malibu43

I'm not sure here what you are trying to do or what you are asking? It sounds like you are having problems merging and patching titles. What exactly are you installing, in what order, and what patch are you trying to apply? For example the SF2 Vietnam is not compatible with and connot be merged with Strike Fighters Gold. Also, the Feb 2010 patch is for the SF2 serieis only (not Wings Over XXXX or Strike Fighters Gold).

That is actually a really good idea! Much easier than dealing with a modified cockpit sound or speech pack. You could easily have a different 10-15 min .wav file for different nationalities or eras, and just load the desired .wav file in winamp before starting the game. You'd only need 1/2 dozen or so, depending on how many installs you have. Of course, you'd still have to find a way to deal with the anoying in game speech! Is this what you have already Fubar, or did you create files that were meant to be used as cockpitsound by the game?

If you tell us exactly what files you edited, exactly what you changed in them, and exactly where you put them, we should be able to help you figure this out...

You'd be surprised. In my experience 30 mi visibility is a pretty clear day as far as aviation is concerned, and I think your screenshots look about right. *edit* - I just did a google search for "Israel Arial Photos", and I saw quite a bit of haze. So again, I think what you have looks about right.

I did not think I'd need to post that twice in one day...

I want it and I want it now!!!

The basepoint values should not be needed, but if that is the problem for some reason, it would just take some copy and pasting to get the values from targets.ini and put them back in the campaign files. Let me try my install when I get home and see if I'm getting the same issue. When I updated the campaign files, I tested the changes and didn't get any problems, but I missed something...

Hey guys, I, for one, am very interested. Unfortunately, I'm limited to .ini editing only, so this isn't something I can really contribute to. But by all means, keep working on it! I will definitely add populated aircraft carriers and/or carriers with battle groups around them to my Vietnam campaigns the second they're available!

Just curious, could the same method be used to add other ships in formation with the carrier? I didn't initially think going that route made sense, since adding the initial method utilized a phantom aircraft and only worked in single missions, and you can already add ships in single missions. But, if this weapon method works in campaigns, it would be nice to see some other ships sailing with the carrier...

I didn't really check any target areas. If things are out of place, then it doesn't make sense to incorporate it. Thanks, Eric,

The VietnamSEA.ini file needs to be tweaked (just a few lines changed) to work in the VietnamSEA terrain withe A&G Exp Pack. Also, the A&G Exp Pack has a South Vietnam terrain that is separate, so in order to get the new tiles and trees in South Vietnam, the .ini file needs to be tweaked there and renamed as well. I've done it already in my install, and it seems to be working with no issues. I can try and post the .ini files here with some instructions later. There will need to be an updated the SF2V expansion pack to bring it up to date with the latest patches, so I'm sure GH3 will be adapted and incorporated in that update.

Just to clarify - what I described above is a way to get the desired ground objects to show up first when the ground objects folder is read in alphabetical order.

Actually, if I remember correctly, I think the game goes through the ground objects folder in alphabetical order to find the first enemy and friendly ground objects defined as TANK. So you might want to try renaming some enemy and friendly infantry units with an underscore as the first character in the folder and main .ini file. I'm on an iPod right now so I can't easily give an example. But if you get what I'm saying, you can give that a try.

The single missions generated with the single mission generator will draw ground objects from the ground objects folder. I forget exactly how it chooses the ground object, but I remember it tends to choose tanks over infantry. There is nothing that can be done about the way the game chooses ground objects for single missions. Therefore, you have two options. 1. Delete the tanks that you don't want to show up, and leave only the ground objects (infantry). 2. Write your own single missions to specify the targets you want. If you upgrade to SF2:Vietnam, you can use the new mission editor to write missions, which makes thing easier.

Also, Alt+D cycles through HUD display modes, and the third one removes all the HUD info altogether. This is an alternative to changing the HUD setting, which would allow you to still have the HUD information available, if/when you want it.

I know this has been discussed here before, but I couldn’t find any recent threads on the subject. I’ve been playing around with different FM and Enemy Skill settings to try and get something that is the right balance between realistic and challenging, but also rewarding. ie – I want to be able to get at least 1 A/A kill on most A/A missions. I know that’s not realistic, but it’s a game and I need to have fun. In “real life” pilots would fly entire campaigns and get only a handful of kills (5 is an “Ace”…), but that wouldn’t make for a very fun game. I was using a MiGCAP mission in SF2V to try different settings, F-8D vs MiG-17. I found that FM on Hard and Enemy Skill on Normal was too… “hard.” Even using my best energy management tactics, most of the time the MiG and I just danced all over the sky for 10-15 minutes until I got impatient and did something stupid or just gave up. When real life time is limited, not a very rewarding use of time. One thing that’s been discussed here and at SimHQ is that the AI always use the Normal FM, so I thought I’d turn my FM down to Normal to make up for that imbalance. Well, the result was the same – 10-15 mins of turning and zooming all over the place with no kills. Since there was no noticeable benefit and I like using accurate FM’s, I turned FM back to Hard. The next thing I’m going to try is turning the enemy skill down to Easy. Hopefully they won’t be so great at flying their aircraft right at the edge of the envelope, and maybe they’ll make a mistake once in a while that I can capitalize on. From what I’ve gathered, it seems like most N. Vietnamese pilots were not necessarily the best anyway. I’m curious to hear from the regulars around here what settings they’re using, and if those settings are meant to be realistic or fun or both. Maybe I just suck and everyone else is owning the skies on all hard difficulty settings. Also, do you use different difficulty settings for different installs? For example, I’m assuming enemy pilot skill shouldn’t be as high in Vietnam, but in SF2E maybe I’ll keep the harder settings since the assumption there is that your flying against the Soviet airforce who would probably be better trained. Plus, it seems like blue aircraft and weapons seem to tilt the scales in blue's favor as you get into the laters dates in this series. Are the easier settings going to make things to easy in the late '70's and early '80's? Then what about SF2I and Korea (when that comes out)? Choices, choices, choices… I know “it’s up to me and I can do whatever I want,” but I just thought it would be interesting to hear how others are approaching this.

Yeah, but you said yourself, this list is intended for new pilots to be able to know what to add without a lot of guess work. To me, it looks like there is still a lot of guess work to figure out what is compatible with what. I think the thing that is most likely to happen here is that folks new to the TW games will look at this list, install everything from it, and then flood the forums with questions about why their game is screwed up after they followed the must-have install list. And, like wrench mentioned, the list has gotten pretty large and has been created by a limited number of folks. And as someone who's been around here for a few years, I see tons of stuff on there that I've never considered installing. So is it really the "must-have" stuff? I think the real must have list should be more like this: NF4+ SF2V Exp Pack Range Terrain But that's just my .02

One thing I'd like to point out, is that there are some mods listed that may conflict with eachother. For example, Pasko's SAM's and Gunny's weapons pack will probably overwrite things in NF4+ or the SF2V Exp Pack that were updated specifically for those mods. NF4+ and the SF2V Exp Pack are updated quite often, where I'm not sure if some of those mods listed are. Just my .02.

What setting do you have for visual targeting then? I thought the only way you'd be able to target primary targets from your own runway would be to have visual targeting set to "easy". Is that not correct?

This is looking great guys! If you want to do any skyraider missions, this site (and the combat journal in it) has some great material. I started a mission set based on this at one point, but it fell off to the wayside. www.skyraider.org

Just curious, for all of you who are using HUD set to Hard, how do you identify your primary target on strike missions? That's probably the main thing that's kept me from switching to Hard HUD. If I get "srike the enemy hangar at the airfield" I can't figure out which one to strike unless I use the red square! Along the same lines, something I did for my install was to go into HUDDATA.ini, and remove the white cone and triangel for waypoints, and remove the red cone for targets. I also changed the red target box into a small red dot. Much harder to see and really doesn't screw with emmersion as much a that giant red box!

For randomly generated single missions, the game chooses ground objects with groundobjecttype=TANK out of the ground object folder. IIRC, it's not totally random, but it's definitely not controlled by an entry in a file somewhere. The game engine chooses whatever it wants to. So the only way to control what you get in CAS missions is to 1) write scripted missions, or 2) limit what's in the ground objects folder. As far as the columns of firecan radars go, I would change the groundobjecttype= in the _data.ini file from TANK to SAM_RADAR. That should fix that problem.

You forgot that the new simulation needs to also be compatible with all future formats that haven't been invented yet!

It's probably the SF2V Expansion Pack (free-ware from CA,). It has not been updated for the latest patch level yet, although a patch is in the works. I would expect that you might see other oddities if you continue to run a .exe that's patched up to Dec 2010 with the SF2V Expansion Pack installed.

I still think it's a good idea. But the list, so far, seems to really just be 1) clouds/trees issue, and 2) prop issues. Those are the two that have the most impact on what's out there and require the most work to fix (or are not fixable in the trees' case). PS - if we're going to add a 3rd item to the list, it should be "TK, please fix the sim so it runs on the highest graphics settings on my lowest of low end computers at 60 fps and add every aircraft from 1912 - 2011 and make the gameplay infinitely scalable from HAWX-like arcade to DCS Black Shark... and please include a flyable pony as well."