Gunrunner

There is a problem with the AI and missiles. 1) The AI can't use Laser weapons (well, that's not entirely true, under specific conditions your wingmen might use them, but not always, and no other AI plane, it's better to avoid them for AI use). 2) The AI uses the RocketAttackAI statements of their DATA.ini to attack, which means that while it is suited for rockets, it usually fails for modern, long range missiles. 3) Modifying the RocketAttackAI statement means you will tailor it for a certain range-class of missiles but means the AI won't correctly handle rockets and classes of missiles requiring another attack profile. You could tailor planes to have a better attack profile for Mavericks, but then the planes won't be able to have an efficient dumb rocket attack, or missiles with a different profile requirement. The parameters in the plane's DATA.INI are (values are there as an example for dumb rockets, not missiles) : [RocketAttackAI] RollInRange=8000.0 RollInAlt=1400.0 PullOutRange=900.0 PullOutAlt=200.0 ReleaseRange=2000.0 SecondPassRange=4500.0 SecondPassAlt=750.0 ReleaseCount=16 ReleaseInterval=0.08 AimPitchOffset=0.6 Everything is in meters, except ReleaseCount (in number of weapons fired), ReleaseInterval (in seconds) and Aim PitchOffset (in degrees). RollInRange and RollInAlt are the distance to target and altitude the AI tries to reach before starting its attack pattern. PullOutRange and PullOutAlt are the distance to target and altitude from which the AI will break out of its attack pattern. ReleaseRange is the distance to target at which the AI will try to fire its rocket/missiles. SecondPassRange and SecondPassAlt are the parameters for an eventual second (or subsequent passes), useful if you want to have a first pass at long range but don't want to wait for the AI to go all the way back to do another pass if the missile can be launched at closed range. ReleaseCount is the number of missiles launched per attack run, ReleaseInterval is the interval between each release. AimPitchOffset is for dumb rockets, and the number of degrees above or below the target the AI should fire (to attack for gravity and the pitch angle of rocket attachments), it's mostly useless for guided missiles. In the example above that means the AI will try to be 8km away from its target, at an altitude of 1400m, then will dive toward it, aiming 0.6° above and firing 16 rockets, 1 every 0.08 seconds when it is 2km away from the target. I can't remember if the PullOut values are the limits after which the plane disengage or a target to reach after firing. Once disengaged from it's first pass, if the AI still can fire the same ordnance it will try to get 4.5km away from the target, at an altitude of 750m and repeat the process. What happens in your case is probably that the plane tries to use the default, suited for dumb rockets, attack profile, meaning by the time it tries to fire the Maverick, it's already closer than the MiniLaunchRange for the missile, hence the passes without firing. The slamming into the ground might be solved by changing the PullOut parameters. The failure to call Rifle though is a bug that probably can't be solved that way and is probably tied to the number of sound voices playable simultaneously and their priority.

Congrats guys on this well deserved recognition.

Won't help, the WW2GunnerCB model is facing backward at the LOD level. We have a handful of these and even fewer facing right or left, but that means not a huge choice of pilots and you're stuck with the orientations set in the LOD, on the plus side, they have animated heads, provided they use the right node names. The rear gunner entry is to animate the gun (or whatever, but a node of the plane LOD) and the limits of its animation, this has no influence on the pilot model. Some modders get away with it by making seats and pilots part of the plane LOD (but if you are working at that level, using a custom properly orientated pilot LOD is a better choice with greater flexibility and reusability, but less flexible skinning options).

If you don't mind it not being animated, yes, as weapons (but that consumes two weapons slot and you need to put them on group 7 and force load them in your loadout file), otherwise it's the model orientation, there is no angle option for pilots and seats to my knowledge. You'll need to create them as ECM pods or fuel tanks (in which case make sure the station are set to NoJettisionTank=TRUE, unless you want to be able to "eject" them).

Unfortunately Razbam's models are no longer for sale and they broke their promise to deliver existing customers shadow-fixed LODs before closing their Strike Fighters "production line". They were good for the era, but have almost all been replaced by either TK's or the community's alternatives, including for the pits, or have unfixed problems. The Banshee is about the only thing we don't have a replacement for but it's kind of a niche plane. YAP is a mixed bag, some aircrafts we already have, others are outdated, some are pretty fine. Unfortunately they're all to SF1 standard so might require some adaptation, plus most textures have everything baked in, making it not always that simple to reuse them for something not intended without some serious skinning work. Some of the helos are interesting but we've been spoiled by Yakarov on that front already and it requires some work to get YAP's helos to his standard, but it's mostly the various ground objects, carriers and ships that can become very interesting. Also, YAP's way of downloading files and handling updates is... let's say... primitive... which is fine, it's not their job, but it can get infuriating at time.

Well, this community is over 15 years old now and most modders still don't use a proper code editor (come on, Notepad++ is great) to edit INI files, don't use proper comments (no, you don't comment on the same line you barbarian, looking at you Wrench ), don't use a diff/merge tool (come on, WinMerge is free), don't use version control (come on, Subversion with TortoiseSVN is easy to pick up) and even worse, many still don't use Mue's wonderful tools. I mean, we're 15 years in, and we still don't have a wiki to document the folder and file structure, what each and every file and folder are, what they do, what each line in each file does... We're 15 years in, we finally have some "licencing" in place allowing the community to pick up where the last modders stopped (with some noticeable exceptions for more or less valid reasons), but we still don't have a Subversion (because Git isn't made for projects with large binaries, don't make that mistake) server for projects under that licence. It's not necessarily that they don't know that these tools exist or don't know how to use them, but for most it's just that it's a hobby and they don't feel like working on it as if it were a job, and I certainly can't blame them... I mean, I know exactly what to do, how to do it, I do it on a small scale for my own installs, but I don't have the time or energy to set it up or organise it for the community. There, that's my frustration, and I'm not really holding it against modders, I mean, I'm not doing anything to solve this situation even though I could, so I'll just shut up now.

Thanks, another option is that it is scaremongering and political games. 1) Screw up the crisis response with an incompetent irresponsible plan. 2) Announce an inflated number of predicted deaths. 3) Finally enact some reasonable measures. 4) When the crisis ends and the numbers are lower than your inflated expectations, pretend you won the crisis and saved lives, hoping the electorates forgets that in actuality you screwed up and sacrificed more lives than necessary.

Do you have a source for that ? I read the 20k estimate for the best case scenario but failed to find that 200k estimate yet. Anyway I can confirm that Amazon is somewhat impacted as I was due to return damaged products but they contacted me to tell me they weren't in capacity to manage the return and I'd get reimbursed without the need for return, which I suspect means the center my package should have gone to was closed. I suspect this will increase as 16k out of 17k post offices in France are now closed, making it near impossible for anyone other than companies with contracts to expedite packages larger than a shoebox in some metropolitan areas, or at all in the rest of the country (it would take me a bit under an hour to reach the closest open post office).

France here, slooowly going into "full lockdown", only delayed about two weeks from what it should have been because some muppets kicked up a fuss about postponing mayoral elections (facepalm, prioririties people, priorities). Kindergarten, schools and universities have been closed since saturday, retirement homes are on lockdown and the rest of the country is preparing to officially be in a few hours. Idiots raid shelves only to have them filled again* in less than a day, others continue living as if nothing was happening, still shaking hands etc... until the last moment. The government is slowly taking over paying wages of people who can't telecommute and compensating small businesses and independents so as few as possible go under; Rent, taxes, loan repayments etc are or will be suspended for the duration, utility bills will be waved, most other european countries are preparing to do the same and we expect the European Central Bank to start printing money like mad, same as in the US. Things on the medical front are still somewhat holding except in eastern France (well, where Balto is) where some fucking evangelical gathering, despite warnings, started a cluster that's spreading like wildfire. The Army will set up a field hospital there to alleviate the situation as there are too many patients and transferring too many of them toward other regions would create cascading problems. Many people "flee" the big cities, at the risk of spreading the infection, but hoping for better quality of life should the lockdown take more than the three weeks announced so far (yeah, right... more like two month). Since most are either students leaving their 15m² "apartment" to go back to their parents home, or families with young children leaving the city to go to some family house in the country where the kids have space to play, I can't really be mad at them, especially considering we're at the stage where we should consider the virus already reached almost everywhere. The only downside is that they will increase the stress on medical staff in regions already under equipped for the regular population, potentially putting lives at risk. Me, not getting out of the house ? Avoiding human contact ? Working from home ? Muhahahahah, I've been training for this all my life. It's the US and UK I worry for... We have kind of screwed up our response to the crisis for idiotic reasons, especially with Italy giving us good examples of what works or not, but at least we're doing something and not expecting to let it run its course and let the plebs die, either literally or financially. * The shelf raiding being both for themselves and in some examples, a very entrepreneurial streak appears, stocking up on things in larger quantities they'll ever need, hoping to make a profit on the eventual black market with it if things come to this... I just love humanity.

Don't even bother with WinRAR, go for 7-Zip, it does RAR5 since version 15.something. Friends don't let friends use the RAR formats.

As far as I understand the location map either 1) is not fully implemented, 2) doesn't work or 3) is a deprecated test to avoid assigning things manually to a region in the TARGETS file. What it supposedly does is redundant with the Location key of a TargetArea definition in the TARGETS file.

Nice ! Any chance of getting a F1CR this time around ? I know I'm one of the very few caring about tactical recon, but still...

That's a new one to me, if you had the game freeze with the sound "hanging", sure, but if the game keeps on running, never saw that one yet, are you sure it happens only with SF2, or may it be a weird coincidence ? Could it be linked to remanent keys and other weird windows shortcuts ? Sometimes with Windows 10 when you keep some keys, or combination of keys pressed for a certain time or pressed in quick succession, it will pop up a menu asking you if you where intending to do some specific actions, sometime this pop up will remain in the background but be in focus, robbing the input from the foreground window (usually a fullscreen game) until either the timer expires, you somehow click blindly to dismiss it, or you press the right key to dismiss it. I've never had it happen with SF2 though but it's been a pain in my neck with some other games.

I think there is a more elegant way to do this but I'll have to check my installs to remember how I did it. If you are out of StationID and are fine with always having the LAU-105 (and maybe ACMI) on, you could replace these two Stations with FakePilot entries.

So, something like that ? It's a quick proof of concept using the stock A-10A (78) and uses 3 StationIDs (the single rail 2IR trick doesn't work the way I remembered). Files are minimally commented, search them for ";/!\" to find comments about changed or added parts. Keep in mind that due to the engine's limitation, you will lose player selectable weapon stations. If only GroupLimit worked with StationGroupIDs beyond 6. Objects.zip

Define a twin rail launcher with only one position defined (AFAIR that works, but that's only necessary if you don't hide the pylon from the player), add a new pylon for the ACMI pod, however it will require some trial and error to position it properly, of course that means you must have at least one free pylon position in the DATA ini. Ideally you would then put both these pylons hidden as part of Group 7 and use your loadout file to force them loading the way you want. I could whip up an example when I get more time if you have no clue what I'm talking about... are you trying to do so for TW's A-10 or one of the others ?

Hmmm, let's say, combining all binaries, tools, installs, storage and version controlled stores... Behold my insanity, mortals ! Files : 5 041 927 Folders : 361 580 Size : about 2.57TB And that's fairly conservative because the largest part resides on a compressed partition and half of it are archives (the largest being one 24GB file, which unarchived would be 160GB and about 400k files). To be fair, that also includes some research material mixed in. The oldest file is from January 2003 (Deuce's Euro Terrain). Even for the part that is properly tagged, indexed and linked to my search engine, it takes quite some time to find anything. Never worry about the space you devote to your hobbies, there's always a madman out there who will make you look reasonable. :D

Looking good. Yeah, the tailcode thing is weird, but every picture I could properly source seems to confirm it, but I've yet to find a picture with two B-26N of 1/71 showing their tailcode to be absolutely sure of it. One of the hypothesis, considering all pictures have a very small N (smaller than the numerical code), rather than the usual large letter, is that the N is not actually a tailcode, but something to indicate the aircraft is a B-26N.

In case it's needed, here's my translation/research dump so far October 1, 1958 Creation as Escadrille de Chasse de Nuit 1/71 (ECN 1/71) in Tébéssa (Algeria), using the means of the Escadre de Chasse 30 (EC 30) from Reims (France), inheriting the traditions of VB 135, receiving the radio callsign "Rengaine" but receiving no name Equipped with 6 MD 315R June 15, 1959 Move to Bône-les-Salines (Algeria) with permanent detachments to Oran, Méchéria, Tébéssa, El-Oued-Guelmar, Ouargla, Biskra and Bir-el-Ater September, 1959 Equipped with 6 MD 315R and 3 Meteor NF.11 January, 1960 Equipped with 9 MD 315R and 6 Meteor NF.11 May, 1961 Arrival of the first B-26N October, 1961 Retirement of the Meteor Equipped with 9 MD 315R and 6 B-26N November 4, 1961 Transformed into the Escadron de Chasse de Nuit 1/71 (ECN 1/71) July, 1962 Moved back to Reims (France) August 31, 1962 Dissolution of the unit Known planes Meteor NF.11 NF11-41 346-QN Meteor NF.11 NF11-19 346-QC Meteor NF.11 NF11-38 (?346-Q?)Z B-26N 42-32579 B-26N 44-34213 B-26N 43-22609 B-26N 44-35926 MD 315R 13 MD 315R 15 MD 315R 24 MD 315R 26 MD 315R 32 MD 315R 70 All B-26N have a N tailcode. Reminder, the Armée de l'Air's organization at the time (and still today), doesn't follow exactly the US/UK schemes; to simplify it's using the Escadrille/Escadron/Escadre levels, instead of the Squadron/Group/Wing ones. An Escadrille is a smaller unit than a Squadron, usually the equivalent of two flights. It's not a subdivision of an Escadron, but an Escadre, it's at the same level as the Escadron for most purposes, just a smaller unit. An Escadron is usually a larger unit than a Squadron, usually regrouping the equivalent of 2 to 4 Escadrilles, it's the new name of what was once known as a Groupe and is close to US WW2 Groups. An Escadron doesn't have Escadrille subdivisions on an organisational level, some may be considered to have Escadrilles, but mostly as a way to carry traditions of multiple units within a single organisational unit. An Escadre is the largest unit below the Commandement (at that time) and is roughly the equivalent of a Wing. In the present case, the change from an Escadrille to an Escadron is mostly administrative, apparently changing nothing in terms of personel or planes available. Sources : https://www.traditions-air.fr/unit/escadrille/escadrilledivers1.htm#EEC171 http://www.passionpourlaviation.fr/tag/escadrille-de-chasse-de-nuit/ http://www.deltareflex.com/unite/ecn71.pdf

Yup, Menrva is right, it was never named, like most ad-hoc squadrons raised for our decolonisation wars. Do you need help on documentation for ECN 1/71, I could spend some time tonight. As for the Matra 122, that doesn't sound right, to me the Matra 122 is the training, 7 rounds version of the Matra 155, it might have been used as an ad-hoc air-to-air weapon on planes without guns though (edit: checked, the Type 122 is exactly that, not a dedicated AA version, there doesn't seem to be a specific AA SNEB version).

1) The A-12 Avenger II was not from the TMF originally, it was released on the french community site, Check-Six, exclusively at first, but at least at the time rhugouvi wasn't part of the Mirage Factory. 2) Veltro's plane is an YF-12 which is another beast entirely from either the A-12 or the SR-71, same overall program and airframe but not the same plane. The YF-12 is the ugly one of the family (not a comment on Veltro's work, just the subject matter). And yes, the YF-12 is available here... So shut up, you're both kind of wrong and kind of right, there, happy now !

Let's hope he takes this opportunity to remove some hard coded limitations that made sense with Windows 7 and older hardware but no longer make sense with Windows 10 and vastly more powerful hardware.

Mostly being stunningly incompetent* and bribing publishers to get exclusives from under Steam and crowd-funders, without regards for the consumer's or developer's best interest (despite crowing about how they're all about developers). * I mean, it's 2020, they've had their store for more than a year now, and having a wishlist or a shopping cart to purchase more than one game at once are still considered as some futuristic tech they don't see implementing before at least 6 months... How incompetent can you be ?

Which Rebel Galaxy ? The original one, or Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, which is a Privateer single-player spiritual successor. It is currently an Epic Exclusive, which might eliminate it for some people, me included, but I've only heard good things about it, if you're willing to caution Epic's anti-consumer moves. As for Star Citizen, it's taking its sweet time, a lot of problems come from developing two games at once and the Wing Commander, single player, successor taking all resources currently, but the whole project reached a point where the viability is not that much in question anymore (unless Squadron 42 flops hard that is), it's just that expecting a "1.0" release any sooner than in 5 years is... kinda optimistic at this point, there'll be a beta sooner than that, but yeah, only get into it if you're comfortable with the long game. Currently Star Citizen is playable, if you like bugs and not having many things to do, but when it works, and for exploring environments... it's just gorgeous and sometimes magical. It's better when faffing around with friends than solo currently. And expect bugs, lots of them, big, small... still not as bad as a Bethesda game and at least it doesn't look like trash, but still, bugs, bugs, bugs... Oh and if you get into Star Citizen, don't bother to buy anything beyond a starter package unless you're fine with "losing" that money, everything will be obtainable in game, you have rentals and in-game buys (reset each time a major patch hits, currently) and asking in general chat will often have some stranger willing to spawn almost any ship for you to try.

I don't want to spoil it, but we're already FUBAR... barring a miracle, the ball is already rolling and we won't be able to stop it before it irremediably destroys ecosystems, some species that were on the verge are already dead men walking. We have long passed the tipping point, it's not about avoiding damage anymore, it's about mitigation strategies and how quickly we can get back to "normal" without reaching the point of no return. That's where I hate the little Swedish shit, she doesn't listen to scientists, she doesn't understand the science, she is still under the childish impression that if only adults were willing, everything would be miraculously solved and she wouldn't have to do a thing when reaching adulthood... For most things we are already in what was considered the worst case scenario decades ago, just because science keeps updating the predictions and some of our worse fears thankfully didn't realise doesn't mean we're not fucked already and that the current situation, even taking radical measures right now, won't take generations to "fix". Worse, at the point we're at, any radical solution might end up making the problem even worse, so not doing anything might be the lesser evil. This isn't a simple, almost single-factor problem like the "ozone layer hole" that can be fixed in a couple of decades, this is an extremely complex, multi-factor, self-feeding problem. Worse, not even taking just the climate into account, the fact that we have put education on the backburner, plus the economic problems, real or perceived, and the bleating of idiots about their holy books, their sovereignty, their way of life, their guns, their cars, their "freedom" mean that any quick solution that will, necessarily, impact economic circumstances and way of lives will be either stopped or reverted thanks to the rise of cynical populist shitbags who only have the perspective of having power for a few years rather than the long term benefits for their countries and fellow citizens.