Does this bring back memories???????

[Shaky]

Explain...track IR?

Originally posted by AWRaid

Regardless Track IR is the way to go these days.

[AWRaid]

http://www.naturalpoint.com/trackir/


It basically tracks the movements of your head so you can 'follow' the bandit by moving your head.

[Shaky]

Interesting....you use it?

[AWRaid]

I used to use it until it got broken mysteriously one drunken night. I should get a new one but haven't been into games for a long time now.

It worked well but it was kinda weird at first. Theres a video of it being used somewhere I'll see if I can find it.

[Brooke]

Originally posted by AWRaid
The first thing I did in air warrior was take off in a p51 and try to stallfight... don't tell me ALL of you didn't do the exact same thing.

You bet!  I remember the very first time I went on-line.  I took off in a P-51 and tried to stallfight -- with 100% fuel, no use of flaps, and with my only air-combat move being a hard flat turn right off of takeoff.  I got shot down quickly and repeatedly by Biggles, I think it was.  Still, I was giddy with happiness about finding a sim that allowed multiplayer air combat.

[Rino]

Originally posted by NoBaddy
Lag and warps? Heck, I keep thinking about playing in halftime...and being impressed.

     Trying to shake someone in HT was a pain in the rudder

[Brooke]

Originally posted by Pyro
It's hard to look at the graphics now and imagine how you ever thought they impressed you so much, but that's not even the biggest difference.  Lag and warps are worlds apart.  What was considered good then would be considered completely unplayable now.

Can you imagine what people would have thought if AH were available back then?  I would have been asking whom do I have to kill or what body part do I have to give up to play this thing.  The improvements are amazing.  Graphics are great, and as you point out, there are many non-graphical features, some of which have an even bigger impact:  low lag (such that you can actually fly formation these days), lack of warps, great flight model, good implementation of voice, many more aircraft, more-realistic gunnery, more-realistic damage models, trim . . . even little things like the ability to zoom to account for large resolution of the human eyeball Mk. I.

[Flossy]

Originally posted by mussie
Flossy Said
 

What the hell is a Vader

I didn't say that - Bullethead did.  If you are going to quote, at least quote the correct message/person.  

[AWRaid]

Originally posted by Brooke
more-realistic damage models, trim . . .  

I disagree, IRL All planes have a huge magical bubble around them allowing you to miss a bit and still hit. Everyone knows this cmon!

[Brooke]

Originally posted by AWRaid
I disagree, IRL All planes have a huge magical bubble around them allowing you to miss a bit and still hit. Everyone knows this cmon!

Hmm.  You might have something there.  I know my plane does, judging from how often I get shot.

[Bullethead]

mussie said:

What the hell is a Vader?

It's real name was the A-26B Invader, but in AW we discovered it SHOULD have been called the F/A-26 Darth Vader.  GAWD, that thing was the ultimate weapon of the Dark Side.  In competent hands (who could keep 4.95 Gs on it indefinitely, without ever crossing 5.0 and losing the wings), it could out-stallfight everything except zekes, but it had the E-fighting edge on even them.  In real life, it had 1 gunner with remote turrets above and below the tail that worked together, but in AW it had 2 separate gunners who could aim in different directions in a multi-bogey furball.  It carried so much ammo (like 1.5 minutes worth) for its 8x.50s in the nose that we'd spend the whole ingress with the trigger down to lighten ship (and trying to stay out of line-astern formation ).  The ammo gauge looked like a fuel gauge and we'd usually shoot down to just an RCH above 1/4 before engaging.  And the guns at both ends benefitted from the jacked-up "gunner leth" setting, and the plane itself enjoyed the "3x buff tuff" setting.  In short, it was an awesome instrument of destruction.  Look back on the 1st page of this thread for some old screens of how I decorated its cockpit .  (Actually, that was done by Crash, but to my specs)

I remember in the weeks before AW4W appeared on AOL, those of the Truly Evil among us, who weren't above going on AOL openly (many were too snooty, and denied ever doing so although they usually had "dark glasses" accounts there) decided on our plan for how to enjoy the opening of the dweebgates.  We decided we'd fly nothing but Vaders, with no bombs or gunners, and without dumping ammo, and vulch ourselves blind until such times as AOL's baby seals could put up a decent fight.  And we made predictions about how many kills we'd land.  My personal best was 28, but that wasn't anywhere near the top.  IIRC, several folks got over 50 per hop.

There was never anything like it, nor will there ever be again.  Tens of thousands of totally innocent, totally clueless dweebs suddenly popping up everywhere you looked, and some of the best and cruelest pilots sims have ever produced licking their chops in anticipation.  I'm sure there are literally hundreds of people out there who tried AW4W for an afternoon, whose experience consisted entirely of being vulched repeatedly by some taunting sadists in Vaders, and who've never touched a joystick since .

And if anybody reading this survived that initiation and is still flying today, !

[Bullethead]

Pyro said:

It's hard to look at the graphics now and imagine how you ever thought they impressed you so much, but that's not even the biggest difference.  Lag and warps are worlds apart.  What was considered good then would be considered completely unplayable now.

Pyro!

Man, you said a mouthful there.  Due to the host-controlled hit determination, combined with the horrific connection issues, being a good shot required a type of ESP, even WITH the old 3x hit bubbles.  You didn't shoot at the nme, you shot at the place you hoped the host would think the target was at by the time it received your lagged bullet packets, and you did this by subconsciously gauging both your own lag and that of the target while concentrating on your ACM.  This usually meant using tons of extra lead, and you had to shoot with some deflection because there was a recurring "dead 6" bug that discounted shots from that direction.  As connections improved (somewhat), the hit bubble shrank down to 1x, and finally became the same shape as the plane, but it was still a combination of luck and Zen that got you hits.

The really horrific thing was the WW1 arena.  In there, with the planes so close together and changing position so fast, the host couldn't keep up with them, and it was anybody's guess.  We often died from the "rear guns" of the guy we were chasing because, although it looked to us like we were on his tail, the host (and the other guy) thought it was the other way around.  When I won the Turkey Hams' 2v2 WW1 thing, I compared films with my opponents and you couldn't even tell it was the same fight.  But it was still a lot of fun .  My proudest moment in AW was beating BB himself in a Fokker D.VII duel at the last BopCon .

But even in WW2, the lag issues could drive you mad.  If you were "canopy to canopy" across the turning circle, and the nme appeared to be anywhere in the rear half of your straight-up view, you had to realize he was really well around onto your tail and you were about to die unless you did something different immediately.  When you checked 6, any nme seen at about 1000 yards was really within guns range from his POV, and you'd better act accordingly.

Periodically, I see somebody in here lobbying for host-controlled hit determination.  Geez, they have no idea what a bad idea that is .

[Bullethead]

Shaky said:

Nope...haven't grabbed the client yet. Still thinking about it

Good to see you, Shaky!  Still doing that paramedic thing?

You really should give AH a try.  It's way better than AW in so many ways there's no way to ennumerate them all.  The community's way different, but you'll get used to that .

[Lye-El]

I dug out my old Amiga 500 and took these Air Warrior screens. I may try take a 30 second movie with my digital camera of a flight for people to see. And guess what, the framerate sucked back then too.

[NoBaddy]

Originally posted by Lye-El

I dug out my old Amiga 500 and took these Air Warrior screens. I may try take a 30 second movie with my digital camera of a flight for people to see. And guess what, the framerate sucked back then too.

I played my first 3 months on an Atari ST with a frame rate of 8. A barrel roll looked like an 8 point roll.