Gr.Viper

Started balloon busting mission... decided to try ramming. The result looks like this I've shot down three S.E.5a by such dismemberment so expected to fall myself... BUT it handled perfectly - just lost some altitude and the lewis MG was obviously gone. Notice that S.E.5a has ailerons on lower wing too - unlike SPAD and Fokker. So I landed without a problem and stopped I was still curious so I set to full throttle again and was able to take off. Then I exited the mission - the debrief gave me KIA status. Log said I was shot down, maybe it meant collision with the balloon. Funny that it said "shot down" and then logged my Vickers MG bursts of joy a minute after that... Erm.. so is it possible to set options to destroy certain components right at mission start? Or erase them from plane data? Because without the upper wing the view is MUCH better.

Sometimes you can even land the jet

The model itself is good but some LOD editing is needed. When I switched to external view and looked at 16 of them my PC nearly froze. Didn't get such an enormous drop of frame rate on other planes. This plane is definitely for the fans of hardcore combat. It gets easily overtaken even by the German two seaters :) Just flew an intercept mission. Was able to score two kill because DFW were coming from behind and going right in front of my gun. The gun... having single 'Lewis' with 4 really small clips sucks :)

I use gundata (I thought of accuracy = 5.000000 with rate of fire of an autocannon :) ) and aircraftobject from AImod So I opened a-object.ini and set ChanceContinue=1 for all skill levels Don't know if it did the trick but... I spent about two minutes trying to tail a Fokker on my SPAD in instant action. I saw AI Albatross to tail and shoot down S.E.5a after about half a minute of very twisted flying. Continue can either mean "continuing straight flight" or more likely "continuing the turn in the same direction" as opposed to ChangeTurnDirection. I also increased these. AileronDeltaRoll=2.2 ElevatorDeltaPitch=2.2 ThrottleDeltaSpeed=2.1 The AIs stalled sometimes badly but tended the fly in a more inventive way. But I don't know what to do with corresponding rates. Do they mean smth per second, or the time for the action? RollForHeading=3.6 MinRollHeading=5.0 PitchForRoll=10.0 Altered these to see if their turns will get sharper. Don't know if it works. I don't even know what are the maximum values allowed. I also changed SafeAltitude to 100. Maybe that was the reason even burning AIs managed to land successfully. Many engine-dead landed. Can't see casualty list but I suppose more pilots survived... Was testing only in instant action.

Just looked at AI in red baron 3d... WOW! They even fly zigzag while over flak zones... We can try to imitate that by lovering flak accuracy(and increasing rate of fire)... Not the planes will avoid flak, bus flak shells will avoid planes.. Yet there will be plenty of blasts to make the player wet his/her pants... Found some balloon gun in gundata.ini. But is is not used by any of three balls... maybe TW included it for further add-ons? Met a couple of very good AI pilots in the campaign... It was quite hard to tail them. I wonder what it will be like if we set skill of all pilots in the campaign to ace? or... hm... I'll go and torture aircraftobject...

They announced that next games in this series will add more regions and planes. Modding experts might add something too ;)

Well.. it was British S.E.5a... but it got a bit mm.. broken :blush2: purely by accident... I tried deleting entries for all top wing components (including gun and controls) from plane's data.ini but of course it didn't work. P.S. ouch that was one big quote... update It turns out that removing entries just disabled the whole upper wing and the gun. You get to stall more easily, lewis is silent... I suppose wing surgery has to be performed via .LOD editing. :(

Yep, I noticed that armor has values for all sides... It might be reasonable to increase it for top and bottom of wings(but not tips) and stabs, sides of rudder and the whole tail. Though it seems to me that only player would be crazy enough to fire from such angles (I do!) :) AIs prefer to stab in the back.. or blow you to pieces with flak. By the way once I was downed in a very nice way. I've hit the engine of a two seater - it landed safely. Then I was just fooling around and flew low above it. There was a short burst from the gunner and my plane went on without me. But it glided safely by itself to the ground and stopped. I was then "Wounded and hospitalized" though I landed in the enemy territory. Actually I've never got POW status I just tried to add machine gun "turret" to balloon.. didn't work(well the game just gave me the wrong balloon type). But if it does it might be funny... Balloons hang everywhere. If you give them armor, a weapon and place them closer to each other and to the ground... a nice suicide mission...

There is a perfectly simple and visual way of finding out, where the aircraft DATA.ini is loaded and if in both folders, which overrides the other. Just use the Exhaust smoke mod for Fokker or Albatross and play with placing the clear and modded ini file wherever you want. If Albatross and/or Fokker D.VII trail smoke - mod ini is loaded. Though it might not help if the game is able to load only parts of ini... I see that you added some wood armor to the pilot (looks like poor guy is already in a coffin) and to the whole fuselage. Is it possible to armor plate engine separately? I can't find any entry that would describe its location apart from being a subsystem of fuselage :( My idea of a good kill is exactly this.. http://www.richthofen.com/arcdocs/richt_08.htm

Hm.. it gets a bit funny. I mean, disabling pilot wounds and engine shutdown - weren't these the main reason for WWI planes to go down? I might be better if AI was tweaked in such a way that everyone maneuvered much more. I was able to get numerous kills just because the enemy I tailed suddenly just went straight forward. And they don't try to avoid flak that much - they just go on fighting while I usually drop to 30 meters or less until flaks run out of ammo. The AI in the game lacks survival instinct. Is there a way to teach it? wow, Fokker speed fix really adds fun to the AI battle. At least allied planes don't overrun them so often...

I had a look at the campaign .ini file which comes in FEexpertmod - there are strings which, I suppose, determine the chances of certain mission types for all squadrons on the map. Try altering those and you might get more air-to-ground action. Doesn't look like mission types depend on difficulty...

You can try switching to F2(wide) view before the fray and setting it to look up-front with your mouse. The position of each view is saved until you reset it, so you'll be able to switch between F1 looking front for general navigation, F2 set to up for tracking someone you follow in a turn and F3 for finishing the bastard off. F4 is also good if you don't consider automatic padlock a cheat and do not mind hitting target selector key many times. Default controls are rather awful IMHO... too many Alt+, Ctrl+.. some related functions are scattered all across the keyboard. But don't get carried away by the fight too much - SPAD's advantage is speed, not maneuverability. I've never been able to catch up with any in a straight level flight. BTW, AI is definitely aware of that and quite often "runs away" until I stop following it. Then it turns around and comes down on my tail. So for your safety you should at least try to do the same - never lose speed or follow them into tight turns. Fokkers are literally able to fly in circles around low speed SPAD without much exposing themselves to gunfire. Yes, you actually can learn something from AI in this game :yes: Sometimes life gets very tough for German two-seaters. All three are AI. I just love bad weather. And camouflage gets even harder to spot...

Downloaded the thing from 3 different locations - same stuff happens to all of 'em For a start SFP1 Extract Util won't install - it copies all the files but the freezes at "Registering fonts" stage. I goggled this and it turns out to be a known occasional setup factory 6 bug but I didn't find any workaround. When this happens, I kill the setup - some files seem to be in place (6,95Mb on hard drive). Sfp1e starts just fine but when I try to open any .CAT file in First Eagles' folders I get... ...and that's it. The extractor exits. Restarting PC doesn't help... So the question is - what's wrong? OS: WinXP Home SP2 P.S. Sorry, if that was already sorted out somewhere. I did look for it here and at Thirdwire.. maybe even at SimHQ - no luck.

I did all my install attempts under admin account... I'm getting exactly the error described here http://support.indigorose.com/v3/index.php...d=103&nav=0 The version of SF used for making the installer matches. Tried rebooting and running the setup before any browsers, downloaders, irc client and stuff. Wouldn't work. *a light bulb flashes up above the head* YEEHAAA!! I've done it!! *faints* Uh.. Just in case someone else encounters that. The problem's name is Kerio Personal Firewall. Exit it completely during the installation. KPF works fine but has some weird issues e.g. for some time I experienced constant lockups of 16bit windows programs because of it. The firewall never said a word about blocking something from running but apparently it does(or someone just screwed up the code). Got to find something else to prevent web demons from possessing my dear PC...