streakeagle

Robin Olds had already long ago established that the AIM-4 was worthless junk. He had F-4s in his unit immediately field modded by talented mechanics to go back to the AIM-9B. Units in the field wanted the Navy AIM-9s, but their F-4s did not have the pylons/plumbing to support their seeker cooling. Inter-service rivalry can be healthy and good, like competition in a free market. But in Vietnam (and later), it got in the way of doing their principal job -- providing effective military power for the USA. I don't understand why any AIM-4s were being deployed, much less to the dedicated air superiority units like the Triple Nickel. An interesting fact is that Robin Olds couldn't stand radar warning receivers. He felt that they were nothing more than an unnecessary distraction in a situation already suffering from information overload. He always turned his off. In an environment like Hanoi, threat radars were in every direction and causing continuous alarms. He didn't want or need a light, a buzzer or a green screen to tell him he was surrounded by radar directed SAMs and AAA. He felt that you couldn't effectively defend against a SAM unless someone had eyes on it anyway, so he stuck to visual scanning techniques for keeping up with SAM threats. Of course, he had an amazing, almost superhuman, ability to maintain situational awareness and equally important, he was flying in a daytime environment where his eyes could potentially do an equal or better job of sorting out threats as long as there wasn't too much cloud cover.

The USAF AIM-9's actually regressed. The AIM-9E performed the same or worse than the AIM-9B and the early AIM-9J performed even worse. Had the USAF accepted the USN AIM-9D/G/H development path instead of going over to the AIM-4 and then trying to develop its own AIM-9, there certainly would have been several more kills. If the Navy had committed to slats and a gun, they might have done a little better, too. The Navy was more stubborn on slats than the USAF was on training. They bit their tongue and finally partially installed slats on the F-4S, admitting the USAF was right about the the aircraft being part of the problem instead of just being a training issue.

I certainly didn't mean to challenge/refute/or insult your discovery... but rather to clarify how the game handles the AI difficulty setting and explain alternate means for manipulating the AI to get the desired result. In my experience, Normal is the way to go for general gameplay. But saved missions with AI set precisely as needed to get the desired behavior is absolutely the best way to make historical missions achieve historical results. Whereas making all the AI supersmart produce decidedly non-historical results whether you are talking a single mission or a full campaign. AI vs AI is much different than player vs AI. Optimizing the AI to provide you with the best challenge may not work out the best for the overall intent of the mission.

A long, long time ago, I had always set AI difficulty to "Hard". The idea is that it affects the probability distribution of pilot quality. There are baseline settings for each nation (or branch of service as the case may be) that are modified by the difficulty setting. The problem is that when you choose "Hard", not only do enemy planes tend to have higher quality pilots than normally specified by their nationality, but friendly pilots have lower quality. I wanted enemy pilots to be better, but I didn't want the friendly pilots to become stupid! I simply learned to live with "Normal". This should result in a good historical match for AI vs AI fights even if it leaves you effectively being an ace. No matter what the setting is, both the AI and the player tend to unrealistically maintain situational awareness, ignore fuel constraints, and fight to the death. Combine that with over-effective weapons and the result is extremely unrealistically high air-to-air losses. If you save missions, then manually edit the pilot quality for each flight, you can better control the flow of the missions. I tended to find myself giving both sides the highest quality possible to make the AI for both side do something more than wait to get shot down. Even then, the AI was never really as smart as I would have liked. But try out missions with every possible AI combination to see the full effects on gameplay. It can be a challenge to find the right combination for re-creating historical missions.

I am looking forward to the DCS F-5E... perfect compliment to the MiG-21bis.

This video is pure gold. I hope the SimWorks Studios are able to use the information in it to improve their F-4B addon for FSX.

While poking around for info on CV 43 Coral Sea, I stumbled onto this fairly old post that I somehow missed. Great stuff! Thanks for all the pics.

The ongoing beta development of the F-4B continues with the addition of the promised aircraft carrier. After troubleshooting all day and finally realizing the problem was the loss of my default key mappings for carrier operations, I finally completed a cat launch. It took several tries, but I finally trapped, too. The "meatball" is functional. Landing without crashing is far more difficult than SF2. Overall, I am very happy with the beta even though some of the systems aren't fully implemented. The only limitations I have run into aren't the fault of the addon, but due to FSX not truly being a combat simulator and the limited number and quality of FSX addons for simulating the Vietnam War. If I could fight MiG-17s and MiG-21s in the air with decent AI, I would be a lot happier. I have yet to attempt strike missions or face SA-2s. Perhaps if that works as well as advertised I will be happier with the FSX/TacPack combination. As it stands, SF2 is the better combat simulation for flying F-4 Phantoms, but FSX/TacPack/SWS F-4B addon is better from an operations point of view.

It is interesting. As I understand it, it is currently just the standard FSX flight model engine tweaked to the max. It is intended to make it better. But it already exhibits many of the textbook characteristics of an unslatted F-4 with things like "nose slice" and "Mach tuck". You can depart controlled flight, particularly at low speeds/high AoA. They developers claim they are going to make it better over time. I have enjoyed flying it, but sorely miss air-to-air vs aggressive AI. Shooting down drones or simple intercept-only AI is no fun after just a few times.

Did someone say "badgers" ? I see the badges in the other post. Strange.

I got out of the Navy in May of 1997. I went back to college in January of 2000 to finish my electrical engineering degree that I had halfway finished before joining the Navy. I bought my first Windows PC, a Win 98 SE Pentium III around August of 2000 to help with school work... and play flight sims. By January 2001, I had a Voodoo 5500 gpu, and an X-36 USB HOTAS. As fast as I could afford them I had bought all the Jane's sims: USAF/IAF/F-15E, Jane's WW2 Fighters, and Jane's F/A-18/Fleet Command/688i. Jane's USAF had become my favorite because of the F-4E Phantom and its amazing graphics (compared to my previous experience with Fighters Anthology that I had already played on a work laptop for years). A really cool feature of USAF was that many alternate skins were available for all of the aircraft in the came and a tool made it easy to install them/swap them before flying. I loved flying the F-4E in USAF Thunderbirds colors... I had discovered flight sim forums which led to new games that could be downloaded like Warbirds and Aces High. I ended up hanging out primarily on one forum: the SimHQ Jane's USAF section. It was there that I first learned of a new upcoming jet air combat sim starring the F-4E: Strike Fighters Project 1. In those days, the developer, TK, would post screenshots and answer questions in the SimHQ SFP1 forum. After what seemed like an eternity, I stumbled onto the legendary (infamous) Walmart release of SFP1 while shopping for some stuff to fix up my friend's PC. Suddenly, every flight sim I had became obsolete. SFP1 had the best aircraft/weapons graphics of any flight sim I had. The flight model, even in a rough beta stage, was a huge leap beyond Jane's USAF. I had found my primary flight sim that I would fly to this very day. SFP1 was designed to be easily moddable and Third Wire provided tools and templates to ease the task. Tutorials started popping up on how to do everything up to and including building a 3d model and importing it into the game. Out of this whirlwind of enthusiasm and talent came an artist that went by the online name of marcfighters. He was cranking out beautiful new aircraft skins for SFP1. He never made my favorite F-4E skin, the Thunderbirds, but he made Blue Angels skins that were the best I had ever seen in a game. It seemed like every week he released all kinds of new skins. I collected them and stored them on CD's. marcfighters had established his website and addons as an important anchor for the early SFP1 modding crowd. Many more people would join the online modding community, but marcfighters would remain at the hub of development; eventually branching out into 3d modeling projects such as aircraft, ships/subs, and ground objects. Unfortunately for the SFP1 community, Marcelo established such a reputation that it pulled him into professional flight sim development. But CombatAce.com preserved his legacy: http://marcfighters.combatace.com/ If you were around for the early years, click around and enjoy the memories. If don't know much if anything about marcfighters, click around and see one of the last vestiges of the early SFP1 modding community that made the Strike Fighters series and its still highly skilled and highly active community what it is today. I remember the day-by-day adventures at SimHQ, the early fansite/modders of the long defunct Skunk Works forums, and all the trolls that did nothing but complain about the games' limitations and the free addons produced by the online modding community. Nothing lasts forever. There will be a day when the SF series will only run on a handful of legacy PCs. But CombatAce might still be here, and until all of the old geezers that originally bought and played SFP1 fade away, a little corner of CombatAce.com will continue to showcase the early work of Marcelo aka marcfighters. <S> to all the all the great people that helped make flying with the Strike Fighters series an even greater experience. The list of early modding greats is fairly long for such a little niche game, but sitting near the top of any such list is Marcelo. P.S. No modder ever produced an F-4E Thunderbird skin for me! So, I struggled to make my own. I lacked the skills/experience to make anything close to the quality of a marcfighters skin, but when I was done, I could fly like I did in Jane's USAF... but with better graphics, better flight model... better everything (except maybe the terrain). It wasn't until TK started releasing DLC for SF2 that I finally got a professional grade F-4E Thunderbirds skin. Of course it looks way better than mine. But it only showed up as my days of flying SF every night were coming to an end.

For my PCs with AMD 7970 and 7870, I have reverted back to Catalyst 15.7.1. The problem with SF2 was some random/intermittent flickering texture problems off to the left or right along the horizon line. It was livable, but I discovered Star Wars Battlefront 2 was utterly ruined with bizarre ground textures, so I looked for the last good driver I was using before "Crimson". Image quality for both games was restored by reverting to this driver.

Shimmering cannot be fully eliminated. One source that cannot truly be addressed is the "z-fighting". The software can't decide which item clips the other, so it paints over one than the other pops back to the front. Objects on top of the runway viewed at longer distances always shimmer for instance. I see cities shimmer because of shadows. But, there are sources shimmering that can be addressed. Anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing helps with shimmering textures. When I can get away with using "supersampling" instead of "multisampling" for the FSAA method, it makes every game I have look far superior, but it drops the frame rate too much for most of my games, even at a basic x4 FSAA. Fortunately, SF2 is one application where the frame rates tend to stay above 30, even with heavy mods and long range visibility, so if I don't mind dropping from 50-60 fps down to 30-40 fps, I can enjoy minimal shimmering and aliasing while still seeing smooth graphics. For intense dogfighting down in the mud, I still want 60 fps more than pretty screenshots, so I go back to multisampling or adaptative as required to fly and gun more precisely.

Z-fighting is exactly what I am seeing. It is only objects on the tarmac that do this. Now: what is the solution to have the terrain not show through the runway and the objects sit securely on top of the runway?

No I do not, trying it out now... That doesn't fix PIT8 or PIT16, which are what I am seeing on almost every base. As my Vietnam terrain is already extracted... I edited every object to 60,000 for both the last lod and the max visual distance. Didn't take that long for Vietnam.

OK, I modified every single <target>.ini I could find in the VietnamSEA terrain folder. Everything looks great... except the pits (where aircraft park--open revetments) and hangars which give me some issues with flickering at any useful distance.

I will have to try these adjustments. As for the shaders re-enabling fading... maybe the distance was so far that it didn't matter? I could see cities properly populated as far as I could see. These small changes really improve the looks of the game, especially when combined with the latest mods such as Green Hell 3.5. However, I have been comparing Hanoi/Thud Ridge to both FSX (upgraded with high resolution meshes) and Google Earth. FSX and Google Earth are nearly 100% identical other than textures. The SF2 Green Hell 3.5 textures look better than both the stock FSX textures and the free SEA upgrade, but the terrain elevations and runway placement, etc. are far from the accuracy achieved in FSX. What I really want is a single sim with the best features of SF2, FSX, and DCS all wrapped into one!

Absolutely brutal article. But it is hard to argue the history of any aircraft that kills many of its pilots or incapable of performing its intended mission or any other mission for that matter. I still generally love all airplanes and especially fighter planes, even if they aren't always pretty or successful.

I used to consider Strike Fighters better than LOMAC/FC. You could fly the stock F-15A and A-10A in WOE (later and much better SF2E) and compare every aspect to the LOMAC F-15C and A-10A. LOMAC had much prettier graphics for the terrain. But SF had more accurate/better looking 3d models of the aircraft and drew shadows better. SF won flight modeling hands down. Unfortunately, the dogfighting AI was broken around the time of WOE, but by SF2, the AI was fixed and overall modeling of radar, ecm, terrain masking, missile performance were all in SF's favor for realism, playability, and fun. But years later with DCS:FC3 in the picture, almost everything has flipped in favor of FC3. There is simply no comparison on the graphics now. FC3's flight models are not only more detailed than SF's, but have been heavily calibrated to match pilot manual chart performance, something SF never really did out of the box. FC3 still has a few holes, which SF2 may be comparable if not better in overcoming. The FC3 AI is still far from perfect and so is SFs, hard to say which one is better, I think it comes down to personal taste. Air to air missile performance use to be as or more scripted than aircraft performance, now FC3 is in the middle of tuning much more detailed missile flight models that are comparable if not superior to what SF had all along. SF actually took a step back, dumbing down their reliability issues to satisfy customers complaining they couldn't hit anything with missiles. As DCS missiles progress, they are becoming more and more realistic. SF2 missiles can easily be tuned to behave any way you want and aren't too bad other than a little to accurate out of the box. For reference, the DCS MiG-21bis Atoll missiles (both radar and irm) seem to be more reliable and effective than the F-15A AIM-7F and AIM-9J missiles in SF2. But DCS is constantly improving and SF2 is static aside from user mods. Both sims suffer issues from damage modeling. DCS appears to use less detailed modeling for AI aircraft, and some are flying tanks. Many always complained that SFP1/SF2 aircraft went down way too easy. I don't know if DCS is ever going to address this, SF2 problems can be solved by modding the aircraft ini files... adding armor to systems/components as necessary to replicate individual strengths/weaknesses. But I have to say, the visual differences and superior flight modeling, particularly at the edge of the envelope (including landings), makes FC3 far superior to SF2E--aside from the much more limited flyable and even AI plane set... and even more limited choice of maps to fly ;)

You can't go wrong with FC3 unless you want to click on buttons. The flight models are as good as they can be. I own LOMAC, FC, FC2, and FC3. I never played them very much because of the simple flight models. FC3 goes on sale online for $12 very frequently. Just the F-15C or Su-27S is worth that price. I am waiting for the MiG-29 and Su-33 to be brought up to the same standard. Not only are the flight models (and underlying systems) modeled as well as possible, but the aircraft have new 3-d cockpits, too. So, if you liked everything but the flight models in LOMAC/FC/FC2, FC3 is for you.

Belay my last regarding aircraft draw distance, at least on my first test mission. I intercepted Badgers with the F-101B and I am pretty sure I could get them to go down to 1 pixel even fully zoomed in... which is a much longer view range than before. I want to try an F-4 vs a Bear so I can judge the range accurately from the radar display... I am confused though. I have not put the shaders in any other terrain, yet in SF2E and SF2NA, I can see aircraft at their 1 pixel limits. If I recall correctly, disabling the fade in function did not restore max spotting distance, then it is the detail mesh setting in the flightengine.ini that has changed the max spotting distance? Just did two tests: MiG-21bis intercepting B-52s over Germany with stock flightengine.ini, and the same mission with the DetailMeshSize=18. That is the difference. All these years of having aircraft, especially large ones, pop into view and all that needed to be changed was this one parameter? and maybe disabling fade? Now how to fix the base objects popping out of view at relatively short distances? Further experimentation: merely turning off fade and increasing DetailMeshSize gets the job done. I don't see any difference with the shader files removed.

Ok, I am late to the game. This is a huge step forward. But, the one place I always fly still has popping in/out issues: air bases. barracks, etc. disappear/reappear at relatively short distances. A separate shader determines this? Tell me there is a shader for aircraft so that their visibility distance can be restored to the 1 pixel limit instead of having B-52's pop up out of nowhere.

To just derail this thread a bit more... I definitely am capped to 60 fps. I don't know when that happened. I don't fly SF2 that often any more and when I do it is with VSYNC pretty much locking my fps at exactly 60 fps. On the darker side... I see some small texture glitches. Nothing like the scale of the pics above. Just a small rectangular bar that flickers off to the left or right... not always there depending on zoom/view angle etc. I wonder with AMD driver added that?

Since when are AMD cards limited to 60 fps in SF2? I have been flying SFP1 with Radeon cards ever since I decided to replace my Voodoo 5. I do prefer using Vsync and I don't have any monitors that support more than 60 fps, but I used to run unlocked just to see how many fps I could get... quite a bit more than 60. Now you have piqued my interest and I need to unlock vsync to see what my current hardward can do.

Let me read my crystal ball: high tech, expensive Northrop aircraft during a time when the budget is or needs to be slashed and unmanned drones are being considered for heroic combat medals... Do they have even one flying yet, because I see the order being canceled any day now...