AmericaNW Mountain Thaw

This is a mod of Major Lee's America Northwest terrain mod using some terrain tiles from Deuce's GermanyCE2 tile set. The terrain tiles hopefully make for a more exciting feel. And the SAM sites will definately get your attention. The waypoints were changed to work better in multiplay dogfights. In an effort to get a more standardized mod for multiplay, I have included these directions, that when followed closely, should allow folks to successfully connect and be able to play dogfights and coop missions on it. And if played in single player mode, should prove to be a challanging terrain to fly on. I have included all the files needed for this mod to work except the VietnamSEA.CAT file. Because it's size is way to big for most people to download and they already have it. This mod works with Strike Fighters, Wings Over Vietnam, Wings Over Europe, and Wings Over Israel.

To install:

Unzip this file into your WOV\Terrain Folder

There should be a new folder created that is named AmericaNW

Next open your VietnamSEA folder and copy and paste the VietnamSEA.CAT file from there into the newly created AmericaNW folder. Open the AmericaNW terrain folder and rename that VietnamSEA.CAT file to AmericaNW.CAT.

That's it, you are good to go.

For those people wanting to use this mod with Strike Fighters Project 1 the directions are the same except use the Desert.CAT file.

For those people wanting to use this mod with Wings Over Europe the directions are still the same, only this time use the GermanyCE.CAT file.

If you want a couple good single player missions to go with this terrain, look here;

http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autoc...p;showfile=5426

If you want a good campaign to play with using this terrain look here;

http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autoc...p;showfile=5661

For Multiplay dogfights, you need to edit your WOV\Option.ini file.

In the [DogfightHost] section, change the following command lines to this:

RespawnTime=45

RespawnDistance=2000.000000

MinHeight=1500.000000

MaxHeight=1500.000000

HeightDeviation=5.000000

MinHeight and MaxHeight can be as low as 1200.0000 without causing to much trouble, you'll have to play around with that to suit yourself.

The Desert.CAT or GermanyCE.CAT files can be used instead of VietnamSEA.CAT file, but if you do use them, you might have to use a different figure in the MinHeight and MaxHeight parameters above for multiplay. Those you'll have to experiment with. I like to start a dogfight out as low as possible since the game doesn't allow one to start out on an airport yet. I had to keep the RespawnDistance close in to lessen the chance of respawning on the side of a canyon. I might recommend using Desert.CAT for Strike Fighter Project 1 and Strike Fighters Gold so you can be compatable when playing those sims, staying with VietnamSEA.CAT for Wings Over Vietnam, and using GermanyCE.CAT for Wings Over Europe. This mod works with Wings Over Israel as well using the IsraelME.CAT file.

Fixing the terrain swap bug in Multiplay:

The problem: There seems to be a glitch when swapping terrain in multiplay dogfights, in that the starting waypoints start out wrong. An example is when switching to the America Northwest Mountain Thaw mod AFTER playing on the VietnamSEA terrain. THe game starts out using the waypoints from VietnamSEA, not the waypoints programmed into the Mountain Thaw mod. To clear this up the host must exit the game and start a new game and everything works just fine. Then when you switch back to the VietnamSEA terrain, the multiplay dogfight starts out using the Mountain Thaw waypoint and again the host must close the game and restart a new one to clear things up. When this problem first presented itself, I thought the problem was in the terrain's Dogfight.ini files. It's not, those waypoints are correct and work as intended.

The Solution: In the WOV directory, create a folder named Options_Ini Backups. And inside that folder create two new folders, one named AmericaNW and another named VietnamSEA. Now, after you launch a multiplay dogfight using the AmericaNW Mountain Thaw terrain and it works ok, close out the game and copy the Options.ini file into the the Options_Ini Backups\AmericaNW folder. Then after you get a good dogfight game using the VietnamSEA terrain, again close out the game and copy the Options.ini file into the Options_Ini Backups\VietnamSEA folder. Then whenever you want to swap terrains in a multiplay dogfight, before starting the game go to those folders and swap in the correct Options.ini file.

I'm not entirely sure what's going on here, but this seems to work. Just editing the Options.ini file and saving the changes before starting the mission doesn't seem to work. This doesn't appear to be a problem with the terrain per say, but more of a "bug" in how the game loads the terrain. And this seems to be a problem not only with WOV, but with SFP1, SFG, and WOE as well. Perhaps someone in TK's group can fix this when they release a patch sometime, but in the meantime this will fix that problem. It's my guess the game loads the waypoints before loading the terrain, sticking you with the waypoints from the previous game. I'm of the opinion here that we may need an Options.ini backup for each terrain we use in multiplay dogfights. Some guys use the Range terrain and may have to create a Range folder (and Options.ini backup) within that newly created Options_Ini Backups folder they created above. And this appears to be host specific so only the host of a dogfight will need to swap out those Options.ini files for the various terrains they use when hosting a multiplayer dogfight. Also, multiplay coop missions seem to be uneffected by all this.

And lastly. It's fine with me if anyone wants to use this mod for further development. All I ask is you please give credit where credit is due.

Simple as that. You are now good to go in both single player and multiplayer modes.