NON-English Speakers, HOW TO JOIN US ONLINE

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We generally gather for organized flight on Wednesdays about 19:00 Zulu time, and on Thursdays about 6:00 PM Central USA time (which would be 23:00 Zulu time). Our sessions generally last about 2 or 3 hours.

The Thursday time-frame was chosen for the convenience of USA players.

The Wednesday gatherings were chosen for better convenience of our small group of European players. If you look for us on a typical Wednesday around 19:00 Zulu you are likely to run into me and one or two others. Sometimes more, sometimes less.

These weekly gatherings on Wednesdays and Thursdays are small, loosely-organized affairs. People come and go as they please, according to their own priorities. Nobody is obligated, and the social atmosphere is welcoming. We LOVE it when people join us, but we understand that life has higher priorities and higher demands than LAC. Feel free to join in when you can, but feel no obligation to do so. That's what I do. Sometimes we have 3 or 4 people, sometimes nobody at all. When only one person is present, he generally flies among and against the automated "Replay Blokes" of "Network Battle 2" or "Network Battle 3" or "Peabody's Mission" in Realm01, where it's easy to have a lot of fun without other Sentient players, and the fact that another real, live, "Sentient" player could drop in at any time adds another element of excitement and anticipation. Sometimes participants are more passive, just monitoring the "Root" channel of our Mumble Server at LinuxAirCombat.com until somebody responds, whereupon they talk and choose a mission setup to their liking.

Nowadays we almost always have two or three people constantly monitoring with Mumble. It's fairly easy to put together an informal flight gathering, at almost any time, with one or two people that way. Those friendly negotiations are generally held in English, but we are an international community and we are learning to be patient with those for whom English is a second or third language.

Note that Mumble has a facility for text communication in addition to voice. This allows any combination of voice and text comms that can work better for those whose primary language is not English. (I am also fluent in Spanish.)

I am uniquely able to fly with people that don't have Mumble, because I monitor the server too. Whenever somebody starts a new flight in one of our online, multi-player, server-based missions, a computerized trumpet plays a loud fanfare in my lab. If I'm awake, and nearby I will hear it and if I am available for flight I generally drop in and fly for at least a few minutes, especially if I can help a new person get started. I am the only player that can monitor the LAC Server that way. Everybody else relies on Mumble to alert them when a new player joins our Root channel or switches OUT of that Root channel into one of our mission channels. (Mumble can be configured to vocalize a loud message in response to events like that.)

Accordingly, If you are enjoying LAC and plan to fly more than a few times, I recommend that you install Mumble even if you don't plan to use it for voice comms. You can configure it to alert you whenever anybody else connects, or when LAC automatically SWITCHES somebody from the Mumble server's "Root" channel (where we passively wait for others) into one of the mission channels. When NOT in flight, you can use Mumble's text facility to communicate instead of (or in addition to) voice, and when in flight you can use LAC's text-based "Morse Code Radio" to communicate. No need for voice at all, if you are more comfortable with text. Furthermore, a glance at Mumble's user interface will instantly show you if any other players are already connected and the combination of Realm/Mission that they are using, so you can match that setup and try joining them.

You can learn a lot more about LAC and Mumble from our "Mumble and LAC" forum here:

https://sourceforge.net/p/linuxaircombat/discussion/mumbleandlac/