Terrain Swap in Multiplay Dogfights

[+Dave 2,322]

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.