Foxendown

I went for the changed values in the B-52D_DATA.INI file (those suggested earlier in the thread by Fubar512): it seemed to calm them own a lot, though I didn't track them for that long. I'd be interested to know how you get on with this. When I get time I'll build a larger test mission for B-52s in KMD and take them all the way to defended targets, but I'm busy playing Rolling Thunder (from both sides :-) ) at the moment.

That did it! I set up a flight of 12 B-52s in KMD with a 4 ship escort (because the mission generator doesn't seem to create B-52 flights all that often). They're still pitching a bit even with those values but it's good enough for me (and it looks OK from my F4 cockpit which is my main concern rather than how it looks in external views). Not sure whether there will be any undesirable side effects (e.g just sitting there as a SAM heads straight for them) but I'll see how it goes. Anyway that's bearable compared with Buffs stunt flying! :-) Thanks for your help with this.

Thanks for the suggestions-I'll give both a try. Taking the first, I extract the B-52D_DATA.INI file put it in the relevant aircraft folder and then edit the values in the FlightControl Section? Currently I've got PitchDamper=1.0 RollDamper=0.5 YawDamper=0.4 so playing with these may help (just checking I've got it right)?

Many thanks for the quick response. I'll head over to C6 for a copy.

Good question. OK my fantasy FE (excluding fixes for known issues) would include 1) More aircraft (of course) Halberstadt CLII Hannover CLIIIa Junkers J1 DH4 DH9 2) Balloons that get out of the way (winch down) when enemy ac approach (and "flaming onions") 3) A library of static objects such as fortifications, buildings, trees and vehicles to use in mission building 4) active objects, particularly artillery and the ability to set up artillery spotting missions to increase the effectiveness of battery fire. Also moving trains. 5) An integrated mission editor with a 3d view (as in IL2 and Lockon) 6) The ability to link single missions together to create campaigns (and write briefings that appear in the game). 7) (Getting rather wild and fanciful here) a bit of the Belgian coast and some more planes Hansa-Brandenburg W12 Albatros W4 Felixstowe F2a and some ships.....(I'd better stop now, when is "Jutland" coming out"?) All fantasy I think given limited resources, but I enjoyed answering your question .

Magnificent Hanriot, congratulations and thank you.

Season's greetings to all. I hope everyone's had a great Christmas. I've been working on a new mission for FE using Kreelin's KMD. After trying out a couple of test missions with air starts (sort of "instant action" missions which went well), I'm trying to put together a realistic high altitude patrol mission for the SE5a. After that, if all goes well I was thinking of trying to create a set of 6-8 linked missions for the SE5a based on real life incidents. I'm thinking about basing these on the career of Edward Mannock, but not sure if this will work yet. Because FE has no means of writing briefings to accompany missions, I plan to create a separate set of briefings as linked HTML documents. Assuming I ever finish all this I would want to make the missions generally available, However, there are some things about the structure of mission files that I don't understand at the moment and having done a few searches, I don't seem to be able to find the answers I need. I may well have missed something but if anyone can point me in the right direction to get a detailed explanation of what makes mission files "tick" I would be really grateful. A lot of it is obvious but I don't understand for example why there is a true/false flag for waypoints and how the ALT N trigger works (what is an "encounter"). I am also a bit mystified by the fact that the game edits out some of my waypoints and sets up a flightpath direct to the IP and by how the scoring system works. Certainly the hardest part so far has been to get flights to run into one another, though I seem to be getting the hang of that now.

Thanks for your help, Brainless. I had read the KMD guidance but missed the need for a depart waypoint, which is where I think some of my problems lie. Also, as I'm trying to set a realistic altitude for an SE5a patrol, the player flight needs to go up to 5000m and I probably wasn't giving the a/c enough distance to climb to that height. I've found the time and distance tools in KMD, but have still had a lot of trouble getting flights to meet so I've resorted to setting collision courses so the flights had to meet somewhere along a leg of the flightplan. Not sure if thst's how others do it but it seems to work. As you say it's trial and error. Next I want to see if making the size of waypoints very small will allow me to simulate artillery spotting aircraft. They flew figures of eight not circles but I really doubt if that can be done!

I've had this sim for a while now but have only really started to get into it in the past few weeks, so I'm getting to know it a bit better. I think it has the makings of a great sim and there are things I like a lot about it. The aircraft are beautiful and I like the terrain and sky a lot too-there is a real feeling of being up there in the heavens in a small biplane. The dogfights I've had have been close-range, swirling affairs that feel realistic for WW1: with other sims covering this period I've sometimes felt that the AI has almost supernatural marksmanship, opening fire at ranges where I didn't have a chance. In my last FE mission, an SE5 went right over the top wing of my DVII missing me by a hair's breadth-exciting stuff that felt convincing. But there's some problems too and at the risk of rehearsing points others have made and which are already on a list of coming fixes, here are mine (they all relate to stock aircraft-I've not really tried out the add-on aircraft with the new FMs yet, though I have had a look at the Junkers monoplane which is a superb piece of work). 1. The AI pilots fly like they're drunk, swooping up and down in pointless climbs and dives. They also roll about all over the place while trying unsuccessfully to stay in formation. 2. When I select the hard flight model, my clouds disappear (yes really!). I assume this is the sim stepping down my graphics options to make room for the extra demands of the hard flight model? 3. The hard flight model is too hard IMHO. I usually fly the DVIIF and it is extremely unstable in all axes in "hard". If you try to bank you spin wildly. On the other hand the normal flight model is too easy: the aircraft flies like it is on rails in the sky. I'm sticking with normal though for the moment because I find hard impossible and I like my clouds! It would be nice to have a compromise, "moderate". 4. As I've mentioned in another thread, there is definitely a problem with auto-generation of enemy flights in single missions if you are starting from the runway (I've flown a few more missions in skies empty of enemies to confirm this. Apart from coming across things I like as well as problems as I play FE, I find myself thinking about the sort of features that it would be good to have in any WW1 flightsim, a wish-list if you like, but I'd better post about that separately, this is long enough already......

That certainly makes sense. Perhaps this issue could be raised with peter01 at a later date then.

It's always interesting how people's views vary. I tried OFF and there's no doubt about the devotion and hard work that has gone into it. But I just didn't like it. Apart from the fact that it ran a lot slower on my rig than even LOMAC with high detail settings, I just couldn't get along with it. I find the MS CFS-based terrain ugly and FE's cockpits look a lot nicer to me. But I can readily accept that OFF has strengths that FE lacks. Certainly at the moment I am having problems with FE's flight models. Since there aren't many WW1 flightsims out there, it seems like a good idea to try them all if you have the time and money. I only stopped playing RB3D because my updated video card could no longer deliver emulated 3DFX. I had the Full Canvas Jacket Supermod (a really excellent mod). I've even thought of reviving an old machine and trying to find some Voodoo cards to get it going again, but at the moment I'm reasonably pleased with FE which seems to have potential and in several important respects feels right for a WW1 sim, the close up dogfights being the main one. FE also looks great IMHO and runs well on my now out of date machine. I think another good thing about RB3D was (?is) the strong, friendly community and the multiplayer. To be honest Red Baron (the original one for IBM 386), RB3D and FE are the WW1 sims that haven't disappointed me. I didn't like the Rowan ones (Flying Corps and Dawn Patrol) despite enjoying other Rowan sims-they too had an enthusiastic following. As for Knights of the Sky, just a brief look at the Gennadich site suggests Quad Core might be a good idea!

That would certainly explain what is happening at 6000m, but the lack of control (in the hard FM) seems to be just as bad at 3000m. Cecil Lewis ("Sagitarius Rising") ".......Scrapping at high altitudes, fifteen to eighteen thousand feet the Huns had a marked superiority in altitude [over the SE5A]". Lt John M Grider's account (85 Sqdn again flying the SE5A) "We climbed up to 20, 500 feet feet and couldn't get any higher. We were practically stalled and these Fokkers went right over our heads and got between us and the lines." Grider also says about the altitude "Your engine has no pep and splutters; it's hard to keep a decent formation and you lose 500 feet on a turn". Well that works in FE!

Just modified my test mission (which was all stock aircraft). I've now taken out all the stock aircraft and substituted the add-ons with the new flight models. They performed better at keeping formation, not perfect but no swooping. I flew a Siemens Shuckert and on hard it was OK. However, if I engaged the autopilot some strange things happened. My aircraft started to roll wildly and my flight started to move away from me. After that I tried some automatically generated missions with stock aircraft (DVIIF and Camel) and the hard flight model was OK again. But when I went back to my home-made mission I was still having problems. I'm wondering now if the problem is altitude. I have flights of DVIIs at 2000m and 6000m (quite a normal height for combat in the DVII) and the stability problem seems to be much worse higher up. I've played around with joystick sensitivity and that helps a bit but not enough to get me back to the hard fm, for the present anyway. It's interesting to read what people in this forum have to say about OFF. I gave it a try but didn't like it. It runs too slow on my PC and the terrain doesn't work for me. But I could see that an amazing amount of work had gone into it.

I've certainly noticed that the AI is good in combat, but even on the way to the target I've seen erratic flying. That's possibly because I didn't give the AI flights a long enough run to the target in the mission I was building, so I'll experiment a bit with the waypoints. Ground fire-I'll take a look at your mod Tailspin, thanks. I take the point about Archie. If the sim has made it harmless rather than merely ineffective that's a pity. There can be little doubt about its psychological impact, which would have forced aircraft up a respectful distance (in our virtual cockpits we don't have the same motivation ) . There's an interesting discussion of Archie in "Fighting the Flying Circus" by Eddie Rickenbacker (Doubleday, 1965 ISBN 0-385-50559-00). Rickenbacker thought that ".....the actual danger is almost nil". Having said this he does go on to describe the death of an American pilot from a direct hit, but clearly thought he was very unlucky.

I am playing FE with the expansion. Re my 1. I've observed this "drunken" behaviour in both enemy and friendly AI flights and not just after take off. 2. I've tested this by switching between hard and normal several times and every time I select hard my clouds disappear. When I go back to normal they always re-appear. Weird I know. 3. I don't even get to the stall warning-I can't even fly on a straight course. Last time I tried the hard model I was in a DVIIF at 3000m and I just couldn't control it. I have no problem with hard FMs in other sims. As you say, the cause may be my joystick settings (Cougar HOTAS) so I'll check that out. 4. I can live with this one because, now I've got KMD going, I'm more interested in building historical missions, but it would be good if this feature worked as it should. Whether the flights are crashing or just not there, something is amiss. I think I can live with the harmless Archie too because I think flak was pretty ineffective at medium and high altitude in WW1 (ground fire at low level was a different matter). I remember reading somewhere that gunners had a poor grasp of how much lead to allow. It's good to see that different colour smoke for shell bursts has been implemented though I haven't worked out yet whether it's consistently the right colour (black for German white for Allied ??). No "flaming onions" though. There were other risks from guns on the ground. There's a scary account of artillery spotting (another potentially interesting area for WW1 flightsims which tend IMHO to be too focused in fighters) and how the giant shells fired from far behind enemy lines would actually arc clean over the aircraft spotting for them. Their velocity was relatively low so they were clearly visible. Occasionally a spotter plane would be hit and little trace would remain. Something I find harder to live with is the ease of balloon busting. It would be great to have balloons that winched down when enemy a/c approached or if that isn't possible, several balloon models for each type at varying altitudes including one on the ground. Attacking a balloon low down was suicidal because of ground fire, so the best chance was to catch one by surprise. Pretty well impossible to model the same conditions in FE (I seem to remember that in RB3D the balloons did winch down). Thanks for the info about the terrain CoolHand29 : I'll check it out.

I must be doing something wrong. I've just added the expansion pack (very nice) but I've flown 4 missions without anything coming up to meet me. There are static aircraft on the ground when I chack in external views, but that's all. I'm flying single missions with enemy air activity set to "heavy" but not a foe in sight. I always take off from the airfield. I thought flights might be generated as I got nearer to their airfields but no that isn't happening. Is anyone else experiencing this?

Thanks for the link to the tutorial: I've downloaded it and will read carefully. It's true that you can build missions with notepad in this and other sims, but that's a bit slow, at least it is when I'm doing it. I find it really hard to visualise waypoints on a map by looking at a set of co-ordinates. Just ran up a mission quickly with kreelins's editor-the sort of thing I wanted-a strong recon patrol of RE8s escorted by SE5s and further along the Front Camels attacking German balloons, quite a melee!

It's good to have the info about the flight models Tailspin, thanks. I found a couple of mission editors in the download section. One (KMD) is described as generic so I gave it a go, but I can't see how to insert waypoints at the moment. I suppose it may not be compatible. Anyway I've sent a PM to the author (kreelin)-hopefully he can put me right. It would be good to get a mission editor up and running for FE because I'm sure there's a lot of creativity out there waiting to be tapped. I've built missions for IL2 and would like have a try at doing the same with FE if the tools were in place. Now if only I could program........

Thanks for the helpful information Tailspin. It's good to be here. When I tried out the single missions, I was using accelerated time to get to WPs quickly and I checked (in "normal" time) before each one whether there were any enemies airborne but there weren't. So I assume that if I had flown more of the mission in "normal" time the autogeneration of enemies might have worked better? Also when I reflew one of the missions with an air start there were plenty of enemy fighters aloft (but I don't like air starts, kills my immersion)! I've tried the campaigns but my problem with them is that I find the plane sets too small to be realistic so my immersion goes again. I've tried my hand at editing campaign files but some of the results seemed to be causing CTDs so before I installed the EP I did a clean re-install of everything. I was very pleased with the results of that (doubled my fps and stopped some graphics corruption I was getting in the sky) but I'm still looking for a way of setting up the kind of missions I want (large realistic planeset using the excellent work of the modders and most of all more two seaters, which would seem to me to reflect the reality of the WWI air war). What I'm not clear about is if I add third party aircraft and then use the single mission generator will it limit their appearane in a mission according to the year (e.g. no Fokker DVIII in 1917). Also there seem to be only two years to choose from, 1917 and 1918: is there any way generating missions that are limited to types in service in 1916 or 1915? The quality of First Eagles makes me wish there was a graphical mission builder like the one in IL2, though having the ability to generate random missions is a great feature provided there is some control over it so the results make historical sense and you don't end up with Snipes dogfighting Eindeckers! :yes:

Hello everyone, I'm new to FE and I've been trying to make some modest changes to one of the campaigns (St Mihiel Op), but without success. The aim was to give me a choice of aircraft to fly by including some of the the very nice add on ac from Skunkworks. Here's what I've done so far. 1. Extracted the WWWCAMP1.INI and WWWCAMP_DATA.INI files from the MissionData.cat file using the SFP 1E Extract utility. As I understand it, these files will now override the ones in the *.cat file. 2. Altered both these files for a few of the squads to show different aircraft and also ensured that the right skins were specified. For example, I changed the starting aircraft from Fokker DVIIF to PfalzDIII for Jasta 19. 3. Changed the in service dates for the Pfalz so that it is still in service during this campaign. 3 Copied the WWWCAMP.INI file to the \Campaigns\WWWCamp1 folder. However, when I start the campaign, the Pfalz shows up OK in the Create Campaign screen but as soon as the first mission loads I'm back to the Fokker. The add on planes work fine in single missions. I've probably missed something obvious and would be grateful for any help on offer.