gerwin

hmm, any suggestion on how that would be most refined? As it is now, in height map mode, TFDtool gives complete control of the height of every node in the terrain. I used it myself properly flatten bugged airfields in the VietnamSEA terrain. But it was a bit tedious to decide the height of each node seperately. What may help is a soft flatten tool, one that makes a flat plateau that blends a bit more gradually with the surrounding heights.

IIRC the 'TAG' value displayed for every tile may have something to to with it. In stock Desert.tfd it is always TAG=0 around runways.

Suppose yes, My only reluctance is that the program grabs more and more memory at startup, wheter it is used or not. Maybe I will just compile a separate version with double the memory allocation compared to the current version.

I see. There is now version 0.96 of the program, which allows tile number input through the tile info dialog. It is accessed with the enter key. Hope that works better. :)

Have you tried using copy-paste? set one tile to the desired texture using pgup/pgdn. Then press 'c' to copy it to the 'clipboard'. Go to another location and press 'v' to paste that same tile there. But like you said, adding a number input dialog to the program would have its benefits too. I will consider it.

Nice Article! Will read it properly later. As to TK's permission about EXEs,DLLs,CATs. Allthough it is funny he replies at all to such a question. AFAIK his reply is basically the law, like it has been for decades. Posting Hacked No-CD Executable = illegal Posting No-CD Patch (without part of the Target Software itself) = Not illegal, but often frowned upon.

So it was just like he told us, it was about what he could afford, and indeed he could not afford a proper SF2NA. That game also lacks most distance lods, as if he did not have time to make these. (Having a dozen Hawkeyes parked on an airfield will seriously impact FPS) I agree with Beachav8r that we should not forget that it is a great series as it is, (at least if you agree with that). What i missed in the last posts is any mention of the 30% commision that Apple takes on purchases in the app store. This is huge. Good for apple, very bad for the world. I won't complain about Third Wire's marketing, or the game bundels as they are. Maybe it is less then it could be, but it should not matter. As long as the SF games are for sale, that is the main thing. Merging the games is easy enough as it is. Marketing could be compensated for by user marketing: Swamp Youtube with vids, Revive TW facebook with new releases, create a few dedicated websites about the game or mods. I don't say we have too, it may very well be too late to change anything. I just mean there is not much use discussing about TW doing such things, They created the game engine and top notch assets already.

Where are all the latest BOB + M0G Alley patches and source files? All links are dead. VSF Framework looks cool. Too bad it is a commercial framework. Probably you can interface with it, but they won't give the real source. Edit Found these files for MiG Alley / Battle of Britain so far: migalley.exe ; 13.162.532 ; Mig Alley original Source mig123.exe ; 2.310.904 bytes ; Official Mig Alley Patch 1.23. mig_085_f2.rar ; 2.703.700 bytes ; MiG Alley Executable v0.85, Dated 13-05-2005 by BDG, goes over Patch 1.23. Bobsource2.exe ; 16.891.025 bytes ; Battle of Britain original Source bob_v099.exe ; 61.750.076 bytes ; Battle of Britain patch 0.99 by BDG, Dated 01-01-2005. Seems BDG ( Battle of Britain Development Group) does not publish the modified sources.

Rewriting everything from scratch is painful to think about. It is like repeating the programming hours of TK, maybe a little less because the game design / file structure is already decided. That is like giving half your working life to the project. Falcon 4 is the interesting because the source is available. No such thing for CFS3 or DCS. No source means we'll have to take it as it is, until it dies out over the years, together with all that is invested in it. (fails to run on the next windows versions etc). I haven' t tried CFS3/DCS myself. Sticking to Il-2 for WW2, SF for everything beyond. Did try Falcon BMS a little; it was difficult.

(In reply to Stary) If you take three aspects of making SF games: 1- Coding. 2- Replicating real life objects based on reference material. 3- Filling in some bits with graphics based on artistic freedom. IMO 1 and 2 is where Third Wire is very good at, and what I look for in a game/sim. 3 is where they are mediocre. Like the tilesets for Dhimar, Vietnam, GermanyCE. Like menu Backdrops. Like the Spacecraft in star vector. Honestly, I found that if I do a lot of Coding or technical trouble shooting, my mind gets in state where things like artistic skill and even chatting suffers. Until you clear your head, Like sleep. TK was most likely honest when he wrote repeatedly "it is about what we can afford". Must says, I am generally content with the current state of the game. When I picked up the game in 2007 I really missed an Editor, Proper Naval War and Helicopters. Since 2012 it is only the helicopter part that remains. Had a few silly ideas yesterday: - Group of coders *including mue*, get access to a advanced source of Falcon (Derived from the leaked Falcon 4.0) and gradually adapt it to use the assets of SF2. It remained closed source to protect the assets from piracy. The game was adjusted to have simplified take-off and landing procedures. - An SF2 Modders group makes a top notch mod for SF2 with all the quality assurance of an AAA title, and a dedicated website and advertising campaign, which sparks such an interest that SF2 starts to sell, and ThirdWire picks up development again.

LOD viewer v0.5 woth older LOD format support is excellent, now it works great with my custom SF1 and SF2 install! Really enjoyed browsing through the 3D objects like this. Thanks a lot! There were only some ships shown without textures, where the Lod model refers to .JPGs but the CAT archive holds .BMPs instead. (When textures are outside of CAT archives the Lod viewer does fall back to .BMPs) Would Z-Y (side of object) be a better default view then Z-X (back)? Are you considering stepping through to inspect the distance lods? The often ignored but important part of models.

I cannot speak for TK, but it would be a lot more serious if the requesting party would be a developers organisation with a resume, and potentially income. Instead of a collection of enthousiasts. Wo can guarantee the source will not leak? That aspect needs more consideration IMO.

For your information; AFAIK: A simulation is about book-keeping all the game data every tick. Even with the source it is not an easy task to do this. Fortunately, In the source all structures are named and can easily be expanded upon. Once compiled to an executable all such structures+procedures lose their name and are tied to fixed memory offsets. Writing beyond that range gets you in the memory range of another structure. This makes it very hard to add a feature to the engine without the source. Much harder then disabling a feature, like CD checks for example. One typical thing is that SF uses a lot of DLL's to hold game code. There are only few projects I know that have reverse engineered a game exe back to comfortable C, or the more primitive ASM code, thus allowing for expanding of structures and features. OpenDune / Dune Dynasty is the best example I know (C code). Red alert has also been recompiled to ASM by some people, not yet to C. Here is a time estimation of reverse engineering a simpler Flight Simulation: 15 years. http://fabiensanglard.net/reverse_engineering_strike_commander/ "they (Third Wire) were happy not to be working on PC these days" Piracy has been an issue ever since the PC was introduced, back then. Has it become worse? Apple has its own Piracy, the terrible 30% of all payments in the app store that goes in the pockets of Apple. And most importantly, these TW mobile games are just too simple. It is like playing Chuck Yeager's air combat (1991) with a timer and bad controls. Better graphics though. Would also be curious how a SF2 game would do in the GoG Catalog. Though I often think the average customer tends to stick to games he already knows, or something close to it.

Latest old CatPack program can create CAT's that are read fine by the game. You have to pass '2' as the desired output format, the ASCII format '1' is no longer supported by SF2.

Amazing work mue!! Quite an accomplishment to decrypt both the protected cat files and the 3D model formats. I hope you can add support for the older simple .cat formats too. I can tell you how to read them, but then again it should be a piece of cake compared to the current format.

Thanks, that is definitely helpful! I'll compare it it with what i noted myself. The manual says: "In addition to the TileMap and Heightmap, the program can display a ReferenceMap named *_ref.bmp. When found it will be loaded and can be shown through switching the editing mode, with the M key. This Bitmap must be in a fixed size ratio compared to the TileMap: 1:1, 1:2, 1:4, 1:8." So it is a matter of exporting the tilemap to a bitmap, and load it in an imaging program with layers. For best results scale it up so it is 8x the size of the actual tiles (ratio 1:8). In another layer one puts the map from google earth, make it transparent so you can see the tilemap as well. Then you use scale/transform/rotate/distort until the google map matches the tilemap below. remove the transparency and save it for import in TFDtool. Good luck. .... I am sorry to say that the past months did not allow me much time for hobbies; Since the contract for the house I rented was revoked. So I had to move to a temporary place, and soon to a new place of my own.

AFAIK that bit information is displayed on the bottom left, at any time: "texture: ##"

Thanks guys. Good to see the tool is still in some demand. The reference map feature was just a quick adjustment, I think it took about 2 hours. Centurion, I disabled the editing commands while in reference map mode. Is that proper or should I allow (blind) tiling or something?... Hope this month will allow me some time to look a the TOD's again, as to read the tree and building locations.

Fair enough. :) I just added support for a ReferenceMap, which can be displayed just like the TileMap and the HeightMap. Details are in the manual.

My Classic TFD/HFD IcelandNA Is about as realistic as the Stock North Atlantic terrain, as it has the exact same targetareas: 2031 targets in 46 targetareas. The Stock North Atlantic targets are very generic, as the towns are just stock towns. It has a limited amount of tiles: greenish areas, brown rock/mud and snow. No roads or rivers. But great care was made to make the tiles blend in with eachother: no visible tile transitions or patterns. Places like the fjord airfield are pretty cool and real, but reykjavik is still nothing like it should be. I remember this terrain is shrunk compared to real size, like two thirds the size. The SF2NA naval campaign can be played with this terrain. Baltika's Iceland V2 Tried this briefly before, I would say more research went into this, regarding target areas and terrain type. 7519 targets in 166 targetareas. There are more different terrain tiles, but they are arguably contrasting a lot with eachother, as can be judged in the screenshots. Note that in reality the snow cover changes a lot throughout the year. I suggest you try both. The downloads are tiny in size anyways.

No, sorry. First thing on my TODO list for Strike Fighters is to finish the HEMTT truck model I started.

Thank you was enough already. :) There is this trick of listing the meshes for old style LODs like this. For newer LODs, made with a SF2 exporter, it is back to staring at the XVI 32 hex editor like wrench said....