New Condor Tips Document

HL Falbaum wrote:
OK---I'll ask---
What joystick is recommended for Condor.
My Gravis Eliminator was not very good with a large dead spot in the middle.
I took it apart to see if I could improve it---made it worse.

Saitek, Logitech, and Microsoft all seem to have good ones on paper at
least.

Favorites?

Saitek x52

incomparable.

I've had Condor for a couple of years. It was fun. I even tried to create my
own landscape.
looks like some interest growing in the states.
Maybe I'll dig it out again. : )

--
Message posted via AviationKB.com
http://www.aviationkb.com/Uwe/Forums...aring/200805/1

I have both the old sidewinder II and the Sidewinder Force feed back.
I found the Force Feedback to be novel at first but after playing for
a while I find it more annoying than anythng. I usually prefer to play
with standard sidewinder which I have found to be a very good
joystick.

Let us know what you think of you Force Feed back stick after you have
had a chance to try it out.

Thanks

Brian
CFIIG/ASEL

Hi Noel

I bow to your superior knowledge. The 3D complexity is probably more important.

Unfortunately many of the folk who have these kinds of problems have the three -
five year old shared memory video cards...

Consider my business oriented notebook (1680x1050 resolution and a slow GPU)
great for fine text and flowcharts, lousy for gaming. - only answer is to reduce
display resolution. I know - time for that new HP.

I will have to check on Condor - the other soaring simulator I own is SFS4 PC -
that has the neat trick of allowing you to reduce the rendered resolution but
leave the screen at native resolution. Works by reducing the rendering workload
although the image does deteriorate.

One of the generalisations in economics is that expenditure rises to consume
income. My first PC had 128K of RAM and a 20MB hard drive and I ran an entire
business off that, but found the 8Kb Hercules CGA graphics too slow for any
games to be fun...
My current video setup on the gaming PC has 512MB of dedicated fast RAM, and we
are still complaining about the video speed.

Cheers
Bruce

noel.wade wrote:
Bruce -

Your advice is generally good; but those rules of thumb are changing
as graphics cards have evolved over the last few years.

Screen Resolution and Color Depth affect graphics performance mostly
when the graphics card doesn't have much memory (such as with cheaper
PCs that have "Integrated" graphics chips or "Shared memory").

Furthermore, most of today's LCD screens are actually designed to work
at 1 optimum resolution. Using lower resolutions will cause the
screen to look blurry or blocky (in Windows and other 2d applications,
not just during 3d rendering).

The geometric complexity of a scene (i.e. the number of three
dimensional shapes in view) is more critical to performance with
today's modern 3d graphics cards.

So the first thing to do is to try to lower the amount of trees and
objects being rendered. Also lowering the visibility (drawing
distance) or lowering the terrain or texture detail can help. "High
End" smoothing (such as anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering) can
also add a big slow-down and should be disabled if the computer isn't
performing well.

Most of these display/graphics options are visible from within the
Condor settings / configuration screens.

Take care,

--Noel
(Former computer-game developer) :-)

Paul,

a great resource to develop your skills in Condor is the Condor Task
DataBase at http://condor.ephemeride.com/home/1/

They have their own badge progression that you can fly by yourself,
uploading the flight track when you're done to claim
the badge. There's also daily scores ala OLC and the "XC Challenge"
which has a list of fun flights to do.

At some point when you think you can stay up without the thermal
helpers turned on, try flying the various online
contests such as SpeedBattle and Monday Night Soaring. In both cases
you will fly along with (real life) good
competition pilots and learn quite a bit in the process.

I think that doing all this over the winter helped me improve quite a
bit when I flew a real contest for the second time
in my life this spring. I do have to add that just flying the
simulator by itself isn't going to help you as much as having
specific goals you want to accomplish in the simulator. Also find
yourself a good coach, either in person or by reading
the great books of soaring (e.g. Reichmann, Moffat, etc). It is just
as easy to reinforce bad habits as it to build good ones
if you're not careful.

I totally agree with Matt's comments!

When they see Condor, the first question out of most people's mouths
is "Does it have my home airport?"

But I've come to the conclusion that the LAST thing you want to do in
Condor is fly your home airport! It will never match the real life
location 100%, and changes to the real-life landscape over time won't
be reflected in the computer. Plus, it will encourage people to fly
via ground-references; which most instructors and books DIRECTLY
caution against doing!

Learning to fly the traffic pattern by launching from a bunch of
"foreign" airfields will teach pilots to use visual angles like we're
all supposed to. Its much easier to do this with a student in Condor,
than to actually take them to a couple of different airfields in real
life - illustrating another great way in which Condor is a valuable
learning tool.

I stopped flying Condor after I got my glider endorsement (I was
already a PPL SEL pilot). But then after I read all of the various
Cross-country books and manuals I returned to Condor and found it to
be a GREAT tool for learning how to safely stretch a glide (and find
out what happens when that doesn't work out), how to figure out which
clouds or markers to go for, how to set a goal and work towards it,
and how to center thermals (Condor thermals are a little more stable /
ideal than in real life - but that consistency actually makes for
really good practice at centering thermals if you set the strength to
be weak and the width to be moderate or narrow. If you can keep the
vario steady throughout an entire circle, you know you've nailed
it).

I recently discovered how much fun the Speedbattle tasks are, and how
flying these tasks online can really help my real-life flying. In our
real-life club we deal with weak weather conditions and so XC flying
is very casual - we launch and then see what conditions will permit,
and work our way slowly along from marker to marker. It was very easy
for me to never get far from the airfield as a result. With a pre-
determined Goal, the Speedbattle tasks and other online competitions
FORCE you to head out on course and make the most of what you can
find. Being on the computer, there's no risk to being daring and
trying different techniques. And Speedbattle lets you try each task 5
times - so you can fly it in different ways and see how the outcome
varies based on your tactics and risk-level. There are benefits to
flying these online tasks even if nobody else is logged into the
Speedbattle servers and you fly it solo.

This practice has fed back into my real-life flying and made me a
better cross-country pilot. I'm still SLOW in my real-life flying;
but I'm making better distances and having more fun! I just posted my
first real-life flight to the OLC, in fact. Its not too impressive on
the surface, but considering that I was dealing with 3000 to 4000 foot
cloudbases and only ~4 knot lift, I'm pretty happy with the flight:
http://www.onlinecontest.org/olc-2.0...Id=-1550701213

Take care,

--Noel