Flying as a Wingman

[pagsab]

As I explain in my video at https://youtu.be/i4NyOMsilsY, my enjoyment of FE2 and SF2 has been increased enormously over the past year by discovering how to fly as a wingman, just like in the old European Air War.  I laid out in https://combatace.com/forums/topic/100072-following-your-leader-through-the-low-european-clouds/ the simple text edits to the mission file needed to allow this in single missions.  Jockeying stick and throttle to maintain close formations like those in WW1 makes flying a constant challenge, and gives a perfect marriage between the immersivity of cockpit views and the beauty of close-up external views of the classic planes concerned.  FE2 does not have the benefit of the mission editor available in SF2, but by opening the terrain in Gerwin's TFD editor, one can find the coordinates needed to edit saved mission files manually to modify or delete flights and to shift bases and waypoints to whatever one desires.  I often set up 'Recon' flights with no opposition except AAA fire, for the sheer pleasure of 40 minutes or so of atmospheric formation flying from takeoff to landing, as shown in the picture below of our pair of closely grouped Nieuport 17s over the mountains in the Vosges 2 terrain.

Applying my mission cloning trick in FE2 has the rather disconcerting initial result that your leader starts superimposed with you on the airfield.  This is not a problem unless you have Collisions set to Hard, but I now add some simple extra tweaks so that my leader starts flying above me instead, as in SF2.  Just ensure that AdjustStartPosition and AdjustBaseWaypoint in the Mission Data section and  StartOnGround in your leader's mission entry are all set to FALSE, and then boost his initial height to 50 and speed to 30 and the height of his first waypoint to 100.  I boost LOD ranges in planes' ini files to stop details distractingly popping on and off, and I adjust CruiseSpeed in certain planes' data.inis to stop my leader flying too quickly or slowly for comfortable formation keeping.  I also finally stopped towns in FE2 shimmering distractingly, by increasing the ExternalClipDistMin value in my planes' cockpit.inis from around 0.04 to 0.15 as diagnosed by Mue a decade ago in https://combatace.com/forums/topic/85970-shimmering-tods-and-target-objects/#comment-692525.  These various tweaks have given FE2 a whole new lease of life for me, and allowed me to enjoy the cornucopia of user-created add-ons with renewed vigour.