gerwin

That looks good. I played the original USNF campaign years ago, good memories indeed. Here is some inspirational material for Baltika and anyone else. Notice how small the map actually was in USNF. Free Image Hosting by ImageBam.com

Eric, I am very interested in your results!, and sure all I have to do is read the above. But I won't have time to do so until tomorrow...

AFAIK All 2008 patched games support a mercenary side. Obviously you would need to edit the campaign and also add an image file: menu\LoadoutMercPad.bmp [290x315]

Past days I have been modding Wings over Vietnam a little, somewhat for my own interest. One of the mods consists of Planning Maps for WOV with political borders. How is something like this installed in the case of SF2V? I don't have SF2V myself you see. Maybe the procedure of creating borders would add something to other Terrain mods? For now I put things here: wov_maps.zip (rapidshare, 10 downloads only!?) Another WoV mod I have been wasting my time on is here: WOV Campaign fix I do not think it has been tested enough to release it. And looking a the download counter; not many people seem to need it anyways.

Noticed that too. The political borders are a very accurate overlay in relation to the coastlines though. It is the airfield placement that has been off from the start. That is just how the WoV Terrain was made by TK/Third Wire. I wonder why? It is easy to move the airfield on the planning map now, but then it would have to be moved in the actual terrain as well, which is difficult. Reminds me of that one time I played Il-2 sturmovik FB. And the campaign took place around Berlin 1945. I wondered where an important river, the Oder, was in the terrain... There were lots of fantasy rivers, but no oder.

Did about 5 to 10 missions for about 3 different campaigns each. As it is now you can be assigned airfield attack related missions, but also targeted are bridges, sampans, oil depots and truck convoys etc. All seems very random. (When continuing a campaign after selecting 'restore dll to its original form' the Noi Bai issue is back immediately)

Okay, this is a new patch (v0.2). It changes only one entry in campaign.dll and that makes the difference. I have had no stability problems in about 4 hours of testing. I also put my campaign datafile in the zip file, but it is not required. Campaign_Fix.zip

Hmm, Allthough the generated missions are looking good with the modified dll, I did get some lockups in the game. That is not nice.

that sounds plausible, Considering TK's recent clarification on the subject: He changed the campaign engine for SF2V. Now that is something we cannot do ourselves... Or is it? we can transplant certain '06 or SF2V dll files to WOV '08. I had bad experiences with doing so earlier, but '06 MissionManager.dll seems to work in a '08 WOV... If that is the right dll to swap? anyways, I have to take a break on this as I have to attend to some other things now.

Yes, it seems so. It even disregards the focusarea variables after some missions. But I was thinking that when the SFP1, WOV and WOI campaigns work, what keeps a certain WOV campaign from working with the same binaries (.exe's/.dll's)?

Thanks for clearing that up. Now I tried the campaign a little further, and unfortunately the Airfield attack priority showed up again... So I have to take back the announcement that it was fixed. :( I wonder what the AirOffensive[] variables do exactly? I tried AirOffensive[].FocusArea=Vinh for all entries, that kinda worked...

Thanks for the info, I understand you speak as one of the developers of the SF2V fixpack / expansion pack. That 'fresh supply of migs' idea crossed my mind too. One downside is that a player downing a lot of migs will not get the logical reward, being less migs in the sky. I don't know wheter I will make further tweaks to this campaign in the days ahead, or wheter I will playtest it further. The idea that the campaign was broken annoyed me, so with that fixed I am quite content again. I do have two 'base screens' for WOV that I might upload. Earlier I added DEUCES Treemod, plus I changed the targets file to have less SAM sites as it slowed things down. Besides that my WOV game is in its original state. I have now idea what changed with the terrains since SF2V. I think I saw someting suggesting that there are maps of north and south Vietnam indiviually?

I tested it some more, the AirOffensive[] lines made most of the difference. So yes, AFAIK the campaign is fixed now. but I haven't played an entire campaign through yet, to test it. Attached is a fixed campaing ini for WOV patched to the 2008 version. All changes made are commented. The SF2V campaign file has another difference, instead of upgrading VPAF units to a new aircraft, it often disbands a unit at a certain date, then creates a new one a day later. This has not been copied over, as I don't understand the reason for this. wovcamprt_data.zip

Just been messing around with this WOV campaign bug for a few hours, now I was about to give up, and to get me some sleep. But in a final attempt I pasted in this header from the SF2V fixpack INI, and suddenly I had enemy aircraft in combination with target variation! I kinda fear I am just confused now, so if someone else can verify this?

No problem, thanks in advance!

Nice, very nice.. But didn't you forget to give a little credit to the templates which you used for this? Being the original IAF third-wire skins recolored by me to the USAF Hill Scheme.

Thanks for that list, I already wondered what exactly the folder contained. Three flogger G's, and also a Flogger K! Wings over Europe was always the most planes for the buck.

They should prove more of a challenge indeed! Also there was a cockpit released for this MiG-23ML some weeks ago, at combatace I mean. from wikipedia:

MiG-21 Looks the same to me... But the MiG-23 does not, that is the tail of a modernised ML/MLD flogger 'G'! Which I requested on the TW forums. Now with a silver skin too. Wasn't it the other way around: like modernised MiG-23's usually with camo, and older ones usually silver? No problem though :) Also I like the new French Mirage Skin, the F-84F and of course the aircraft wreckages. Finally some worthwhile additions in the new series.

Good to read about your opinion on graphics versus other features. And indeed, I might not fully agree on the graphics emphasis of SF2, but it is still Strike Fighters and as TK works on it over time he will surely put in great new features in a solid way. Probably. There is an unofficial direct-X 10 for XP , maybe I will install that when I am bored. My processor is also 2GHz, the AMD ratings of the time like '3000+' differed from the actual megaherz. "wasted your money".. you mean on the current and feature SF2 games? Well, I put much more time in the games then money anyways ;) .. But as it stands I will probably not buy the other games of the SF2 series until they cover the same Aircraft/Terrains as the original. At that time I will decide. About PC hardware, solid state disks are what I am interested in, if only to just try one out for the heck of it. Also DDR3 RAM sounds nice. Loading times will be very fast with that. The 2008 games also have a 'Limitednationlist' tag for this. But I suspect it doesn't work 100% correct. Also I use my own iniswitch tool to quickly change installed aircraft and groundobjects and their default nation+skin. works well. : )

I think it differs from system to system. This is what I measured: With Windows 2K, AMD Sempron 3000+, 1GB+ RAM, and Geforce 6/7's: WOX 2006 a factor 1.35x more FPS then WOX 2008 and seemingly 1.64x more FPS then SF2. I know the advanced shader ini setting, but I haven't tried that one because I understood it was something Vista or Windows 7 specific? I know my system has sure lost its edge in gaming, but I am waiting it out a little until some hardware that I like gets affordable.

Sometimes not, but it doesn't matter, I am happy with my single Wings over everything install. Maybe In the future I will build a fancy system with Solid State Disks and low power but high performance CPU's and GPU's, and buy all the SF2 games for that one. :)

Not really, TK mentioned some days ago that the Suez addon is for the original WOI. He also wrote that it 'should' work without an additional WOI patch. I think the SFP1 and SF2 series are two different code-sources now, and TK won't have the means to work on them both, I guess. Personally I am not to happy with the new direction of SF2: higher poly aircraft and cockpits, higher res skins. more plane 'variants', and obvious incompatibility with the original games (LOD format). I mean, my systems have a hard enough time with the original patched games, and I think the original aircraft detail was fine. I would have rather seen the original series get expanded with proper helicopters, mission building features, terrain detail and interaction, stuff like that. Fortunately Suez should still work, and SF2 still retains most of the SFP1 series anyways.

You surely could just use it freely, but adding me in is nice, thanks :)

The new A-10 FM... I noticed it is merely the tweak I posted in the Third Wire forum. Funny to see it used in the DS patch. :) Anyways: Interesting screenshots!