Baltika

Well, I'm no expert on the Vietnam air war. I do know that while the latest SF2:V patch has fixed the Da Nang airfield strike bug, it remains an issue for WoV, even patched up to the most recent level. TK has said it may get fixed in the next round of patches, but that is at least a year or two away, even if the older series of titles gets patched again. I seem to recall somebody saying that it is frustrating because the rules of engagement did not in fact permit airfield strikes, but I could be completely wrong about that.

There are only a small number of MiG squadrons in this campaign, which reflects the historical situation. In fact, only 7 enemy air units as opposed to about 154 US & S. Vietnamese air units. So, air opposition is always going to be thin on the ground, and I think TK said somewhere you can expect it to be completely wiped out relatively early on in the campaign. The best way to get strong air opposition is to increase the number of enemy squadrons, and place them all round the available enemy airbases. Just copy & paste from an existing enemy squadron, making sure to increase the [AirUnitxxx] entry in sequence. You may also want to edit the UnitName= entry to give them a distinct name. Then edit the BaseArea= entry for each of your new squadrons to distribute them around the available enemy airbases. Also, increase the MaxAircraft= and StartAircraft= entry for each enemy air unit, to something like 16 or even 32 for each. I think in stock Rolling Thunder, the MiG units are restricted to one or two airbases, which again I think is intended to reflect the historical position. But for playability, I agree, the more bad guys around, the better

Nice one, thanks

Yup, the PTO certainly has a strong attraction for me, although I'm certainly looking forward to your North Africa rebuild. That's most timely, as my long, long, overdue North Africa campaign is the current one being worked on. But, perhaps next up for PTO should be the Battle of Leyte Gulf

Personally, I use SFG patched to v 083006 for my baseline WW2 installs. I am slowly migrating stuff over to WOE patched to Oct 08, thanks to the work being done by the AvHistory guys on WW2 prop FMs. It is common knowledge that the older WW2 FMs behave rather "oddly" with post Oct 08 patch builds, but gregoryp has come up with this fix which has resolved 99% of my Oct 08 WW2 FM problems: http://avhistory.org/communityserver/forums/t/694.aspx Frankly, the improvements in AI behaviour, rendering, parked a/c to strafe, and campaign improvements (known aces, ease of setting frontlines for each campaign, no need to define co-ords for strategic nodes) are just too good to miss out on, IMHO. So, for your WW2 Pacific build, I say go for WOE Oct 08, add Wrench's WW2 Wep pack (you will need to run it through the newest wep editor to get it to show up right), CA_Stary's WW2 effects pack, then pick and choose your planes etc, checking to see if they need the data ini edit flagged up by gregoryp. As for terrains, etc, for pacific theatre there is Gepard's Midway terrain, which has a lot of the ships and stuff you will need, plus a few by Edward, including Philippines, New Guinea, Solomons, Okinawa and Darwin. Wrench has a Central Pacific and Pearl Harbor terrain, and has also built terrain upgrades for many of Edward's. As for campaigns, well, some guy called Baltika has put together a Midway campaign and a Philippines campaign, which I dare say might be worth a look and one for Burma if you fancy flying for the AVG :yes: There are also many Midway-specific skins by Wrench both here at CA and at Wrench's toolbox. I should say also that the AvHistory guys have released beta models with their FMs for testing in the latest TW builds, including a P-51, Zero and Ki-43, so grab them and post your feedback on the AvHistory site. Tally-ho, Baltika Duh Should've known Wrench would beat me to the punch on this one

Yes, Wolf has the earlier P-40B (under filename Tomahawk) in his WW2 plane pak. He has left pretty clear instructions about non-distribution of his models, so yes, you ought to comply with that and leave his .lod out of your mod. Skins and .ini files have generally been regarded as free to mod, although it is also considered polite to give credit to the originator of said files. Nice Russian skins, BTW

Looking Good I suggest you try this fix for your SF2 Prop FMs: http://avhistory.org/communityserver/forums/t/694.aspx That will get most birds at least flying and will do as a placeholder until the AvHistory team come up with a definitive set of WW2 FMs for SF/WOx series. By all means include Burma campaign file if you wish, although maybe Midway campaign would be more suited to your USS Enterprise theme?

Hi there, Sorry I haven't responded directly before now. To "load" a single mission, you require to have a mission set up and saved as a .msn file, in the Wox/Missions folder. There are no such missions inlcuded with the BoB d/l package, as yet. So, you can select random single mission types from the UI Single Mission Screen, but you cannot "save" such a mission to refly later. Same goes for campaign missions. You can refly a mission from the debrife screen, but you can't save a game generated mission to refly later. To create a custom mission to fly over and over again, you will need to create a user mission using kreelin's KMD mission editor, available in the utilities section here. Hope that answers your question. Cheers, Baltika

Sorry, following the discussion on that topic in this thread, I received a request from the 3d modeller concerned to update the BoB pack removing the DAT planes. I considered it appropriate to comply with that request, given the policy in force at CA which states you require the express prior permission of any modder to use their work in any uploaded mod of your own, unless the person whose work you are using has signed up to the CA Fair Use Modding agreement, and you give full credit to the original author. Details of that Agreement right here:- http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?showtopic=26131 Many of us around here consider that to be the lifeblood of the community and the work produced by those who have signed up to it speaks for itself. Personally, if I can contribute in some small way to the community here which has brought me from complete TW noob to someone who can knock a campaign together, create a custom skin and bang out a new terrain, all the while providing me with helpful advice and a ton of free high quality add-ons, then I consider that to be the least I can do. However, the BoB pack available here has now had the DAT planes removed, at the request of the author of the 3d models involved. You will have to get the DAT planes at capun's site.

Yup, I reckon you should just release stuff as you finish it. An all-in-one package is great for the end-user, but takes a lot more organisation and co-ordination to put together. Also, speaking personally, my completion dates for any of my WIPs are entirely unpredictable, dependant on all the usual RL variables, and I would not wish to hold anyone back while they waited for me to finish any particular piece of the puzzle. So, I say go for it

Whilst I appreciate capun cannot be contacted via the CA forum here, there are instructions on the Skunkworks forum for applying for membership. May I suggest you try that procedure? If you have already, sorry, I'm just trying to help. The whole thing with the DAT models is rather unfortunate, but there it is.

Oh yes, make sure you have downloaded Gepard's BoB terrain v 1.4 and installed it before adding the terrain files included in the BoB campaign d/l.

Check the catfile pointer in the terrain.ini file matches the version of the game you are running, i.e. CatFile=..\Desert\Desert.cat //CatFile=..\GermanyCE\GermanyCE.cat //CatFile=..\VietnamSEA\VietnamSEA.cat Change the above entry to match for SFP1/SFG, WoE or WoV. I think it would be IsraelME.cat for WoI, but you'd have to check that one.

Way ahead of you I have a WIP Operation Zitadel Campaign to go with WIP Kursk map. I have good OOB for Luftwaffe and other Axis units, rather more sketchy information on Red Air Army. Unit level info is pretty good, but exactly what planes each unit was flying is rather less clear in many cases. We do not yet have some of the Russain a/c required, eg Yak 9 (maybe Pasko & Wolf257's Yak-9U can be "retrofitted"), La-5FN (although I have already cobbled together a retrofit of the DAT La-7), and Ju-87D. Also, I have not yet compiled sufficiently detailed info on ground units to create the ground battle, and there is a fair amount of work still to be done on the terrain. On the bright side, some clever chap has put together a Ju-87G mod, so at least the Panzerjagerstaffeln of STG1 and STG2 will be flying the correct aircraft PS, here's the progress blog: http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?showtopic=31417 Obviously not much has changed for a while, but I will try to progress this asap. There are one or two pressing matters taking up my modding time at the moment

Just a heads up. I built these for the SFP1/WOx series patched up to v083006, but I think they should work with mininal conversion post-Oct 08 patch. Not yet tested in SF2 series. The main difference there is in the file architecture. There are more in the works (North Africa, Kursk '43, Solomons, Mareth Line etc) Battle of Britain http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autoc...p;showfile=5246 Philippines 1941-1942 http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autoc...p;showfile=7014 Battle of Midway http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autoc...p;showfile=8420 Burma Air War - The Longest Retreat - Dec '41 - May '42 http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autoc...p;showfile=9133 Some other WW2 campaigns by scrapper: Fallen Angel http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autoc...p;showfile=5323 Flying Tigers http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autoc...p;showfile=5335 Operation Torch http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autoc...p;showfile=5184 Enjoy! Baltika

For the avoidance of doubt, permission was sought and granted from all modders concerned prior to release of the BoB package. Subsequently the DAT download policy changed. I have not received a request from capun to remove DAT files from that package, although we are in touch occasionally in relation to other matters. If I receive such a request, I will of course comply with it. I hope that will not be necessary. However, the Spit and Hurri pits are Kesselbrut's work, and it was not my understanding that those were "exclusive" in the manner suggested. But Kesselbrut would have final say on that, of course.

There is an Elefant by Kesselbrut floating around somewhere - not sure if it is one of the terrain d/ls. I will see if I can find it.

Well, I can't do Moscow, but I have a Kursk '43 terrain WIP which is fairly well advanced. But, you know the drill, "2 weeks" Glad to hear Ostfront is getting some attention

Gets my vote. Your Ground War enhancement really made WoV for me, so I say go for it :yes:

OK, I have tried reducing the number of active gunners on each bomber to 2, simply a tailgunner and a nosegunner. No dice. My framerates still dip into single figures (3.4, aargh ) when attacking a formation of 9 Ju-88s. Must be a lod thing. The good news is that, after applying gregoryp's FM fix to the WW2 birds that need it:- ( http://avhistory.org/communityserver/forums/t/694.aspx for those who missed it ) the old BoB campaign runs passably well in my SFG Oct 08 WW2 test install. Yes, you will still get departures and stalls that you maybe didn't get before, but only at the extremes, and at least you can recover from them now. So it is probably no bad thing. (Rolls up sleeves) time to start migrating my WW2 installs over to Oct 08. OTOH, maybe now is the time to take the plunge into SF2 series. Didn't I read somewhere that people were getting a framerate increase on XP with the new versions? BTW, has anyone tried dropping any of the WW2 campaigns into an SF2 series install?

Thanks for the heads up

Hi wolf, Great looking planes there Slainthe! Baltika

Well, looking at the data.ini for the He-111H2, I have listed Reargunner, Bellygunner, Nosegunner, BellyGunnerFwd, LeftGunner and RightGunner, plus sundry other crew who do not have active aiming/firing entries. Similarly for the H3, H4 etc. I will try to cut it down a bit and see if it helps. Resizing skins helps, but not as much as I thought, hence the above examination of gunners. As to WOLF's Emil, Hurri & Spit, yup, I'm excited at the thought. I fired him a PM over at AvHistory, as I am keen to upgrade BoB campaign to post Oct-08 standard, and the framerate thing is a real killer in the new build. One of WOLF's priorities seems to be keeping the models low-poly for big furballs, so that would help a lot if he wanted to come on board. BTW, capun has posted WOLF's Mustang lod v3 over at Skunkworks, with an additional skin, so those who have access may wish to try it out. Happy hunting

Hi Kevin, Funnily enough I tried out that very thing this afternoon. Seems to work a bit, as does reducing the stock skin .bmps, which start at 1500x1500 - a dozen of those on-screen sure slows things up a tad However, I think the real culprit is the fact that each of the bombers have a half dozen gunners or so, each with an AI aiming/firing routine and all those muzzle flashes and tracers. Uses up a lot of CPU cycles I'm sure, as attacking a straggler just doesn't generate the sort of lag you see for big groups. I haven't yet expereimented with restricting each bomber to just a tailgunner, but that's next. Shame though, I want to keep them well-armed and dangerous. This is going to take some working out

Great stuff, thanks But don't let me distract you from other projects - a Judy would be great for those PTO installs :yes: