The Bitches of Aces High

    Quote from Beej

    They remind me of the typical Canadian...terrified of breaking rules

    I demand satisfaction! Ban him Skuzzy.


    Does anyone remember the pre Skuzzy years at HTC on the forums? I remember the Bush/Gore election saga, and it was great times on the forums there, no moderation, no swear filter, there were some truly great threads. I'd bet anything that they lost far, far more customers over moderating/punishing them, than they did gain customers by moderating people and bleeping out "bad" words. HT is a brilliant coder, and a really nice guy in person (well on the phone in my case), but he made a few poor business decisions, the moderation of the forums and to some extent the game itself being top of the list IMO.


    I nagged HTC for years to run their game on Steam - when they finally decided to, the numbers of downloads of AH were staggering, tens of thousands for weeks - the problem was they were NOT ready to service a general gamer customer. The help/startup docs weren't very good, the website was ponderous to navigate, etc etc. Had they been prepared properly, they would have captured a lot more of those Steam clients. I also think blending in some sort of FTP model would be a huge benefit - allow x many FTP clients in the arena, limit them to a very small number of aircraft/vehicles, and it would have the effect of making the arenas "full" most of the time, giving paying customers more targets for PVP action, while also capturing a good number of the FTP players who might want better/more access to the full range of aircraft.


    Remember the Blue/Orange server days? The game was so popular you had to fight to get into the arena where your squad/friends were.

    I always liked the base capture squads. Look, those guys weren't furballers and never would be. If you forced them to furball, they'd quit the game.


    There were other players who didn't furball who spent all their time busting and attacking the base capture guys. You also had guys who didn't want to fly fighters - they liked flying bombers (hard drinking socializers who chatted away all night) and driving GVs. Force them to furball, they'd also quit.


    Others still liked doing CV ops - hitting a base with the naval guns, then launching a CV based force to capture a base. Again, it could be really fun to try to stop them. It was also fun to take part in it.


    Look all to say, to me the best year in AH was around 2004-2005, when you had these perfect big arena maps that had it all. They had a landscape that was appealing to the base sneakers, the CV ops guys, had a tank town for the GVs, and had a perfect spot in the middle of the map for epic furballs.


    No arena caps or player balancing. I loved that era - the chaos, the hordes... and a million ways to have fun and bust people. I loved logging in there, taking all the battle in, and choosing something to do. If I felt like pure furballing with no distractions, I'd go to the big furball in the DA.


    I liked all of it, and I liked the variety. Something for everyone (even the two account cock sucker 007 spy types).


    I think what hurt AH the most was the hardening of bases - that killed the chaos... that ruined it so a group of 3-4 guys could no longer sneak a base. The more they reigned in the chaos, and tried to force people to play a certain way, the more people left the game IMHO.


    I liked the Chaos and the Action. I liked the variety and the fun.

    Heck I knew a couple of guys... they played for years, many hours a day -and you know what they did exclusively ? They flew goons only. Literally, the entire game for them was flying a C-47 at the tail end of a base capture mission, and drop those troops.


    One of these guys in particular, he'd fly a goon full of paratroopers below country radar, sometimes for two hours - then he'd land in a field somewhere, just outside of the base ranges so nothing would flash - and he'd sit there, parked, sometimes another 2 hours, just drinking his beer, and socializing with his friends. He'd eventually tell a few base capture squads where he was camped out, and they'd send a sneak mission over. With the goon so close, they'd drop the base and he'd finally take off, fly a very short distance and crash the goon in right next to the map room and let the boys out.


    He's one of the many people who quit the game forever when they hardened bases. So many guys like that left the game and got into World of Tanks or other games like that (where they remain today).

    Quote from Beej

    I drove a goon across the ground for most of a sector once (ripped wings off on a awshit) was hilarious

    See I loved furballing - like at one point some of us here spent like 6 months in the WWI (Toad, -gg-, Lazs and others that I recall) arena only doing 1 on 1s. But I also like crazy shit like the above. I liked doing Stuka or Mosquito raids, the odd Astronaut buff runs, a GV Rush, or taking down base HQ in some crazy novel way. I liked all of it. I thrived in variety and chaos... but yeah, the core was 1 on 1 furballing I have to admit that.

    Quote from slamfire

    You have to be really into Flight simming to love AH.


    People actually showed up with a sim pit at a large RC flying event. Nobody cared. They'd rather turn a wrench on a tiny plane.


    The most fun I had in AH was one of the big ops flying with a Spit squadron vs 109s over Malta. Single day ace that day. I started with one of the base grabber squads in the MA and.. man that shit got boring fast. Then it was on to furballing off carriers under 3k. Best fighting in the game until some cunt eventually sinks the CV to ruin the fun to "protect the base!"

    I was SHOCKED at the difference in resource use AND graphics quality when I first downloaded DCS. But from what I understand a lot of AH's resource problem (considering relatively poor graphics) was the sync and lag part that DCS didn't have to deal with.


    BUT... DCS adds more and more multiplayer stuff all the time and STILL.. I can have the eye candy cranked on DCS with 60fps while over in AH I'm turning off water textures and shadows just to keep it near 30.


    I always found that kinda weird.

    All Government is Organized Crime.

    One time I remember Elite Top Aces (the greatest outfit of all time) was together doing a one-off GV base raid - we dropped this base using GVs, but this one asshole in a Tiger was sitting there killing anyone that dared get too close. Nobody had enough GV perks to challenge him. I upped from a nearby friendly base in a Stuka with the massive cartoon bomb. There were some fighters doing defense, but they were all tied up in 1 in 1 battles - somehow, against all odds, everyone missed seeing my Stuka, and I came in and did a full vertical dive on the Tiger.


    Really I didn't have enough alt for such a tactic, and it took just a little too long to stabilize my angle of attack for a perfect drop - I released the bomb and pulled the stick back as far as it would go, going FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK as I smashed into some treetops (ripping off my undercarriage), but I managed to fly away. I thought I missed the Tiger as there was a massive boom, but no message. Then the delayed reaction thing happened about 2 secs later, and it registered the kill of the Tiger. The base was captured, and I belly landed, but not before I dramatically got on local vox and declared An Emergency.


    -"MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY BREAK BREAK!!! THIS IS AIR CHIEF MARSHAL SLAMFIRE DECLARING AN EMERGENCY LANDING, I REPEAT EMERGENCY LANDING !!! ALL AIRBORNE ASSETS NEAR BASE A15 STAY IN PATTERN OR SEEK ALTERNATE LANDING SITES!!!" - and I did an extra long belly landing.


    What a mission! I earned the Congressional Medal of Honor and also got my Trident !

    Quote from Gina

    I think akak was in on that mission too. That guy was so much fun and I says hi. He was so good at the b-25 strafer. Picking off tanks and Gvs

    Yeah I remember we were all laughing our asses off, it was like one of the last missions of the night - very late, like 2am - all of us pretty shitfaced. I'd do things (like get on vox) thinking it would just piss people off, but almost always people found it funny as hell. Dred was there, akak, you were there, sluggish maybe and assi. Great times - never had more fun online than those days. Most people understood our humor, and the ones that did not, we'd just take it to the next level to mess with them even more LOL.

    Quote from El Sluggo Loco

    I was SHOCKED at the difference in resource use AND graphics quality when I first downloaded DCS. But from what I understand a lot of AH's resource problem (considering relatively poor graphics) was the sync and lag part that DCS didn't have to deal with.


    BUT... DCS adds more and more multiplayer stuff all the time and STILL.. I can have the eye candy cranked on DCS with 60fps while over in AH I'm turning off water textures and shadows just to keep it near 30.


    I always found that kinda weird.

    Nah, DCS forces DirectX 11 or better. The last time AH2 updated their requirements it was 2018 according to their min req page, and it runs on DirectX 9. DirectX 9 came out in 1995. DCS supports multi-threading. As far as I know, AH2 never has. Multi-threading allows you to distribute time intensive functions off the main core and massively speeds up everything.

    I wrote a quick "boids" demo (flocking AI) for a bunch of fish to swim around a tank. Without multithreading you can get about 1000 fish before framerate crashes. With multithreading on my PC you can do 10,000 fish at the same framerate as the 1000. My PC isn't anything special either.

    That's how I used to think of it, kind of like hanging out in a bar getting shitfaced with your buddies without having to leave the house

    Well respected man about town doing the best things most conservatively

    Barb and I went to Dayton three or four years in a row, the first one there must have been 50 or 60 people there, was freaking awesome

    Well respected man about town doing the best things most conservatively