Getting Started

[jeanba 1,920]

Hello

 

Which mod is best for Verdun : are max's tiles still best, or Jan Tuma's work more up to date, or is it a matter of taste ?

 

Thank you in advance

max188's high res remake of the stock terrain and if you prefer max's tiles, Sopwith Snipe made an adaptation for Edward's Flanders Terrain.

Edited February 15, 2016 by jeanba

[+Geezer 3,569]

Hello

 

Which mod is best for Verdun : are max's tiles still best, or Jan Tuma's work more up to date, or is it a matter of taste ?

 

Thank you in advance

 

While its mostly a matter of taste, Jan Tuma's tiles have more a bit detail and variety than Max's tiles.  If you are really ambitious, take a look at GTerl's tiles in his superb WW1 Italian map.  He used Tuma's tiles, plus made new ones that were based on Tuma's work. 

 

Sometimes you can drop different tiles into existing maps and get very impressive results.  Other times, not so much...

Edited February 15, 2016 by Geezer

[jeanba 1,920]

Thank you

 

I will start with Jan Tuma's Tiles

[rwatson 26]

I just went through 40 pages looking for a Verdun terrain..This is mentioned in the first post but the link is dead,,,,I just want to improve on the stock terrain as a start but can't find any thing,,,I appreciate any help

[rwatson 26]

Ok

  Don't know how to delete the previous post but reading the forums I found out I already have Verdun in FE2..So I down loaded Stock terrains upgrade pack..The read me says

  BASEPACK -holds all the seasonal reworked ground textures in their sub-directories and tod (trees and buildings) files,
copy the contents of this folder BOTH to your wwiVerdun and wwiCambrai folders!
(I've tried pointing the Cambrai ini to use the Verdun textures, but ran into heavy

  I went to my terrains folder and all thjat's there are two cat files..So I checked in my docs third wire and nothing there ..I tried running it and went to see if it created a file in my docs folder..Nothing,,At a total loss as how to proceed..My eyes are going crossed from all the reading but it's how you learn ,,,,,As always any help is appreciated

 

[Wrench 9,886]

Did you look in the /SavedGames folder???

for FE2, that's where you'll find the "mods folder". YOu'll need to create a /Terrains/***name-0f-terrain** sub folder.

also, wasn't there a readme with the download? Should be, and it should have the install instructions

[rwatson 26]

Thank you Wrench I was looking in documents the wrong place..Yes in my post I quoted from the read me  " copy the contents of this folder BOTH to your wwiVerdun and wwiCambrai folders! " " I went to my documents /My games..wrong place to look,,,,.Found it now ,,Just not used to adding mods...I should have caught it from when I was adding things to SF2 and knew where to go

[rwatson 26]

OK..Got it in and working..Takes awhile but I'm learning by reading through the forums and a bit of help from the members here..Thanks

[seany65 11]

Hello all, I was wondering if there's a place here with simple instructions on how to install mods, bearing in mind I only have two braincells?

I have played heavliy modded games in the past (Fallout 3 and System Shock 2) but they were easy to mod and Fallout3 had a mod enabler thingy.

Does Armchair Aces Redux 1.5 contain all of the planes and other stuff from the individual Armchair Aces mods? I read the Readme but it says "Well You'll need all these planes plus the peter01 FMs for them..."

Which makes me think not.

EDIT:  I've just found "FE patch 2", "FE_Apr 2008_Update", "FE_Update_Oct2008b" and "FE_Update_Nov2008". I see in the blurb for FE_APR2008_Update it says "Earlier patches do not need to be applied.." . I take it that means I don't need FE Patch 2?

Are the "Updates" the same as "Patches" and if I have FE Update Nov2008 I don't need any earlier patches or updates?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Edited February 6, 2019 by seany65
Aded new questions.

[rwatson 26]

seany95

  It would help if you listed what sims you are interested in modding,,It would help to know that and you can get sim specific advice

[seany65 11]

Thanks for the reply rwatson. I'm mainly looking to add pacthes/updates to and expand First Eagles (1) as I'd like to add more years, more planes and more missions/campaigns.

I'd also like to add better in flight maps to Over Flanders Fields Between heaven and Hell (with Hat In The Ring), as at present they are poop.

I'd always been under the impression that OFF3 had more Years in it but I can only get to 1917 and 1918.

[+VonS 1,424]

3 hours ago, seany65 said:

Hello all, I was wondering if there's a place here with simple instructions on how to install mods, bearing in mind I only have two braincells?

I have played heavliy modded games in the past (Fallout 3 and System Shock 2) but they were easy to mod and Fallout3 had a mod enabler thingy.

Does Armchair Aces Redux 1.5 contain all of the planes and other stuff from the individual Armchair Aces mods? I read the Readme but it says "Well You'll need all these planes plus the peter01 FMs for them..."

Which makes me think not.

EDIT:  I've just found "FE patch 2", "FE_Apr 2008_Update", "FE_Update_Oct2008b" and "FE_Update_Nov2008". I see in the blurb for FE_APR2008_Update it says "Earlier patches do not need to be applied.." . I take it that means I don't need FE Patch 2?

Are the "Updates" the same as "Patches" and if I have FE Update Nov2008 I don't need any earlier patches or updates?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Latest patch/update for FE2 is from the summer of 2010...no further updates have been done to it. Updates are usually bigger than patches but neither are being offered anymore for FE2 so that simplifies things. The peter01 FMs are quite old by the way, about 10 years if not more. Most of those have been re-tweaked in my huge FM update pack (see the relevant file under the downloads section for FE2). FE/FEgold I think were patched no later than about 2008...but I only have FE2, so FE/FEgold flyers can perhaps pitch in with more info.

My FM pack covers more than 200 aircraft types for FE/FE2...there are another 10 or so I didn't get to...some were visited by peter01 long ago, others are still un-modded. My only suggestions, if interested in installing the FM update pack, is to read the directions in the read me files included carefully since it requires manual installs...making a JSGME friendly variant would take too much time unfortunately, and besides, hardly anyone flies FE/FE2 unmodded - modding it up either fully or at least with the mods you like transforms it from "sim lite" into a credible flight simulator.

For campaign and redux questions, I recommend contacting Ojcar, since he has produced many of those campaigns...as far as I know, the planes required for many of those campaigns need to be installed individually, for them to appear in the campaigns.

Happy flying,

Von S

P.S. WOFF goes as far back as 1915/1916 (with Eindecker campaigns, also with the Nieuport 10, DH.2, BE2 and so on)...older versions like OFF2/OFF3/Hat in the Ring, have a more limited planeset...WOFF has about 80 planes in total.

Edited February 6, 2019 by VonS
Added info.

[seany65 11]

Thanks for the repy and info, VonS. 

The patches I want are for the first FE, but one patch is called "FE Patch 2" in the mods list. For some reason I didn't notice that in Brackets it has "v 02.19.07" after that

If I've understood you correctly the "Patches" are different from the "Updates", so I don't need "FE Patch 2 (v02.19.07)", I just need the apr2008 patch (as it's called in the Patches List, although after download it calls itself FE_apr2008_Update), then apply both oct. and nov 2008 Updates?

Also, if I want to use any Armchair Aces thing I have to download each individual plane and your FM pack (as it would mean less downloading of undividual flight models) and install them separately?

While I would like one of the WOFF games my pc has XP and I can't really afford to buy win7 and possibly get a new cpu and graphic card (I have a core2duo E8500 and nVidia GT640 1gb-which is a half-height low energy thing which works well for what I need).

 

 

[+VonS 1,424]

5 hours ago, seany65 said:

Thanks for the repy and info, VonS. 

The patches I want are for the first FE, but one patch is called "FE Patch 2" in the mods list. For some reason I didn't notice that in Brackets it has "v 02.19.07" after that

If I've understood you correctly the "Patches" are different from the "Updates", so I don't need "FE Patch 2 (v02.19.07)", I just need the apr2008 patch (as it's called in the Patches List, although after download it calls itself FE_apr2008_Update), then apply both oct. and nov 2008 Updates?

Also, if I want to use any Armchair Aces thing I have to download each individual plane and your FM pack (as it would mean less downloading of undividual flight models) and install them separately?

While I would like one of the WOFF games my pc has XP and I can't really afford to buy win7 and possibly get a new cpu and graphic card (I have a core2duo E8500 and nVidia GT640 1gb-which is a half-height low energy thing which works well for what I need).

Have double-checked the patches downloads link now and I think that patches and updates refer to the same thing, just a different choice of word. From what I could figure out, you only need to install the latest patch for FE1/FEgold to get it up to date...in your case it would be the November 2008 patch, which should include all previous patches in it already. The direct link for the latest patch for FE1 is:

https://combatace.com/files/file/8942-first-eagles-nov-2008-update/

For the armchair aces campaigns, you have to download the necessary aircraft individually...and yes, if you're going to try out my FM pack, best thing is to download it at the same time as you grab the individual aircraft too - will save time on downloading since my FM tweaks override the older peter01 mods, so no need to download earlier FM tweaks unless you want specifically to try out the peter01 mods. My FM tweaks should be flown on "hard" mode in the FE settings menu, by the way, as should the old peter01 mods. No telling how they behave on easy or medium/moderate settings.

Von S 

[seany65 11]

Thanks for the reply and the info VonS. I've patched the game with the last patch/update. It's a nice touch that we can see the bulllet cases from the SE5A's Lewis gun being ejected. There do seem to be less indication of planes and objects on the flight map though, and there do seem to be fewer enemy planes about- I can spend quite a while attacking the flak guns over German airfields and no German planes show up.

So I need  to Download all the planes  mentioned in th Armchair Aces Redux readme and they all come with peter01's FM's but His and yours should be flown on "Hard". Got it. Hmm, does that mean I can't fly Armchair Aces redux on "Medium"? Do your FM's make flying the planes a bit harder than the "Hard" setting, due to better accuracy?

 

[+VonS 1,424]

1 hour ago, seany65 said:

Thanks for the reply and the info VonS. I've patched the game with the last patch/update. It's a nice touch that we can see the bulllet cases from the SE5A's Lewis gun being ejected. There do seem to be less indication of planes and objects on the flight map though, and there do seem to be fewer enemy planes about- I can spend quite a while attacking the flak guns over German airfields and no German planes show up.

So I need  to Download all the planes  mentioned in th Armchair Aces Redux readme and they all come with peter01's FM's but His and yours should be flown on "Hard". Got it. Hmm, does that mean I can't fly Armchair Aces redux on "Medium"? Do your FM's make flying the planes a bit harder than the "Hard" setting, due to better accuracy?

 

Once you download all of the required planes for the armchair aces campaigns, it's likely that there will be more air traffic than currently.

Having said that, if you try out some of the congestion settings in my update pack, you may (in early war scenarios) find yourself flying for an hour or two with no enemy planes in sight - as historical. The occasional enemy may come trotting by and engage in a duel, but otherwise it's pleasant sight-seeing until about the summer of 1916. For more obscure fronts, such as Palestine and the eastern front, low air congestion would have been historical well into 1917, even 1918. It's not really until the spring of 1918 that the Entente start putting up aircraft in greater numbers in Palestine, for example, while the Germans have the aerial upper hand to about 1917. For the Italian front too, not too much congestion until about late 1917/early 1918. And then keep in mind that the last couple of months of the war should feature lower congestion than the peak of action in Italy and the western front (basically the first half of 1918).

The armchair campaigns should be fine on "medium" realism as long as you stick with the data ini files (the FMs) provided with the aircraft - don't install any other FMs.

Yes, overall, my FM pack makes flying the planes noticeably harder than even the hard setting can provide - I like to think of it as the "historically realistic" setting....or at any rate good fun if you enjoy the surprise of flying early crates that are often like wild horses. It's not so bad from about 1917 onwards (with the newer plane types), but lots of luck is now needed to score well with crates typical of the 1914 to 1916 period. I recommend trying out the Morane Saulnier type H, also the type G variants, as well as the Longhorn and Shorthorn types, Parasol types, also the early Eindeckers and Pfalz monoplanes on the Central powers side - for a ripping good challenge.

Von S

P.S. Ver. 9.7 of the FM update pack will be posted soon so you might want to wait and download that version (the install will be simpler than the several versions of folders currently available in the ver. 9.5 pack).

[seany65 11]

Thanks for the new info VonS. I don't think I could cope with even harder fm's than the present hard fm's.

Surely with air traffic on "Heavy" there should be at least a couple of enemy planes during single missions, even if I don't get to fight them?

I've been using the single missions to try out a couple of things, mainly learning how to bomb things. What I don't get is even though the game is now pointing out the enemy warehouse (which took me a long time to realise wasn't on the airfield, as for some reason I wasn't getting the target indication, so I had to guess), and I'm bombing it,  no other planes in my flight are doing so even though they all have bombs in the Loadout screen. How do I get them to bomb the warehouse? I can hit the ruddy thing 2 or 3 times in a mission, but they all just fly about.

 

 

[+VonS 1,424]

On heavy settings, you should indeed be getting some occasional traffic going back and forth. For bombing and ground strafing, I don't have much experience with that but I'm sure someone will pitch in who flies FE2 frequently in ground attack mode or bombing runs. There should be a command to send your flight to "attack ground targets" - I've tried the command a few times but it's usually hit and miss, although I've only tried it by sending my flight to strafe an AA post or something similar...from what I learned later (I think from Crawford), FE/FE2 does not have the ability to tell other aircraft to do a strafing run, using the attack ground command - "attack ground target" being limited to bombing/grenade runs. I'm sure some of our fellow flyers know more about air-to-ground technicalities in FE2. (It's possible also that the attack-ground-target command is limited to the type of mission being flown....with limited effectiveness, for example, in offensive-type missions...but I'm sure that someone knows more about this.)

Von S 

Edited February 12, 2019 by VonS
Added info.

[seany65 11]

Thanks for the quick reply, VonS.

Do I take it that any info about such things that applies to FE2 also applies to FE? I only have vanilla FE, I've tried tofind copies of FE Gold and FE2 but no luck yet.

It does seem odd that the other planes in my flight don't auto attack/bomb ground targets when the mission is to bomb ground targets. I can understand it if I was bombing stuff that ain't the official target, the game (and thus the pilots) wouldn't know what the ruddy blink I was doing.

 

[Sky High 166]

FE Gold and FE2 can both be downloaded from the Thirdwire website.

[+VonS 1,424]

2 hours ago, seany65 said:

Thanks for the quick reply, VonS.

Do I take it that any info about such things that applies to FE2 also applies to FE? I only have vanilla FE, I've tried tofind copies of FE Gold and FE2 but no luck yet.

It does seem odd that the other planes in my flight don't auto attack/bomb ground targets when the mission is to bomb ground targets. I can understand it if I was bombing stuff that ain't the official target, the game (and thus the pilots) wouldn't know what the ruddy blink I was doing.

Yes, the beauty of FE/FE2 is that, unlike SF and SF2, these two are largely cross-compatible. Most info. applicable to FE2 is applicable to FE/FEgold, except for some directory paths for file installation, and I think that FE/FEgold do not have a separate "user directory" as does FE2. Even most plane types made specifically for FE2 are backward compatible with FE (Crawford has figured out an ini trick to get FE2 aircraft loaded in FE....I think he posted some of the info. under the "new aircraft" thread...somewhere around page 20 of that thread).

And most FE aircraft are flyable in FE2 (only thing requiring tweaking is usually decal placement and decal files). I fly several FE-era aircraft in FE2 with no problems.

Happy flying,

Von S

[seany65 11]

Thanks for the info VonS.

Sky High,  Thanks for the suggestion.  I don't suppose they were ever done on disc were they? At my download speeds they'd take absolutely yonks to get.

 

[Sky High 166]

11 hours ago, seany65 said:

Thanks for the info VonS.

Sky High,  Thanks for the suggestion.  I don't suppose they were ever done on disc were they? At my download speeds they'd take absolutely yonks to get.

 

 

Seany, I don't think they were ever released on 'hardware'. I think only the original game was. Perhaps, a download manager would help-I think they maintain the integrity of partial downloads, even in the event of a broken link?