Piecemeal

I've offered my help to Centurion. The beta release was called beta for a reason I've been a little quiet of late for personal reasons, but last night I decided to change the tiling in the urban areas to make the towns and cities less "square" looking: The TFD and HFD tiles have been sent to him for approval.

With the recent passing away of my Mother, I've been in a very reflective mood lately. Bygone Ireland is a subject that's always been close to my heart. I've always had the opinion that the humility of our recent ancestors is something that most people today neither care about or try to capitalise on. I viewed this on vimeo today, and a flood of childhood memories of being brought with my siblings to visit elderly relatives returned to me. The strangely therapeutic sound of the old clocks ticking away in the background; the faithful, friendly old household dog that came out to the car to greet us as we pulled in; the stories, the songs, and of course - the elderly relatives themselves. I'm not ashamed to say that viewing this video brought a tear to my eye. The description by the photographer says it all really: https://vimeo.com/88597387 In memory of Mary Curtin December 13th, 1935 to March 4th, 2014

Great stuff, d!! Some might be interested to know that ludo's Mirage F1 cockpits fit perfectly in stock Mirage IIIEs to make a credible Mirage 50 cockpit.

If I could put my six pence worth in; My own install has an exclusively pro-Western air force, with Mirage F1 and Mirage 5 squadrons, serving alongside F-4Es, F-5Es (Centurion's upcoming mod) and one or maybe two F-15 squadrons. Paran is exclusively kitted out with Soviet hardware (MiGs and SUs). This may seem a little bit off balance in favour of Dhimar, BUT ; if you go into the DESERT_NATIONS.ini file and change both Paran and Dhimar's 'PilotTrainingStandards' prompt from POOR to NORMAL, you'll see that in a lot of cases the balance is often evened off in air combat. Take for example a combat air patrol in the mid 80s - I've often had a lot of my flight (and sometimes myself) wiped off the sky by Parani MiG-23MLs armed with AA-7s. My Parani MiG-21MF/bis and MiG-23MS models are by default armed with two AA-2R radar homing missiles, so that can also give a nasty surprise sometimes when going into a head-on engagement. Has anybody had a thought about dressing up Dhimari aircraft in a chocolate brown/sand coloured camo scheme, like this? http://combatace.com/topic/72591-strike-fighters-2-screenshots/page-172?do=findComment&comment=655798 I've got all my Dhimari Mirages in this livery and if I'd any skinning talent I'd have the F-4s dressed the same. Just a few thoughts.

Stop, Baffo!!! You're embarrassing me!!!! (well done btw)

Never noticed that before baff. Well done.

Out with the old...... in with the new

Refresh my memory again as to what causes a loading crash at 30%? I was having issues already with the 100% crash due to a faulty ground object, which I was trying to get to the bottom of. Initially I renamed my "GroundObject" folder and the game was working perfectly. Anyway; I was working on nailing down the offending groundobject when all of a sudden the game just stops dead in its tracks at 30%, leaving me to exit via the Task Manager. I never touched any of the terrain INI files so I'm effectively at a loss as to what it is exactly I've done

Why, Hawks of course old chap! There's a good boy. (insert pipe smoking smiley here)

Passing the IP - weapons free, weapons free.........

Ay carrrramba!!!!! Excellent work Raven; well done!! As regards suggestions, will you be working on any French dumb iron bombs? (Matra 250lb, etc)

A lot done; a lot more to do.....

Update: I've spent the past couple of days testing out the above shown groundobjects individually in order to find the offending item. It looks like the only object that's been causing the crash is the SA-9 launcher vehicle. All the others are working fine in-game and causing no problems. Strangely enough though, I replaced the object in question with the SA-9 vehicle from eburger's SF2 SAM Pack only to have the same problem. I'm starting to wonder is the 3D object itself flawed? As regards concerns with Desert4, it seems that at least now I know that the terrain is definitely working fine.

Actually I've tried loading a single mission in the last 20 minutes and it seems to be loading (well; past 30% anyway). dsawan: I've been trying to nail down the offending groundobject file. If I knew which one, I'd be a lot more able to fix it. Spinners: not sure if it's Desert 4 that's causing the problem. It only seems to be during a certain time period that this problem was occurring (early 70s onwards). I renamed my own groundobject folder and the problem disappeared, so I'm deducing that it has to be something from that folder. I had a similar problem with an offending object before which was occurring during the 80s (a Rapier launcher I think it was). I replaced the object with one from a d/l pack and the problem seemed to go away. Sundowner: Never thought of using the event viewer, but it's telling me the same thing as the Task Manager, in this case it seems to be the SingleMission.DLL file. I was hoping it might go a bit more in depth by telling me which groundobject file is causing the problem, but I suppose I'll have to try and nail the problem by process of elimination. This is what the Event Viewer is telling me: And the game seems to be loading fully without these objects. Hopefully by gradually testing each one individually I might be able to sniff out the problem:

Nice one Spinners. Last year I had a similar setup for a Dhimari Hunter. I was able to remove one of the decoy blisters from the rear fuselage via the INI dance, but for some reason beyond me the other one wouldn't budge. You want to try it out? Let me know if you're interested and I'll forward you the files.

After spending most of the day Googling and surfing I think I've found the right RAM to upgrade my gaming desktop with. I'm lucky I found some at all, as apparently high capacity DDR2 RAM is rarer than pixie dust these days. I know I'm OK as regards the DDR2, but after reading into different types of DDR2 (240-Pin DIMM etc.) I just want to be sure that I'm buying the right thing for my PC. If anyone with IT skills sees this, could they let me know if I'm making the right choice? Here's the RAM in question that I'm going buying: ..... and here's my current RAM specs: Thanks in advance

Cheers, Fubar! Hopefully this'll sort out my framerate woes

Stary; now you've really intrigued me as to the identity of that cockpit. I'm thinking MiG-21F but - anglicised cockpit instruments? Obligatory screenshot

Todd - the terrain wasn't meant to work straight out the box with the stock campaign INIs. There may have to be a bit of editing to be done with the campaign INIs. Although the parking chance is at 100, I don't know about others but they don't always appear with me either. Might be a guess but it may be a game issue. As regards the 100% locking up issue, it might be a ground object issue or an issue with an edited FLIGHTENGINE file (as mentioned earlier) EDIT: Desert Fury was meant to be used with the stock Desert terrain. Desert 4 is similar to the SF2:NA terrain in that it's a naval terrain, so some big time editing of the campaign INI files may be needed.

Thanks for the info there guys. Happy: I did a bit of comparing between your AMD control centre and mine (with a little help from Google Translate!) and made some changes to mine. I'll try it out in a couple of minutes. The cockpit mirrors are something I may have to consider turning off. daddyairplanes: Upsizing my RAM has been something I've been considering since I got my new graphics card last year. When he installed the card, my brother said that more memory wouldn't necessarily mean higher framerates - but then again my brother never played the SF2 series. Definitely something to consider.

Registry cleaning is something I've gotten into the habit of doing weekly, along with anti-virus scanning, defragging, etc. It's amazing the amount of crap that your PC can pick up over seven days.

Hi Centurion. What era were you trying to fly a mission in? ('60s, '70s, '80s) More often than not I've often had the same problem when trying to fly in any time from the mid 70s onwards. I tried finding the problem by adding my groundobjects back into the game one at a time but the results were inconclusive. In the end I still wasn't able to pin down the problem. It must be a groundobject issue though cos when I removed all of them from the "OBJECTS/GROUNDOBJECT" folder it worked just fine. With all the objects in the folder it's a case of Russian roulette - sometimes it'll start, sometimes it'll crash To be honest I thought more people would be having this issue but surprisingly you're the only one I've heard of (apart from me) with this. Maybe it's a bad entry in the DESERT4_TYPES.ini file. I might try and go through it over the weekend when I've time.

Can't remember the last time I was at the flicks. In my opinion the quality of entertainment on the big screen over the past five or six years has gone waaaaaaaaaaay down. So many rehashes; so many script writers who couldn't write a one line limerick..... While I'm not doubting the hardship that Luttrell endured, but from watching the trailer I can't help but think that this is one more story of bravery hijacked by Hollywood for financial gain.

That R530 from the Mirage pack seemed to do the trick. Thanks Ludo