Gunrunner

Actually, I was not entirely right, after extensive testing using adjusted MaxVisibleDistance for targets it seems the ATG_AGM behaviour is not always following the RocketAttackAI profile, provided the AI starts its attack far enough from the target it seems to do its own thing properly, without an explicit AI profile, only firing one missile, at long range; but if it's too close to the target (or the target has too short a MaxVisibleDistance) it seems to revert to the behaviour set by RocketAttackAI (I thought it a coincidence but altering RocketAttackAI seems to affect that close range behaviour), with all the limitations and issues discussed previously. My hypothesis is that the attack profile for AGMs is either dynamic, based on the weapon's data, or hard coded (but why TK decided to do it that way when he added entries for the newer CruiseMissile remains a mystery), but similar to how the engine determines whether to conduct a LevelBombAI or DiveBombAI bombing run, there is a distance to target element to which of two behaviours it uses. Reasons it might not always work as intended thus are not really related to AI profile but possibly problems linked to warping (and thus the AI being too close to the target), or possibly a visibility issue, the target becoming visible to the AI at too short a range for the AI not to revert to the RocketAttackAI profile. Editing the AI profile thus helps mitigate the problem but isn't properly dealing with it as it creates its own issues. My previous statements are still valid for weapons set as guided rockets such as APKWS and Vikhr which are set up as ammo for Rocket Pods (at least the ones I use). Anyway... lots of things to change to take that into account, dammit, for years I was wrong on that one.

Yep, moving your square waypoint will solve that part of the problem but remember that when pressing Alt-N while you're by default teleported a bit before the square waypoint, IF the game detects you get in close proximity of an AAA/SAM protected site, or an hostile flight during travel, it only teleports you at the point of hostile encounter and lets you deal with it, refusing to teleport you again until the threat is destroyed or a safe distance away.

Yup, consequence of another of TK's little tricks, the pixels on the border of a decals are duplicated along the axis on the whole mesh, so you have to leave clean space around your decals. On the other hand, when doing solid stripes it allows you to have extremely compact decals, or have them adapt to the shape of your mesh if the design allows it (think of having a stripe above a tail number, you need the decal to be only as wide as the number, the stripe just needs to be at the right height and to reach the borders of the decals, once in the right position the stripe will get duplicated left and right till the end of the mesh). Weirdly enough, while it seems intentional to have coded it like this, I have no memory of stock decal exploiting that behaviour.

Congrats Denis, another deserved recognition.

EOGR and EOGB, provided a correct AI attack pattern, do work fine for all AIs, in most cases. CGR is a little more random and you must ensure the AI only has one in flight at a time and that the carrier still dives toward the target until it hits, because the game seems to properly track if the AI launcher "guides" the missile.

Actually to guarantee a single pass you'd also need to specify a ReleaseCount superior or equal to the max number of ordnance, and set your attack run so all ordnance has time to be released before PullOut, otherwise there will be ordnance remaining and you take the risk of the AI doing another attack run using the original RollIn parameters.

Don't diss the beautiful, tiny-winged white elephant; the TSR.2 was a thing of beauty, the problem was more on the insane specs and expectations than the manufacturer abusing the system to get infinite money. The F-35 program, at this point, is just a gigantic scam, it's no longer about making a plane fit for a mission, it's about extracting as much wealth as possible and funnelling it toward Lockheed Martin and its backers. To think that some European countries are paying insane prices to use these things for air defence and air policing makes me sick.

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.