faster load times, and perhaps a little less stutter. On the other hand, converting all textures to a compressed DXTn DDS format (DXT1 for opaque textures, 1a for binary alpha, 3 for low-quality alpha, or 5 for high-quality alpha) would instead provide much reduced system and video memory usage, since they would remain compressed throughout the pipeline (HD -> system memory -> video memory), and a potentially significant FPS boost on some hardware. Believe it or not, but a compressed DXTn DDS texture consumes less video memory than one of these 8-bit "Bright" textures.

Shot in the dark: I get that effect when I have the DX9 debug runtime enabled. If you have the DX9 SDK installed, make sure you switch to release before running Lock On.

No need to get your panties in a twist, son... Do *I* think that a PC game, especially one produced in the 1990's, simulates the actual FBW controls in the real jet? Uhhh... trick question? ;) Falcon 4 uses a table-based flight model, just like any other flight sim produced in the 1990's did and the vast majority of sims produced this millenium do. Your point is... ?? That's just fine, everyone is entitled to my opinion. ;) Because there's a flight sim out there that doesn't... ?? Ooooh, ahhhhh, big words! "Dynamic sense of flight"... and you know what that sense of flight is because you're a pilot with real-world experience flying which aircraft again... ?? No, really. I was merely suggesting to you that the F-16 may feel like it's "on rails" due to the FBW nature of the F-16, something I've heard from several real F-16 pilots commenting on this very subject. But what do they know about the "dynamic sense of flight"...

The Falcon 4 16 *feels* like it's on rails, especially compared to the aircraft in Lock On, because it's a FLY BY WIRE aircraft. The aircraft in Lock On are all NON-FBW.

Anything else? :P :)

As of Jan 23, FC is in a very late stage of testing. We're primarily going through all the missions and banging on MP. We'll also be testing the installer very soon. Assuming no significant flaws are found, it should be available ONLINE by the end of the month, if not early next month. As with ANY delivery date estimate, this is NOT a promise and could well go longer if new bugs are found. Bests, Matt http://www.simhq.com/simhq3/sims/boards/bbs/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=37;t=006426

"A very cool application was created by our very own forum member; Andrew Poison that lets you - the user - select if you wish to play a game (that is not offically supported in the NVidia SLI-Supported Games List) in SLI mode or not. You can select between AFR and SFR. You can also select to use just a single GPU. Try it out and please leave some feedback! Updated - read below to see what's changed." http://www.3dchipset.com/index.php#152

DVD worth of source code? :D The biggest project I've worked on so far has roughly 1.2 million lines of source code, including blank lines, comments, and deadcode. The average PC game has roughly 700-800k lines (including blank lines, comments, and deadcode). 1.2 million lines zip down to ~30 MB.

Yup, LOMAC is CPU-limited in most cases. I've been running some missions lately on a P4 3.0E @ 3.6Ghz and a 6800GT @ Ultra speeds, and found that while the GT does help in some cases (vs. my old Radeon 9700 Pro), especially with overcast and heat blur (both are very GPU-intensive), most everything else is CPU-limited, especially terrain and object rendering. For example, just changing my FSB leads to dramatic changes when viewing a large number of ground objects (5+ (15 to 20) FPS from 3.0 to 3.6 Ghz), while fiddling with my 6800 GT overclock does absolutely nothing in this scenario. Seems to me that triangle setup is very expensive in LOMAC, or perhaps they are not using vertex buffers optimally.. can't say without seeing the code really. Furthermore, but this is GPU-related, many of the shaders are fairly unoptimised, especially overcast.