Gunrunner

I never really clicked with LOMAC/FC/DCS, the time period, the plane selection, the place on the survey/study scale and more importantly, the fact that unlike SF I can't have a quick game only playing with a keyboard (yes, I am an heretic). However the direction DCS World is taking is very interesting, but not as a SF replacement at the moment. Having TW switch to providing 60's/70's modules for DCS World would be nice, but I'm sure that, beyond the money problem, TK would not be interested in that as it would remove the "fun" part of the coding from his point of view.

Mirror, you mean like... Reverse=TRUE ? However, I still can't visualize what you're trying to do... maybe something more concrete would bring other suggestions.

RS, so what ? Some people donate to charity because they believe in it, others donate only for tax purpose and to look good, does that change the fact that it helps ? Some people follow the laws because it's beyond their programming to do otherwise, others do it because they fear the consequences of not doing it, others do it simply because the law aligns with their self interest, does the motivation matter to the end result ? If as inmates they are able to make the ethical calculation that they have more to gain being on the side of law and order than against, there may be hope that they'll understand the same applies on the outside.

Brillant ! But... Animations are screwed up because GroupAnimation doesn't seem to work the way you think. From testing GroupAnimation ONLY works IF all stations members of the group use the same animation AND are loaded, otherwise the GroupAnimation statement is ignored (I've confirmed that with the Arrow having both missiles and bombs loaded and working, and the Lightning only having one rocket pack loaded and failing to work). Here since you load either the missiles or the bombs, GroupAnimation is ignored and thus, the animation being declared last for bombs, it's completely ignored when missiles are loaded and they shoot through the plane. So to make it work it's either back to duplicating animations or getting rid of the bombs (I haven't tested changing the bomb bays to manual bomb animation).

You have to admit that was a devious one... In the meantime, let me propose another....

Yep, finally gave in to curiosity too, that was a tricky one, I've learnt something today.

British, probably mid-40's... prototype or only low-volume production I guess, the wings are not right for it to be a Blenheim modification, something to replace the Blenheim and Beaufighter perhaps ? I've never seen that one before.

With a big enough blender... But still, I don't know if it's the perspective, the paint job or the lack of refuel probe but the nose seems somehow "wrong", too long, too pointy, too downward sloping...

Well, since no one seems motivated... in the meantime I'll leave that here :

Thanks I'll have to test that, it used to be that way, but I had to resort to blank files recently, maybe it's changed back... I'll never understand why TK messes with priorities on a regular basis.

Derk, since you were close on mine too, your turn to offer us a challenge.

Well, since no one else seems to play... I'll say, Able Mable, maybe ? Not sure though.

Yep, doesn't work anymore for campaigns only, neither with the campaignx.ini or campaignx_data.ini. However, it still works fine for terrains, so if you disable a terrain, all related campaigns will disappear as well (and it will make it quicker), at least until a next patch.

I'll check on my side, maybe one of the latest patch changed to file priority behaviour and I haven't noticed.

You should have the SF2 extractor ready if you don't know the campaign identifiers (the campaigns are stored inside the Flight/MissionData[xxx].cat files). In our case we know that Burning Sands is Campaign1 (from opening MissionData001.cat). So in your mod folder you should create the empty file (and necessary folders) in "Strike Fighters 2 Vietnam/campaigns/campaign1/campaign1.ini". Next time you launch the game it will know there is a campaign1, will want to read it's detail, will find them empty and will ignore completely. I hope that was easy enough to understand. You will want to do that for : campaign1 to campaign5 (SF2) campaigne1 to campaigne4 (SF2E+Exp2) campaigni1 to campaigni4 (SF2I+Exp1) campaignna1 (SF2NA) as well as for the terrains by creating empty files named : terrains/desert/desert.ini terrains/germanyce/germanyce.ini terrains/israelme/israelme.ini terrains/icelandna/icelandna.ini I usually also do that with planes themselves and some weapons, using the same principle.

Yes, put an empty file with the name of the campaign in you mod folder and the game will ignore the campaign entirely, the same can be done with terrains, planes and weapons. Do you need more details on how to proceed ?

Close... The one in the picture is in fact a HD.321 used during the Suez Crisis and the War in Algeria, you can distinguish it from earlier HD.31 and HD.32 by it's single large tail instead of a twin tail and from the later HD.34 thank to it's shorter nose, nose wheel at the front, compared to the longer glass nose of the HD.34 with its nose wheel further back.

Craig, it should be your turn to submit one... well, guess I'll fill the gap in the meantime... and I propose :

Wait, does the 4 decals limit still apply ? I thought it went away some time ago...

Brain, these variants nevertheless require work and the original calculation already takes into account the variants themselves (but not yearly variations) rather than only the basic models (unless my top of the head plane counting was way off).

Doesn't quite compute outside of SF2 unless one is willing to consider that in the DCS series a flyable plane is worth $22.5, interesting exercise but not necessarily a useful metric. It serves however to put the price of full planes DLC into perspective.

What do you call a "personal attack", disagreeing on something and motivating that disagreement with facts and rational arguments ? Grow up will you ! Of course it is personal, the man is spewing lies, either deliberate or through sheer ignorance or mental issues; doing so he is implicitly and at times explicitly insulting people not sharing his opinion as well as propagating ideas entirely removed from facts. Even if he does so based on ideals I share, it doesn't mean he should not be ridiculed for it. You can't dissociate the speech from the speaker. What exactly is out of context, enlighten me... are yesterday's posts that old, especially when it IS the subject of this thread ? Just because I'm forced to recognize the member in question has not made a valid point doesn't mean he's right... Calling the individual in question a "son of a whore", now that would be an unsubstantiated claim, an insult and entirely irrelevant to the topic at hand, it would be indeed stupid and gratuitous and make me a complete asshole. Calling him an idiot or a troll because it is easily demonstrated (as I did for most of his point, until he decided to claim I was misinterpreting his questions and objections, because you know, he is necessarily right, so if you disagree and object, it's obviously because you are too stupid to understand him) that he bases his vitriol on very poor research, faulty logic, self-centered bias, self-aggrandizing and immunity to facts is actually a very tame way of describing what he is... The logic he showed so far would be right at home with the "but Evolution is only a theory you know" crowd.

I think it's older than that in the SF community and originated on TW boards when TK used to give us "two weeks" as an answer frequently (I think it was about the release of WoE, but I may be wrong on that one)... Add a little Total Recall geekery and the adoption of the answer by many modders and there you have it.

The reason is not the difference of opinion, but the fact that 1) it was going nowhere and 2) that the OP wasn't here for an exchange of opinion but to deliver his absolute truth and belittle those not sharing it... and when someone like myself intervenes, it's a recipe for trouble and a mod decided to close it down before things became hairy and someone not ready for it made a complete fool of himself; That was the right decision. I'll reiterate, my problem is not with "I don't like digital distribution services (from now on DDS)" but "I blame DDS for all the wrong things, most of which are simply lies and imaginary, and just can't admit I was wrong". It never was about DDS, it was all about said member self-aggrandizing and showing contempt to people disagreeing with him, he did not want to listen to reason, he just wanted to show what a brilliant individual and rebellious mind he was, far too good to use DDS, in opposition to the masses of blind idiots disagreeing with him. He bragged about his ridiculous hardware setup (come on, 4 low capacity SSDs in a RAID 0 ? 8Go of high latency OCed RAM ? what is he, 12 ?**), about the perspective supposedly given by his age, when that didn't work he switched to bragging about the "great" people he supposedly knew, when that didn't work he tried evasively to brag about his own accomplishments (without any solid information in case we could verify them or use them against him later when he'll claim something else). There is also a cultural difference with what you call "name-calling", but I guess that's to be expected when painting millions of people with a wide brush as complete morons but not saying so directly is OK, but telling one individual making no reasonable arguments or using obvious lies that he is behaving like a complete idiot is out of the question... ** Let me explain that one, said member pretended being a hardware enthusiast and expert, having come to his current configuration through a lot of thought, research and testing. With the kind of SSD he uses, the life-expectancy is inversely proportional to the capacity of the drive, so he deliberately chose the drive with the lowest life-expectancy. With the kind of SSD he uses, the price-per-capacity sweet-spot is, depending on when and where he bought them, in the 60 to 240Go range, meaning that he is relatively paying more for less by going with the lowest capacity. With the kind of SSD he uses, the drives performance of the lowest capacity drives are inferior to the other drives in the family. Due to the SATA controller he is using and Windows 7 way of dealing with SSD, the read/write performance boost of RAID 0 SSD is denied by performance hits under certain kind of load, meaning that with his setup, he's getting less performance when most needed (One should note however that his choice of another SSD based solution for hosting his games was very good as it is suffering far less from such drawback). To my knowledge, the particular controller for his system RAID array still doesn't allow the use of TRIM, meaning degrading performances over time as files are modified/deleted, which is a common occurrence on a system drive. In short, had he gone for a RAID 0 array of 3x 60Go drives, he would have had equal or better performances, for 50% more capacity, a longer life expectancy for only a handful of dollars more. Or he could have gone with a 120Go to 240Go single drive, at the cost of reduced theoretical peak performance and average performance but equal or greater capacity, better practical peak performance, better life expectancy, better performance over time, and far less money (as the dedicated controller would not be needed). Of course that last solution sounds far less bad-ass and would yield only around 7.2-7.5 WEI and that would be unacceptable (remember, the global WEI is the lowest subsystem WEI). Now, to the RAM... There are HUGE price differences when it comes to the frequency supported and the OC supported. He decided to go with a modest amount of high-speed RAM and OC it. Trouble is, frequency is not the only parameter affecting RAM performance in a system. Memory also has timings, let's make it simple by saying that frequency determines how often RAM talks/transmits to the rest of the system and timings determines how long it takes between receiving an order and executing it. Usually, the higher the frequency, the higher the timings. Some platforms and workload benefit from timings more than from frequency, others are the exact reverse and many are more sensitive to the capacity, regardless of memory performance. On current Intel gaming platforms... timings are the most crucial element, with frequency having far less impact unless you go really high, and even then, you are better served by going for low-frequency, low-timing memory as 1) it's more stable 2) it requires less current and thus 3) it heats up significantly less 4) It's cheaper allowing you to field more capacity. Once again, a bad decision due to the fact that he wanted something "top-of-the-line", he would have been better served by 16Go of low-latency, low frequency RAM, twice the capacity for up to half the price, however that wouldn't have allowed him to overclock his CPU (but who still cares about that ?). Likewise, such a real-life performance based RAM configuration would yield a lower WEI... One must assume that the careful thinking went more into optimizing theoretical benchmark bragging rights rather than adapting the hardware to the intended use and getting the most coherent configuration for the most stability, heat dissipation and money spent.

And what if Ed Roberts was a family friend, how does that make YOU in any way competent or knowledgeable ? Does one man's accomplishment by some magic rubs off on people he happens to know ? What sort of logic and appeal to authority is that ? Should I take credit for the accomplishments of friends, relatives, professors, colleagues as well or does that rule only apply to you ? As for your claim of being a hardware enthusiast just because you think that throwing money and childish tricks will make you a "power user", let's not get into that, I don't want to grow contemptuous, clearly we don't belong nearly in the same computing culture, in my world, computers are above all work tools, not the latest way to compare penises, stability and adequation to the workload are more important than theoretical peak-performance. But just one thing... since when assembling a modern computer is "building your own hardware" ? I'm giving you facts, I'm countering your arguments one by one and still you refuse to admit that you are mistaken in both your target and analysis and keep on piling up more strawmen, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and swims like a duck, I think I might allow myself to call it a duck.