Giorgio262

Perfect post, in my opinion. Also it would be ideal if families were given assistance in the upbringing of their children. Any fertile couple of idi**s can make a child, being a good parent, a good guide for a child, is a completely different story and an infinitely harder job. Freedom is preserved when everyone respects and understands the others, not when they refrein from hurting others because they're afraid of the punishment they would get if caught. One may be seduced by the idea that mandatory military service could do miracles because he's thinking in terms of healing bad apples. What if we could help prevent apples to turn bad with good education and support? Wouldn't that be better?

I'm somewhat allergic to alchool. I've got a couple of bottles of beer here at home. Zero % alchool. What about that!

I whish I'm not going too off topic here, but as for the opinion you expressed, and I feel is well compressed in the first phrase I quoted, I'd like to say that just because a system seems to work for some time, it doesn't mean it works just as well in the long term. It's easier to get oportunities for those who got rich before, so there's the risk of serious monopoly and concentration of wealth on the hands of a very small elite, which is seriously unhealthy for any nation. No need to talk about socialism or anything here, but public insitutions are there (or, rather, should be there) for the people, to help to set fair rules, to help a nation develop in a sustainable and fair way. Doesn't mean the Government should feed freeloaders, or encourage people to become freeloaders, but a civilized country, a truly civilized country makes sure that a minimum standard is available for all its citizens. As far as I know private healthcare is just a way for Health Insurances to make money by scaring people and then doing their best not to give their customers what they've been paying their good money for when they really need their service. I suspect private healthcare was never a system introduced to benefit people. Selfishness is an extremely expensive commodity. Definitely having the best people to be politicians would be the best, unfortunately in most cases, the game of politics makes the worst emerge.

Reading this thread I get the feeling our American friends are planning to export a lot more democracy in the future. Is that so? Keeping the military force in good shape with good equipment is ok, but you may want to refrein from spending too much especially in areas of marginal importance, since it's all taxpayers' money taken away form other uses. Think about what's wrong or inadequate in the USA and could use a bit more investing from the Government. I believe for too long certain lobbies fed the fear for their own economical advatage. Arming up during the cold war era to face what was presented as a terrible enemy always ready to start a fight armed up to its teeth, while, probably, the USSR was pretty much dragged into this escalation, never able to touch the US in terms of technological progress. In the end the US ended up selling its military products to a lot of countries. War as an industry and fear as a way to keep it going.

Clearly this whole situation is a consequence of the new scenario resulting from the end of the cold war and the emerging of more elusive enemies like terrorists. Like you can get very powerful cannons to scare elephants, but it won't do much to bugs who would just flip some finger and keep on flying around. I think the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are desperate tentatives to deal with new enemies in an older fashion, one which, incidentaly, is pretty remunerative for the defense industry. I think it also made clear that there are huge economical powers and interests at work behind conflicts: corporations lobbying around to keep their business going, eager to prove how necessary it is to have lots of weapons and to be ready to fight. There's not so much interest in peace ...like you can't make much money by printing rainbow flags. There's just not enough room for R&D there, I suppose. War keeps the economy going, apparently. So when there are no enemies in sight, somebody has to make them. Much like software houses developing anti-malware software: they need a steady flow of new viruses and stuff to keep their business going, so one might even think they could acutally spend on R&D there as well. As for North Korea, just like Iran, I think all their "showing muscles policy", meaning the nukes and missile tests is partly meant to send a message to the international community, to be taken in consideration, and, possibly, in an even larger part for the benefit of their internal politics. These kind of dicatatorships and similar regimes, need a strong cause to keep their people united, to justify the oppressive rules and laws. Political regimes that survive by creating a constant state of pre-war. And for some governments to be granted the possibility to purchase some F-22s could actually be more a matter of international prestige rather than the most effective response to a real operational need. Anyway AFAIK the US have signed some agreement (at Dayton or something?) that states that what military equipment they sell to Israel they have to offer it to Egypt and other surrounding arab countries as well. So I suppose they may not want to sell the F-22 to anybody in the middle east. As for everything else, please, correct me me if I'm wrong.

Thanks for your kind answer EricJ. It's just that extracting original files with "SFP1E Extract utility" I didn't notice any special .ini settings for default TW tanks and given that some add-on planes have reflective, bare metal tanks, I was under the impression that having them flat right in the modelling process was somewhat of a default procedure people was not even questioning at all. I see several modders strive for hyper realistic planes and sometimes I feel they could get a better balance with a little less polygons on the models, smaller skins and decals and perhaps just a little more precision on the 3d model so to avoid damaged shadows (like those affected by the "black spike syndrome"). Sometimes nice lighting settings and a neat shadow can do miracles in terms of perceived graphic realism. Just compare a picture of a high res model with shadows off to a lower res model with working shadows on. Anyway I understand it's always hard to read the attitude of people through a post. it's most likely we will end up projecting our own feelings and perhaps give written words a smug or even offensive attitude that was not necessarily intended. Rest assured I intended not to offend or hurt anybody. I've being downloading and using many add-ons for both LOMAC and TW games from this website in the last few months, and I'm greatful for all of them, I just felt like writing a couple of words on a few subjects, that's it. Sometimes looking at the great job you've done so far it feels like some smallish things could be fixed with a very small marginal effort. Although perhaps you're right Dave, perhaps not knowing all that's behind your work I tend to underestimate the amount of time, the effort and the abilities required to do an add-on aircraft. Perhaps I underestimate that sometimes it gets to a point where one is so exhausted that even the idea of spending another hour on a subject is simply unbearable. Bye and have a nice day :)

These new Super Hornets are just fabulous. They're so detailed I end up spending most of the time looking around them with the external cameras, taking pictures, then looking at them over and over, rather than just flying these things. And is during one of these explorations I noticed a strange "bug" on its shadow. The model lets the engine of the game (in my case WOE) model the shadow rather than using a .shd shadow model, which is usually fine, provided the model doesn't have gaps, which usually produce the well known and pretty hideous black spikes connecting the aircraft to its shadow. In this case there are no "black spikes", but there's some strange behaviour of the generated shadows of the lower fuselage of these F\A-18. I just don't know whether it's just something that happens on my pc or if it's actually a charachteristic of this 3d model. To cut it short, it looks like the air intakes and the lower part of the fuselage don't cast any shadow. They receive shadows from other parts of the 3d model but don't cast their own. It appears (at least on my pc) the only parts casting shadows on the lower half of the airplane are the arrestor hook and the doors of the main landing gear. I would just like to know if this is a known issue, or some glitch that only I experience, and if it's known if there are any plans to get rid of it. Another curiosity of mine is about the external fuel tanks. As with many other add-on aircrafts they're pretty flat to light. While one can change light reflection settings for the FA-18 (and several extra skins for it implement more reflective settings), its tanks stay completely flat. If possible, it would be nice to have some reflections on the external tanks as well. Thanks.

Great shape, perhaps only the canopy could be more "precise", with a more round cross-section maybe. But the engine textures on the top, between the rudders look a bit misplaced or perhaps undersized and placed a bit too near the longitudinal axis of the plane if compared to other Flankers you released. Nothing serious actually, I think I'll try and change it myself, see how it looks like. Also on you're Flankers I noticed the rectangular dielectric just aft of the nose radome are always missing on the textures. Is it perhaps because it's a delicate area on your model, subject to texture deformations, and these rectangular bits would look all deformed? So perhaps you deliberately chose not to depict them? Apart from these and a few other smallish issues I like it very much. Thanks.

What a real beauty this is. My only perplexity lays in the choice you made to set some parts, black parts, to be flat. Flat black paint in the real world is not enough to have a real flat, light absorbing surface (such as I can see from the pictures of this A-7K I took in game), let alone on parts of an airplane constantly brushed by air and weathering agents throughout its operational life. Complete flat black is just not realistic. Honestly it ruins an otherwise perfect creation. The same issue is somewhat common on other otherwise excellent birds, I believe. Like, for example, on the exhaust terminals of M.F.'s F\A-18A, and the black nose radome of the A-6 from Third Wire. I think all these and other planes as well would look better if they didn't have such parts set to flat in their respective 3d models. Same goes for many add-on weapons and fuel tanks.

Compared to pictures of the real plane, the bubble glass nose should have a round base section: http://www.easypedia.gr/el/images/shared/1...ic.6112.arp.jpg as opposed to: http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/2590/20090406img00006.jpg But, I guess, fixing just this issue would be a very hard and long process. Also a pity this Atlantic doesn't have a flawless 3d shadow due to a few small gaps or imperfections in the model. Personally I also preferred to use the semi-transparent glass .tga files from another plane. I'm talking about the one used on the Su-30 as well as on several other planes. You should see it from the screenshot I posted above, and this one below, also showing the elegant shape and livery on the Atlantic: http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/3224/20090406img00007.jpg In general I noticed a lot of planes benefit from the use of darker glass .tga files in terms of visual realism. I really think it's a better compromise than those almost white glass parts. Try for example to give darker glass to some C-130. Hope nobody feels disturbed by my post. I'm new to this forum and really wouldn't want to hurt nobody's feelings by popping out of nowhere with comments on other people's hard work.

Me too I have an (old, since it's a 9600xt) Ati card and I could see the clipping isssue. That said, I Whish to thank the author for this awesome add-on. It's really a HUGE improvement over the original files. It's a real joy to fly through the clouds now, and the sunshine; Oh, the sunshine, just great!

Having so many variants of hte Foxbat is great. I'm just sorry that somewhere on the nose there must be a small flaw in the model (just like in the previous Mig25 add-on) which seems to be affecting the 3d shadow. Using the .shd file included in the package doesn't solve the problem. A pity, really, since the 3d shadows contribute significantly to graphic realism.

post edited. I found the solution to my problem in the next page of search results, so no need for this post anymore. But I couldn't find a "delete post" button. Anyway, just a newbie doing clumsy newbie things. Have anice day.