Nicholas Bell

Nele- I really appreciate your work and enjoy flying your birds. At bit harder to fly than earlier FM's, and it makes surviving in them even more difficult. They do seem to bleed energy a lot faster! Now only if we could convince you to tighten up the FM's of the NATO aircraft so everyone would be flying on the "same sheet of music".

Fire Suppression stops any chance of the plane flaming. Self-healing nearly does too. Been doing a lot of testing on the damage models lately. The only way to get a balance between flaming with 1 bullet and never flaming at all is to keep self-healing and fire suppression false and armor the tanks with steel. 20-30 mm seems to work as a reasonable balance considering machine guns and cannon are such radically different animals when it comes to damage modeling. Increasing structural integrity of the tanks or the assembly they are in (fuselage, wing) doesn't impact the chance of a tank flaming. Apparently there are critical hits modeled unaffected by this. If you want to tweak the DM yourself I recommend setting up an "all friendly" mission and have at your buddies rather than attempting to see minor differences while actually dogfighting the enemy. Thanks for the convergence tweaks!

My parents put it on my birth certificate.

If ugly is familiar Man, what an nasty looking "aircraft"! More like a beached dead whale. No style at all. Pregnant looking with a fat tail. Thank goodness we ended up with only the "Warthog" - what would the A-9 have been nick-named?

Very nice and quite an improvement, Fubar! Looking forward to it should you decide to release it.

I don't have the Kosovo terrain, but the method is similar for all terrain maps. First, you have to add it to the _TYPES.INI file found in the the terrain folder. Then you can place it on the map by modifying the _TARGETS.INI file. If you open these files and examine them, and follow the pattern for other objects, you should not have a problem. What is a bit more tiresome is getting the map coordinates so you can place the object correctly. Kreelin's mission builder is a good tool to use, but you will probably have to "fly" in game to confirm the specific coordinate location. Do this by creating a mission using KMD with just one plane and place it in the air in the vicinity of where you want to work. Edit the HUDDATA.INI in the Flight Folder to read: [Debug] DisplayDebug=TRUE In sim, customize the keyboard control HUD Information toggle so that it works. I use ALT-D. Start the mission and pause it. CNTRL F12 to get out of the plane. Point the view toward the ground and you will get a lot of information, including the coordinates of the location you are looking at. Use these to edit the _TARGETS.INI file. Always exit the game and restart to refly the "mission" to confirm the location. In _TARGET.INI you can either add the object to an existing TargetArea and offset from it or create a new Target Area if none is near. This sounds more difficult than it is, although it is time-consuming. I figured it out looking at other terrain map files, so I am sure you can too! :yes:

Yes. Sarcasm doesn't carry well when writing. While we might laugh now, at the time of it's introduction the Martin B-10 totally outclassed the competition - including the fighters which it might oppose. I just like the idea of fighting hypothetical wars in planes we're hardly familiar with. Unfortunately I have no skills to assist in creating these aircraft.

As for running out of military aircraft to model, there's a whole world of 1920-1930's aircraft begging to be done for hypothetical wars. Someone around here has to like the idea of carrier battles with biplanes, ultra "modern" monoplanes (like the B10 - LOL) and a while assortment of odd looking aircraft which would be "fun" to shoot down

Good stuff - thanks Saganuay! Maybe the strafe AI parameters could be altered to help too.

In the AIRCRAFTOBJECT.INI under the AI section are the specific AI data for each level of pilot experience, which contains the SafeAltitude level: For example: [DogfightRegular] SafeAltitude=300

Ready and able to serve...as a target - as usual.

One way to make the gunner fire more often (or less) is to adjust the following rate values. Higher values means the gunner will rotate and elevate quickly and get on target. Bump them up to 60 and you may be better served by your gunner In the Fe2B_Data.ini: // Crew --------------------------------------------------------- [Pilot] SystemType=PILOT_COCKPIT SeatID=1 PilotModelName=WWIpilot PilotHeadNodeName=head Position=0.00,0.7926,0.60 MinExtentPosition=-0.32,1.0,-0.3 MaxExtentPosition= 0.32,0.50, 0.8 HasArmor=TRUE ArmorMaterial=STEEL Armor[REAR].Thickness=25 [Gunner] SystemType=GUNNER_STATION SeatID=2 GunnerID=1 PilotModelName= GunnerBodyNodeName= SetCockpitPosition=FALSE Position=0.0,-1.02,0.95 MinExtentPosition=-0.32,2.2,-0.7 MaxExtentPosition= 0.32,1.7, 0.2 PitchModelNodeName=Lewis_F YawModelNodeName=Lewis_F GunRange=2000 PitchAngleRate=25 MaxPitch=25 MinPitch=-25 DefaultPitchAngle=5 YawLimited=TRUE YawAngleRate=25 MaxYaw=45 MinYaw=-45 DefaultYawAngle=0

I think you're right, Wrench! TK has a commie on his staff. I may move on to other working on other aspects of air defense "improvements" if I can't shake out the problem on this soon. Spectre you may have discovered a problem I must admit I didn't think all the way through, ie what happens when the target area is captured. Generic object types (eg AAA, Sam Radar, etc) are filled with like "enemy" units. In order to make the HAWK stuff appear on a regular basis one thing I did was to make it a specific object. I guess the program just makes the HAWK enemy instead of not showing it on the map? I thought the program had terrain masking programmed in? At least that is what thought I picked in reading. FWIW, I did placed the HAWK batteries on dominant terrain as we actually sought to do to in order to minimize masking, so it possibly still had line of sight (?). Probably just wishful thinking on my part...

I guess no one is having any problems with this mod...which is good. Now I'm back to having the same "darn" problems with the Nike related objects disappearing on and off HAWK stuff is still there, so what the "heck" is going on?!

http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?autom...sst&id=4714 File Name: WOE Air Defense Mod v0.1.zip File Submitter: Nicholas Bell File Submitted: 17 May 2007 File Updated: 7 Feb 2008 File Category: Ini Edits File Version: No Information Website: No Information Wings over Europe Air Defense Mod version 0.1 ------------------------------------------------------- This modification adds HAWK SAM batteries to the NATO defenses. It is intended for use in the excellent NATO Fighters Campaign or with the standard campaigns with the outstanding July 2006 Weapons Pack. If you don't have one of these this modifications installed it will not work. Works with single user-created missions and campaigns. This modification includes work by Pasko, Fubar512, and Wrench. I appreciate their work and thank them for permission to include it. Please refer to the README.txt file enclosed for installation instructions. Click here to download this file

Yes Sir, that will come in handy

It's an outstanding campaign package. The only downer is the mission load times which take several minutes because of all the nice hi-rez textures and all the targets

This is on my list of things to fix with the GermanyCE map after I get the Nike-Herc batteries placed. Most of the NATO Air Defense units depicted on the current map would never be found around static targets as they were divisional level assets. What is missing for static defenses are the 40mm and 20mm guns which were used until the 1980s (non-US) and 75mm & 90mm guns which were phased out in the late 1950's and 60's. The US Army & Airforce had & have no serious close-in air defense assets for airfields or other static targets, relying on HAWK, Nike-Herc and later Patriot units to cover multiple potential targets. The Chapparels and Vulcan's were issued in small numbers to armor and infantry divisions - hardly enough to defend divisional support units less so the maneuver brigades. Perhaps this was done because of the belief that the US Airforce would knock out Warsaw Pact air forces. Similar to WW2 and Korea where air defense units were superfluous and used against ground targets. Doctrine has recently changed. Since there is no viable air threat against our ground forces, now seemingly everything on wheels or tracks has mounted Stinger capability. Not to mention all the man-portable Stingers. Go figure....

I found a solution and have uploaded the initial version to the Objects Mod Section. Thanks for the help, guys! Everything is working fine on the two computers I tested it on. Hope it works for you too! Comments and suggestions are of course welcome. Next step is add the Nike-Herc units. For those interested, the "disappearing" units problem was solved by modifying the OBJECTLIST.INI [ObjectGroup009] GroupName=GroundObjectGroup GroupSize=4096 <------This was 2048. StaticGroup=FALSE ObjectFlags=GROUND Searchable=TRUE The problem was not the number of Target Areas.

Those are very encouraging words - thanks, Wrench. Gives me hope I can make this work. I have a map with 25 batteries placed on the belt. I've also added them to airfields, but I don't want to do generic setups. Rather, I'd like to keep them on the hills were I put them when I had 55 batteries placed (and working!). Since I've "rediscovered" how airfields differ from other target areas, ie offset orientation is per runway direction rather than the normal x-y axis, I think I would prefer to use another method - either using other non-airbase target areas or creating macro target areas as you mentioned (thank you!). Wondering out loud if having an enormous target area radius is going to impact memory, frame-rates, etc. And FWIW apparently using cities as target areas and adding units to them causes problems.

Try setting every pilot's abilities to 100 using my Squadron Editor. You will see some improvement, but nothing miraculous as I was hoping. Every little bit helps though. What gets me is why the friendly AI always seems to be more stupid than the enemy AI?

No ideas? I guess I'm on my own here breaking new territory with modifying the map. This week I have narrowed the problem down to where things start falling apart when I have over 370 Target Areas. At least in my tests this seems to be the number where the program crashes. So I am trying to add the additional HAWK batteries as objects attached to other Target Areas, rather than being one themselves. This takes a bit of calculation and effort, as each element is offset from the main Target Area, as opposed to a HAWK battery target area where everything is offset from the BCC location. Last night I managed to add one battery using this method (with 370 Target Areas total) and it worked. So if you are still reading , the bottom line is I am still determined to complete this project and am working on it daily.

I don't have experience with the Thud in WOV, and maybe speed is all you need. However, flying either the Thud (or worse a Hun) in a WOE 1962 campaign is close to a death sentence. Admittedly I am using the UberAI mod, but more than that is the type of missions (CAP, Sweeps and interceptions), the escorts (or lack thereof) when you are on a strike mission, distance to the target, etc seem to me to make it near impossible to avoid interceptions. I've had all my flight blown from the skies and had 2-3 MiGs of varying types on my tail. Much harder to run away from a 21 too! I would hazard to say that the AI does not know how to properly fight with F100s or F105s, which come in a poor second to the MiGs. Guess what I am saying, James, is that if you are looking for more challenge, try a WOE campaign

Any experts know if there is a limit on the number of target areas a map can have? Having problems with my HAWK belt mod of the GermanyCE map. Having problems with objects not appearing, and while I have not pinned it down exactly - it appears to start with target areas above the number 350. Thanks...