gerwin

I once copied a preinstalled Photoshop 6.0 folder to a Windows 7 computer, Made shortcut which was set to "XP compatibility" and it worked fine. Maybe that also works in windows 10?

I received the files and fixed the synching issues with the GR.1 distance lods. They all work fine now. :) Though I started to put in a few more low-poly parts for wings, droptanks and ordnance, as to make this plane a tad more framerate friendly around busy airfields.

Guuruu, thanks for making this beautiful aircraft. Especially appreciate the effort to include distance lods in an effort to retain some acceptable framerate, possibly even when a dozen or so are visible on the airfield. However, there is a bug that prevents most of the distance lods from working. I suspect this is caused by the 2,07 MB lod containing nodes that the preceeding 3,17 MB lod does not have. Comparing things with the lod viewer: I count 15 such nodes to be exact. The game only accepts distance lods with equal or less nodes then the parenting lod. Currently the game ignores the last three distance lods entirely. Edit: Removing the 2,07 MB lod does not fix the situation. If you need help with distance lods I am willing to assist with that job, though I am merely an amateur in 3DS max.

I was busy with other things for a few months. But it would be a waste to just leave the Flak 18 gathering dust. This evening I patched it up to be worthy of a release, at least as a beta model. Added some ammo boxes too. The texturing could still use some work. You can find the package for SF2 on my website as usual.

gterl; I quickly made a test terrain with 599 texture entries and indeed it was still capped at 511/512 in two procedures. These two procedures have now been updated with the new limit global variable, which is set to 1024. Please redownload TFDtool and try again.

Understood, but the website anology is not entirely comparable IMO. The suggestion that the downloads were down for good was obviously speculation, the downloads are there again. I am not argueing for or against something, but can imagine situations were a business does best by saying nothing, At least for business sake.

For recent purchases download access would be pretty much mandatory I agree. I don't know if one can expect a lifetime service though. I have local copies. As for the announcing of something, I don't know, maybe.

You cannot expect a source code release. You can hope and wish for it but not expect it. It is not the norm. AFAIK Falcon 4 source was leaked not released. And source code access for a single team is not the same as releasing it. Third Wire Strike Fighters Fairy tale ended when people did not buy the product in sufficient numbers, several times in a row. Silly games with zombies or something sell a lot better ;) Besides that we can only guess about what is going on at Third Wire currently. Should I explain myself to everyone when I go do some other job or nothing at all? Or is the question, does he owe the remaining players anything? He does not owe me anything.

TFDtool can give you the offsets by dragging with the left mouse button. In other words: click target location, hold mouse button pressed and drag to targetarea origin, then release the mouse butten. For rotated airfields it does not work; runway must be angle zero.

Interestng stuff. Since SF2 is no longer developed menu mods can't get out of sync again. I like the concept of looking at backgrounds that a real pilot would see. One of the missing things in Strike Fighters is the lack of the human aspect in the background. Like ground crew, aircraft preparations and repairs etc. Even if it is just a mild suggestion of such. I am thinking of the European Air War backdrops and the Airfield/Carrier top view in Jane's ATF/USNF with repair indicators. On the other hand I prefer the bigger buttons of the SF2 menu, and would never use the Comic Sans font for anything.

(in reply to your second to last post) You should consult the ReadMe of these mods to be sure. But many terrains will work fine with just SF2E, or can be made to work with minor editing, as long as these terrains do not refer to stock Desert/Vietnam/Israel tiles. There are different GermanyCE tile repaint mods around. (I use my own repaint, but since it is more like an adjusted version of the origial tiles I don't think it is proper to upload it. ) You can also mod a campaign manually to get the same result as the campaign customizer, but it takes more effort and knowledge. Or make a campaign from scratch SF2 expansion pack 2 is no cheap way to get the mission editor, suppose it depends whether or not the Lightning interests you. Actually the Mission editor DLC seems cheap at $10.

North Atlantic has Iceland with custom airfields. These differ from the 6 original types of airfields used in all the other stock terrains. Pretty much all terrain mods also refer back to these 6 original airfields. So AFAIK having just SF2NA is insufficient to use terrain mods. SF2 Europe seems to me like a good start, it has lots of nations on both side of the fence, and their aircraft have interesting nation specific paint schemes, like the Royal Airforce, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, etc. A downside is that the stock tiles of the GermanyCE terrain are not that great, they are similar to the Vietnam game. The mission editor DLC is a very useful addition, and you can also get it by purchasing Strike Fighters 2 Expansion Pack 2. In other words: With Exp 2 you don't need the DLC. The Campaign Customizer is not nearly as extensive as the mission editor. It allows you to start campaigns with nations not normally supported by a campaign. It is not a must IMO. See the screenshot here https://lparchive.org/Strike-Fighters-2/Update 11/ It mentions mercenery mode, but I think Strike Fighters 2 (the first of the series) is required for that.

My pleasure, I added it to TFDtool while it was still fresh in my mind. You can download v1.05 for these things: - Duplicate check and warning when loading the map textures. - Duplicate textures merge filter. - I found that the unresponsive keyboard bug can still happen, but only in dialogs. I removed clear_keybuf to see if that fixes things.

Allright. Just to be clear: TFDtool does not make _Data.ini files, and the _Data.ini file you are having trouble with was just hand crafted by somebody in its current troublesome state. It is doable to make a filter in TFDtool to check for duplicate texture entries, then merge them in the .TFD to only point to the first one of that texture entry, then display a list of texture entries which are no longer used, to allow them to be manually emptied in the _data.ini (Filename=*empty*). Obviously the above leaves gaps in the texture sequence, but these textures are not used on the map. The Game and TFDtool work properly regardless. Not sure about the TE. (For example: Stock Desert terrain has quite a few unused texture entries, which I changed to Filename=*empty* so it does not waste time to load textures which are not used anyways) Edit: Is this worth it? I find that with terrains it is important to work on good heightmap data and a properly generated tilemap. When the start is poor, countless hours in TE or TFDtool cannot make it a good terrain, and it would be better to start over.

Thanks for the detailed report. To be honest, I am not surprised at all that TFDtool just works with this, I am surprised the TW Terrain editor does not. (Makes me wonder if the game works with it?). TFDtool does not make any texture list, it just reads from it. What do you consider a proper way of handling this? What comes to mind is when loading a texture, TFDtool can check if the same filename was already loaded before, then give a warning message?

The earlier crew turned out to be a bunch of Yankee infiltrators, they have been arrested and replaced with proper flak crew.

The crew arrived already! Judging by their helmets these must be Fallschirmjager.

I will try to add some crew, like in the two seated positions that rotate with the gun. AFAIK any other crew can not sync nicely with a changing gun direction. It would have been nice if it was possible to add a recoil effect to this gun.

TFDtool v1.04 is available since last week already. - Texture limit increased from 512 to 1024. - The keyboard input bug is gone. :)

I uploaded a new version of the Panzer IV. It now has a Tan/Sand texture as well. It got a fourth distance lod, plus I renamed it from Panzer4 to Panzer4H. Yesterday and today I worked on a Flak 18 88mm. Made from scratch, fortunately there are several detailed drawings available for this gun. It is not ready for release yet.

I hope so to. For the people who reacted 'haha' to the previous post, I don't really see much irony there. If you wan't to get a feel for the potential stress of game programming, look up some interviews regarding those famous 1990's independent game development companies and their working hours near the deadline. A bit unhealthy to say the least.

Attached below is a function list of D3D.dll. It does not seem to be a wrapper, since the function names give me no matches with Google search. So I figure it is just (part of) the Direct3D rendering code. For 3DFX-Glide I would expect a similar DLL called glide3x.dll. This glide3x.dll is mentioned in the EAW exe, but maybe it is statically linked, thus included in the exe? d3d.dll.txt I tried EAW barebones v1.60 on another computer: WinXP, Radeon HD6670. Now the textures seem smoother and I cannot see the dithering like on the Intel HD system. But the mouse cursor remains visible in the center at all times, but I can get rid of it with "Windows 2000" compatibility mode. Some windows file icons change after running this game, this may be indicative of a problem in exitting the game? In d3d.dll there is the function "d3dSupports8BitTextures". Well ATI/AMD radeon never supported that in hardware, so when it gets a NO answer; there the game might actually behave better.

Migbuster, your SF2 changelog is amazing work and has lots of details I missed myself. Though " Terrains have higher resolution tiles." seems to be in error. I have never seen a change from 256x256 pixels ever. Also did you add the crashed plane wreckage feature somewhere? A few of the SF2 exclusive features were eventually backported to SF1 with WOI expansion pack (2010). I used that as a base for a long time. But SF2 got so many small improvements that it is hard to recommend anything SF1 at this point. For modding purposes I can no longer do without the mission editor (if only to quickly check how the game handles installed objects) and userlists (to have better control over how the game distributes objects between nations).

German Panzer IV is up! Same story as the Sherman; it is from the same royalty free payware source. MG-34 by me. I re-uploaded both HEMTT models also. The color of the cab/base textures was adjusted to better match the trailers.

About the amount of work; It depends a lot on the state of the code. Just as an example; Compare it to an old game with a small fixed resolution like 640x480. In some cases these games were actually programmed with abstract and flexible resolution handling, and just changing a few values makes everything scale properly, to 1024x768 or something. Because the original code already had the procedures to scale things. Other games make assumptions about being in 640x480 mode all over the place, and it is a lot of work to find all these places and replace them with scaleable code. Especially when assembler code is involved with it. In the worst case you'd have to conclude that the old rendering code was a bad job and needs a complete rewrite. EAW 3D rendering code should be reasonably modular at least, since it supports both Software + Direct3D + 3DFX-Glide. Meaning that the code was made to handle three different rendering paths. In the EAW 1.60 version I just tried (It runs!), there is obviously a dithering effect in the video output. Probably used at the time to improve the looks of the game by reducing color banding, but dithering is not beneficial for true color games, so it would have to be removed. I am sorry if my remarks sound annoying, I sensed a little confusion over this subject and this is my try to help out.