Quote:
Originally posted by Reticuli:
The lack of auto designation is a big problem on this sim. Massive. All you need is to be able to auto designate and then cycle through targets, forward and back. No big difficulty for them to have added that. The avionics are not that bad. There are enough cockpit instraments to fly this aircraft without stalling, it's just that stalls occur too abruptly and frequently. They're not gradual. They flick on and off like a light switch. All the accuracies of flight are there, they're just overly pronounced and shouted to you in 140dB at point blank. If you can get good at flying this, X-Plane and any other sim is going to be a cinch. I landed successfully for the first time last night...on a normal runway. Landing has to be done just right, and any deviation from how the autopilot would do it is fatal. That's just totally wrong. You have to be pitched up in just the right amount, wings perfectly level, speed 270 kph or less, down velocity very low...there's not enough margin for error. Centainly TAW makes it too easy, but this is significantly more difficult than it should be. The velocity vector circle appears to become part of the ILS system, making it fairly easy to get the ILS markers to line up. It's just keeping it exactly there with all the other perameters perfect, then executing the roundout at the correct amount at exactly the right moment. It's all real-like, but in an overly descrete, overly stringent, analytical kind of way.

I'm starting to enjoy the air combat more, but easy missiles is too easy and medium is too difficult. I think auto acquisition would have fixed the BVR balance almost completely.

I'm pretty happy with the graphics. XP let me have 4X AA, but sometimes it would switch off. 98SE only allows up to 2X, but at least it appears to always be on. XP was sharper looking. I'm not sure why 98 looks so much softer. I wonder if the latest ATI drivers are the problem. I noticed a drastic softening of the picture with the latest drivers for XP, so I reverted back to those from a couple months ago. Maybe it's the same thing for 98. Objects on low and everything else on high in 640X480 (with noise texture raising on), the landscape looks great and seems fairly smooth. Clouds are bad, though. It's simply this thick fog above a certain alt.
Fwiw, if by "them" you mean the game designers, there's no auto lock in the game, because there wasn't any auto lock in the actual avionics of the jet at the time the sim represents.