gerwin

Lets turn it around in the extreme: Whatever TK invests or does is of little consequence here. The survey flight sim customers, that were a thing in the 90's, are gone or out of reach. This fundraiser being a measuring tool to make that conclusion, and the measurement is pretty clear on this. Edit; It should not discourage anyone to at least do a $1 vote, to state one personally cares for those extremely moddable survey flight sims by Third Wire. Despite what the rest of the world is currenly doing.

If this fundraiser ends with like 75 people contributing, then I don't think any additions to the game are justified. It is almost like Third Wire improving a game just for their own use. I cant compare it with other game fundraisers or kickstarters, since normally I don't care for them, but in my view this amount of contributers is very, very small. Where are all the potential customers? They can't all be into DCS? Still, there should be a real desire to at least make SF2 Windows 10 proof, otherwise all the assets and investments from the past become totally unsellable.

Of course not. That would make no sense at all.

The additional information on this campaign is fine with me. Just don't really like Windows 10 anyways. But whatever helps TK doing some actual PC SF stuff again. So I threw in a contribution now.

Okay. Thanks for confirming that. I will just keep checking for this in the coming days... I suppose this does take the speed out of this initiative.

Good news in itself, So I have read the two topics on this fund raiser, and the comments at the fundrazr.com. I understand the term 'Keep it all' campaign. But AFAIK such a campaign requires TK to state what happens when the goal is not reached? Worst case the money is then used to fund mobile rubbish instead? It is not comfortable to make a decision when I lack the info that I need...

Yeah, the bits that I wrote were a sidetracked discussion with Menrva and Wrench, not so much for the original question. I am sure Menrva got the original question covered.

I had similar problems with ships. Ended up using it like this, then all is fine:

Coincidentally I did a small test with _HM bitmaps two days ago. - Added a _HM to the normal inland tiles, instead of just the coastal tiles, mainly by changing the _Data.ini. - Raised each tile's HeightMapScale from 40 to 240, to exaggerate the effect. It works as expected, see test image below. A coast like the cliffs of Dover while inland it is like Verdun 1918. So again, for coastal tiles this stuff is useful. But for inland tiles I have no good answer yet. Maybe some tiles can benefit from a _HM bitmap, like tiles with rocks and snow. But in general they don't seem to add to the viewing pleasure there: Either you don't notice their effect, and when you scale them up it quickly becomes too much.

Good catch. I will fix it this evening. The direct link to the zip will probably change, since I suspect that part of the server reached its file quota.

I recently checked some of the YAP stuff, the ships by Hinchinbrooke and the aircraft by Bobrock are rather nice: good shapes, details and textures. These objects need some work, for SF2 use and such, but still, what I said. I could mention plenty bad things of course, but I don't see much use in that now. It is not like anything is gonna get fixed or updated, except by myself and people here. As for _HM bitmaps. I had some adventures with these when (re)making the IcelandNA map. For the coast of Iceland they definitely have their use. IIRC I did things a bit differently compared to stock terrains, because I found grey is level zero, and not black. A normal HFD heightmap does not have the resolution to define the coastline nicely. But it depends on wheter or not the coastline should be more beach- or cliff-like. For flat beaches _HM bitmaps are not doing much.

There is not such a clear difference in SF1 vs SF2. Strike Fighters games, addons and updates were released in the timeframe 2002 to 2013. The features came gradually over that time. The SF1 to SF2 redefinition was a big step, where the developer implemented all the Windows Vista/7 game design recommendations that came out from Microsoft at the time. First SF2 'rehash' was out in 2009, It was not available as an update. One big difference was that the SF2 games were easily mergeable into one install, sharing all the assets like planes and ground-objects mostly without issues.*** There was also the SF1 Wings over Isreal addon, released in 2010, for which many SF2 features were backported into the last official SF1 release. It was a bit like a SF1.5 game. It seems that there was little development time spent on the terrain engine throughout all these years. Only in 2012 a new non-tile terrain setup was added, but it was left in a premature state. The Tile-based terrains of SF1 and SF2 are technically pretty much the same. Just minor differences. ( *** SF2 currently handles different planes, ground-objects, terrains etc. in an almost perfect way. They can be added as desired and they are distributed according to UserLists with Dates and Nationalities. If done right, there is no need to remove or deactivate objects, since objects only appear when it is appropriate. )

Not really. AI flight has no way of dealing with that. We talked about this, a few pages back.

I will give it a try, when I have some time to spare.

Third Wire did supply a few Photoshop files with panel-line layers a long time ago, 2005?, for a select few aircraft. But since then no such luck. So some people made new panel lines, some of those are in the combatace download section. What I generally do is use every photoshop trick I know to re-use the stock panel lines. But it is not always possible, since idealy I have one camo skin and one plain color skin as a base, and it gets tideous regardless.

For such situation, Maybe a cockpit expert can program some mini games like Pong or Tetris into the MFD? ;)

I can open DDS in Photoshop 6.0. I have a plugin called "dds.8bi" for that. Maybe I got it from here (link below). Otherwise I can send it. https://developer.nvidia.com/gameworksdownload#?dn=texture-tools-for-adobe-photoshop-8-55

I made quite a few desert/sand-color skins in the past. You can find them in the link below. But they may not fit the exact models you are looking for. Like there are often different models of the same aircraft type in use: Stock SF1, Stock SF2, Original TMF addon planes or Later reworked addon planes. Skins are suitable for only one exact model. (Take it as it is, I don't do requests, booked full for 10 lifetimes already :) ) https://combatace.com/profile/32175-gerwin/?do=content&type=downloads_file&change_section=1 Edit: I may have a few others that I need to upload. MiG-15 and Tu-22, maybe C-47 as well.

Since the Sherman M4A3E8 was not used in the Pacific Theater of WW2, I assembled a similar M4A3(75)W for that purpose. Available on my site as of now. Also I update the Flak-18 88mm a little.

I meant you can get $9999999 starting money instead of $10000. I now see the campaign customizer DLC has an input field for that as well. I don't know about finite stock of certian aircraft, and no time to find out now... You can look in .ini files to see if there is a setting that may be related. If you want to learn about this game it is easy, since everything is nice and tidy in readable .ini files.

That example screenshot with that generator instrument panel: That is 3DSmax downsizing textures. I don't know why 3DSMax 8 and 2009 are downsizing textures by default. But in the Preferences-Viewport and UVW-unwrap-options you can set texture size to either the maximum, or to match bitmap size etc. See screenshot. Also Setting forced anti-aliasing in Radeon/Nvidia driver display settings helps smoothen things. EDIT: Note that the forum seems to scale the attached image, making it fuzzy again. Also I use OpenGL since Direct3D gave me issues. Good info, thanks!

Wrench, I am aware of the availability of that spitfire VIII. Much appreciated! Nevermind why I do what I do anyways. Amariani. This is a strange node transplant mod like Avia S-99 flaps fix. I don't know how to share it yet. In case of interest PM me for instructions. Screenshot thread, sorry I am not home yet to grab one... Fixed! (Waterworld - Dryland oil refinery - Strike)

Spitfire VIII SEAC (Stock DLC Spitfire 9C with modded tail and tail-wheel)

in Campaign1_Data.ini: Nation=MERC MercenaryUnit=TRUE PlayerOnly=TRUE StartingFunds=10000