Sherpa

thanks

Just got around to trying this over the weekend and it is very nice. It sure makes AG missions more exciting. I do have a question. I see this pack includes many of the weapons contained in Pasko's SAM&AAA vehicle pack. Do we still need Pasko's pack or is it now obsolete?

As far as I remember, the walmart fiasco was caused by TK's publisher at the time who released the game still in a Beta stage. That is one reason why TK now does everything in house. From the amount of work they are putting into it, it sounds like the new sim will have many new features. really looking forward to it.

I am wondering how much of the stuttering problem some players are experiencing is caused by the game itself? On my system which is certainly not top of the line (intel Q9550 quad core, ATI 6950, win 7), I have had no issues with the sept/oct patch. I run the game pretty much plain vanilla with only a few select mods, including Stary's Israel terrain with 1024x1024 tiles. When I did some benchmarking with "Rise of Flight" a few weeks back, I found that the biggest FPS hit came first, from the number of AI ground/air units around, followed second, by the amount of terrain detail.

Thanks. Since my original post, I rummaged through your mod and the previous version and saw all the river tiles are hand painted. The colour actually looks fine on the tile, very dark blue with a slight greenish tinge. It also looks light blue in game when the sun is reflecting off the water. It is only when you look at it away from the sun that it shows as green. I have been playing with the colour settings on my card (ATI 6950) to see if I can get the colour to shift to more blue.

Hi, I have been spending much time using this terrain which is very nice, especially the 4 seasons. When I fly a winter mission in inclement weather, it really feels like my native Canada. However, I have a small issue, all of the rivers in summer are very green. When I remove the terrain, the stock water is blue. Although one could argue about the proper colour of the north/baltic sea, it does not feel right for a river. I presume there should be a file I can remove or tweak to either get a more bluish colour or if that is not possible to revert to the stock water colour? thanks

no need to apologise, it is a beautiful piece of work, I love to check out the instruments in flight.

very nice job, beautiful airplane and cockpit. I did notice the AoA gauge says "Angel of Attack" instead of "Angle of Attack".

I voted for Angola/Namibia. The "Border War" was an interesting air conflict which has never been covered. It was fought from the mid 70s to the late 80s and features some interesting planes: SAAF Mirage III/F.1 vs Angolan Mig 21/23 (with Cuban/east german pilots). At one point in the mid-late 80s, Angola had some of the most sophisticated air defences in the world, courtesy of the USSR. The theater map would not need to be that huge, basically all the fighting took place in the northern half of Namibia and the southern half of Angola, an area which is the same size as the ME map in WOI/SF2I. Almost all SAAF strike/fighter flights took off from bases close to the Namibia-Angola border. The farthest was AFB Windhoek, about in the middle of Namibia.

Always do at the beginning of the engagement. I also tried using "rejoin" or "RTB" to get my flight to break off with varying degree of success. I did notice the AI will break off and return to base when its aircraft is damaged. It also appears to sometimes breakoff and RTB if it is losing a fight. Of course, the Alb III and V were outclassed by the Camel and the SE5, so the results in equal matchups are not totally unexpected. It works out better in the campaign where you can choose what scraps to get into. For example, in a campaign mission last night I was flyng CAP with 8 Alb V. We pounced a flight of 4 Camels and later on 4 SE5s. We lost 2 Albs but shot down 6 enemy AC, which was more to my liking... Obviously, your AI wingmen require a certain amount of babysitting to get them home safely, but it is not better or worse than other flight sims. I will eventually but want to get a good feel for how the stock game works first. So far, the only thing I have seen which looks really out of whack is the excessive yawing of the AI SE5.

Did some more testing...or rather flying, still the same issue. Dogfighting in 1917, the Camel and the SPAD VII outclass the Alb III and V, resulting in allied victories most times. I think part of the issue is that the AI has a problem flying the german planes to their full advantage. The AI is very good, but like most AIs, its preferred tactic is the turn fight. The german planes are better for boom and zoom and fighting in the vertical. When the AI in an Alb gets into a turn fight, it is at a big disadvantage, especially against the camel. I just started the 1917 campaign, shot down two planes, but lost all 3 planes in my flight. I may have to adopt Richtoffen's strategy and make sure I always have numerical superiority...

Do we know how AI skill levels are allocated in missions/campaigns? Presumably, if you pick "hard", you should normally receive some aces with the skill levels of other AI pilots gradually going down to rookies. I know the player has some control over his own squadron through the "Roster", but what about the enemy AI? I presume there must be a setting in an INI file.

I have been getting back into FE, dogfighting in single missions on an unmodded installation of FE+EXP+Nov08 patch. All the game options were set to hard except normal HUD. I played a number of offensive sweeps /defensive CAP missions, only retaining the equal fights (i.e. 2v2, 4v4 or 8v8) for my observations. I noticed that almost all battles quickly turn into a blowout with all the planes on one side getting shot down and no losses on the other. This is the same whether the AI is set to normal or hard. It appears to me that, in single missions at least, all planes are set to the same skill level and only the slight performance advantage of one aircraft against another determines the outcome. Has anyone else noticed this?

I figured out the answer, in the HUD.DATA INI, if you switch the map label answer in the [MAP] section from TRUE to FALSE, it turns off all map labels. Unfortunately, it is a global setting, all map labels are either on or off. It would be nice if we could just turn off the AC label and keep the ground targets label.

I recently picked up WOI. I am now editing the HUD and MISION INIs to get my favorite views back. I edited out the friendly and enemy plane icons from the map, but I noticed that WOI introduced map labels and even though the icons no longer appear, I can still see the labels for the enemy planes flying around. Is there a way to remove these?