## Aeron Aeron is a combat flight simulator that focuses strongly on air combat maneuvering, artificial intelligence, and flight dynamics. Aeron minimizes focus on aspects such as intensive graphics, complex avionics, story/campaigns, and setting. ## Getting Started After extracting/installing the game, plug in a flightstick or gamepad in if you want, then run the .exe executable to start the game. To configure the flightstick, select Options from main menu, and Press some buttons on your joystick. If you see the stuff on the right under Information change, then it has seen your joystick. Otherwise, change Joystick Number and press some buttons or move some axis on your joystick, until it has detected the right joystick. You can also get around to which buttons are what number, what axis is what. If you want to use a gamepad but still want throttle control using keyboard, simply change the axis used for throttle to some axis the gamepad does not have, like axis7 or something. If you've played a combat flight simulator before, you should be able to easily tell which buttons do what. Otherwise, you may have to explore a little. ## The Server Screen Choose Start from main menu. This will automatically open a server running a dogfight match, to which anyone on the network can join. (If this is your first time flying, you might want to instead play around by choosing "FreeFlying" from main menu, which will put you in an F-16 in the air.) Choosing start at the main menu will take you to the server screen. Players will appear when they join. Here, you can add/remove AI players, change player jets, and set up teams. To add an AI: Select an empty slot with up/down, and press TAB to add the AI. Use F1 and F2 to change its team and difficulty. If you want to remove an AI, simple press TAB again while selecting the AI slot. To change game settings: To change how far apart teams start with, use F5/F6. To change how high teams spawn at, use F7/F8. Start flying: To start the match, press ENTER. ## The Game Once you're in-game, you will be sitting in the cockpit of a triangle plane that represents your jet. The objective of the game is to shoot down all other teams. To fly the jet: Use W/S for throttle, arrow keys for pitch/roll. To turn labels on: Press L to turn labels on/off. This way you will know who's where even if they are far away. To look around: Hold right mouse button and drag. Press 2 to reset your view to the default forward cockpit view To look at an enemy: Press F3 (or joystick padlock button) to cycle through enemies that are within close visual range. You may have to press a few times before you lock your view at the enemy you want. Now, joystick and keyboard padlocking works a bit differently here: With keyboard, view is default set to forward (non-padlocked) view, and you hold '3' to stare at your padlocked enemy. With joystick, view is default set to padlocked, and you hold "Glance Forward" to un-padlock and look forward. To fire: Aim your gunsight, and press SPACE, or the designated key on your joystick for fire gun. To record the current game: Press F, you should see a red message that tells you how many seconds you've recorded. Press F again to stop and save recording. Recordings will be saved in the Aeron game folder in a folder called "ACMI". See below on instructions on how to playback your recordings. To play recordings: Aeron cannot play recordings by itself, but its recordings are in a format used by an external free program called 'Tacview'. The website to download is: http://tacview.strasoftware.com Once you have installed Tacview, the '.txt.acmi' files inside the ACMI folder should be associated with Tacview, so double-clicking them will open and play it. To Pause/Quit: Press ESC and you will be ttaken to PAUSE screen. Press F1 here will take you back to the server menu. PRess ESC again to resume from pause. ## The Networking Networking is very simple. Please note that you may have to do firewall port-forwarding stuff, and maybe cut through a firewall or two. To start a Server Simply choose Start fromt he main menu, and stay on that screen. The server is started when you enter that screen, and will close when you go back to the main menu. To connect to a Server Choose connect from the main menu, type in the hostname or IP address, and connect. (Port changing not recommended) To change server port First, at main menu, before choose Start, choose Connect. Change the port. Go back to main menu (ESC). Choose Start. Note that your clients will also have to change to the same port to connect to your server. To adjust update rate The server, and every client, can change their own rate. Changing server rate will affect how often all clients get updated with information. If a client changes his/her rate, it only affects his/her own UPLOAD rate, and will affect how responsive his/her own jet is. Client net rate can be changed at the server menu, the client has connected. Server's net rate can be changed as soon as the server is started. ## Learning Air Combat Maneuvering Once you are used to flying your jet, I highly recommend reading up on basic fighter maneuvers. Sources I recommend are a book called 'Fighter Combat: Tactics and Manoeuvring by Robert L. Shaw' and a video called 'Art of the Kill', which stars Phil Handley and Pete Bonnani. Online game communities can be a good source of information. A good starting point is to always turn into your opponent. Put him right above you in your cockpit, and pull(pitch) up, into him. If enemy is in front of you, this may put your jet in position for a gunshot. If enemy is behind you, this may deny him/her his/her gunshot. ## Video Troubleshooting If your textures seen to fail when loading, try the command line switch '-nomipmap'. If fog stuffs up, and you can't see ground properly (all covered by a thick fog, try '-nofog'. If you want higher framerates, try turning models off with the '-nomodel' switch. If you want to load the USAF Thunderbirds skin for F-16s, use the '-thunderbirds' switch. If you don't know how to add a command line switch, make a shortcut to Aeron.exe and right click shortcut file and choose properties (Windows XP). Add options you want to end of the 'target' box. For instance, to start Aeron with no models and no fog, your 'target' box should look something like this: 'C:\Somewhere\Aeron\Aeron.exe' -nomodel -nofog ## Extras Pitch and roll performance graphs for all the flyable planes: Pitch Graph Roll Graph Plotted using GNUPlot. ## Legal and Licensing Aeron is open-source. All the artwork done by me is public domain. The work not by me, e.g. music, is Copyright to their respective owners, and may or may not be public domain or open source. Music is by Toby emerson and used under permission. No classified data is used: All data is strictly easily and publically available or estiamted. F4Graph used for information, with data coming from Falcon 4.0: Allied Force, Lead Pursuit. H-F-F-M Manual data used, which is also estimated and non-classified. Terrain textures use images from Google Maps, http://maps.google.com. Aeron is under the GPL, which can be found here.

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