Bandy

I'm amazed at the number of people mentioning that the AI needs to break off combat due to some sort of composite variable, such as a "morale check". I mentioned this years ago and nearly got laughed off the forum... Logically it shouldn't be too difficult, but its whether the game engine will support it is the rub. From the P4 screenshots I've been able to see, the ground looks very nice, much more random, but I did not see whether the rivers have improved. They are all dreadful currently. For me it would be the ability to navigate by the in-game map by looking at map and ground, ie rivers, large forests, roads, cities where they all should be.

I was going to say, hey here it is in the downloads LINK but this is the G100. Funny, he did allow all his work to be uploaded from CA, perhaps this one fell between the cracks?

Interesting history to the project. Those guys (and gals?) have heart taking that topic on for a school project.

You could edit your wwiCambrai.ini file so clear does not appear. Cambrai because if I remember correctly, this terrain contains all tiles so other terrains reference it (or at least that was the way it was before). As quack says, clear sky is a default if any other weather is not chosen, all other weather adds up to less than 100% like so: ... [WeatherChance] ScatteredChance=25 BrokenChance=25 OvercastChance=17 InclementChance=8 [season001] Directory=..\seasonal_tiles\Deep_Snow StartDate=01/1 EndDate=01/31 ScatteredChance=20 BrokenChance=25 OvercastChance=25 blah, blah, blah for the other seasons... Make the weather add up to 100% and viola, no clear sky. But it doesn't bug me like it seems to do to you. InclementChance=3

File Name: Seasonal Town & Water Tiles (Spring, Summer, Fall) File Submitter: Bandy File Submitted: 30 July 2010 File Category: First Eagles Terrain and Environmental Mods Read Me for First Eagles Spring, Summer, and Fall modded town and water tiles by Bandy. These tiles only go with Jan Tuma's seasonal terrain tiles mod. As the title says, these are only for Spring, Summer, and Fall; winter is a work in progress. Many thanks go to Jan Tuma for creating his FE seasonal town tiles that, to me at least, have made a huge difference in the feel of the sim. Thanks to TK and friends, and all 3rd party modders who make this a great community. The town tiles are 1024 x 1024 in order to improve certain textures. All other non-town tiles in this mod are 512 x 512. Resize as you require. The water tiles replace the "turquoise" shaded water with a darker blue-gray. If you like turquoise, then let me know and I will render a version with that colour. I noticed a long time ago that one of the Flanders Town.tod files was mislabelled; a replacement is provided. To Install: 1) Back up your terrain folder. 2) Unzip this download and drag the corresponding folders into the /Terrain/seasonal_tiles folder, and the /Terrain/Flanders folder overwriting the files when prompted. 3) Fly! Caveats: I could not extensively test these tiles in all seasons and all terrains, I simply do not have that much free time, so please post any errors or tweaks you think are required. Some trees and buildings do funky things at the tile margins; short story, this is unavoidable. I would like to have shifted the "statues" or monuments in some of the town squares, but did not. If you can do this, that would be sincerely appreciated. Dog fighting over towns is really enjoyable! Click here to download this file

Hey Quack, Great news, I've been looking forward to a Vogesen based campaign for a long time. Couldn't help but notice that in some of your high altitude screenies that the river tiles are rendering their trees etc. well past where non-tga tiles (bmps) stop rendering their trees. Have you done some personal tweak to render distance? I've never seen this in my heavily modded installs.

Seasonal Town and water tiles are just waiting for the zip to upload and to be cleared. It is pushing the max file size limit, and I suppose it is Friday night. Don't you people have a life? Oh well, just filling in time here. As I mention in the Read Me, I couldn't fly in all seasons (3 x Spring, 2 x Summer, 2 x Fall) over every terrain to test, so please while flying keep an eye out for anything odd. Take a screen shot and post here. Known issues: 1) I know in Flanders the trenchriver tile that crosses the front has margins off, but that is a function of the original terrain and tile assignment. 2) One town in Verdun Terrain, south central of the front, has custom church placement (independent of tile.tod) and so churches are in odd places. 3) Roads do funky turns at the margins, and sometimes pass into buildings positioned right at the margin. Every town tile has completely unique building placement, and so seamless margins w.r.t. road crossings was not possible without shifting most buildings along the margins. I wasn't going there... 4) These town tiles have the look of depth to them (at least to me) because of multiple layers each with drop shadows. Because drop shadows have orientation, yet each tile is re-used at different rotation, so margins/interfaces sometimes show seams. 5) Some 3D buildings, and sometimes a complete tile's worth of 3D buildings, do not render. I do not know why, it isn't a function of this mod. BUT I have roofs rendered onto each tile (allowing building drop shadow) so that this bug is somewhat ameliorated. It also helps somewhat with the 3D render distance "front" as it advances. 6) Some monuments/statues (especially the one in the large round-about) need to be shifted slightly onto the pedestal. If anyone can do that in terrain editor that would be great and much appreciated! If anyone wants the Photoshop files to build on this mod, please feel free to PM me, though I do plan on completing the winter version myself this fall. S!

Good point, I have never seen them in WWI photos either, but as mentioned, people like McCudden and MvR specifically mention the whispy tracer in their autobios. Perhaps the B&W film technology (silver grain, lenses etc) weren't up to capturing it against a background of clouds/light blue sky; the images always appear over exposed and pretty grainy.

Well, in fact tracer smoke was standard issue (1 in 4 or 1 in 3 load) for both sides during WWI, with the British as early as 1915 though I'm sure it was a primitive version at that point. I'm sure the Germans and French were not far behind given the obvious benefits, and that it only improved. Reading many 1st person accounts of A2A combat, they all mention the web of tracer smoke that was created in churning dog fights. This is part of reality! So eliminating tracer smoke for DiD is not historically correct at all. If you don't want it in your game, then that is another matter...

Unfortunately a long time in coming, but as I tested the town tiles, I kept discovering new tiles that interfaced and needed face lifts. It is amazing how Jan Tuma made all the town tiles different, every single one of them! The buildings are very nice as well, thanks Jan! Also, I substituted blue-gray water instead of the turquoise, but will provide turquoise if people ask. Just the winter tile versions left to go... Old coast town: New coast town: Old ruined town: New ruined town: New ruins from 10,000 ft.

Thanks gents, If you like I could package up the non-winter season tiles as a download by itself. Winter tiles will come later on then, as I anticipate they may take some time to get the wintery look on the roads etc. just right. Anyways, it seems I've been working on the seasons as the seasons actually transpire. I kind of like to fly that way as well for some strange reason; having snow on the ground outside and in sim just oddly feels right.

I was looking for a widescreen a few years back, and was shopping based on price and then features. Apparently a number of the bargain types are basically the same monitor and components but in a different case, and sold under different names, so price at the low end is really not a consideration. All I can say is, after having a number of low end 22" and 24" HannsG LCD monitors crap out on me (thank the gods for Costco's return policy!) I paid a bit more for a Vizio 26" 1080p HDMI and was literally blown away by the quality an extra $100 to $200 made. Night and day. Go to see the monitors in a store first, like Costco or... write the name/model down that impresses you the most, then shop online. Choose a fast refresh rate (minimum 5 ms, 3 is better) and highest contrast ratio you can find in your budget. Read a few online articles, education is power.

Mentioned this some time ago, and suggested that if possible some code-based morale check challenge be implemented, i.e. if the odds were against one side they would turn tail and run 1 out of 2 times (well, that would only work for the German and French sides, mad dogs and Englishmen being one-and-the-same... ), or have a morale check if the AI flight leader was shot down, or a certain percent of aircraft in a flight were lost. Of course this may not be possible given the code environment of CFS3. AND I have to agree with almost everyone else, the in-game map is terrible and does not reflect what is seen from the cockpit. Printing off real-life maps and using them is all fine and fun, but real-life maps don't reflect the in-game in-cockpit environment any more than... well you know.

I agree with you, there are too many lousy loops around the home field. The only way you can get around it is to fast forward, or lead the flight yourself and ignore the waypoints. Either way you miss something. Fast forward is not an ideal solution as it is intrusive to real game play, and ignoring the way points means the enemy always have the height advantage. That sucks.

Reducing the gunner's pitch and/or yaw angles (not the pitchanglerate though) in the Aviatik.ini will reduce/restrict the amount the gunner can move, and perhaps resolve the poke-through. Lots of trial and error. You may end up with an emasculated rear gunner though! The max and min extent positions are the invisible hit boxes for the gunner, not where he shows up.

Hello fellas, Is there a consensus on the ATI drivers? 10.6 or 10.4 ??? I have a 4870 1 GB, so should I assume that the new drivers are not going to make much difference for such an "old" card? I find ATI drivers to be particularly flakey and problematic to delete/install, so am loath to make a change unless justified. Thanks for any replies...

Many of you likely heard of new developments in 3D for home theater and computers, but this review may be of interestHERE Imagine your favorite flight sim in true 3D! Add some exhaust fumes, burning engine oil and dope fumes and you've got a party!

All I can say is this works in my FEG install. FE2 I think has new FX files, so maybe the code above is referencing FX that do not exist anymore. Sorry, can't add anything more except that it is weird that those textures are not specified. There must be a default.

I lost water animation on installing Tuma's terrain as well. If you have FE backed up elsewhere it is easy to find the relevant bits of code to re-install. In fact, I posted on this subject in Jan's terrain release thread (the really long one) when it came out. EDIT from earlier post: This reanimates the water, though I noticed there are some z-buffer water artifacts in Flanders when flying along the coast. It is only a slight PITA, and have not spent time trying to correct it further, yet. ...futzed about with old ini's and got the water moving and looking better. Not perfect, but better. Works good in Vogesen thus far, don't know yet about the others, but should be fine AFAIK. If interested try this in each terrainDATA.INI (includes Stary's tweaks for convenience) apologies for my code comments, I suppose everybody has their own style. The code line following //Stock is the baseline, which is also commented out // followed by the effective change and whitespace to easily find each of them. . . . [WaterTextureMaterial] UseEffectShader=TRUE EffectShaderName=WaterEffect2.fx DepthBufferCheck=TRUE DepthBufferWrite=FALSE RenderedInOrder=TRUE AlphaTestEnabled=TRUE //STOCK //CullMode=NO_CULL CullMode=CLOCKWISE LightEnabled=TRUE SpecularEnabled=TRUE EmissiveEnabled=FALSE FogEnabled=TRUE AmbientColor=1.000000,1.000000,1.000000,1.000000 DiffuseColor=1.000000,1.000000,1.000000,1.000000 SpecularColor=1.000000,1.000000,0.900000,1.000000 SpecularPower=1.000000 //STOCK //ZBufferOffset=4.000000 ZBufferOffset=6.000000 BlendOp=BLEND_SRC_ALPHA NumTextureStages=2 TextureStage[01].TextureName= TextureStage[01].MipMap=FALSE //TRUE TextureStage[01].FilterEnabled=TRUE //STOCK //TextureStage[01].StageColorOp=TEXTURE_MODULATE_DIFFUSE TextureStage[01].StageColorOp=DIFFUSE TextureStage[01].StageAlphaOp=TEXTURE //STOCK //TextureStage[02].TextureName= TextureStage[02].TextureName=ref_color.bmp TextureStage[02].MipMap=FALSE //TRUE TextureStage[02].FilterEnabled=TRUE //STOCK below --other INI's have no ReflectionMapping //TextureStage[02].ReflectionMapping=TRUE //STOCK //TextureStage[02].StageColorOp=TEXTURE_BLEND_TEXTURE_ALPHA TextureStage[02].StageColorOp=TEXTURE TextureStage[02].StageAlphaOp=DIFFUSE [solidObjectTextureMaterial] DepthBufferCheck=TRUE DepthBufferWrite=TRUE RenderedInOrder=TRUE AlphaTestEnabled=TRUE CullMode=NO_CULL LightEnabled=TRUE SpecularEnabled=FALSE EmissiveEnabled=FALSE FogEnabled=TRUE AmbientColor=1.000000,1.000000,1.000000,1.000000 DiffuseColor=1.000000,1.000000,1.000000,1.000000 ZBufferOffset=0.000000 //STOCK //BlendOp=BLEND_DST_ALPHA BlendOp=BLEND_SRC_ALPHA NumTextureStages=1 TextureStage[01].TextureName= TextureStage[01].MipMap=TRUE TextureStage[01].FilterEnabled=TRUE TextureStage[01].StageColorOp=TEXTURE_MODULATE_DIFFUSE TextureStage[01].StageAlphaOp=TEXTURE [AlphaObjectTextureMaterial] DepthBufferCheck=TRUE DepthBufferWrite=FALSE RenderedInOrder=false AlphaTestEnabled=TRUE CullMode=NO_CULL LightEnabled=TRUE SpecularEnabled=FALSE EmissiveEnabled=FALSE FogEnabled=TRUE AmbientColor=1.000000,1.000000,1.000000,1.00000 DiffuseColor=1.000000,1.000000,1.000000,1.00000 ZBufferOffset=2.000000 // STOCK BlendOp=BLEND_SRC_ALPHA NumTextureStages=1 TextureStage[01].TextureName= TextureStage[01].MipMap=TRUE //FALSE TextureStage[01].FilterEnabled=TRUE TextureStage[01].StageColorOp=TEXTURE_MODULATE_DIFFUSE //STOCK //TextureStage[01].StageAlphaOp=TEXTURE //STARY's Suggestion follows... TextureStage[01].StageAlphaOp=TEXTURE_BLEND_TEXTURE_ALPHA Fade=NORMAL StartFadeDistance=50.0 EndFadeDistance=50.0 . . .

While tints etc. are certainly a matter of personal taste, what really happens at altitude is aerial perspective [Definition Here], the terrain colours become desaturated and contrast decreases due to atmospheric effects. I like all the other effects illustrated, etc. but the green tint looks kind of day-glow to me and unrealistic on my monitor (maybe that's it, monitor differences?), but just my humble opinion, nothing personal.

Hello, As I've been testing tiles lately I have relied on single missions for any flying I've done, almost always defensive patrols. As far as I know a defensive patrol should not limit the type of NME AC that shows up. However all I have seen for the past few months are scouts!!! No 2-seaters or bombers AT ALL. In ruminating on this I think it may be due to sampling bias and the fact that there has been a proliferation of variants available for each fighter, i.e. Camel 110, 150, 180; SPAD with Lewis, with 2xLewis, with Vickers, with Vickers AND Lewis, N17 with... you get the idea. The fact that there are so many variants swamps the random chance that a 2-seater or bomber will ever show up! Or at least that is my hypothesis. Anyone else have an opinion??? Other than culling the installed AC list, or flying campaigns (which I do love, but can't at this time), I see no way around to get more random single missions.

If this is true (and it may very well be, I never paid that much attention before) then it makes absolutely no sense to restrict what shows up. Heck, they're supposed to be 'defensive patrols' so scouts or bombers should be able to show up, and an intercept should be the same way since you could be intercepting a reported flight of scouts, nit just bombers. Maybe this is a throw back to the 3rd wire jet sim code?

Yeah, this question comes up about once a year. Some guys even tried to make a smaller pilot inside the main pilot, but didn't work. TK just won't support it... I hate when they "beam out"...

Hey, now I like that added benefit! Good idea. It never ceased to annoy me that the default skin was all you got to see on random NME, that is, unless skin was assigned by squadron within a campaign.