Returning F4 player. A few questions please.
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So I’ve been hanging onto my old Falcon 4.0 for years, and have been aware of BMS for some time now. I just haven’t had either the time or the “ummph!” to get back into the time sink that learning Falcon’s systems requires. Hopefully my experience with it prior will shorten it some as I now try to ease back into it.
I bought a used X45 for $30 from Ebay. Hopefully it’s not too worn out. But if it is, do any hardware mods exist that might tighten it back up? I’m kinda kicking myself for not hanging onto my CH Pro setup, but it was the old model (non-USB, ie serial port) so I gave it away some years ago not sure if I’d be able to use it with the USB ports.
My system specs are AMD Athlon II X2 245, Radeon HD 6570 and 4 gigs DDR2 800 Mhz ram. Installed with no issues and can run the “Free Flight” TE at around 75 FPS. Not terrible, should be playable in campaign I hope. But what would people recommend to upgrade first? I know, it all could be upgraded, but I’ll have to do it in stages. I’m thinking to do the CPU first as it looks like it’s getting difficult to find a quad core AM3 socket chip now. There’s nothing new anymore, but I can find an AMD Phenom II X4 955 here and there on Ebay.
I also bought a PS3 Eye with the intention of building the TrackIR thingy using Free Track. Can anyone speak about how much CPU that uses and will it hamper me right away? I’ve read it does eat a moderate amount, so that’s another reason why I’m thinking about the CPU upgrade first, but would be nice to hear from anyone who knows. But I’m really set on that…I’ve never used a head tracking for anything and I can’t wait to give it a try…it’s a dream come true for an old flight simmer!
Extra Campaigns. I was amazed to see there’s more than a couple add-on theaters now. Any recommendations? Do the dynamic campaigns work ok with them? The dynamic campaign is the main reason I’m coming back to fly Falcon again…I don’t know why no-one else has been able able to duplicate what F4 did all those years ago (and still today), but the campaign is amazing and I’d love to find the add-ons work just as well as the Korean.
I’m sure there’d be more, but that’s plenty for now. Thanks for any answers. Looking forward to getting back into the greatest combat flight sim ever made.
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Repairs to the X-52, buttons and dials/pots can be purchased cheaply enough from Radio Shack or similar outlets, take one down with you to get the right sizes and values. The stick comes apart easily anough, its worth buying the correct size screwdriver as well so they dont get damaged. Youll need a soldering Iron and a reel of prefluxed solder, also a roll of desoldering braid to take the old stuff off the boards. A pair of your wifes eyebrow tweezers is a good idea to have around and a rol of cellotape to fix some button caps in place. Most are surface mounted “POP” plates.
As for your PC its way more than Falcon needs to fly. I used to fly it on Sp4 with an AMD athlon 1.7Ghz, 128MB of DDR memory and an 8MB All in wonder pro graphics card so yep its more than enough.
As for getting an eye to work on trackIR type function, ive no idea sorry. I just use a x52 hotas, keyboard and mouse. Surprisingly the sim does work without a cougar and TrackIR and only one screen. Buy what you can afford to get. Having the most expensive stick on the planet oes not make you the best pilot going. Only knowledge does that.
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My rig is older and less powerful than yours Bahnzo and I manage no problems. FPS drop slightly on the ground and when using the TGP but it’s still playable. Don’t know about the X45 as i have a cougar but i do know that having a decent HOTAS is crucial to success in BMS (and the knowledge like Gyro said).
I use a home built Freetrack set up instead of Track IR and i find it works outstandingly well once you get used to it and get your profile/axis/curves set the way you want them (top tip is to disable rotation by the way, is not useful in the sim and just makes like more dizzying) and it probably cost me about £40 all in all. As regards performance i cannot notice any performance hits with or without Freetrack running, it makes no difference as far as i can
tell, even on my ageing rig!Korea, Israel and Balkans are the 3 most complete/working theatres right now but I beleive one or two of the campaigns in the Balkans don’t work properly. Others will be able to give more information plus there is loads of information about them on the forums.
Good luck and enjoy.
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Freetrack gives me no performance hit at all. I would recommend setting the curves to a sort of flat s like shape. This gives you the stability in the centre of the screen and allows you to pan all the way around without having to move your head too far. One downside of this solution is that sunlight rather easily overwhelms the pseye (make sure you get the right kind, one of them cannot be modified to remove the ir filter) and weaker ir leds. I’ve used for a while now and while it’s transformed my BMS experience and looking for a slightly more robust system and am thus considering a trackir
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Joining the thread with a question of my own. Likewise a returning “old” Falconeer, callsign Greywolf. Some may remember me from the Froggy days. It’s been years, but once a Falconeer, always a Falconeer! :D:D Dusted off my trusty Falcon 4.0, and headed for BMS 4.32. Downloaded nicely, installed nicely. Looking forward to a weekend of re-acquaintance. The system should do it justice - 12G RAM, 6G NVIDIA, Win 8.1 The question - can I transfer my logbook of Falcon SP4.2 days to Falcon BMS 4.32? It’s currently on CD. Worked hard for it and would love to be able to transfer. If it will work, instructions on how to make it happen will be gratefully accepted. Many thanks in advance, guys. We keep returning!
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My system specs are AMD Athlon II X2 245, Radeon HD 6570 and 4 gigs DDR2 800 Mhz ram. Installed with no issues and can run the “Free Flight” TE at around 75 FPS. Not terrible, should be playable in campaign I hope. But what would people recommend to upgrade first? I know, it all could be upgraded, but I’ll have to do it in stages. I’m thinking to do the CPU first as it looks like it’s getting difficult to find a quad core AM3 socket chip now. There’s nothing new anymore, but I can find an AMD Phenom II X4 955 here and there on Ebay.
I’m sure there’d be more, but that’s plenty for now. Thanks for any answers. Looking forward to getting back into the greatest combat flight sim ever made.
Yes your best item will be a 955 if you can get one.
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If it helps you any: freetrack took 5 % on my old 6750 core 2 duo using a modified 30 hz microsoft vx1000 webcam. I found that using a low resolution was very stable, too - this drove down the numbers to 5%.
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I build a freetrack with 3 IR LED’s using 100mA of forward current, 45° view angle which is usable even in good light. Used an old microsoft webcam, removed the IR filter, put some old floppy disk in front of it and it worked surprisingly well considering the 30 bucks I did spend on it.
Freetrack gave better results for me, I had to play around with the curves and smoothing settings on it.
I have an AMD X4 760K, 4Gig RAM and a rather old radeon (I think the 6570, but with the slow memory) which will give me about 80-100fps in TE (graphic card is soo old…), but allows me to play campaigns fluently.
Now, when I record my whole flight to video in 1680x1080 when in campaign, the headtracking tends to lag a bit. Tracking itself is not that much of an FPS issue, but my bottleneck isn’t the CPU, so it doesn’t tell a lot. Using the IR LED’s worked, but flying with a facetracking solution was a pain in the *** for me since my face seems to be off to some side. At least I could turn my virtual head more to one side than to the other.
It ain’t TrackIR and it ain’t as fast as 150fps, but given the 30 bucks, it worked better than I expected.
My wife did have a strange look in her face when she saw it the first time however. I did expect that, given the funny looking IR LED’s on top of a cap… But who cares, I can’t see that while flyingI personally upgraded from a similar CPU than yours and had a huge FPS boost. Next thing will be a decent GPU, but I’m waiting for 4.33 to see what happens there. On my old system, the CPU was a real bottleneck. Now, it’s the GPU, but I tend to fly with low graphic settings and it’ll be fine.
I think your system will be fine for running most of the campaigns. Try korea strong over Seoul and see if it stutters… When this works, all the other stuff will be fine too.As for the addons, the falcon online theaters are one of the best around, but not that great for offline campaigns. Try the korean campaign with strong DPRK, even the “old” korean campaigns have changed a lot. If your internet connection is good enough (about 1Mbit up/down with ping time <300ms), you should consider joining a virtual fighter wing.
Most of the other theaters do not have a working offline campaign. -
Just a quick thanks to everyone for the info so far. I’m less worried about the IR tracking now, but will have to see what type I want to go with.
And I think I’m definitely going to try to find a 955BE processor for my AMD. Like you TobiasA, I want to get a decent GPU as well, but that’ll have to wait. Trying to find a compatible X4 CPU might be kinda tough, there just aren’t many out there for sale, and they are all used.
Should see my X45 in a few days, so I’m excited for that to arrive. Playing with just a cheap joystick (and my Thrustmaster wheel for buttons/rudder) just doesn’t cut it.
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Hi Bahnzo. Just to add, I’ve got 2 Track IR4s running on different cockpits / pcs and I’ve never noticed any impact on performance. My Falcon PC is a duo-core from 2007 and is still running Windows XP. As a tracking device during dog fighting, Track IR has been brilliant.
Welcome back to the community. -
Sorry to revive this thread, but I’m also considering either purchasing TrackIR or building a freetrack setup. Is the quality comparable? I guess freetrack has only gotten better over the years, right? I’m not too good at soldering (I know which end gets hot, but that’s about it), should I still attempt building something myself?
Uwe
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Sorry to revive this thread, but I’m also considering either purchasing TrackIR or building a freetrack setup. Is the quality comparable? I guess freetrack has only gotten better over the years, right? I’m not too good at soldering (I know which end gets hot, but that’s about it), should I still attempt building something myself?
Uwe
Go for it you might have some minor problems if you have a strong light behind you but its ok, if you "play and search the settings a little you are fine. I use it and ok but remember buy a camera with a good framerate or even the playstation one witch most of the users say, i have a creative HD (can remember the model) i removed the IR filter from the lens addwd a piece of floppy disk in front (the magnetic surface of the floppy) and its fine, i dont really know if it is comparable but it does its job! If you are not good in soldering you can find in e-bay complete setup for your headset with the ir led soldered and powered by a usb cable for i think 25$ or so. Let me tell you something different feeling and + to dogfighting as you will be able not to loose your enemy from your eyes! Cheer i hope i was helpfull
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efcharisto poli Mano! I’ll check ebay for a ready-made clip. I have a logitech webcam (quite a good one, a leftover from the office, Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000), do you think it will work ok?
Cheers, Uwe
PS: Do you have a link for a freetrack compatible cap clip? A quick ebay search came up empty.
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efcharisto poli Mano! I’ll check ebay for a ready-made clip. I have a logitech webcam (quite a good one, a leftover from the office, Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000), do you think it will work ok?
Cheers, Uwe
PS: Do you have a link for a freetrack compatible cap clip? A quick ebay search came up empty.
Uwe here ya go http://www.ebay.com/itm/DelanClip-Motion-Tracking-FaceTrackNoIR-Free-track-compatibile-with-TrackIR-/331421809593?pt=UK_PC_Video_Games_Video_Games_JS&hash=item4d2a477bb9
As for logitec i think its ok i dont have the details about the FPS and stuff but you can always use smaller resolution on the camera to get better resultsEDIT: Just saw that the guy has a bundle for almost 40 pounds with the PS-3 Camera ir ready… not bad… how did i missed that
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Thanks again Manos. Looks like the webcam does 30fps @ 800x600, I think this should be enough for proper free-tracking, right?
The clip looks great, I guess I can mount it to my headset of choice?
All the best,
Uwe
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Thanks again Manos. Looks like the webcam does 30fps @ 800x600, I think this should be enough for proper free-tracking, right?
The clip looks great, I guess I can mount it to my headset of choice?
All the best,
Uwe
Yes Uwe you can and even if have smaller resolution its even better. Anyway the freetrack it has a software multiplier fro the fps. my cam also runs for 30 @ 720p but i have it on 640x480 and with the software multiplier goes to 120Fps and works great. Remember you are gonna face problems if you have some strong light looking the camera. and also take your time to fix the curves and the settings in the profile you are gonna make. Cheers!!