And infinite poly limits :)

MrHemlocks you see me better than I can see you having killed me several times the other night! Good news is my kill rate is improving on SIM, bad news is - often they are my team mates! Looks like its a session in the hangar and work on my plane recognition skills. :(

Yep, Hemlocks had no trouble seeing me in his I153 last night, he was on me like white on rice :)

It's defintely not as hard to spot real airplanes. I spend hours looking for little cessnas and pipers every day without any trouble, and their usually painted white. These fighter aircraft were BIG (at least compared to most general aviation aircraft today. I think it's just hard to translate human vision capabilities into a video game. You have no peripherals on the game and due to the fact that everything seems animated it's harder to sight moving objects. As far as gameplay I just stay low and try to spot people on the horizon. During dogfights look for fires on the ground, I've noticed that most air battles happen over the same area and there will be a lot of crashes directly below the fight :)

Very good point I've noticed this as well. Funny how that happens that we have these huge maps and yet a furbal basically happens over about 1 square kilometer.

Yes, It is so much easier in real life. Our eyes have evolved like many other animals eyes to be very good at spotting movement, so looking down from a plane at the ground which seems to pass by slowly at high altitude, it is quite easy to notice another plane moving against the background even if it is a tiny dot. Also with two eyes and full neck mobility you have the 3D of your vison which even at this long distance can really help. Oh and infinate screen resolution :)

Now with a simulation you are really looking at a smooth stationary screen so light and movement has to also be simulated along with the 3D to trick your brain into believing you are looking out of a planes window but even with the highest posible screen resolution its nowhere near as efective as real life. And then if you have a LCD screen you will have at least a small amount of movement blur to deal with.

When playing in sim I usually stay high at first and inspect the map to find the right direction of the targets, then I usually point the plane so Im looking out the side of the cockpit towards the target and hold the camera as still as I can to avoid screen movement bluring, then I consentrate and look for the slight movements of planes and zoom in on them if nesesary with the left trigger. Then i dive in.

im usin the aviator layout here, so no zoom in for me unfortunatly:(
Still having a hard time seeing outhere but i feel like i'm slowly getting a hang of it, kinda getting the feel on where to look (distance, angle and altitude) depending on where the red dots appear on the map and what plane (and pilot) im flying against.
even when the patch arrives and we'll b able to remap controls, i dont kno how exacly ill configure to fit in the zoom, trim, map and flaps on the control pad and on the stick too. Seems like i'll either be 1 button short or having to do the cross-hand over and under dance on the av8r-03 stick... does the thrustmaster have more buttons on it?

Hoping things will improve when I swap over to the Xbox HD VGA cable and access my PC monitors full resolution. Supposed to be far better than using the component video lead, hope so anyway!

As for the AV8R stick, I don't thimk the word 'ergonomics' appeared in the design spec! Better than a game pad though!

That's cause the winner is the one with the most kills, not the least deaths. If there's 3 planes, 2 of them good dogfighters and 1 built for speed instead, the 3rd plane has to attack, extend to distance, climb, turn and attack again, which eats up valuable time while the two slower planes are racking up kills against each other right above the ground, and respawning in the same exact area.

I don't think it's much of a simulation when the i-153 is getting the most points. How many pilots were really so gung-ho about jumping into tight furballs with I-153's? All they had to do was take their time. Like in the 1st Stalingrad mission where you have I-16 and can't catch the 109's till they run to the edge of the map and turn around and climb to 3,000m