PHJF,

http://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=5159-QYFK-0185

This fixed that issue for me...

Link for the FS-Google addon:
http://www.elbiah.de/flusi/MyFsGoogleEarth/MyFsGoogleEarth.htm

Someone was talking about the online MMO type thing for FS pilots and controllers - that's http://www.vatsim.net - it's amazingly cool. I know regular gamers might not quite "get" this, but it is an amazingly realistic simulation of what it's like to actually being flying an airliner in the real ATC system - you really can't tell the difference between listening to a VATSIM voice comm channel and the real thing on a scanner a lot of times...

There's already an addon for FS2004 that connects it to Google Earth... there's bunch of photorealistic scenery that loads maps from GE into the sim too, I can pretty easily find my house/street in Tucson using one of them...

It has a Radeon X1600 though - something that is almost impossible to find in PC laptops currently... it's way better than the X1400 HyperMemory etc that Dell has.

This looks like a smaller-scale Planetside ripoff with better graphics to me - those mechs look just like the BFRs in PS...

It's so that crackers can't use the demo's exe to create hacks for the retail game... Still don't agree with Starforce's philosophy though and I'm worried it will damage my DVD drive...

You do realize that F4:AF is addons and reworking of the original Falcon 4 engine right? It's the best they can do given that basically no one will front the cash to do a true high fidelity sim anymore... I'm glad we have at least this, we could have nothing.

Amazingly descriptive patch notes...

Two private businesses making a deal with each other is not a monopoly. This is like saying if Coke decides to distribute its soda exclusively at one particular grocery store that it's a monopoly. The monopoly would be if coke forced other soft drink companies out of business. Other game makers don't have a right to use sports team logos and player names, the leauges are other privately owned businesses.

That's the legal side of it anyway - I do think EA is lame as hell for doing it, but there's nothing illegal or monopolistic about it.

Is there a link to info about what kind of damage SF can allegedly do to a DVD drive? I got Lock On Gold a few months back and my Plextor 712A has really been acting up probably for about that long and through a reformat without reinstalling it - it never even crossed my mind that the SF crap could have been the issue...

Yeah we can only hope that Lead Pursuit is able to create a truly next gen Falcon product that updates the graphics to Lock On or higher levels in the future... the sim just will not die hehe!

Riley,

Valve has a right to charge whatever they want for their product, just as you their consumer have the right to balk at it and walk away if you think they've asked too much. Where exactly do you get the idea that you have a right to afford Valve's games?

I run a business myself and I charge what I think my products and services are worth. Should you complain that you can only purchase those from me and not from Wal Mart or Best Buy? And even if you could purchase from those places, wouldn't I just charge THEM what I'd normally charge you directly, forcing them to have to price higher in order to make a profit on what they'd already spent buying from me?

Your monopoly argument is invalid because you're pretending that Valve is an industry unto themselves, when they're merely a single developer in the larger gaming industry. Valve can't seize Doom 3 or BF2, put them on Steam and say that you can only buy them there. If id or DICE chose to give Valve the exclusive right to sell those games on Steam (which would never happen anyway), you are perfectly capable, along with other gaming consumers to tell them that you don't like this practice by not buying their games. If as you say, Steam is so anti-consumer, consumers will communicate that by not purchasing the games, causing Valve to abandon the system in favor of one that they can make money using. The system self-regulates.

Your wants as a consumer of videogames don't trump the creator's right to sell their products at the price and in the manner they see fit.

Interested to see your response...

"it's exclusive so it eliminates sales competition for its products which keep prices higher than they would be, and it gathers and tracks information on its users."

Funny, I seem to recall paying less for my HL2 Silver on Steam than what someone would have paid in the stores for the crappy $85 Vivendi CD ""Gold" version that didn't even have everything...

You also fail to see that Steam delivers profits to the proper party - the ones that created the game. Why should some middleman who had nothing to do with creating the intellectual property in question get a portion of the proceeds from it. I am more than happy to put up with whatever shortcomings you think Steam has (I've never had a problem with it, even on the night HL2 was released) to make sure my $50 goes to the people that deserve it. Where is the law that says Valve must first sell their product to a middle man before going to the consumer?

Your competition argument fails as well - Steam is a market innovation, not a monopolizing force. Other game companies will develop similar tools and if they sell their games at a lower price sucessfully, it will put pressure on Valve to bring theirs down to a lower level as well. Ultimately, if people are willing to pay what Valve asks for their games, they will continue to sell - that's how the system works. If gamers as a whole decide that the cost isn't worth what we're recieving, then we stop buying and Valve adjusts price - rinse, repeat.

This comment was edited on Oct 13, 15:46.

There's also a 78.03 on the beta page by the way for anyone with a 7800GT/GTX that largely fixes the shimmering issue as well as the application specific profile bug...

"Out of interest, what is the current, most cutting edge flight sim on the market these days? I haven't played a flight sim since... Flight Unlimited 2 (heh). "

MSFS 2004 with the PMDG 747-400 addon ( www.precisionmanuals.com ) ...

George Romero's about to make you his bitch?

Cannot wait for IL-2: Underground to come out

HAHAHAHA!! I am cracking up here! Do we get Brooke Burke in the cockpit trying to sell us a Cingular phone too??!

Where are you guys getting this crap about Steam from? I've been using it for quite a while and have no problem with it at all - would you rather get the game directly from the people who made it, giving them the lion's share of the profit, or buy from some publisher who's in it purely to make money? Same idea as music - I'd much rather that my favorite band got my money directly than their scumbag record label who's going to give them 10 cents or less on the dollar for it.

To answer that huge list of supposed concerns about Steam - you can set it not to auto-patch, you can easily play single player or LAN games without connecting to the internet, it is not spyware, it doesn't upload (they have talked about this for the future, but it would be a configurable option), and as to the people without internet connections - they couldn't even have Steam in the first place - that's what the boxed version is for. The chances of someone without an Internet connection having the type of computer needed to run HL2 I also think is slim to none.

Quboid,

Actually, I was forgetting about this - Justin released the FSGenesis USA 35m meshes for free onto AVSIM a few weeks ago - you can check em out there - it's not $100 to get the whole US either - it was like $35 or $40 for me. They come in packages like "The West Coast" "The Rockies" "The Great Plains" etc. I live in Arizona so having that high resolution mesh really helps with being able to visually identify mountains etc. It's gonna get better with the patch properly recognizing the resolution of the terrain now too!

Quboid,

There's some good stuff in the avsim library too. If you're willing to pay for it, the FScene ground textures, FSGenesis terrain mesh and landclass, and the Flight 1 FSWater water and sky textures produce a much more realistic looking sim than the defaults...