WhiteBoySamurai

Hi! I recommend you use one of the weapons from the Mirage Factory F-16C, such as the"F-16_LANTRIN". It includes pylons and looks much better. If you need help installing it, please tell me. I'll give you the modified F-2A_Data.ini an loadout.ini. がんばってください！ Hmm, maybe someday I should try to make a J/AAQ-2 FLIR pod...

The Arleigh Burke has been uploaded. Here are some preview pics covering the various features and last-minute improvements I made. This post is pic-heavy so sorry about the load times! I decided to play around with the extended object creation tools in max and was able to come up with some decent railings (only for the main deck) and simple nets for the helo pad. They will only be visible on the high-detail LOD extremely close-in, which is 35k polygons. The medium and far LODs are 15k and 10k respectively. And yes, I made provisions for helo operations on this ship. From another angle: I changed the color of the name plate lettering last minute. All weapons have been thoroughly tested, including the guns... ...Standard Missiles... ...and Tomahawks. As with my Tico, there are two different versions of the ship included: Flight I ships have SM-2, Flight II has Tomahawks. Unfortunately I didn't have time to finish my new model for the Standard Missile, so I'm afraid we're stuck with the stock ones for a while longer. I think the Arleigh Burke is overall my best model so far, so I hope you guys enjoy it.

It looks like gerwin beat me to the upload. I didn't see the Waterworld_water.bmp in the package, though-- do you still need that? Or were adjustments to the ini file sufficient to fix it?

You bet! She's already shooting bad guys out of the sky, too. In retrospect, it seems that most of the newer ships have dark grey lettering on the name plate rather than traditional white (pictured above), so I may just redo those for consistency. With regard to the model itself, the mesh is basically done except for railings and flight deck nets... which is a sticking point for me. The ones from the original model no longer fit and would add many thousands of polygons even if I rearranged them to match the new hull. The transparency trick I did for the Bainbridge isn't an ideal solution because these ships are constantly bathed in missile smoke and tga transparencies don't look quite right in those conditions. I could just build new (polygonal) ones by hand, but that will take time. I'm open to suggestions!

This is true. You want to know about real dedication? I lived in Hawaii for about 10 years-- There are even goths there! I'm pretty sure I met both of them. Also? Goth chicks can be smokin' hot, so don't knock their quaint counterculture too much.

Problem fixed, thanks! ...But, I ran into another issue. (Sorry for being such a pain!) I couldn't get the mission editor to place ships on the terrain except a lone target for anti-ship missions. But I could add tanks and stuff... It seemed to be treating the water as solid ground. I read through the knowledge base and posts and found that the issue was the waterworld_water.bmp file. (The RGB was 108/0/10 instead of 128/0/0 like other terrains.) I edited and re-saved the file, and now I can place ships and ground vehicles appropriately.

This will certainly be a terrain I'll be using quite a lot from now on. Thanks! Unfortunately, I'm getting the "ships floating above the water" issue. Could this be a HeightMapScale issue? It's set to 25 in the Waterworld_data entries; should I try adjusting it? I'm running a full merged install with the latest patch, if that helps.

I'm well underway with texturing. This will be a single 2048x2048 skin, with room for growth for the Flight IIA and other modifications. I have to go on a business trip next week, which will take me away from my computer for a while. Therefore I'll try my hardest to get this ship released in some form before then.

Yes, but that in turn limits us to a single spot on the ship that has missiles. I know that the game seems kind of finicky about which way the missiles are "facing," even pointing straight up, so allowing them to yaw fully on a single axis probably gets better performance. But if you do so on a ship with more than one launcher, you either have to sacrifice half the missiles or put them all in the same spot, which isn't very realistic. So, I think it's a trade-off either way. I'm open to both methods, though, and hopefully TK will give us more options for ground objects in some future update.

My solution is a bit more time-consuming, but it's worked well for me since my very first project: (This is with ShowMissile=TRUE and each one elevated slightly so you can see where they are.) In my experience, the game's single-launcher axis limit is actually a bigger limitation for traditional arm/box launchers than VLS. I found that if you don't assign a pivot node, the game assigns the exact center of the model as a default pivot. (An actual model pivot can help you to visualize how the weapons will be rotated on the model, or to re-position all the missiles at once via max.) From there it's just a matter of locking weapon pitch and yaw, and positioning each round where you want it. The WeaponSystem is only half the issue, though, since the missile's parameters make or break the VLS. I had trouble getting the Slava to shoot properly when I first downloaded it until I modified the Grumbles it uses. Also, it seems like SF1 and SF2 handle these parameters a little differently when it comes to high-off-boresight shots. Also, many VLS launchers, including my Tico, have a tendency for missiles to go stupid and explode after going straight up depending on where the target is located. While doing my Arleigh Burke, though, I found one simple tweak that fixed this problem completely. You'll see it in a week or so.

I'd give nearly anything to be able to do that in a sim. I mean JDAM-ing 80 targets from 40,000 feet, mind you, not bombing a teenybopper pop star. ...Okay, honestly, I'd like to do both. >_>

I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I don't know how to read dll files. It just looks like gibberish to me in notepad. >_> I'll just give the animation a try and see what happens. Thanks. There's actually a lot of different variations of this weapon mount. So it wasn't just a matter of catching the details, but choosing which details to catch. Here's the nearly-completed model. I'm going to try to finish it up and start skinning this week. And here's a close-up on the VLS. Again, these are going on the Tico someday too.