Page 1

Daily News
By Douglas Helmer

| Send Us News | Archives | Main |

Tuesday, February 04, 2003





PC Game and Hardware News

IGI 2: Covert Strike Movie
The movie shows off how integral the game's accurately modelled real-world weapons are if you're to succeed in the covert missions.

You have a plan…You have an enemy…execute them both in IGI 2: Covert Strike, Codemasters' stealth-based first-person shooter, which launches February 21 for PC.

The new "Strike" movie, along with the game's single-player demo, are available from the link below.

Download: IGI 2 Movie
Vietcong Multiplayer Demo Patch v0.98
Patch 0.98, which, among other things, lifts it from 32- up to 50-player jungle warfare.

Download: Vietcong v0.98 Patch
Battlefield 1942 Updates (4 Items)
Gee, only four new things on PlanetBattlefield.com today? Not bad considering that both the Road to Rome appeared on retail shelves today and a patch for the regular version also released today. The v1.3 patch fixes numerous network, graphics, sound, and gameplay issues. It also includes a new carrier war map.
  • Battlefield 1942: Road to Rome Expansion Released
  • Patch v1.3 Released
  • Patch v1.3 Contains Cheat Bug
  • BF1942 vs MOHAA Poll
  • G.I. Joe Mod Update

Website: PlanetBattlefield.com
Delta Force: Black Hawk Down Official Demo
As promised, NovaLogic has now released the official playable demo for Delta Force: Black Hawk Down, superseding both the previous single- and multi-player demos of their imminent squad-based tactical shooter. This demo "contains a single player mission called 'Diplomatic Immunity' as well as a multiplayer Capture-the-Flag map."

Download: DF:BHD Demo (3D Gamers)
Jane's USAF Mission, Fly II and FS2002 Aircraft
AVSIM has the following new files for you to enjoy:
  • Janes: Barrier 2 by Michael Pookbooncherd
  • Fly! II Aircraft: P51D- Mustang 'SU-SU' by J.Sabatier, L.Claudet and TJ ( ROTW ) / Repaint by Leen de Jager
  • FS2002: F-15 Eagle 318th FIS USAF by Paul Barry

Website: AVSIM
Plane Repainting Tutorial
Tip o' the hat to AVSIM for this news:
The Jet Doctor, a member of AVSIM's partners groups, has just released it's latest on-line help/tutorial guide. This new guide focuses on a beginners guide to repainting aircraft using Adobe Photoshop. This on-line guide walks new users through converting the aircraft bitmap files into a Adobe Photoshop useable format, the basics of painting, how to create and edit alpha channels, how to edit the light table file, and finally how to export the final texture into a FS2002 usable DXT3 format. The guide is more than six on-line pages, twelve word pages, and has more than forty images to help guide you. The guide can found under the Tutorial section of the Jet Doctor website, available here.

Website: AVSIM
Website: The Jet Doctor
LO:MAC Alpha Preview Article
Found this news nugget at Biohazcentral.com. Now, I'm not sure if the site where the preview is found is called Falcon4.0 Headquarters or Simmersworld.com, at any rate, Edwin "RazorBlade" Versijp has posted his first-hand impressions of an alpha build of LO:MAC. He got a chance to play with it while at a Ubi Soft press-event in Rotterdam last Saturday.

Check it out here.
Strike Fighters Update (3 Items)
Biohazcentral, your one-stop uber site for all things Strike Fighters, has the following new downloads:
  • Euro Terrain Tileset v2.0 [12.7 MB]
  • Missions Pak (30 Missions)
  • Nightfix [2.23 KB]

Website: Biohazcentral.com
Serial ATA Hard Drives. Worth it?
Aside from improvements in connection and cable design, is the future of faster data transfer rate technology the serial ATA? Well, that's the promise and Tom's Hardware Guide has a hefty review of the Seagate Barracuda ATA V serial hard drive and five of the latest controllers.

Website: Tom's Hardware Guide

Defense & Aerospace News

Joint Strike Fighter Testing Software Cuts Costs
AUSTIN, Texas—National Instruments (NASDAQ:NATI) announced today that Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co. (NASDAQ:LMT) , a leader in building advanced military aircraft, recently began tests to further refine the design and operation of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, scheduled for deployment in 2004. By replacing VME-based systems with new test systems using industry-standard measurement software and hardware from National Instruments, conducting these tests on the next-generation jet fighter now occurs 80 times faster when compared to previous equipment while saving the aeronautics company hundreds of thousands of dollars.
New software reduces testing time and costs

"Thanks to the versatility of NI software and hardware, we now have more reliable, more powerful test systems that cost us only a portion of what an upgrade of our previous VME-based test equipment would have cost," said Darrel Russell, senior staff engineer at Lockheed Martin. "Not only did we save money by choosing LabVIEW and PXI, we also now run our wind tunnel tests up to 80 times faster than with our older system."

In testing its designs for the military aircraft, Lockheed Martin uses two measurement systems built by NI Alliance Program Member G Systems. One system uses LabVIEW Real-Time and PXI-based measurement hardware to monitor and control a series of detailed engine tests conducted in a transonic wind tunnel. A second test system uses NI LabWindows/CVI and measurement hardware to test aircraft subsystems using a full-scale mock-up of the jet.

Engineers at Lockheed Martin use LabVIEW Real-Time to test the single turbo jet engine that powers the F-35. To duplicate how air flows into the engine in various flying conditions, engineers test a scale model of the F-35 engine inside a wind tunnel. They use LabVIEW Real-Time to monitor the transonic forces generated by the wind tunnel that, if allowed to flow unchecked, could severely damage the engine. Providing the exacting wind tunnel control feedback requires LabVIEW Real-Time to perform 450,000 floating-point calculations every 50 milliseconds while measuring air pressures across 128 different channels at up to 20,000 samples per second. LabVIEW works with two PXI chassis, each equipped with eight NI 4472 dynamic signal acquisition modules, to acquire the dynamic air pressure data.

"The open, modular PXI platform provided us with off-the-shelf technologies necessary to implement a cost-effective yet technically challenging application," said Dave Scheibenhoffer, G Systems director of sales and marketing. "With the tight integration of LabVIEW and industry- standard hardware, we were able to develop a operating system in less than four months, significantly increasing the capabilities over the original system."

In addition to testing engine performance, Lockheed Martin engineers currently are developing an NI-based application for measuring temperature, flow rates, pressures, and other parameters needed to evaluate the performance of the F-35's numerous subsystems. These systems reside on the "aircraft systems simulator," a life-sized mock-up of the F-35, which sits on a large metal carriage and is "flown" by a pilot in a flight simulator. NI LabWindows/CVI combined with NI hardware monitors 1,200 signals from the aircraft simulator using 800 analog and 400 digital inputs and outputs. All this information is synchronized via five PXI chassis that interface with the aerospace industry's IRIG-B timing standard.

| Send Us News | Archives | Main |