How to find somebody to fly with online

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After you've downloaded LAC and experienced its offline flight, you'll want to experience the REAL fun online. LAC's online community is small, but it has been growing. Now there are a few of us that "hang out", ready to fly, almost constantly.

When one of those dedicated LAC fanatics has some spare time to fly with another, the usual process relies on voice communication based on the well-known "mumble" voice comms application. When two or more experienced LAC enthusiasts decide to join each other in flight, they sometimes agree to a "no holds barred", robust competition, and the action can get fierce.

On the other hand, when a new player joins in, our friendly, experienced players are anxious to offer a training session. They will probably offer to fly with you, on the same team, and talk you through the processes involved in surviving a team effort versus the "replay blokes" that are always flying in some of our online missions. (They'll explain all of these new terms to you.)

Several dedicated players constantly monitor LAC activity through the root channel of our Mumble Server at LinuxAirCombat.com, and you can generally find somebody to fly with anytime if you fire up Mumble, connect to that server's root channel, and just start talking. You will probably see that others are also connected to that "root" channel. If they are near their keyboards and available to join your flight, they'll answer.

Just say something like "Hello. I'm new here. Is anybody available to fly with me?".

You may need to repeat that request several times, for a few minutes, because those that hang out there long-term may not be close to their computers, or just may not be available right then. But if you repeat your request a few times, you are very likely to get an answer from somebody anxious to help you get started. (Some of us leave our computers listening to Mumble even while we are sleeping at night, but we do that because we are willing to wake up and fly!.... Just give us a couple of minutes to respond.)

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Here's a video link showing what it was like when new player "J-Bird" (who was flying without a joystick, using only keyboard and mouse for flight controls and who had asked for help via Mumble as described above,) flew a multi-player mission and received lots of verbal coaching from a volunteer coach named "Lincoln" :

That video shows LAC in a large frame dominating the left side, while a smaller frame shows Mumble along the right side. Instead of setting up LAC this way, most players configure it for "full screen" video, but the prominent "SETUP" menu allows lots of options for these kinds of choices.

J-Bird's fragile Internet connection was acting up for a brief period, so the coach's camera recorded a little bit of visual jumpiness and rotational jitter for 30 seconds or so about 8.5 minutes into the film.

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If after repeating your voice query for a flight companion a few times you get no answers, you can still enjoy robust combat flight by flying with or against our "Replay Blokes". We recommend selecting REALM01 (the default) and "NETWORK BATTLE 03" to get started. Here is a YouTube video clip showing what you can expect:

In addition to NETWORK BATTLE 03, most of the missions are automatically populated with Replay Blokes like this if you choose to fly in REALM 01 (the default). We think beginners will prefer NETWORK BATTLE 03 because it's a lot simpler than the other missions offering automated replay blokes.

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We have published a new web page, updated every 60 seconds, that constantly advertises a list of all of the players that have been active during the prior 15 minutes or so. Learn more about it and see the published player list here:

https://askmisterwizard.com/2019/LinuxAirCombat/LacCurrentOnlinePlayerList.htm

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As our small online LAC community has evolved, we've simplified the way we use mumble for voice comms. Most of the time nowadays, everybody just uses the "root" channel for everything.

Accordingly, you'll find it easier to communicate if you disable LAC's "automatic mumble management" (disabling this will prevent LAC from switching mumble to other channels. It will tend to stay in the "root" channel all the time).

This is easily done. In flight, just tap the "a" key of your keyboard to toggle LAC's automatic mumble management on and off. Cockpit messages will tell you the current status immediately after every change. These mumble management changes are persistent: The next time you start LAC, mumble management will retain the same setup from the prior LAC session.