Hi everyone,

I am thinking of buying Lock On Platinum and was hoping some people can share their wisdom.

a) Does it support Thrustmaster T.Flight Hotas?
b) I searched and see that it does support Track IR5...does it do a good job of implementing it?
c) Is the casual setting pretty casual? Does it scale well? I want to eventually move more into the sim parts of it, but if I can't get up and have a little fun right from the start then I'm not interested.
d) Are the graphics good? I was very impressed playing Wings of Prey. I find bad graphics break the immersion, which is a deal breaker for me with a flight game.
e) Does it run well on a fairly modern machine (Quad Core Q6600, Nvidia 470, 6GB RAM, Win 7). I play Arma2 most nights and cry each time because I have to dial down so many settings.
f) Is the editor easy enough to use to throw together simple missions?

Thank you in advance for any feedback. It sure looks like fun.

Cheers.

A. Yes
B. Yes, I have a TrackIR4 and it works great
C. Yes
D. Yes, I'm the same way, that's one reason why I really couldn't get into Falcon.
E. I have a Dual core 2.4, 8800GT and 4 gigs of ram and I get very good FPS. 30 on the ground and higher in the air
F. It depends, I have made a few missions but that was years ago. I don't think it would be too hard to throw something together.

f) Yes, I'd say it's fairly easy to make simple missions with the editor.

I've had the game for all of two days, and I already loaded up the VNAO mods and created two 'Navy' missions with the editor, both pretty simple but the editor interface is pretty good and it looks like a pretty powerful tool, mostly on par with the editor that shipped with Janes' F-18.

So I'd say the learning curve ain't TOO steep.

Thanks so much. Sounds like a good buy.

The steepest learning curve of the editor IMO is the trigger system. Everything else is pretty straight forward but creating triggers, especially complex ones involves delving a bit more into the editor. The good thing is you don't have to use triggers in your mission and as you get better at building basic missions triggers won't seem so difficult. I think its well worth the money, even if it were to just help the genre along as a whole, better to help the genre and fly a good sim though!

Does the editor do "random"...similar to ArmaII's editor? An example would be placing an enemy fighter in a random radius.

Every unit has be linked to a trigger and the trigger can be set to a number of settings, including random. I am kinda getting up to speed on the mission builder and the campaign engine right now. It lacks a lot of things that Janes FA-18 has but also much improved in a lot of ways.

The camparison with the Janes FA-18 mission builder is a natural one, perhaps since Matt Wagner produced both sims.

Ripcord