SSX flight school!

[M.Steiner]

3. Finding a server on which to practice flying together as a group.

[Edit - Link removed for now. I think most of us got the practice in that we needed whilst the server was up and with it being Christmas shortly and TOR early access in a matter of days I haven't renewed this. Plus I think many of us have been busy playing other games like Skyrim too. If it's still possible to launch a server with 1-2 players in a month or two and some of you really want some more practice we could probably renew it then if needs be! ]

No need to waste useful jets on full servers when decent pilots could be making use of for the team instead, or waiting around for one to spawn along with several other jet campers. We have this server for the next month just for getting to grips with the jets and as such is just a 16/16 server. The only maps in rotation are the ones with air vehicles and the game will start with a minimum of 1 player.
There's an issue atm with password protecting it but I've sent a ticket about this already so hopefully that'll be sorted soon but atm it's still empty anyway. It's also in the SSX name as you can see and linking back here so even if not many people spot it amongst the thousands of other servers maybe it'll be a cheap bit of advertisement for our community and platoon whilst we're at it which can't be a bad thing. If some of us still want some practice in a months time I should be able to extend it for another couple of months at least until I have a TOR subscription to think about as well.
I guess we could play some clan matches on it as well if we want to test anything out but I was mainly thinking of the flying practice since 64/64 is the way to go at least for me hehe.

Have fun!

[Edit] - I've figured the password thing out. When the password is set it will be the first letters of our ideals in lowercase (Freedom, Equality, Honour, Integrity, Friendship).

[Anubis]

Very cool to see an SSX server. Hope you guys find it useful

[Ash]

Please note that I am led to believe that you can switch control devices between ground and air,
so you can use a playstation/ Xbox controller for the planes/ helicoptors and it automatically reverts back
when you disembark.

[M.Steiner]

Yep you can. If you have your gamepad/Joystick or whatever plugged in you can use your keyboard & mouse for ground combat like usual and then the minute you enter a jet/heli you can pick your pad up and use that instead. Infact they don't revert between one another so to speak, you could put your gamepad down mid flight and start using the keyboard again as both will work at the same time.

Also I have set 2 server profiles up now.
A private profile which is just for our use and is password protected. Limited to to the wide open maps with air vehicles and will start with just 1 player. See above for pw.
A public profile which covers all conquest maps which random people can play on whilst we're not using it. I've also added ingame admin messages which will yell our website address every so often and is an extra bit of advertisement.

Will be reverting between these two settings since we won't be using it all the time and other people might as well use it whilst we aren't. If it happens to be open at the time you want to go on there just yell on IRC and I'll switch it over to the private one for ya.

[Kon]

This is so awesome! Thanks for providing us with a server to practice on, MS. I'll be putting it to good use.

[SSX-Andy]

Very nice.

Gave it a go. Managed to stay up in the air for quite a bit. Still having some problems with finding my way back to the targets after each run, but at least I don't crash any more.

Learned that it is possible to land the planes without crashing. Although if you get stuck between two trees there isn't much you can do since the plane can't reverse and isn't strong enough to actually break the trees. Was fun though.

[Whizbang]

So I hoped into the SSX server for a bit of flight school last night. I will say it's a bit disorienting at first using mouse/keyboard to do everything. But once you've gotten the jist of the controls you can do ok. I think the hardest part is the turning and landing as for some reason as I was landing and touched down the jet decided it was better in the air and took back off....right into a forest.

Lots of fun though. Now to wait for a map that will provide heli training.

[Ash]

All maps I've tried so far has Helicoptor also.

Not got the jist of the plane yet, but the helicoptors isn't too bad, although no one was shooting at me.

Which made me think that we could arrange some live fire target practice.

I'd be up for shooting you fly boys down in an AA vehicle.
Also give you a ground target to attack.

On another topic, i cant seem to get my gamepad or joystic kto work with BF3, am I missing something?

[M.Steiner]

Other than switching the vertical fly to inverted and remapping some of my ground combat keys to my mouse etc I've left all the controls from a gamepad as default. The wired 360 controller I tried out worked out of the box with that tbh. I just leave it plugged in so I can switch between them quickly.
That being said I did have an issue yesterday where my gamepad suddenly stopped working for some reason and wouldn't respond outside of a vehicle either. Don't know if the problem you have is the same Ash but when I restarted the game completely that seemed to fix it though unplugging and plugging it back in before that made no difference as I was worried that it was broken. If that doesn't work I'm not sure what could be wrong.

Also good suggestion with the live target practice. I can now take off, do some turns and rolls and even manage to land my jet too. Before practicing I hardly made it off the ground tbh
Tried that out on a live server and stayed up in the air for a while whilst evading other jets but trying to take down enemy targets at the same time as focusing on flying the thing and avoiding being locked on will take some more practice. I ultimately got shot down by AA heh.
I'll be playing some more this weekend though so perhaps we could go 2vs2 on the jets whilst having a couple of us in anti-air vehicles on the ground too or something.

[SSX-Andy]

Some 2v2 airfighting sounds like fun.

[Ash]

I've got my gamepad sorted and got a half decent handle on my helicoptor flying.

[Ash]

I had fun over the weekend getting to grips with the helicoptor, I think I'll leave the planes alone for the moment.

And I've nicely developed my roof landing techniques, great approach for hitting a roof with no access.