malibu43

Definitely going to grab this after I get a bigger hard drive (hopefully for xmas)... and after some of these bugs get sorted out!!! *edit* - so does this thing really take an additional 6GB of space?

I'll give it a try, assuming I have enough space on my HD.

I build/fly RC as well as fly real planes.

Click the "save" button at the debrief screen.

Got it!

Sorry. You guys misunderstood my question. I know how to copy .exe's and make multiple installs. It was just the part about needing to move the .exe up one folder before renaming it and moving it back down. I just copy and past the .exe back into the same folder right away (it'll be named "Copy of StrikeFighters2.exe") and then rename that .exe to whatever I want.

Huh? I had no idea about this. I've created "separate" installs successfully so far without doing this... Not disagreeing that it needs to be done, just wondering why I haven't had to do that...

Just fired up Janes F/A-18 last night and played through a campaign mission. However, I spent too much time looking down in the cockpit trying to remember how to work things and got my @$$ handed to me by a MiG-31!

Jeez... After all this, I started a Rolling Thunder campaign flying F-8C's with FM on Normal and AI skill set at Normal. Well, I got 4 MiG-17's on the first mission! In all my testing, I didn't account for the "experience" entry in the campaign_data.ini file. The MiG's in this first mission were kind of flying around aimlessly, like one would expect MiG's to do early in the Vietnam conflict. They were nothing like the MiG's I encountered in single missions. So all this discussion was kind of pointless. I was doing all my testing with single missions, but the entries in the campaign file gave me the result I was looking for. I set the FM back to Hard. Time to move on!

Very true. I'll have to play with it for a while and see how it goes. Thanks all for your help!

OK. So here's what I've decided. FM on Normal. The AI get to use the Normal FM, then so do I. No reason to handicap myself. AI Skill on Normal. For reasons explained by Gr. Viper. Hopefully this will be the right combination of challenging rewarding...

Even if "Easy" is the enemy AI difficulty? It seems like that shouldn't affect my wingman's aggressiveness. Totally agree.

No way! I just bought moved from Free-Track to TrackIR 4! This would have been interesting to try out.

Thanks for the input. At this point, I think I'm still going to try my Hard FM settings with enemy skill at Easy. If the enemy ends up being just rediculously easy at those settings, I'll go the Normal/Normal route and give that a try. I'm curious to see what some of the CA veterans (Dave, Wrech, FC, etc...) have to say about this, given that they've been around the series so long and have participated in the FM development of so many 3rd party AC.

For the most part, I totally agree with you here, as this has always been my approach in the past. Lately, however, time to fly on my laptop is very limited, so I'm trying to find a way to get rewarded a little more often without totally sacrificing my integrity!

That's a good point. I figured the F-8 probably had the best chances of beating a MiG-17 out of all the A/A fighters in SF2V, so that's what I chose. After browsing the internet a little more, I keep seeing that the reason US aircraft had such high kill ratios during the Korea/Vietnam time period was a result of pilot skill and training, and not so much aircraft design (at least when it came to dog fighting). I think this reinforces the last thing I said I was going to try, which is leave the FM on whatever gives me the most realistic flying experience (be it Normal or Hard) and lower the skill of the enemy (Easy). I'm going to give that a try. I think it will work well up until the early '70's, but, again, I'm not sure how it will work when I start using the later models of the Aim-9 and Aim-7. Hopefully things don't become a joke. That's something I'm considering as well. Unfortunately, it's hard to remember which FM you're supposed to use for each aircraft. Some are meant for Normal, some are meant for Hard. I'll probably stick with hard until a problem shows up. Another good point!

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.

Man, BoP sure did end up looking a lot better (ie - playable) on the PC vs the 360!

I was playing Call of Duty the other day and thought how SF2 would be so much better if you were on the ground running around instead of in an airplane and if you had machine guns and grenades instead of missiles and bombs.

That was a horrible "hint". Seeing as it's been posted for a few days and no one knows what it is, why don't you just tell us? At this point it's more irritating than interesting. Are you trying to say you've managed to record missions and replay them from different views?

Well, I guess we will just have to keep guessing at it (or just let this thread die) since we apparently aren't going to be filled in on anything...

Are you talking about what they start to show/discuss at ~ 6:30 into this episode? http://www.youtube.c...1&v=Wg8Wa1fMfQE I'm pretty sure that was greatly exhagerated. I can't say for sure, since I've never flown a Foker. But I'm pretty sure what you see there is not physically possible. You can't bring the nose around like that and then accelerate forward and continue to maintain control. If for some reason you could get the nose of the plane around that fast, the aircraft would be stalled and you'd have to recover from the stall - not bank ninety degrees and accelerate onto the tail of your attacker!

I'll take a look at the Dogfights episodes on youtube to see if I can find what you're talking about. I remember watching that one, and I'm pretty sure either: 1) the guys doing the computer recreations misunderstood what was described 2) the guys doing the computer recreations exhagerated what was described 3) like somone else said, the guys that the original story came from exhagerated what they saw/did Either way, what they showed was not possible/realistic. That is the case with a lot of what they showed on that show. The tactics and maneuvers were described well, but the computer scenes usually showed planes doing things too quickly and in much less space than would really be requied.

I wanted to make the "TRACER4.TGA" in the latest updates for NF4+ and SF2V Exp. Pack a little more orange and a little less red. Kind of like the tracers from the "Downtown" scenes in Flight of the Intruder. I downloaded GIMP and made some changes and saved the file. However, when I went back into the game, the tracer was showing up as a big white square, which is what the game usually does when some effect is screwed up. I reverted back to the original file and had no issues. So, is there something else I need to do to the .TGA file after I alter the colors? Thanks!

It looks like it might be the same flight, recorded twice, using different camera angles each time.