pagsab

This is where my ignorance may actually be blissful. I am sure you are right about the many complexities of the issue, but if a simple tweak does the trick (at least for me), I tend to count my blessings and leave it at that. I was pleased to discover that the Western Front water is much easier to lighten, since it uses a single colour unlike the beautiful blended shades in the Caporetto terrain. Hence, instead of needing the selection tool, all I had to do in Photoshop was to bucket fill the water with the same shade of blue which I use in my own manual terrain tilesets. The picture below illustrates the results as seen from an Albatros C.III off the Flanders coast on a November afternoon. I have also tweaked the seasonal tilesets to make snow less ahistorically common in these lowland areas. My commonest winter scene has bare trees but no snow cover, as shown.

Wrench was right as usual – Mue's LOD viewer is indeed a great asset. I discovered this when making flyable versions of Stephen1918's static seaplanes for use in the Caporetto FE2 terrain itself, as reported in https://combatace.com/forums/topic/101534-opening-the-adriatic/. To my surprise, the Lohner's lower wings appeared at the edge of my cockpit view, and I eventually realised that this was because the node name in his static model must have coincidentally matched that employed in the Vickers Gunbus model which I was using as a chassis for this painfully slow seaplane. All I needed to do was to use the LOD viewer to discover Stephen's other node names, substitute these into the ModelNodeName lines of my parent data.inis, and re-expand my contracted arcs of cockpit vision now that the seaplanes' wings were visible in all their glory. My chimeras are a nightmare of inconsistency, but getting them to work at all despite my modelling ignorance gives a wonderful sense of achievement.

My only reservation about the stunning Caporetto terrain is that, like other FE2 terrains, it uses dark, non-reflective water, making the sea look more like outer space than the sparkling ocean which I enjoy so much in SF2. I saw from screenshots that some users had managed to awaken the dormant reflections, and I was delighted to find that simply replacing the entire WaterTextureMaterial section in the data.inis of FE2 terrains with that from one of my SF2 terrains did the trick in my own case, even without needing to supply the different shader file. Seeing rivers shining in the sunlight adds greatly to the feeling of immersion even in land-locked terrains. I also found that the 'wall' in FE2 is not hard coded as it is now in SF2, and that one can extract the FlightEngine file from the FlightData cat and push back the Border in the WorldSettings section from 25000 to 15000 without crashing the sim. This gives useful extra elbow room for flights over the Adriatic, though sadly not enough to reach Venice itself. Lightening the water required greater effort, but I bit the bullet and edited the many TGA tiles in the Caporetto terrain using my old copy of Photoshop Elements. The Quick Selection Tool with its facility to add or subtract areas at the margins let me highlight the water, and then I used Enhance – Adjust Color – Color Variations to lighten it by 3 clicks. This makes the tramlines of tile edges more apparent from altitude, but I consider this a worthwhile price to pay to see the sea churning and to be able to fly just above the surface by gauging the proximity of the waves. I changed the rather lurid 'Isonzo' tiles to the same sky blue as other rivers, and darkened the 'Mesto' files significantly to make town buildings less jarringly bright. Making the water lighter and bluer in my Western Front terrains will take even more effort because of all the different seasonal tiles, but eventually I hope to use my new abilities in HFD rescaling to add a less distorted and smaller scale model of south east England to the NW quadrant of the Flanders terrain, thereby allowing me to simulate the many missions flown across the North Sea by landplanes, seaplanes and airships. I can then use my wingman trick to experience a marathon daylight round trip from Ghent to London and back with a flock of Gothas in summer 1917, braving flak and fighters along the way! As discussed in https://combatace.com/forums/topic/101404-spain-and-seaplanes/, Stephen1918's tantalising static models of biplane flying boats at Trieste and Lignano inspired me to convert them into flyable representations of the later Macchi M.18 and M.41 seaplanes for my Spanish Civil War project in SF2. An obvious follow-up was to use the same techniques to make the original seaplanes flyable as well. The picture below shows a Lohner L over its base north of Trieste, and a Macchi M.5 over the lagoon north of its own base, which is just visible in the distance. I used the Vickers Gunbus and Pfalz D.IIIa as the basis for these visual conversions, with cockpits from the AEG GIV and SAML S2 respectively. (See my Spain thread for more details of my techniques.) I can now simply repaint the markings to create stand-ins for Austrian Brandenburg seaplane fighters and Italian copies of the Lohner, thereby obtaining everything I need to refight the Adriatic naval air war in miniature in the small and accessible bay between Trieste and Lignano. My new planes and better-looking water make the Caporetto terrain an even more enticing venue for my FE2 gaming, and show what users can achieve by experimenting with similar modifications of their own.

I am still much more comfortable editing terrain than planes. As I said earlier, my manual tileset benefits from having only 3 different types of tile edges (land, sea or a 50:50 split), giving enormous flexibility in tile placement compared to standard tilesets in which woods, towns, mountains and grassland must all be matched up across multiple tiles. Some of my land and sea tile edges do have central channels or isthmuses respectively, but although these may link to similar features on neighbouring tiles, they may instead be cut off at the tile edge as shown below, without looking too conspicuous. After further experiments with Photoshop, I decided to give my Mediterranean tiles a more sun-bleached appearance by lightening them and their accompanying TOD elements by 15% using Enhance - Adjust Color - Adjust Hue/Saturation. As shown on the top row below, the result complements my earlier reddening of the tiles and distances them further from their northern European origins in Gepard's high resolution Battle of Britain terrain. Photoshop lets TGA tiles be edited despite their alpha channels, and the Quick Selection tool lets one confine one's changes to the land without affecting the adjacent water. The experience I have gained adjusting the tiles to portray Spain will allow me to add some basic seasonal variations when I return to my NW Europe terrain in due course. My original tiles will suffice for spring and summer, but I can redden the tiles and trees for the rich colours of autumn and lighten them and the buildings by 30% to portray the bleak and frosty landscape of winter, as shown on the bottom row below. (Persistent snow was much less frequent in the NW European lowlands than most seasonal SF2 and FE2 tilesets tend to suggest.) A great advantage of using just 55 tile variants and 2 TOD bitmaps is that such tweaks are easy to apply, and I love the way that one can transform entire landscapes with just a few hours of effort.

Stephen1918's generic open bomber cockpit based on the AEG GIV cockpit makes a great accompaniment to his re-purposed static Lohner seaplane, as seen in the photo below of our Macchi M.18s during a routine patrol from La Ribera along the coast to San Carlos. Tarragona harbour is visible on our right, with the Reus airfield beyond for less flexible aircraft than our own!

In an early experiment to see whether using the static seaplane models would work at all, I tried putting them into a cloned Fokker Eindecker folder in FE2 itself. The result was that the entire engine block span disconcertingly around the vertical axis, clearly due to the rotary engine code in the Fokker files. After that, it was a relief when my SF2 conversions showed up with just a static prop. The only similar glitch I have encountered is that the Macchi M.41 tail fin pivots up and down like a railway signal when the rudder is used, but this is far less of a problem. If I can get the Supermarine Walrus and my reduced scale EuroWW2 terrain to work in FE2 rather than just SF2, a long term hope is to create an enhanced North Sea terrain including the relevant coasts, in which seaplanes, airships, Zeppelins and big biplane bombers can fly to simulate the many maritime and strategic bombing missions which took place across the North Sea in WW1.

Mue's programme is great, but as its name implies, it lets one view LOD files rather than edit them. I think it could have helped me locate the prop textures on the bitmaps had I been more familiar with it, but I used 'seat of the pants' techniques instead as I did when repainting the planes' markings. Proper 3D model editing is currently beyond me.

Incredibly impressive and immersive, though as you say, random missions can be very long when distant bases or targets are chosen.

I can now confirm that my new Macchis work well in formation flights led by the AI, despite their humble origins. My attempt to use Notepad to remove the static propellers from the LOD files proved disastrous, but through trial and error I managed to locate the part of Stephen's texture bitmaps used for the propeller blades and repainted them in light grey instead, making them much less conspicuous.

Thanks for the info on the OUT files. I suspected something similar, but my uninformed methodology tends to be to remove files or code entries to see if it solves problems (as it appeared to do in this case). I was frankly amazed that my blundering technique managed to get Stephen's static models to work in the air at all. I am not sure if my success has much wider relevance, since most static plane models have flyable versions already available. The ContactPoint trick seems more helpful for seaplanes.

Glad you like the wingman experience. I have used successive iterations of Dogfight over the years. It is great for setting up brief bursts of air combat, like those which most FE2 and SF2 players enjoy (as shown in vonS's many videos). I now prefer to fly complete missions without time jumps, hence my focus on other forms of mission file editing. 3D aircraft modelling has always been something I have left to the real experts, but I am very pleased to have managed just now to convert Stephen1918's lovely static seaplane models from the Caporetto terrain into basic flyable models for my Spanish Civil War project. See my latest post in the Spain and Seaplanes thread in the SF2 section.

I finally realised that the seaplanes are static models by Stephen1918, included in the Caporetto terrain. Nothing daunted, I have converted Stephen's models into very basic flyable representations of the Macchi M.18 and M.41 from the Spanish Civil War, as showcased in my latest post in the Spain and Seaplanes thread.

My heart leapt when I spotted parked open cockpit seaplanes in Gterl's thread at https://combatace.com/forums/topic/100799-screenshots-of-all-the-terrains-i-have/ showing his sumptuous terrains for First Eagles 2. To my disappointment, these turned out to be only static models created by Stephen1918 for the Caporetto terrain. However, I decided to do my best to convert them into flyable SCW seaplanes, despite my complete lack of aircraft modelling expertise. The initial results were dreadful, but with patience and persistence I managed to achieve worthwhile outcomes while learning a lot about plane modelling in the process. Stephen's models most resembled two Macchi designs which played minor but interesting roles in the opening months of the SCW, especially in the abortive Republican invasion of Mallorca. His Austrian Lohner model is similar to the six surviving Macchi M.18s which supplemented the government's Savoia 62s and Dornier Wals, while his small single seat Macchi fighter looks far more like the later Italian M.41 seaplane fighter than does the Supermarine Walrus which I pressed into service as described earlier in this thread. To accommodate Stephen's models, I decided to clone the Italian Ro.37 and CR.32 landplanes from the original SCW conversion, and to turn them into very broad brush imitations of the M.18 and M.41 respectively. Adding Stephen's static models was gratifyingly straightforward, involving simply replacing the original LODs with his renamed LOD files, deleting the matching OUT files to avoid confusion, and putting Stephen's texture bitmaps under their original names in the one texture folder which I retained for each craft. I then began a long process of trial and error, leaping in and out of the sim to observe the results of each successive tweak. It soon became evident that the static models would not appear in the cockpit view, but since the cockpits in both craft were ahead of the wings and engine, I needed only to reduce the arcs of vision to make this deficiency immaterial. Adding crew to the empty cockpits simply required iterative positional tweaks in the crew section of the data.ini, once I finally realised that I had to ensure that there were matching entries in the fuselage or nose sections of the same file. Instead of trying to add an independent nose gunner to the M.18, I added a third pilot figure where he would be visible through the windshield of the repositioned cockpit, and gave the plane a fixed LMG under my own control. To add Nationalist and Republican markings, I amended Stephen's texture bitmaps using Microsoft Paint as I had done with my other seaplane stand-ins, and I deleted the decals.ini due to the model substitution. Experience from my Dornier 24 stand-in offered the key to stopping my chimeras exploding on contact with the water as had happened with my earlier seaplane tweaks. In the landing gear section of the data.ini, I changed all the gears to skids and added ContactPoint entries like those for the Do-24, increasing the vertical dimension until the planes unrealistically but safely rode a cushion of air on takeoff and landing. I cut the engine power and maximum and cruising speeds of the original landplanes to fit the inferior performance of the Macchis, but I did not even try to make the thousands of other data amendments which would be needed to model the seaplanes properly – I was content just to get Stephen's models flying rather than sitting on the water as targets. Control surfaces and propellers are not animated as in proper add-on aircraft, but as shown in the pictures below of an M.41 over Pollenca bay and an M.18 over the San Carlos seaplane base just south of Stratos's hometown on the Ebro, these open cockpit biplanes still give a very evocative impression of the planes they represent. The pictures also show how much better my improved scrubland tiles look, and how flexible my new tile layout is in modelling tangled coastal geography thanks to having just 3 types of tile edges – land, sea, or a 50:50 split. These 2 new aircraft models bring the number of different real or stand-in seaplane models available for my SCW gaming to seven – a huge improvement on the paltry two included in the original conversion. Seaplanes were admittedly much less significant than landplanes in the conflict as a whole, but the 1930s was the Golden Age of the seaplane, and I cannot wait to enjoy formation flights in my various models against the background of the mountainous coastal landscapes which SF2 portrays so well.

Thanks for that. Your YouTube site has lots of videos which allow comparison of FE2 with other WW1 air sims like WOFF. I too especially like the 'moddability' of FE2 and SF2. The more comfortable one gets with tweaking the sims, the more that they offer a flexible 'sandbox' which one can customise to one's heart's content. Besides discovering my wingman trick, I am particularly pleased with my compact bespoke tileset as shown below, which uses artwork by Gepard and others in a completely new system with just 3 types of tile edges (land, sea or a 50:50 split) to allow much more flexible and detailed hand-tiled terrain than that created automatically using standard tile layouts. See https://combatace.com/forums/topic/101404-spain-and-seaplanes for my latest endeavours with this tile system.

This looks great for fans of the Vietnam war, and shows what is available for those who prefer their mods and missions ready made instead of editing files for themselves.

It is easy to use the manual editing techniques I have described to set up missions which involve air combat as well as formation flying. My favourite part of the Western Front air war is the early period, when aircraft often flew singly rather than with others of the same type. The picture below shows a mission I just flew set in late 1915, in which my Vickers Gunbus was tasked to protect an equally torpid BE2c assigned to photograph the Marcoing bridge south of Cambrai. A patrolling Fokker Eindecker tried to attack the BE2 using its interrupter gear, but my gunner and I diverted its attention in a swirling dogfight while our colleagues completed their mission. We eventually shook off the Fokker and gradually caught up with the BE2 thanks to our resumed padlock, accompanying it to a safe landing after an eventful 50 minute flight. I reduce planes' ammo levels in the mission file as a way of making such combats less ahistorically bloody.

This all looks gorgeous. What is that light seaplane model shown in your earlier Caporetto pics? It looks like it would be a delight to fly, and it would make a great basis for the Macchi M.41 seaplane fighter as discussed in my Spanish Civil War thread at https://combatace.com/forums/topic/101404-spain-and-seaplanes.

As I explain in my video at https://youtu.be/i4NyOMsilsY, my enjoyment of FE2 and SF2 has been increased enormously over the past year by discovering how to fly as a wingman, just like in the old European Air War. I laid out in https://combatace.com/forums/topic/100072-following-your-leader-through-the-low-european-clouds/ the simple text edits to the mission file needed to allow this in single missions. Jockeying stick and throttle to maintain close formations like those in WW1 makes flying a constant challenge, and gives a perfect marriage between the immersivity of cockpit views and the beauty of close-up external views of the classic planes concerned. FE2 does not have the benefit of the mission editor available in SF2, but by opening the terrain in Gerwin's TFD editor, one can find the coordinates needed to edit saved mission files manually to modify or delete flights and to shift bases and waypoints to whatever one desires. I often set up 'Recon' flights with no opposition except AAA fire, for the sheer pleasure of 40 minutes or so of atmospheric formation flying from takeoff to landing, as shown in the picture below of our pair of closely grouped Nieuport 17s over the mountains in the Vosges 2 terrain. Applying my mission cloning trick in FE2 has the rather disconcerting initial result that your leader starts superimposed with you on the airfield. This is not a problem unless you have Collisions set to Hard, but I now add some simple extra tweaks so that my leader starts flying above me instead, as in SF2. Just ensure that AdjustStartPosition and AdjustBaseWaypoint in the Mission Data section and StartOnGround in your leader's mission entry are all set to FALSE, and then boost his initial height to 50 and speed to 30 and the height of his first waypoint to 100. I boost LOD ranges in planes' ini files to stop details distractingly popping on and off, and I adjust CruiseSpeed in certain planes' data.inis to stop my leader flying too quickly or slowly for comfortable formation keeping. I also finally stopped towns in FE2 shimmering distractingly, by increasing the ExternalClipDistMin value in my planes' cockpit.inis from around 0.04 to 0.15 as diagnosed by Mue a decade ago in https://combatace.com/forums/topic/85970-shimmering-tods-and-target-objects/#comment-692525. These various tweaks have given FE2 a whole new lease of life for me, and allowed me to enjoy the cornucopia of user-created add-ons with renewed vigour.

Thanks, I was wondering where along the coast you lived. Without radar, the Republicans had a hard job protecting their long exposed coast, especially when the He-59s attacked at low level and at first light to minimise the risk of interception. Strafing seems to have played a big role in this conflict, and on p.140 Salas Larrazabal describes the Spanish He-51s' 'chain' tactics with each plane circling for successive firing passes until its ammo was exhausted. Low level flak seems to have been less of a deterrent than it would become in WW2.

As just one example of my last point, I finally managed tonight to resolve the shimmering towns which had annoyed me for so long in First Eagles 2, by increasing the externalclipdistmin value in my planes' cockpit.inis from around 0.04 to 0.15. Were it not for finding Mue's decade-old thread at https://combatace.com/forums/topic/85970-shimmering-tods-and-target-objects, I would not have had the faintest idea that this might offer a solution.

My Spanish terrain modelling has continued to generate insights not obvious from modern maps, such as the case for including the lower course of the Jucar river (as shown below in an early morning flight south from Valencia in our Breguet 19s), since the ill-fated Tous dam had not yet been built. As seen in the foreground, I also used Photoshop to make my moorland tiles look more like variegated Mediterranean scrubland, by pasting in parts of JSF Aggie's lovely high res desert tiles from the SW US terrain and adding 10% of monochromatic Gaussian noise. This greatly improves the 'look' of the many uncultivated areas. However, as my modelling slowly continued north to Castellon and on to the mouth of the Ebro, I became increasingly frustrated by the effort involved in choosing inland terrain tiles. It took forever to cross-reference my HFD view with the Google satellite map at my side, and it was so hard to maintain orientation while zooming in and out to decide whether each individual tile should have fields, forest or scrub that I almost lost the will to continue. Thankfully, I realised at last that there might be a far quicker and easier way to achieve a broadly similar result. I analysed the tile distribution I had created so far by cross-referencing it with the elevation range on the tiles concerned, as indicated conveniently at the bottom of the TFD view in Gerwin's editor. After some trial and error, I settled on a simple rule which gave an acceptable general approximation of the overall effect of my manual efforts, namely that in this terrain, inland tiles should have a random mix of forest and scrub instead of the default field background if they have an elevation range of at least 100 metres. This semi-automatic system proved marvellously simple to apply in Gerwin's editor, after I temporarily changed the TFD.ini to allow random individual distribution of my improved forest and scrub tiles instead of my 8 field variations. Despite some false starts when I forgot to reduce the default 5x5 setting of the editor, it took only 2 hours to re-tile the Mallorca mountains and the entire mainland strip up to the Ebro delta. The mountains had sporadic patches of cultivation just as in my manual efforts, and I could use my satellite map as before to add additional forests and scrubland as appropriate in less steeply inclined areas like the upper Ebro valley. Sooner than I had hoped, I completed my coastal circuit all the way to Barcelona, as shown in the 90 by 64 tile screenshot below. This represents 360 by 256 km of real terrain, but my scale reduction halves the duration of flights and makes my preferred continuous wingman missions just about practical even in the slow craft of this period. The terrain allows complete over-water combat missions by sea and land planes throughout the SCW, and simple reassignment of the central airfields lets it host closer range combat missions in and after the spring of 1938 when the Nationalists in Aragon advanced to the sea from Castellon to the Ebro. I am celebrating my completion of the first full stage of my Spanish project by piloting the wide variety of Golden Era planes used in the SCW either in individual treetop flights to enjoy my undulating high resolution terrain or in as close a formation as my flying skills allow, with the terrain as a backdrop to the beautiful aircraft models themselves. My new techniques of HFD rescaling and semi-automatic tile selection have transformed my hand-tiling endeavours, and for the first time it seems really practical to expand my flexible bespoke tilesets beyond small vignettes into significant portions of the area covered by more conventional SF2 terrains. As I said, my next step in Spain will be to push north-west from the area shown above to cover the entire Aragon front from Teruel through Zaragoza to Huesca, including the Nationalist airfields behind the line. This will position me well to push on in due course to the Biscay coast and to central Spain, giving me a much more extensive overall terrain than the small vignette around Madrid which I envisaged originally. As my projects continue to develop, I am enormously grateful for the resources and insight of so many skilled modders on which my own belated and rather idiosyncratic efforts depend.

Part of the fun of terrain-making is the research it inspires, yielding greater understanding of the reality which our virtual worlds seek to reflect. One of the maps in Lopez’s SCW aviation atlas shows a Republican airbase at La Senyera, 45 km south of Valencia. Sure enough, I found the small hamlet of Senyera and put an airfield on the flat ground there for test flights over my new model of the mountainous cape region. However, maps in Salas Larrazabal’s 1969 history of the SCW air war show the La Senera base only a few km south of Valencia. Google searches to resolve the contradiction eventually revealed that both maps are wrong and that La Senera was the cover name given to an airbase built in late 1936 near Chiva, 30 km west of Valencia. I will now have to delete my phantom base and continue north with my terrain modelling in order to have the mainland airfield I desire!

A key feature of my reduced scale terrains is that my airfields are far smaller than in other SF2 terrains. One can even squeeze seaplane strips into river tiles, as shown below by my remodelled port and seaplane base of Mahon (Mao in Catalan) on Menorca. I have now also modelled Ibiza and Formentera, and I am about to leap further west to the mountainous cape south of Valencia, with a view perhaps to proceeding clockwise around the coast to Barcelona so as to open up this entire maritime arena for seaplane and landplane action by the time that my used copy of Herrera's book finally arrives from Madrid. Thence inland to Teruel and Zaragoza to link up with the land fronts and give me even wider settings for my SCW scenarios.

I was pleased to discover that I could rename my stand-ins to match the real aircraft simply by renaming the aircraft folder, the main ini file, and the full and short names at the start of that file, leaving everything else as is. This allowed me to create separate folders for my 'Dornier Wal' and 'CANT Z.501', and hence to amend the data files to make the former plane slower and to remove its tail gun (which on the Z.501 offers a handy stand-in for the real third gunner atop the engine nacelle). I used similar techniques to turn the Walrus not only into the Savoia S.62 but also into the smaller but similar-looking Italian Macchi M.41 single seat naval fighter, a few of which operated from Mallorca early in the war. I increased the Macchi's speed and engine power, removed the gunners, and turned the front gun into a fixed pilot-controlled HMG (instead of the actual 2 LMGs). To test my refinements, I set up a simple interception of a Republican 'Dornier Wal' by my 'Macchi' over the abortive Republican landing site at Portocristo. As the picture below shows, I did my best to apply standard realistic tactics from FE2 and to use the enemy craft's tail assembly to shield me from his dorsal gunner, with much greater success than in my previous dogfight. Having lamented only the other day the lack of models to simulate seaplane missions in the SCW, it is amazing what a little ingenuity and lateral thinking can achieve!

The single engined Walrus makes a good stand-in for the Savoia S.62 biplane flying boats which served both sides in the first year of the conflict, just as the Arado 95 can double up as the similar Heinkel 60 biplane floatplanes which were also trialled by the Condor Legion. However, as shown in Stratos's pictures above, other SCW seaplanes were significantly bigger, so I decided to look for available models which reflect this. The big parasol-winged Dornier 24 flying boat can stand in both for the earlier Dornier Wal and for Italy's CANT Z.501s which served for much longer than the Z.506. I could not find a big biplane floatplane to stand in for the Heinkel 59s, but the twin engined Fokker T.IV monoplane floatplane serves as a fair substitute in all other respects. I dropped the speeds of these stand-ins to accord better with the performance of the real aircraft, and I increased the vertical ContactPoints of the Do 24's landing gear from 0.9 to 1.1 to allow safe takeoffs and landings. The picture below shows a Republican 'Dornier Wal' over the small port of Mao, and a German 'He 59' over Palma harbour. These various substitutes allow me to me recreate flights by every significant SCW seaplane.