May 11 updates out now!

[+Stary 2,426]

yes and no -the shader does the fading part, while the distance at which trees pop-up is being locked for now. Pop-up in a sense that they do, but as being at that distance fully transparent (thanks to shader) you don't notice this.

 

Simply, Detailmeshsize= seems no longer taken into account, OR we don't know yet how to extend the fading distance. From PMs I know JSF_Aggie may be up with something I think

[+SkateZilla 49]

WEPTimeLimit= The Amount of time you can run in WEP before the Engine Fails.

 

 

This thread is About the MAY 2011 SF2 Update, not about the flight sim market,

no one cares about you two quoting back and forth, and we're getting tired of having to scroll through past your posts, take it to Private messaging, and you guys can exchange market history and facts with each other all you want without peeving the mods or other users.... thus, everyone is happy. It was all informative at first, now its just annoying and counter pro-ductive.

Edited June 2, 2011 by SkateZilla

[Murphy'S 15]

From PMs I know JSF_Aggie may be up with something I think

 

 

some details?

[+Stary 2,426]

nothing at the moment I'm affraid...

[+JSF_Aggie 1,291]

I was playing around with some stuff in the alphaobject .fx file, and/or removing that .fx file all together, from the terrain's _data.ini. I was having mixed results.

 

I haven't messed with it all since TK said he would add some things back in with the next patch. My guess is that the patch would make my tweaks OBE, and hopefully not needed.

[+SkateZilla 49]

.fx files are editable... or should be in Shader programs (FX Composer, Shader/Render monkey, etc)

Edited June 2, 2011 by SkateZilla

[+daddyairplanes 8,611]

Yes, I’ve got a few missing for the USN Phantoms,Skyhawk & a few others.

Seems to be related to squadron insignia & numbering only though. All the national markings seem to be fine.

 

May I ask how did you get rid of your glowing decal problem?

 

SF

sorry bout not responding sooner internet is a every few day thing with me right now. the glow disappeared after i changed the skin slightly. in case of my USAF Phantoms the middle slime light i decalled in was glowing even tho the front was the same decal. after removing the red stripe from F-4x_xx_1 (which i wanted gone anyhow as its a post vietnam mod of mine) no more glow! for others try say putting some silver paint chipping or a black mark in the black portion of the skin. i mostly fly Phantoms in Germany after 1973 so thats where im noticing my issues.

 

as for the navy Phantoms and decals the decal ini seems... different. RL has kept me from lookin at the old decal ini but it dont seem right to me. since when did the USN have rudder stripes?

 

and i will mention once again for those that are awaiting SF2 Tomcat.... look at the squadronlist.ini pretty sure VF-1 and VF-2 were straight Tomcat units. would be nice to plop VX-4 decals on the Phantom also tho. Stock Black Bunny phor me Baby! (like how i tie both birds in there?)

 

mission wise anyone notice how the mission now fails if you hit the target but get your butt shot down in the process? or how you can hit and destroy a bridge or runway yet its still counted as a fail?

 

finaalyy...(sorry i did say i have limited internet time lately) tho OT what is the mesh name for the fin top on the F-16 Netz? i think i could get a decal pack going similar to my long worked on Phantom package for all USAF and Nato units but it would be nice for the units color stripe to show. thank you all sorry but i wont be responding again til monday.

[pablo10692 4]

So, no news or fixes on missing stock decals?

[steelflanker 32]

for others try say putting some silver paint chipping or a black mark in the black portion of the skin. i mostly fly Phantoms in Germany after 1973 so thats where im noticing my issues.

 

Thanks, I'll give this a try.

 

So, no news or fixes on missing stock decals?

 

There will be a new patch out soon the will address the “terrain fade distance limitation” .

Whether it will included measures to address the decal problems that some of us are having is unknown.

TK & Third Wire have been made aware of the problem at least.

 

No fixes per say but you can work around the problem of some missing decal issues by deleting the unused decal entry’s for the offending aircraft.

 

E.G: For the F-16, removing entry’s [Decal005] to [Decal008] in the decals.ini fixes the problem of the squadron markings & numbering not showing up.

 

The missing drop tank skin problem can be fixed by extracting them & placing them in the mods folder.

 

We shouldn’t have to do all this especially seeing that this problem didn’t exist until the latest patch but at least we’ve got some sort of a work around at least.

 

Though this seems to be a minority problem that only a few are experiencing, lets hope TK remember us us & includes a few changes that allow things to work as they used to in the next patch.

It’s a long shot but fingers crossed.

 

SF

[pablo10692 4]

There will be a new patch out soon the will address the “terrain fade distance limitation” .

Whether it will included measures to address the decal problems that some of us are having is unknown.

TK & Third Wire have been made aware of the problem at least.

 

No fixes per say but you can work around the problem of some missing decal issues by deleting the unused decal entry’s for the offending aircraft.

 

E.G: For the F-16, removing entry’s [Decal005] to [Decal008] in the decals.ini fixes the problem of the squadron markings & numbering not showing up.

 

The missing drop tank skin problem can be fixed by extracting them & placing them in the mods folder.

 

We shouldn’t have to do all this especially seeing that this problem didn’t exist until the latest patch but at least we’ve got some sort of a work around at least.

 

Though this seems to be a minority problem that only a few are experiencing, lets hope TK remember us us & includes a few changes that allow things to work as they used to in the next patch.

It’s a long shot but fingers crossed.

 

SF

 

Unfortunely, all we can do is wait...

Edited June 4, 2011 by pablo10692

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

Just re-installed Win-7 and my SF2E-11May is running great.

 

And the world didn't end...

 

...until about two hours ago. Unless I'm wrong, HorizonDistance= is locked down as well. If some of you fellas/fellattes want to confirm this, I'd be thankful.

 

~~> (total SF2 Newb here)

 

(1) I've place the extracted Flightengine.ini in a new folder I called Flight in the "mods" folder. Other modded extracted files work, Enviro, Viewlist, etc...

 

(2) Modified Flightengine.ini also works, kinda, but not entirely.

 

Apparently, the game reserves some variables to be read only from the CAT files, not the extracted files. Horizon distance seems to be one of them.

 

I've tried placing Flightengine.ini in all sorts of places, in both "mods" and the game folders, including Flight folder and a folder I created called FlightData. Even tried extracting ALL FlightData.cat files and deleting the CAT file. Game dumps. I can't get the game to read modified horizon distance.

[+PureBlue 71]

Lexx, you're putting the modified ini files in your mod folder right?

(eg: C:\users\lexx\saved games\....\flight)

 

i'm pretty sure the DetailMeshSize won't go above (3 or 4)

don't know about the horizondistance..

 

other than that, the flightengine.ini in your ModFolder is interpreted correctly, just some of the values are locked down now.

Edited June 7, 2011 by PureBlue

[+Stary 2,426]

same here Lexx... my other flightengine tweaks do work, like StartPaused=TRUE or maxtimecompression=16, but horizont distance and detailmeshsize seem locked away...

 

hmm...

[+malibu43 142]

same here Lexx... my other flightengine tweaks do work, like StartPaused=TRUE or maxtimecompression=16, but horizont distance and detailmeshsize seem locked away...

 

hmm...

 

 

That is a great idea. I've never tried that...

[+Stary 2,426]

Malibu,

 

you can also set StartTimeCompression= to for example 0.5 (half speed) but after engaging time compression it will return to 1x. I was trying adding MinTimeCompression= to no luck. I'd like to have 0.25 and 0.5 like in Il2

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

Yep, I put it in the "mods" folder. Most modified Flightengine.ini variables do work, but some don't. The game ignores a few of these variables now.

 

The Yak-23 is nice. The Lightning with silver glossy shine is very nice. TKMD, well its okay. One thing I have to try is save game, edit, and restart to see if we can swap airplanes during a mission. This SF2 seems to be very computation intensive, with far fewer aircraft in the air than in earlier games.

 

 

Stary::

...like in Il2

AAAGGHA I vowed never to let SF look like IL-2/FB -- the earth pancake horizon seen from high altitude.

 

The 20km, and much later, 30km horizon distance in Oleg's game worked great for the IL-2 treetop flying. Tellingly, when Oleg releaced the P-51 in the -- forgot -- I called it Oleg's CFS3 Addon for IL-2 -- there appeared lots of complaints about the tiny horizon distance. Players flew the P-51 to high altitude, as was done historically, and so they noticed the horizon distance, or lack of it. If TK does Korea, or Formosa, hopeflly he'll learn the same lesson.

 

I think, and I may be wrong, that although TK's height field does simplify with distance, and this softening of terrain elevation detail can be seen visually under the right conditions in very mountainous terrain, the terrain tiles do not simplify with distance. I don't know how one would "simplify" tiles: maybe merge the tiles somehow into larger tiles for viewing at more than 50km away. That's why I gain no performance improvement by using larger height field blocks in Terrain Editor, but I can directly trade tile size for horizon distance at any given acceptable performance. The SF game has long been programmed to automatically adjust height field (HFD) detail for performance. Not so with tiles (TFD).

 

Performance goes up with the square of the tile sizes.

Performance goes down with the square of the horizon distance.

 

Thus, say, 3x tile size gives you, ideally, 9x more framerate, or it gives you 3x more horizon distance, or some combination of trading those three commodities around. At a given acceptable performance, tile size and horizon distance can be traded for equal value.

 

In other words, if you fly 40,000 feet, and you like your framerate, you can use tiles 4x larger than a player that spends most time at 10,000 feet, yet see the same "detail" density since you are so much farther away, but have a horizon distance 4x farther away. I normally used 5km tiles in SF1 to get 250km to 300km horizon distance at 50fps with mirrors, but also made some other tweaks as well.

[JediMaster 451]

You mean the Aces Expansion Pack for Il-2:FB?

 

Yeah, high alt flight was very disappointing in Il-2, it was always better to stay under 10k ft or risk noticing the Earth has the diameter of the Moon.

[+Stary 2,426]

not to mention the altitude at which space begins in Oleg's world would make some birds astronauts

[+Brain32 265]

Never noticed that, high-alt is for pussies, I liked to keep my Focke Wulf/P-51 low and super fast, results were briliant...

[+Stary 2,426]

I'm a mud-mover myself, but the high alt sky colour issues were obvious... TK got it far better

[JediMaster 451]

Doing B-17 bomber intercepts in 262s at 10k was ridiculous, you had to go high. In fact, most of the late war planes were made for that. Also, if you were in a 51 you did better high, that bird wasn't made for sea level scraps. Of course, none of those planes were in the original design document, unfortunately, so the game just never was right up there.

[+Brain32 265]

Well plane performance-wise il2 has it quite good, in Fw-190A you are dead meat for allied planes above 6000m although if you ask me don't go over 3000m if you don't have to, 109's and 190D-9 can somewhat keep it up but from a position of inferiority, maybe a bit too emphasized even.

 

Ofcourse I'm speaking all that from a stand point of an online player only, offline your mileage my vary

[+malibu43 142]

Funny thing:

 

SF2 (all titles and exp packs merged), patched up to May 2011. Nato Fighters 4+ has fading trees and near horizon distance on the GermanyCE map. But, loaded up the Desert terrain with Stary's enhanced desert/Israel environment enhancement (from the SF1 downloads section), and I got this:

 

 

 

 

No fading trees and the horizon is stretching further. Any thoughts?

Edited June 11, 2011 by malibu43

[+Dels 594]

Well, the trees are definitely fading (check out where the vegetation you're flying over meets the desert in the top left corner)...but it does seem to be a bit further. Hard to tell without another screenshot to reference, likewise for the horizon.

 

Dels

[+PureBlue 71]

No fading trees and the horizon is stretching further. Any thoughts?

 

Since the mod is for SF1, i would guess it either uses edited/older shaders or doesn't use any shaders.

Check the terrain_data.ini for:

[AlphaObjectTextureMaterial]

EffectShaderName=terAlphaObject.fx ???

 

You can disable the fading effect but the max. drawing distance is hardcoded. And this limit is lower than the previous patches `Ultimate setting` drawing distances...