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Getting there....right behind you..

Red Flag

Getting there,

And probe final version, BTW ...

Put a bit more work into it.

1950s Air Defence

Hellcats box art (from GiantBomb) Have you ever had the bug to play an old sim? Say, European Air War or Jane's Longbow. What about Hellcats Over the Pacific, or A-10! Attack? Wait… you may be saying, I've never even heard of these sims! I understand if you haven't, as these sims were released only for MacOS, an operating system most hardcore sim pilots have never even considered. In the 1990's, however, there was a very large, and rather unique simulation community built around the Macintosh. While many PC sims such as A-10 Tank Killer and Armored Fist were only starting to scratch the surface of "True 3D", with voxel graphics rendering low resolution textures, Mac developers knew they would have to take some risks to achieve the greatness that was already on full display on the DOS/Windows shelves of CompUSA and ElekTek. Their solution? A typical Mac developer response. They would sacrifice the then high resolution, "photo-realistic" textures for flat shaded polygons to create fully realized 3D worlds and models, including real-time shadows and highly accurate physics. From Wikipedia: "Hellcats was a major release for the Mac platform, one of the first 3D games to be able to drive a 640 x 480 x 8-bit display at reasonable frame rates in an era when the PC clone's VGA at 320 x 240 x 4-bit was the standard." Having only had my parent's Mac to play on, and being crazy about flying (thanks to them no less!) I dove into this world full bore. My first experience in this new world of flight was Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0, a fantastic sim I taught myself how to play at the young age of five, mostly by trial and error. Soaring above the Chicago skyline in my Cessna 182RG was truly amazing for my young self, but something was lacking. That something was obviously guns. By 1991, I was six years old. With the combination of ever increasing hours of time spent in FS4 and the excitement of reading about the air to air victories from the just ended Gulf War, I was ready. During a trip to the store I saw the game I wanted, and I begged my parents to get it for me. Amazingly enough, they actually relented. Soon, I knew, I would be soaring over tropical locales and splashing Zeroes! Hellcats Over The Pacific was released in 1991 by Graphsim Entertainment, who would go on to release the excellent Hornet series a few years later, which will be the subject of a future write-up. Developed by Parsoft Interactive and coded by Eric Parker, it would become maybe the most popular sim ever released on the Macintosh. Sporting bright graphics, excellent physics and flight models, and rudimentary carrier ops it was, much like its namesake the F6F Hellcat, truly a beast to be reckoned with that outclassed and outdated all opponents. Bagging a Zero at the merge. You can see the rudimentary "radar" here (Photo courtesy of mobygames.com) Taking place on a large map of the Solomon Islands, it focused on the Battle of Guadalcanal and related engagements in "The Slot". The missions themselves were rather basic, with accordingly basic mission names. "Bomb Base" for instance had you bombing a Japanese held airfield, which would eventually become Henderson. "Scramble!" is pretty self-explanatory, take off, shoot down the G4M Betty while mixing it up with a pair of escorting Zeroes. Rarely were there more than just a few aircraft in any given scenario. Typically no more than four or five, including your aircraft, most likely to keep memory usage down. Only two missions ever had you flying with allied aircraft, the first an escort mission with a B-17 called, you guessed it, "Flying Fortress". And the final mission of the game, "The Duel", paired you up with ultimate Hellcat ace Cpt. David McCampbell (34 victories, including 9 in one sortie, and the Medal of Honor). Number two behind McCampbell (Photo courtesy of mobygames.com) A particularly grueling trial came in the form of the mission "Flat Top" where you needed to bomb and sink an opposing Japanese carrier. One bomb usually wouldn't do it, and it was hard to get both on target with the massive AAA fire from the surrounding task force. Sometimes this meant multiple sorties in a single mission, returning to trap on the carrier over and over till you finished. Since many flight sims don't include an in-mission re-arming mechanic, this made this fairly unique, especially considering the fact that in many missions you would be returning to the carrier, and not a nice long stretch of concrete. Trapping once is tough enough, but doing it multiple times per mission seriously heightened the challenge! Another tricky mission was "Divine Wind" where you needed to defend your carrier against kamikaze attacks. As the enemy aircraft spawned at a regular interval there was usually no time to return to base and rearm, necessitating careful ammunition and fuel management. With the carrier sinking, the mission is effectively over. (Photo courtesy of mobygames.com) But like all things, it was not without its problems. Chief among them was the seriously lacking draw distance, a common issue amongst many games in the nineties. It is not typically an issue in say, an RTS or corridor FPS shooter, but in flight sims, the farther you can push the draw distance, the better off you are, and the more immersive it becomes. Unfortunately, the distance in Hellcats was short even for the time, making strafing runs on enemy airfields with parked aircraft and long distance intercept missions harder than they probably needed to be. The work around was a sort of radar, in the center of the instrument panel. This radar gave a 360 view around the aircraft out to a few miles, with other aircraft represented as white dots. The enemy AI was also quite lacking. Most engagements typically quickly devolved into a tight turning fight that the Hellcat could easily win by use of the aircraft's flaps to gain a significant turning advantage over the opposing Zero. This was a feature the Hellcat did not have, but that ironically, many Japanese fighters did. The hit detection was spotty at close ranges, causing many bullets to simply pass through the opposing aircraft and simply drain away your ammo. At longer ranges accuracy was better, but many times the enemy would simply smoke then ditch, requiring close in strafing runs near the ocean's surface to get credit for the kill. I can still remember my first kill in any combat sim ever, a snapshot with a deflection angle of nearly 90 degrees. I turned sharply to the right to chase and was rewarded with a swiftly descending, and heavily smoking Zero. It's an image forever burned into my mind, and I was hooked. For better or for worse, I had begun a lifetime obsessed with the skill curve of the Combat Sim. It was a fun jaunt into the past writing this article. I even remembered most of the key bindings! If you're ever looking into the retro-sim scene yourself, don't count out the Macintosh platform. There are several other great sims from this era for the mac, a few of which will be the subjects of future articles. If anyone would like to know how to get into the world of emulating Mac or DOS games for a similar trip down memory lane, PM me. I'll get back to you as soon as I can! Thanks for reading, good luck, and good hunting.

Some 1965 action...

Good to see more people starting to play around with Blender. I learn it myself mostly by trial-and-error. Doing smaller objects and fakepilot-parts has helped me a lot to learn basic things of 3D-modelling and it was and often enough still is a big struggle to get things the way I want them to be. Finding helpful tips and shortcuts to functions was a big help and makes life _a lot_ easier, when you know them. So here are some things and infos that maybe help you guys, that are complete noobs in 3D-business, like myself: Feel free to add more tips, hint and useful infos. They are always welcome! Tips: - set units to metric in your project, so you can see actual measurements of your objects. - useful tools from the tools-section include * subdivide -> split edge or face in 2 or more sections * loop cut and slide -> have a cube and cut it into 2 parts along a loop, you can then slide the cut along the object - remove double vertices: when editing stuff, you sometimes get 2 vertices that are on top of each other. Those should be removed, as they affect shading and other stuff. When in edit-mode, in 3D-view-window, select "Mesh"->"Clean Up"->"Remove Doubles". Mapping: - recalculate normals -> blender tries to find the correct direction of faces (inside/outside). Flipped faces may result in visible holes. - smooth your objects to get rid of hard edges --> "Shading/UVs" in leftside menu of 3D-view-window --> smooth faces, edges, vertices - if a vertex/edges/face does not need to be smoothed, select it and hit flat/sharp/sharp - i recommend also enable autosmooth: properties-window (right side bottom) -> select the triangle-icon and under "normals" select autosmooth and an angle (60° works mostly for me, but sometimes have to be adjusted) - unwrap-menu->unwrap: works best, if you have marked seams on your model. marked seams are the edges, the model will be cut to get the 2d mapping of your 3d object. - unwrap-menu->project from view: works best for complex objects. Attention though: if you do this for example for a cube, the top and bottom-surfaces are just a line in your 3d-view, as those face are rotated 90° to your view. the mapping of those areas is stretched in your final object and can lead to visual distortions. Shortcuts: - Numlock 1 : front view - CTRL + Numlock 1 : back view - Numlock 2 : rotate view horizontal in steps in one direction - Numlock 3 : left view - CTRL + Numlock 3 : right view - Numlock 4 : rotate view vertical in steps in one direction - Numlock 5 : View changed between Orthographic-view (like Drawings) and Perspective view (like Photos) - Numlock 6 : rotate view vertical in steps in opposite direction as "4" - Numlock 7 : top view - CTRL + Numlock 7 : Bottom view - Numlock 8 : rotate view horizontal in steps in the opposite direction as "2" editing (if the key is followed by x, y or z it only affects the according axis. you can also give a value by typing in 2.0 for example): - TAB : changes between Object- and Edit-mode - Shift + s : set cursor to a certain location or move selection to cursor --> useful for scaling, etc. - a : select everything (in edit-mode: vertices/edges/faces, in object-mode: objects) - e : extrude selection --> for example start with a circle and extrude it to get cylinder - s : scaling, "s x 2.0" for example means you scale up the x-axis of your object by factor 2.0 - g : select a vertex, edge or face and move it. - r : rotate --> you should set the cursor with "Shift + s" to set the center of your rotation - CTRL + SHIFT + b : create rounded corners from a vertex or edge. mousewheel changes number of segments ...to be continued...

Yes I did change the 130 &150 hp works fine thanks again.

Krfrge, Initial base work done - properly scaled, optimized mesh counts/naming, finalized all smoothing groups, added in specular and bump mappings, set pivot points including for top gun. Will work more on it later and send you PM with further updates. P.S. Just my opinion: vehicles are not the easiest models to take on initially. Vehicles require a different level of complexity and logic based on the parent/child relationships and hierarchies to make the .INI gurus like KJakker's job easier! If you're just getting up to speed, I might suggest simpler ground structures/buildings like hangars, water towers, etc. Grab some free models, but then try to model them scratch. Old Diego many years ago was by far the greatest influence and mentor in building my skills - and I had no artistic talent at all. I learned everything on the fly by experimenting - he literally shared with me his models and over time I learned to reproduce them completely from scratch (and dare I say even improve a few). Anyway, I'm happy to help anyway I can - will PM more details.

Flowers

more of TK's hidden animations .. we've found a number of them in SF/SF2 as well! in the LOD Viewer, that bottom left panel lists the animations; use the up/down arrows to see them work

VMA(AW)-224 'Bengals'

View File E-2C VAW-115 Skin Pack These skins represent the VAW-115 squadron of the United States Navy. The serials numbers are some i could find that really were within this squadron past and present. You will get the following skins in this package : - Unindified period (TBD) - 1991 Operation Iraqi Freedom - 2000 Era skin 1 - 2000 Era skin 2 - 2010 Era - 2013 Era Same instructions as usual: Copy the E-2C aircraft folder content to your game E-2C aircraft folder. Copy the E-2C decals folder content to your game E-2C decals folder. Open the E-2C.ini and edit the file by adding the lines from the E-2C.ini in this file (replace the XXX by number in sequence). Credits: Thanks to Thirdwire for creating the Strike Fighters series. Thanks to paulopanz for providing the E-2C model. Thanks to pappychksix for providing the wonderful E-2C Hi-Rez Skins. Myself for the decals (all done by me). Happy flights! Mario C. Frenchie1977 Submitter 1977Frenchie Submitted 02/16/2018 Category Other  

Thanks. I'll probably just bite the bullet and redraw the panel lines. Won't take too long.

Started a camo process on it. Has anyone repainted this yet and done the panel lines over?

Thank you. By the way, after testing I was convinced that for more adequate work of the propeller, the ConstantSpeed parameter is better to change from TRUE to FALSE. [FuelPump] ReferenceName=Rotherham Fuel Pump SystemType=PROP_ENGINE InputName=THROTTLE_CONTROL EngineID=2 SLPowerDry=10.0 ThrustAngles=0.0,0.0,0.0 ThrustPosition=0.0,0,0.0,0.0 ThrottleRate=0.5 AltitudeTableNumData=8 AltitudeTableDeltaX=914.4 AltitudeTableStartX=0.0 AltitudeTableData=1.000,1.000,0.875,0.700,0.457,0.361,0.279,0.209,0.000 SpinnerNodeName=fuel_pump_propeller StaticPropNodeName=fuel_pump_propeller SlowPropNodeName=fuel_pump_propeller FastPropNodeName=fuel_pump_propeller SlowPropRPM=600 FastPropRPM=1000 MaxPropRPM=1500 IdlePropRPM=480 BSFC=0.00001 MinExtentPosition=-1.40, 0.90,-0.80 MaxExtentPosition=-1.50, 0.50,-0.60 ConstantSpeed=FALSE <---------------------------------------------------------------------- !!! NumBlades=2 PropDiameter=0.25

I have uploaded the streamer ribbons. There are five different colors - Red, Green, Blue, German (black, white and red), and French (red, white, and blue). They're in the First Eagles - General Files - Weapons section. There is actually an animation built into the LOD (Animation ID 1). If anyone can figure out how to make it run, please let us know.

Somebody asked about an Air Superiority Blue scheme? This is what it would look like. It just needs decals... Pete

A few more pics. of the latest tweaks to the smoke and fire effects, this time a multi-engine fire on a Gotha G.III - will roll this eventually into a ver. 9.5 of the FM packs. The effects now look more realistic I think for the WWI period and aircraft construction of that time, especially average size of fire on various types. Happy flying, Von S

CAF SAR assets

Thanks Crawford works a treat on the 110

Well, after ANOTHER snow storm last evening and a slight car accident this morning, I did find some time to almost finish this project :) Everything is done and tested except two minor thing : Tail numbers on 1991 and 2013 skins Here is 2 screenies 2010 2013 Another little push and that will be it!

Bad weather ...

Also working on some future aircraft.

Of course it's possible to write an exporter for 3ds max. But I don't plan to do it myself because: 1.) I don't own 3ds max 2.) My priorities are more in providing a free/open source toolchain for strike fighters 2

I don't have anything in game yet, I still have to get a fully working data file set up, but I got the materials showing in LODViewer now.

Mue, The tool is great. I have managed to get some items into game. Screenshot is of a troop tent that I found on line.

"Screaming Eagle 100"