33LIMA

Now, that IS good news, have been having a blast with the new FE2 campaign the last couple of evenings so I have not seriously tried the Dr1 out yet, which having read the above, I'm off to do right after typing this! The prospect of the Pfalz being turned from 'spring chicken to sh*tehawk' (or from turkey to eagle, might be more apt, tho less memorable than the famous line from the BoB movie) is very tempting, so I'm looking forward to the final package!!!

PS hope you don't mind Ojcar but I have posted a recommendation for your new mod over in the WW1 airwar thread at SimHQ. The good news needs to be spread!!! http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3533668.html#Post3533668

Yeah the Okha was the craziest of the craziest I suppose; you'll doubtless have seen this Hellcat gun-cam footage then of G4Ms with Okhas being intercepted, the PTO colour gun-cam, ship-cam and ground-cam footage is amongst the most shocking and vivid of WW2, whether colour or B&W: ..or maybe this one, to get back on topic, as this is a war movie of sorts, albeit a WW2 Japanese dramatisation of the air war for Malaya, with a lot of very clear footage:

Yes yes yes yes yes yes....that's a 'yes' Did you do that just by following the instructions you posted, or did you need to copy files from one folder to another as well? I see the data panel bottom left is showing DII not DIII.

Well my own personal Fokker Scouge is now well under way at last! First, I had another scary mission in my Fokker E1 with 2 comrades. We chased after a pair of distant enemies but could not catch up so diverted to some closer flak bursts which turned out to be 4 Gunbusses whom we closed in on, from below and behind. A last look behind us before attacking revealed my formation had grown from three planes to five, the newcomers being another pair of those pesky 60 Sqdn Morane Bullets, who succeeded in spoiling our fun! We were lucky to escape with only one plane lost and the pilot unhurt, I only escaped myself by fleeing at low level while my enemy rained fire down at me from above and only gave up I think because he probably decided I wasn't worth shooting down! But the next mission was a different affair...near the objective the dreaded Moranes turned up - but from their different cockades, I could see these were from a French unit and moreover, they didn't seem to be of the same calibre as the RFC outfit. All four fell to our guns, and all were credited to me, tho in truth in at least 2 cases I merely finished off machines which I could see that my flight-mates had already damaged. Nevertheless, with the feeble EI I really had to work very hard for every kill, with my plane threatening to fall out from under me at every tight turn, forcing me to yo-yo to cut inside their turns or escape their attacks without stalling and spining out in the attempt. Turning away after the last Morane plunged earthwards to rally the troops, I saw that they were now attacking a pair of Gunbusses which had wandered into the arena, and after a short chase, both of these also went down! What a fight - a First Eagles campaign mission at its very best, this new campaign is a great way to experience FE's excellent addon planes! Brilliant!!! A must-have for First Eagles! PS thanks Ojcar for the advice re the Halbs, will give that a go!

How about this one, For Those We Love; has anybody seen this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVlZizY_ubw Maybe these are the only flying/action sequences in the whole movie but I think they are brilliant - FAR better than the usual Pearl Harbour-style CGI rubbish and include some colourised actual WW2 sequences (or sequences closely modelled on them). Always had an interest in Hayabusas, Hiens, Zero-sens and the whole Japanese WW2 aviation thing, and the Divine Wind operation, so might pick this up if it's any good and is available in the UK (preferably with subtitles tho they are strictly superfluous in the above sequence). Even if (to borrow from Nicholas 'Cruel Sea' Monsarrat's preface to Schaeffer's 'U-Boat 977') you would not touch any apologia for Japanese WW2 militarism with a depth-charge, this looks promising.

Cheers and thanks for the feedback; the DII was indeed one of the limited number of known issues; from what I've seen the Albs are all fine in the original mod. HPW provided a separate FM mod just for the Halb DII which may have had its features incorporated in his latest mod. Specifically, the stock DII is remarkably nose-heavy which may not have helped it to cope with flying at realistic weight; HPW had much improved this nose-heaviness as well as reducing the weight, to the extent it could take off fine.

I hope by the time the Bebés and Lattice-tails arrive, the Bullets will have helped me develop suitable tactics for fighting in an inferior plane - but I also hope to have just a little bit of a Fokker Scourge against the BEs and the Parasols, in between dodging bullets from the Bullets :) I have got your recommended skins for the Alb DI and DII and they do make the primitive 3d model a little more bearble, for when the Day of the Jastas comes. You're right, the improved Halberstadt DIII, now that I have installed and flown it, is a MUCH better model than the earlier ones (tho it has some outline inaccuracies like the rudder too far aft - and it is actually a DII not a DIII, the latter had vertical centre section struts not the DII's cabane/inverted V, side exhaust not the DII's vertical stack, and square aileron 'horn' balances, not the DII's plain unbalanced ailerons). Maybe I installed something wrong but from cockpit view, my 'DIIII' also has feeds for twin MGs hanging in mid-air ahead of the cockpit, maybe an edit of the cockpit file can move these out of view the same way you can hide the DE5's ammo drum to enable the SE5 cockpit to serve for an RE8. Anyway yes it's a great mod, I'm off to see if i can find some 2-seaters to convert to Fokker Fodder while avoiding those verdamter Morane Bullets!!!

I think HPW is right. I had a problem with a chosen Fighter squadron being allocated bomber missions and found that the relevant file had the role set to 'bomber', despite the unit being chosen from the list of 'fighter' squadrons presented when creating my pilot. As with your pilotdossier edit, hand-editing the squadron role back to 'fighter' had no effect - it reverted on restarting the sim. The dev's answer was on this forum not long ago but it amounted to what HPW said, there's a look-up master table in a file somewhere, which may or may not be locate-able and editable, which over-writes some kinds of hand-edits in these files.

As a matter of interest, which type of plane is crashing, and do you happen to know at which particular airfield? At the moment as HPW says, it seems that only certain planes (some, but not all, lower-powered, early war?) cannot cope and even then, only have the problem at certain airfields eg with trees and/or slopes at the take-off end. Halberstadt DIIs and Pups I have seen have problems in this situation. FE2s might, not sure. Would help to know what other types have problems. I'm interested to see how HPW's ramp-weight mod works out; I have been sticking with the current weight mod as I think the lightweight AI badly need the reining in it provides and will be interested to see if HPW's new mod can contunue to do that sufficiently, while eliminating the problem from the (few?) plane types and airfield situations where the AI can't safely take off at close to (but less than) normal full military load - which they really should be able to do. That said the current un-modded OFF take-off performance is wildly better than P2 where fireballs at the end of the runway were very common if not the norm, even with the extra weight the P3 AI manage to take off, climb and dogfight quite well in most cases which is a credit to the team. I have also noticed that my flight-mates often lag at lower levels before climbing up after me but I think they had this problem much the same without any mod and that it is more an AI formation-keeping issue than anything else, as they can climb up fast enough when they 'decide' to.

Hi HPW, back again after a week in Spain, which I needed after having to deal with two successive scareware attacks last month, the second needing the HD wiped and everything re-installed. TBH I think it'd be a bad idea to separate the scouts, either by nationality or into other groups. You don't want to have to adjust to different performances (even subtly different ones) twice, first when nationality A's scouts are ready, then again when nationality B's are. Best if they are all done together, all that are being done anyway. Best wait till a full scout package is ready, folks can always delete any individual planes they don't want changed, from the mod's folder. Two-seaters IMHO could sensibly be a separate package...except that 2-seaters which often acted as fighters could perhaps best be treated as scouts - the Brisfit being mainly a fighter, maybe the Hannoverana as well, perphaps also the RFC Strutter, maybe even the FE2. Okay - and this is beginning to sound like the Python Spanish inquisition sketch - perhaps 3 packages - all scouts first, then 2-seater fighters, then other 2-seaters.

Have now completed ('survived' would be a better word!) a couple of missions for KEK Douai and the great thing is the new campaign is providing a very satisfying new way of flying add-on planes, much superior to flying them in single missions. The long-awaited applicatiion of FE's campaign engine to all the extra planes is a big leap forward for this sim. At the moment, flying an 80hp Fokker E1 is proving a real challenge. BE2's I can manage but I have had some really hairy dogfights against RFC Morane Type N's which IIRC have 110 hp engines and realistically in my campaign the Morane 'Bullets' are noticeably faster and more manoeuvrable. Atttempts to 'turn and burn' with them end up often in a desparate low-level spin recovery from trying and failing to turn inside them and spinning out. So I'm having to extend, gain height and come back in or even just make any escape I can. I hope the 100hp EII's will be appearing soon as I will be lucky to last a month in an EI!!! The only other observation I would offer so far is that, not having used a ground MG mod before, the new MGs are very interesting. The only thing I am concerned about is that (i) they seem to open fire at very long range (ineffectively thank goodness) but at closer range even a single ground MG is very deadly. I saw one shoot down 2 SPAD VIIs over a German airfield, during a dogfight with Albatrosses which had just taken off, both SPADs shot down with pilot kills after being well-holed, from flying a couple of times over an MG. Might be desirable to reduce their engagement range and/or their lethality, but it is very early days yet. All in all this is a great (series of) mods!

I have come across a slight problem, posting the solution I found in case it affects others, too. Not with the new campaign, but with one (or more) of the extra planes. I just started a 1915 KEK Douai campaign and my Fokker EI had an invisible pilot figure. Looking at the plane's data.ini file I saw its PilotModelName is WW1GERPILOT. Looking at some planes whose pilots I CAN see, they use different model names - wwiPilotNew, wwiPilotNew3 etc.. So I renamed the Fokker's PilotModelName to wwwPilotNew3 and that solved the problem. I guess I may have to do this for some other planes, too. IIRC I had seen this before once but hadn't tried to find a solution; perhaps one has been posted before, already! It may be caused by FE2 lacking something that planes made originally for FEG need; or maybe there is a mod with the extra pilot models that I haven't got, which would make WW1GERPILOT (and Entente equivalents?) available, without having to hand-edit individual plane data.ini files; dunno. At least it's now working!

Just back from holidays in Spain yesterday and delighted to find this great present waiting from our Spanish friend Ojcar! Bravo!!! This is EXACTLY the sort of thing FE needs most! Great stuff and many thanks Ojcar!!! :drinks: I hope this will inspire someone (Stephen?!) to provide some of the planes needed to make the most of this - the early Bortdafarm German D-types (Halb, Fokker & Alb DII) and the Elephant for example, would all greatly benefit from replacements with better 3d models and textures, while we need a more representative 1916-17 BE2 (no skid undercarriage, fairing under engine), and a later-war German 2-seater like the LVG CVI or Rumpler CIV would also be great. Can't wait to try this out - it makes coming home to the colder weather, very bearable!!!

Wow! Great work Stephen - thank you - grabbing it now!!!

About to give the DR1 a try and looking forward to the rest of the mod (tho I'll prob be on hols when it comes out) after a recent lay-off, partly enforced after having two scareware attacks in a row, of the new nasty kind which leaves essential Windows cfunctions disabled even after you get rid of it . Have never really flown any of the WW1 sim DR1s before so I won't really ahve anything to compare with tho!

For no apparent reason, the German planes in my modded FE2 install all seem to be changed to and stuck with the early pattern of Greek (broad, rectangular-armed) crosses, as used from about April 1918. Nothing I can do gets the proper, Maltese (Iron) crosses back (the ones used up till then). Even Alb DIIIs in a Bloody April campaign have them (which is when I first noticed it, flying Nieuport 17s against V-strutters that all suddenly had the later cross). Can't find whatever it is that applies the correct national markings; it can't be the aircraft files as I did nothing to these yet the markings somehow changed and got stuck . I mostly play 1917-era campaigns so this is a bit of a nuisance. This has never happened before with the same modded install. A second, near-stock install does not have this problem; the correct, Maltese/iron cross is displayed. Don't recall doing anything that could have caused this. The only think I could think is that for some reason I flew an SE5 quick combat mission with a date set of June 1918 but even that is after the change to the final style of German cross (thin-arm Greek). I have looked at the options.ini., flown a mission with the date set back to mid-1917, deleted all pilots and started with a new one and a new Cambrai 1917 campaign same result - stuck with the eealy Greek cross. Any ideas, guys?

Well that did the trick - deleted Nations.ini and crosses are back to normal for both modded FE2 and FE1. Thanks for the solution! Will now try out those different medal packs. Then the hot girls in the seaside!

Medals - now that may well be my problem! I installed a custom medals pack for FE1 recently, not one of the one's you are recommending, Ojcar - had to change the .bmps to jpgs and I'm still not sure the new medals are showing...but it never occurred to me that the medals pack could have caused this! I'll try deleting the Nations.ini that came with that medal pack and see if that does the trick. There is one - and I'm sure you are right. that will be the cause! Then I will cautiously try installing these other medal packs. I have just realised that my FE (1) install is also having the same problem, and I had installed the same medal pack in that, too! It's not in my second FE2 install, however, that is ok. so the medal pack will be the cuplrit, I am now sure! Thank you for the advice! PS I am off to Torremolinos on Saturday for a week so I hope things are nice and sunny in Espana!

Yeah, this one: http://combatace.com/files/file/12430-flak-mod-for-over-flanders-fields-phase-3/

I think that's one of the P4 pics taken using P3 terrain and effects so it's possibly one of those sheets of cloud you get from time to time?

Nice one, thanks - trying this out now!

Looks to me like the same CFS3 fish-eye lens spot view perspective, at least as regards the aircraft. The blue cast in the terrain isn't as pretty as the current more yellowish greens and browns but it seems to do a very good job of conveying distance. Even if the fisheye lens effect can't be removed, I still hope the RE8 will get its missing flying wires, the Pfalz's drooping tailskid will be tucked back up and that most planes will get better LOD models, so they can be seen from spot and cockpit views at significantly longer range (around 3 miles or so, with no zoom) and don't have harsh LOD transitions at relatively close range. Longer-range visibility in particular would be a great improvement, reducing reliance on the TAC/radar/labels and making RFC/RAF/AMF campaigns in particular, where you rarely have Archie to indicate targets, much more satisfying.

If you're now flying a DV with the Jastas, another mod you might like to try is my FlakMod: http://combatace.com...fields-phase-3/ By tightening the grouping of flak bursts at the Workshop 'Hard' setting', while toning down lethality so it's bearable, this enables you to get a better picture of the height, bearing and heading of enemies you identify from clusters of AA bursts (without having to resort to the TAC/radar, which even then, doesn't indicate relative height). On the receiving end, it's not 'B-17 Mighty Eighth' intensity, but the FlakMod is quite a step up from the wimpy flak effects in Rof, which generally give the impression of one gun firing, rather than a battery.

Re wingman commands, in my experience, the 'Split' command doesn't seem to work at all, ever, so your flight-mates will follow you right down if you're damaged. 'Help', Rejoin & 'Attack' seem to work but can take a long time to get a result and sometimes prove unreliabe and/or unpredictable (IIRC in CFS3 if you hit A twice in a certain time, it amounts to a command for a flight attack on the mission objective [if nothing else is specified via the TAC/radar?] which might not be at all what you want. Using the TAC/radar to highlight specific targets is fiddly but seems to work. Wingman commands were never the strong point of any version of CFS, were they? In OFF they do seem to work, just not especially well, which may be a realistic reflection of the lack of radio, and the much slower, lower-powered planes taking longer to do anything, when they do get the message.