Sentry

Hey folks! Hope this message finds you all well!! I've been away from TW games quite some time ago. Now when I'm back what surprises me is the new website look and some recent uploads all are very tempting. It's too early to download them now, just want to wait for some ratings back to see how good they are meanwhile I can re-arrange my hard drive for their new accommodations. Having said that, I can't help feeding my curiosity on FE's update. It's not too much of a deal to have all the updates and to be quite honest the installations went very well and they all are rather straight forward. I must say it's ingenious as far as the graphics goes. The sky looks way better than the vanilla version. I do love the clouds, they are very stereo, marshmallow comes to my mind when I see them. In the case of WoV for instance, you need some cloud mods to make something like that. I enjoy the game very much. The less sophisticated cockpits ups the frame rates nicely. Anything between 40 and 60 gives you that sense of speed when you ride in that flying kites. The terrain is another beauty. To be honest, even modded Vietnam terrain doesn't come that close to the default landscape in this game. I just feel that WWII aircrafts might decorate the theatre equally well. The only trouble I am getting is that not too many British WWII propellers are found up here or I just lost my way when I was in the big download section containing huge number of files. I have the Spitfire in mind, can someone help pointing me to the correct section where this admirable fighter can be found? FE's theater feels just about right for an European theater where WWII fighters will add more atmosphere to it, don't you ever think so?

At what altitude that my ship will not be damaged or destroyed by the "colateral damage" by the nuke I dropped?

A bit reminds me about Jane's F-15. Very cool! When is ti due out?

According to your experience, it clearly indicates that Third Wire games are CPU-bounded games. I am using Pentium D also, but mine is 945 which is overclocked to 3.4GHz. Still I am getting low 20s when all max'd out. My card is ATi X1950Pro AGP version. I think this game worth the money to play. All the mods are fantastic. I actually saw this YouTube video yesterday, it simulated a nuke explosion but looked very laggy guess the smoke effect is dragging the card's performance. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RySgaWAsS4M This game requires good video as well as good CPU to run. By the way, if you go to http://www.guru3d.com website, you will get a pretty good sense of frame rate of any games. Anything less than 30 is basically undesirable for gameplay.

I intend to get a Fighter Stick of CH Products. Just like to confirm if the Hat switch can be used to replace the mouse for moving views around inside the cockpit? Also want to know if the Hat switch is defaulted to that function. Anyone who has the experience of using this stick and can provide the information will be greatly appreciated.

I bought the toy. I also bought TrackIR 4 Pro, it is a wonderful invention really. BUt as far as the Fighter Stick, I am a bit disappointed. I use the hat switch for other functions which should give me 8, but it is easy to press the UP, RIGHT, DOWN and LEFT but for the remaining four it's very very hard to get hold of. So practically, there are only [16+3 (excluding button3)] X 3 = 57 functions to play around with!! I thought I would have 128 buttons??

Say I have a TrackIR, now I can save up the hat switch for 4 more other commands. Are there really 176 programmable functions there? There are 4 four-way switches plus I believ another 4 buttons. So I can only programme 16+4=20 functions how come in the spec it says 176 functions?

Just bought this great invention, pffff! very expensive though. Jumped into SFP1 right away to see the fun playing this thingy. Updated to the latest software already. But having trouble calibrating the device. How calibration is done or no calibration is required. Great trouble in pitching up. It is not pitching up at all, and I thought a slight movement to the left or right will be enlarged by he thing but it requires me to swing my head fully to the right or left and I lost my sight of the screen.. How this thing is operated?

I have fixed the problem! Detached it from my headset and held it in my hand then lined it up with the receiver. I found the trouble was the receiver was placed much lower vertically to the clip. When I weared in the headset, the clip was inclined backwards away from the receiver. So these 2 mistakes made up for the unstable motion and also no pitching up. No I have to wear the headset properly in the sense that the clip is horizontal lined up with the receiver. And I used two paper cubes to raise the height of the receiver so it levels with the clip. It works seamlessly smooth now ingame!!!! This thing is fantastic I tell ya. I really love it. BY the way Migbuster, what does the orange light do? What happens if it lights up?

I saw a demo by a guy from NaturalPoint from Youtube. He placed the receiver to the left of his monitor. . And as you can see, as he moves, the view moves smoothly. What I am getting right now is that TrackIR keeps on returning to its centered view. I moved my head tot he right say, the view moved along and not long before TrackIR lost the side view and returned to its centered view. I am also getting the problem that TrackIR doesn't pitch up. This is what I've got

Is there such a tool which would allow me to see all the SAM and AAA distribution? Then I can use it to change an AAA to a SAM or vice-versa?

Wrench, Would the Terrai Editor come in to use for moving the SAM or AAA around using a GUI as it provides?

In the folder ...\Strategy First\Strike Fighters\Speech, there is a file known as T1tacc001.wav. It says "Red Crown". I think you may create a recorded sound clip of whatever you want and save to this file name. Don't forget to back up the original file.

I have a different experience. My CPU is Pentium D 945 overclocked to 3.4GHz. 2GB DDR RAM. X1950 Pro 512MB. Used FRAPS to measure frame rates. Graphics settings set to High, frame rates vary from 20 ~ 29. This is independent on resolution. When Graphics settings set to Medium, frame rate stays at 60!! No matter how much I zoom out from inside the cockpit, whatever on the groud, buildings no buildings, vehicles war....even when I flew through / inside the thick clouds, it drops slightly to 59 at times but most of he times it holds at 60. I switched to Optimal Quality basically means 6XAA, 16XAF with temporal Anti-Aliasing on, and the frame rate remains at a miracle 60 again, independent of resolution!!! And one thing is I find the image of ATi card is absolutely beautiful. There is no shadow problem by the way. It is exciting to hear that 4850 is performing. I believe you could try bring in another 4850 and Crossfire it to see if the coding of TW series caters for CrossFire configuration. I tend to conclude that TW games if CPU bounded.

In the file, you have SAMLauncher for example in the code below. Now the question is how does the game know which SAMLauncher to use? [TargetArea049] Name=Suran Position=622000.00,508000.00 Radius=10000 ActiveYear=0 Location=2 Alignment=ENEMY Target[001].Type=CommBuilding1 Target[001].Offset=3928.10,-5964.80 Target[001].Heading=0 Target[002].Type=CityBuilding3 Target[002].Offset=-2000.00,0.00 Target[002].Heading=90 Target[003].Type=CityBuilding2 Target[003].Offset=5525.60,-3005.40 Target[003].Heading=90 Target[004].Type=CityBuilding2 Target[004].Offset=5420.80,-4758.00 Target[004].Heading=0 Target[005].Type=Warehouse1 Target[005].Offset=1352.88,4689.94 Target[005].Heading=0 Target[006].Type=mosque1 Target[006].Offset=192.60,-364.50 Target[006].Heading=90 Target[007].Type=mosque1 Target[007].Offset=-6379.20,1780.10 Target[007].Heading=90 Target[008].Type=CityBuilding1 Target[008].Offset=-7149.30,1897.40 Target[008].Heading=0 Target[009].Type=CityBuilding1 Target[009].Offset=-5912.50,-3155.10 Target[009].Heading=90 Target[010].Type=CityBuilding1 Target[010].Offset=-33.93,1949.40 Target[010].Heading=180 Target[011].Type=CityBuilding1 Target[011].Offset=949.10,1946.90 Target[011].Heading=270 Target[012].Type=Crane Target[012].Offset=1421.50,4960.40 Target[012].Heading=310 Target[013].Type=Crane Target[013].Offset=-592.00,4922.00 Target[013].Heading=310 Target[014].Type=Warehouse1 Target[014].Offset=-643.38,4688.09 Target[014].Heading=0 Target[015].Type=Warehouse1 Target[015].Offset=3837.20,-5947.00 Target[015].Heading=-90 Target[016].Type=CityBuilding2 Target[016].Offset=5148.10,-1913.60 Target[016].Heading=90 Target[017].Type=CityBuilding2 Target[017].Offset=5470.40,565.50 Target[017].Heading=270 Target[018].Type=mosque1 Target[018].Offset=3735.30,-4989.30 Target[018].Heading=90 Target[019].Type=mosque1 Target[019].Offset=3963.10,1908.00 Target[019].Heading=90 Target[020].Type=CityBuilding2 Target[020].Offset=2460.40,3476.80 Target[020].Heading=0 Target[021].Type=CityBuilding2 Target[021].Offset=-1950.80,2183.90 Target[021].Heading=90 Target[022].Type=CityBuilding2 Target[022].Offset=-5136.30,-105.40 Target[022].Heading=90 Target[023].Type=mosque2 Target[023].Offset=-53.00,2408.80 Target[023].Heading=90 Target[024].Type=mosque2 Target[024].Offset=-7457.90,-4367.90 Target[024].Heading=90 Target[025].Type=CityBuilding3 Target[025].Offset=-1931.40,-5878.60 Target[025].Heading=180 Target[026].Type=mosque2 Target[026].Offset=82.50,-4263.50 Target[026].Heading=180 Target[027].Type=AAA Target[027].Offset=1926.40,5244.00 Target[027].Heading=0 Target[027].ActiveYear=1961 Target[028].Type=AAA Target[028].Offset=332.10,5200.80 Target[028].Heading=0 Target[028].ActiveYear=1961 Target[029].Type=AAA Target[029].Offset=-1632.00,5236.00 Target[029].Heading=0 Target[029].ActiveYear=1968 Target[030].Type=EWR Target[030].Offset=3571.20,-8496.50 Target[030].Heading=270 Target[031].Type=AAA Target[031].Offset=3264.90,-8476.90 Target[031].Heading=315 Target[032].Type=AAA Target[032].Offset=3791.20,-8546.80 Target[032].Heading=135 Target[032].ActiveYear=1966 Target[033].Type=AAA Target[033].Offset=3853.50,-6189.30 Target[033].Heading=225 Target[033].ActiveYear=1967 Target[034].Type=SAMRadar Target[034].Offset=-4336.00,-7221.00 Target[034].Heading=45 Target[034].ActiveYear=1966 Target[035].Type=SAMLauncher Target[035].Offset=-4436.00,-7046.00 Target[035].Heading=330 Target[035].ActiveYear=1966 Target[036].Type=SAMLauncher Target[036].Offset=-4236.00,-7046.00 Target[036].Heading=30 Target[036].ActiveYear=1966 Target[037].Type=SAMLauncher Target[037].Offset=-4136.00,-7221.00 Target[037].Heading=90 Target[037].ActiveYear=1966 Target[038].Type=SAMLauncher Target[038].Offset=-4536.00,-7221.00 Target[038].Heading=270 Target[038].ActiveYear=1966 Target[039].Type=SAMLauncher Target[039].Offset=-4236.00,-7396.00 Target[039].Heading=150 Target[039].ActiveYear=1966 Target[040].Type=SAMLauncher Target[040].Offset=-4436.00,-7396.00 Target[040].Heading=210 Target[040].ActiveYear=1966 Target[041].Type=AAA Target[041].Offset=-4340.00,-7297.00 Target[041].Heading=315 Target[041].ActiveYear=1966 Target[042].Type=watertower1 Target[042].Offset=-2598.00,-6028.00 Target[042].Heading=180 Target[043].Type=oiltank1 Target[043].Offset=-366.00,5020.00 Target[043].Heading=0 Target[044].Type=oiltank1 Target[044].Offset=-313.00,5024.00 Target[044].Heading=0 Target[045].Type=oiltank1 Target[045].Offset=-292.00,5064.00 Target[045].Heading=0 Target[046].Type=GeneratorBuilding1 Target[046].Offset=-1469.88,4991.97 Target[046].Heading=270