Baltika

OK, looks like I'll go for reworking the stock WOE campaigns to feature China, NZ, AUS, and RAF. My WIP modern campaign can be the War of the Ring Resurrection campaign. Tile texture work is finished. Next up is airfield flattening, always a hairy moment in TE. Target placement will be of the cut & paste variety, although Auckland, Wellington and Invercargill will get some special treatment.

Scenery is glorious hereabouts :yes: As for the textures, they are Deuces' old Germany_CE repaint, plus a few additional coastal transition tiles I have knocked together by merging his tiles and creating new .tgas. As for Minas Tirith, I am no 3d modeller, but there are relics of the Old World to be found lurking in the mountains. . .

Yes, it's a wild area for terrain building. As for new tricks, general familiarisation with the idiosyncracies of TE means that the more you use it, the better a "feel" you get for it. The stock texturelists are baseline building blocks, but for rugged coastlines there are not enough transition tiles to cover every eventuality. So the coastline gets a bit funny, transition textures don't cover it properly, and you get frustrated. Germany_CE is a worse offender than Vietnam_SEA for that. The Germany texturelist has the bare minimum of city/coast transition tiles to make the germany map work. For my UK map I added new transition tiles to that list. There will be even more when I release NZ map. The Malaysia rebuild became necessary because I had been exporting/importing the .bmp file without a full understanding of how TE translated the different colours into heights, so I was getting chopped off mountain peaks. Also, I hadn't used the heightfield % setting to best effect to get a fun, playable map. It was all rather flat. So that had to be fixed. Finally, I realised I wanted to open the theatre up a bit, after reading Volume One of "Bloody Shambles." Hence the inclusion of the Philippines in the new build. So no real new insights, just getting better at working with TE. Cheers, Baltika Oh yeah, there are a couple of typos in the stock TW texturelists which mean some land tiles are treated as water tiles. That means the engine looks for a .tga for that tile, can't find one and you get randomly switching tile textures appearing in game. Wrench, that may be the problem you had with SoCal map having the odd strange flashing texture tile.

Hi Bandy, glad to hear from you. Good point re squadron replacements, I will take a look at it for v0.61.

Thanks. NZ terrain is great for map-making. My wife and I honeymooned there for 3 weeks and were blown away by the scenery. NZ terrain d/l will include at least one campaign. My working build features 2 Sqdn RNZAF flying A-4 Kahu, 75 Sqdn RNZAF flying TA-4K, and 14 Sqdn RNZAF flying MB-339A as a stand-in for their actual model. The RAF will also feature, flying Tornado F3 and Harrier Gr 7. If the Kiwis can put up with it, an Ozzie carrier group may also barge into the fray. The bad guys I currently have set as Chinese, but I may go the whole hog and whip up an "Eye of Sauron" squadron insignia/decalset and add Mordor to the nations.INI. Then, a couple of jet-black skins for the stock TW Migs and we should be set. Marcfighters Su-27 and the TMF MiG-29 will also feature. Life expectancy is low for Fellowship pilots, but you get a great feel for how versatile the Skyhawk is. . . until you die. If I have time I will also make quick edits to the stock WOE campaigns to make 'em work on this map. As to time scale, all I can say is, "two weeks." But most of the terrain grunt work is done.

Update. TE is a continual learning curve, so sometimes the early WIPS just don't cut it. I have gone back to the drawing board with this one, but the delays will be worth it in the end, I think. . .

Great stuff, Wrench, I think we have our first "Known Ace" for the minions of Mordor :yes: @Say What?! Sorry, but the campaign map is as you see it in the screenshot above. This is a full-scale terrain using Gepard's .bmp stretching method, so the distances involved are already pretty large. As you can see, I have also completed my NZ_CityList so I would have to re-do a ton of work to change the map now. Consider this a follow-on to my British Isles map, maintaining the focus very much on the tactical rather than the strategic. Which is why the included campaign(s) will be entirely fictional. But I like the sound of an alternative history Pacific campaign.

Hi Canadair, No problem, I think it would be great if your modded BoB Oct 08 install could be made available - I'm just wondering how that could be done. Thanks for your kind words, but everything I know about modding I learned from the folks round here. The BoB campaign thread shows how the package was developed by everyone contributing ideas and thier own mods - I think it would be great if you could lead us into the 08 patch level for the BoB install. So keep those ideas coming. Cheers, Baltika

Thanks for the suggestion. Sadly, I had to spend a bit of time recently removing all the DAT planes from the BoB v0.60 package, so I think the days of an all-in-one-install are gone as none of those a/c can be included. I am planning simply an update as a separate download for v0.61. It is mostly .ini edits so there is no point in repacking the whole thing again, although I may do that eventually for those newcomers who do not yet have a BoB install set up. I am no FM expert, but there are a few simple tweaks which can be applied to the 109E FM to make a few improvements. They were worked out by Heck and B Bandy RFC and are detailed in the 109 FM thread now in the prophead forum. They are certainly worth trying out. Time for modding is limited atm so expect the BoB updates when you see them. @Wrench, thanks for moving those threads over. Nice to have it all in one place. There are a few others which may be of interest. I can flag em up as I come across them. Cheers, Baltika

OK, thanks for clearing that up. Seems to be working OK on my end. Cheers, Baltika

Looks like there has been a slight re-organisation of the WW2 a/c downloads. There had been some "loose" files which have now been consolidated into the main d/l section - at least I think they have, otherwise a few have gone awol. But it seems that WOLF257 has re-uploaded his WW2 plane pack: http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autoc...p;showfile=4363 Thanks Wolf

The update is really intended for SFP1 at 06 patch level, and, sorry, will not include updated FMs, although I may tweak the 109 FM in particular to resolve a few issues mentioned in the above 109 FM thread, and to fix armanent issues for the BoB timeframe. I will also probably include the Stallmoment fix where required, as, like you, I have ported my BoB install over to WoE at Oct 08 patch level, and am really enjoying the new AI. Makes the campaign even tougher to survive For a full list if what's included, take a look at my most recent post in the BoB campaign thread. Mainly it is updates to the OOB to include many more BoB squadrons, to increase the number of flyable types, and to implement my "all RAF squadrons markings fix

Good to have a "prop" -er home here BTW, these might be worth a move too, cheers Wrench http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?showtopic=31417 Kursk http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?showtopic=29293 Midway http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?showtopic=31665 BF 109 FM discussion http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?showtopic=31823 WW2 Invasion of Japan http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?showtopic=25381 WW2 Nightfighter discussion http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?showtopic=30473 WW2 Philippines campaign thread http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?showtopic=25617 Burma Air War Thread http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?showtopic=34534 Pearl Harbor map/campaign thread http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?showtopic=35678 Brewster Buffalo http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?showtopic=35233 New Hurricane markings by mppd These all relate to various WW2 themed topics, and have some useful info. If you can find the time, it may assist to have them here. There are others, but these are the ones I could find quickly. Thanks again for the dedicated forum section. Cheers, Baltika

The AI will fly the WW2 medium and heavy bombers pretty well for level bombing - just watch airfield attacks by the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain campaign :yes: For player flyable it is a bit more difficult, but there are a couple of bomb-sight mods which are worth checking out. Get 'em here: http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autoc...p;showfile=1462 http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autoc...p;showfile=1483 Cheers to dfang for these. There are a few others in the weapons section of the d/ls, again by dfang.

Well, speaking purely from the campaign building perspective, I suggest both adding Gepard's sea-level airfield at each of the existing fleet target areas, and add a separate carrierstation targetarea near to each of the existing ones, but with no ships etc positioned there. For me, that is the best of both worlds - seaplanes and the like can be assigned in the campaign file to use the surface invisible airstrip, whilst Ican also use the nearby empty carrierstation to position carrier-based units and allow for the full range of carrier ops as currently supported by TW, i.e. take offs and landings from a moving carrier. Looking forward to this upgrade, thanks for your hard work on these terrains Cheers, Baltika

Nice

Well, I posted a very basic wip screenshot of a cut & paste WoE mainscreen Ostfront conversion - not a menu set, just the mainscreen. I can knock the thing together for release, but I suggest you d/l kout's Fighters Anthology menus template, and just copy in the pictures you want to that. That way, you can do a whole Ostfront screenset with minumun hassle. Cheers, Baltika

Thank you Thank you Thank you (Although I think you knocked release date for North Africa campaign back a bit while I get to grips with your new version of the terrain - I believe it's called "playtesting" )

Welcome aboard the TW prop-fest If you haven't already, check out this interim fix for the old prop FMs: http://avhistory.org/communityserver/forums/t/694.aspx That will at least enable the AI to handle most planes without endlessly falling into unrecoverable spins. You can still push the envelope too far, but at least with that little fix in place you have an even chance of recovering from spins.

Duh Well, thanks again for working on them.

Also in game, Options/Video/display resolution. set to 1600x1200x32, or whatever, rather than AAAxBBBx16

Looks like you are 16-bit rather than 32-bit colour mode

Gets my vote Thanks for the update, Sarge. Looking forward to trying out your new beta FMs. Would there be some mileage in uploading the updated FMs only, either here or at AvHistory, so that we don't have to keep hammering the bandwith for the whole model? Cheers, Baltika

StartNumber= controls the start point for the individual a/c numbers for that squadron for decalling purposes. So, startnumber=0 will have that squadron's migs with number 00, 01, 02 on the nose. Startnumber=32 will give you numbers 32, 33, 34 etc on the nose. I think the stock game comes with up to 100 or so numbers in this way. It is useful for e.g. lots of different a/c serial numbers where you have a variety of squadrons flying the same plane.

Thanks for the info