Game: Pacific Fighters. "User defined"?

[Ignition Override]

Greetings. I know little about computers and played the Ubisoft game 'IL2-Sturmovik' numerous times. With the new Ubisoft 'Pacific Fighters' game, there are a few twin engine planes, such as the awesome (fast with many guns/cannon)British Bristol Beaufighter, and the US P-38 (Gabelschwanzteufel), B-25 and A-20. I'm not interested in fuel mixtures and prop controls for the Spitfire, Corsair and F6F etc, unless they are critical in a dogfight. As for these twin-engine planes, it would be nice to figure out how to shutdown the engine which is damaged and feather the (correct) prop, even push a fire ext. button.

Years ago on turboprops (Bandit and Shorts) we knew about failed engine throttle idle, f. prop lever to feather and f. fuel control off.

Is it difficult to find or create the fuel control and prop controls without much computer knowledge? The Controls page on the game is mostly blank opposite numerous items, probably where the manual says "User Defined" for many things, mostly all engine controls except "i" for starting or shutting down both engines at once. If an engine is running out of oil etc, but not on fire, why must one shutdown both and be forced to ditch or make a crash landing? Trying for some realism here, as it is on the job in a much larger twin-turbine machine.:D And if someone can explain how to find a friendly airport after a quick, single mission, it would also be appreciated and worth a free beer somewhere.

[Irish Steve]

Can't help with the operation of the program for finding airfields, but on the engine controls scenario, you're up against ancient history, and the problems of compatability.

A long time ago, back when computers only needed 3 floppies to load an operating system called DOS, ( and they worked well on CPU intensive flight sim packages) game ports were the only way to get data from the joystick into the computer.

Unless you were prepared to spend mega bucks to get alternative solutions, ( and there were some), that meant you had elevators, rudder ailerons and one "throttle", but no multi engine capability, or things like prop or mixture controls, so any form of accurate multi engine operation just wasn't possible.

Now, USB devices have come along, and it is possible to get external devices that will allow multi engine operation, but they're not standard, and for the vast majority of "flight sim" users, they would add a level of complexity that would probably result in most flights ending with a crash

(And don't even start me on the subject of if FS is a flight simulation or a scenery simulation that has a few sort of working aircraft to be able to move around the scenery:D )

So, most sim writers end up making the product work to the "lowest common denominator", and if you want to make it work to any sort of level of competence, you're into some serious work within the software parameters, and with some external and probably expensive hardware.

That may not be the answer you were looking for, but it's about as close as it's going to get for now.

Hope it helps