OlWilly

The decision to drop Strike Fighters series is actually strange from financial point of view. For post WWII era we have two great study sims - DCS and Falcon BMS. Lots of arcade flight games (not worthy being called sims), like Ace Combat or whatever. But for survey, lighter sims, right in the middle, there is an actual shortage on the market. Notice how Nuclear Option waltzed in and seized a decent following just overnight, and it is still in Early Access. A lot of people enjoy sim mode in War Thunder, but hate the grind, and won't mind an offline or less grindy version/spin-off of it. Strike Fighters 3 would easily get its share of the market, especially if it will have an online mode, but without the grind like in WT

From my understanding, BoresightElevation and BoresightAzimuth define the direction of the beam. In this case, it will be 0 azimuth - straight center, and -2 elevation, meaning that it's angled down -2 degrees from the aircraft's centerline. BoresightBeamAngle should be the width of the cone, imagine it not as a "line" but as a "cone" with apex being placed at emitter and degree being measured from the centerline (or bore in that matter)

.LOD in general is not owned by TW, but this is the "umbrella" format of sorts. Some other games used .LOD too, and guess what, they are incompatible with SF2 Generally, I don't recommend this format for open source game as it is a locked format, with no easy editing. Strike Fighters .LOD models are exclusive for Strike Fighters From what I understand, TW is very touchy on the matter of using their 3D assets, so this is a hard no. This is one of the reasons why they choose .LOD format, so no one could touch their precious 3D models On the other hand, modders created tons of decent and great 3D assets for the game, but here comes the issue. All the mods available here are in .LOD too So, you would need their permission and original 3DSMax/Blender/whatever models which would be hard to get. Many modders are no longer active and many original models are lost to time TLDR - if you manage to contact the modders and convince them to share their original 3DSMax/Blender/whatever models, you are good to go. But if you want to work with SF .LOD format, you're out of luck

From what I understand, those are low level functions that process the raw data generated by the game's engine This data is called by scripts which govern the actual functioning of the game, avionics, flight model, etc. Scripts, in return, are set up by .ini files So we have two levels here, with the higher one being accessible to tuning, but not modding. Thus, we know that the low level is contained in binaries. The scripts themselves, the higher level, I assume hidden in the binaries too Low level itself may seem not that important to modding the engine as it's just a set of tools to get and process raw data. But it could open the way into the actual meat of the code, the scripts, and help understand how they actually work Speaking of which, do we know in what language the game is written? C++ I presume

Some compromises had to be made, but overall function of RP-21 could be modeled just fine. You just need to create proper symbology

Indeed, the game engine was built to deal with a limited number of assets during a single mission. You have like up to 10 types of aircraft, limited number of munitions and very few ground objects all using relatively low res textures and not too crazy on polygon count. Then you load up a heavily modded game with number of objects increased by order of magnitude and all using bigger textures and often high poly. Ground vehicle mods tend to contribute to this problem a lot. A single mission won't generate too much types of the aircraft, but can go crazy with ground units. When I added vehicles from massive WarPac pack the loading times increased a lot ...

AI can't really defend again SARH missiles either. The only thing it could do is to drop chaff, but defensive maneuvers - forget about it. I've read somewhere on this forum that in some previous titles - WOE I think - AI could even notch your missiles; but apparently this was nerfed like many other features to simplify the gameplay

Technicians are preparing the Polish MiG-21PFM for takeoff. The canopy is tilted to the right. The MiG-21PFM was the first version of the fighter to feature two rear-view mirrors in the cockpit. Later they were also used on vehicles of the MiG-21SM family. Only on the MiG-21 MF they were replaced with a TS-27LMSh rear view mirror. The MiG-21PFM was also equipped for the first time with the improved RP-21MA Sapphire radar. Two rear mirrors on the MiG-21PFM canopy. These mirrors were not present on early MiGs. This aircraft is also equipped with a TS-27AMSH rear-view mirror. In addition, this is an early version of the MiG-21PMF, since the aircraft is equipped with a KM-1 ejection seat. https://military.wikireading.ru/33447?ysclid=lzs4o0c1wx378987657 TS-27AMSh is the rearview periscope common for other aircraft too (MiG-23, Su-25, etc) View from Il-76

Speaking of the text on the fuselage, before you release these birds send textures to someone for proofreading, me if no one else around

SF2 engine allows only for unlimited CCIP - meaning that it will show the point of impact no matter the distance to it.Things like limited rangefinding distance or HUD limits are not present in the game. This works both for rockets and bombs. What this means in game that you can simply align your CCIP with target box and fire, distance notwithstanding. Rockets will land close to the target Works only if you had CCIP enabled in avionics.ini

By general rule, aircraft produced/designed in 1940s-1950s had dark gray/blackish color - MiG-15/17/19/early 21s, Tu-95, Tu-16, etc. In mid 1960s the coloring scheme changed for greenish-blueish color with MiGs, Sukhoi went with more blue-gray colors

Countermeasure pods of all kinds work only in player aircraft, both chaff/flares and ECM. I tried few ways around it, for example, enabling an internal CM dispenser but loaded only with 1 chaff/1 flare and then loading external pods with CMs. What AI did with it? It dropped exactly one flare and then just stopped. Same with ECM, I enabled internal ECM with 0.001 strength and then normal external pod. No change - in fact, in player aircraft you can't really activate internal ECM but ignore pods - both will go on; but AI has only internal working. So it's not like AI *chooses* not to use the pods, it simply doesn't register them on. The stuff is messed up on .dll level; I've read about that this bug came in only with NA so someone has to compare pre-NA and current .dll's. The only way around it is to fix the pod external model to aircraft through fakepilot, disable the station taken and enable the function in aircraft .data file. The bad news is that this removes the flexibility from loadout options

In RL, to jam something you need to know at what frequency it operates. After you know the frequency, you put out jamming to block it - and from then on, it's the game of jammer and radar powers. Radars, especially SAM ones, usually have more power than jammers, but the signal power decreases with range - so you have jammer working at a certain distance, but then radar "burns" through it. In Vietnam, the main task for Americans in that regard was to learn the frequency range on which Soviet radars operated. After they found out the frequencies of the first supplied S-75 radars, they issued jammers that blocked these frequencies specifically. Soviets, in respond, supplied radars with changed frequencies. And so on, this is the game one can play for a long time. The response to this was firstly, to enable radars to use several frequency presets, allowing operator to choose the one that wasn't jammed (Kub, for example, already had it, not sure about later S-75s though). Then, later, radars switched to dynamic frequencies, randomly picking and changing them within the operating range. Game doesn't simulate these later developments, all SAM radars have fixed frequencies, so early 1960-s level of tech. You can only specify search, track and guidance frequencies Interestingly, missiles have MinFreq and MaxFreq statements, but those are only for anti-radiation missiles, telling them what radar they could pick

After some testing, I came up with a routine to tune SAMs and SRMs as well. For SAMs, the data you can find online is usually given for a high-altitude target - where the air is thinner and missile could accelerate better, having more range. To get the low-level performance, for simplicity sake, we may assume that it is the half of maximum range (which is often close to reality, check MIM-23 for example) and reduced max speed. And this is all we need. Weight and Diameter as in DATA file. Init speed at zero which would mean launching from a non-moving platform. Next, we will check the missile performance at higher altitude. Again, to keep things simple, let's assume 15k meters - IAS/TAS ratio at 0.6. Here, aim for more range and speed as stated online - because you had to account for missile actually getting there and MRS doesn't do this. Then, check missile performance at lower altitudes, which would be IAS/TAS ratio of 0.8, or around 5k meters. The range should drop approximately in half and max speed below the one stated online. Speed of sound at this altitude is around 1150km/h or 319m/s for the reference. SAMs nearly universally have booster stages, so they had to be enabled in data file for the required performance. ---- For SRMs, the process is a bit different. SRMs follow the same energy rules as all other missiles, but they are in fact limited by their seeker - the max lock-on range, plus heatseekers leading algorithms are inferior to radar seekers, and they don't lead in the most optimal way. Purely ballistically, one could lob AIM-9 at well over 20km with no problems, but you would be unlikely to lock on anything at that range. Thus, as SRMs are designed for maneuver combat at close ranges, we simply pick the lesser energy state of the launch platform. For simplicity, this would be 5k meters (IAS/TAS ratio of 0.8) and Init speed at 1 Mach, or 319m/s. Tune the missile so it would have the speed close to what you can find online, and range somewhat below it. The game doesn't have good algorithms for heatseeker operation, and many vanilla SRMs have crazy lock-on ranges - it was not uncommon to lock and shoot with something like Python-3 or AIM-9M from 20km at target that doesn't even have the afterburners on. In my install I arbitrarily capped all SRM at certain ranges to prevent this.

When SF2 crashes, open the crash event report, expand it and look at the module which caused the crash. This may give some input on what caused the crash. Recently, I had persistent campaign crash in a certain mission, on further examination it was caused by ground_formation.dll or somesuch. So obviously, game didn't like something related to ground unit behavior. The solution is to start the mission and then exist it, failing but skipping it.