SF2 - Advanced Moddings (DLL Files editing)

[+Stary]

Intriguing.

I am in no way going to do requests but two questions that are still on my mind 10 years after I drifted away from being regular here:

1) Are you planning to take a look at ViewManager.dll? As far as my own digging went years back, and I might be wrong here but this might be of use to you, it seems certain view classes -the cockpit ones- are hardcoded from having shadowcasting on cockpit object(s) meshes.
2) Same with TerrainEngine.dll -the damn locked altitude clouds are dealbreaker for me and make SF2 look much worse than it could, had we had clouds back at more sane altitudes (or the engine parsing their altitudes from environmentsystem.ini on scene creation), visual issues with the clouds particles aside as those are small price to pay compared to fluffy clouds at 16k feet we have now.

[OlWilly]

On 10/8/2025 at 3:02 PM, Eagle114th said:

Therefore, I have an interesting theory: TK, deep there in his heart, he want advanced mid-fidelity simulation, but he fears that it might not attract enough audience for his marketing.  Therefore, he implements the helper to turn SF series into lite sim.  IF he did not want mid-fidelity (semi-complex), he would not have implemented these very advanced flight model features.  It's coded in there.

From my experience digging through aircraft flight models as well as doing ingame tests, the flight model is indeed the strongest part of the game engine. It is far more complex and detailed if you compare it for example to the primitive avionics capability 

 

[EricJ]

I think TK was some kind of aeronautics engineer or something along those lines, or something like that.

[+Stary]

@Eagle114th circling back to cockpits being excluded from receiving shadows, I did quick digging and we have the OpenCockpit=TRUE flag being used in First Eagles 2 but is seems it's not used in SF2, example from FE2 Albatros V cockpit:

[CockpitSeat001]
ModelName=Alb5_pit.LOD
HideExternalNodeName=cockpit
OpenCockpit=TRUE
ExternalClipDistMin=0.05

All of those are self-explanatory.
If it was the same with First Eagles 1 I can't tell, haven't really played that one much ever.

Also there is individual ID for cockpits in viewlist.ini, ViewGroupID=1, used only by internal cockpit views, somehow I feel like this is of less importance as the OpenCockpit=TRUE seems to be the one of interest -of course I have no idea if it's even included in SF2 engine but omitted or not used at all.
Ages ago I used Pe.Explorer to disassemble and grab all the possible strings and whatnot from all the dlls, need to check that stuff again but I think you're much better suited to search for the stuff with Ghidra and python scripts.

[+Stary]

11 hours ago, EricJ said:

I think TK was some kind of aeronautics engineer or something along those lines, or something like that.

Yeah