Stephen1918

Gterl - beautiful screen shots - what plane is this?

I had one that could drop two Fliegermaus (Gr16) grenades which worked well against ground troops. To get better dogfight action I like your idea of rockets - perhaps a couple of Le Prieur rockets?

OK. You've made your point.

I kind of went down a rabbit hole with the Da Vinci flyer after VonS made a better FM for it. (Thanks, by the way.) I made several versions of the flyer, one had a musket and one dropped bombs. I started thinking of a whole Renaissance alternate history war. I made a Da Vinci tank and some 15th Century cannon; I started working on ground objects for a terrain; I started making decals for different factions. Then I realized that all you could do was fly around and look at it. It would be very hard to shoot down an opponent with a single shot musket. So I abandoned the project. But it's still fun to fly. I spent this afternoon flying it around. Nice video!

I've been slowly converting all of my FE1 installs into FE2 and I came across this from 6 or 7 years ago. (Yes, I'm bragging.)

I asked for this, didn't I? The fuel caps could be added to the skin rather than to the model. I knew about the fuel gauge between the guns, but deliberately chose to place it in the cockpit to make it easier to see and so I could put a cross hairs for the gun instead. In the game, the pilot can't lean over to sight down the barrel like a real pilot can, so sights at the end of the gun are just decorative, I was trying to make it more functional. I did spend a lot of time making the sight line up with where the tracers cross when you fire the guns. (In real life the guns would be fired individually to keep you in the fight longer.) For the windscreen, I just plain forgot. I deleted it when I was adjusting the gun sight and never put it back. Were they able to make a windscreen without a frame in WWI, before plastics?

Real world is taking up a lot of my time. I'm also still working on my install of FE2. I focused on FE1 until recently and only used FE2 for testing my planes. Now I'm rebuilding all of the different fronts in FE2. For some reason, in FE2 all the menu screens are stretched. In the game the graphics look fine, but before I get there the screens are rather ugly. I haven't been able to find the setting to fix it yet. I'm also still learning Blender, especially figuring out the animation features. I don't have any ideas for another plane yet, but I'm open to suggestion.

The stock planes in FE all have 512x512 skins, which is 1/4 the size of a 1024x1024 skin. I reduced most of the skins in my install down to 512x512 (not all of them) and saw a huge improvement in the game. I also prefer decals rather than painting insignia directly on the skin because they are sharper and you can use the decal.ini to make them disappear when the plane gets far away. Every little bit helps. When the computer starts to run out of memory, the game reduces the number of objects in the game.

Thank you Spear_Head and HvitiVikingurrin. You both make valid points. I am relatively new to Blender and I am still working out how to make animations in Blender, and get those animations to carry over into First Eagles. So things like machine gun animations, making the suspension flex when the plane takes off or lands, and most importantly for me, making the control wires move when the control surfaces move. On the two newest planes the wires are static while the flaps move around them. I am aware of these problems and am working on solving them. But these flaws don't interfere with game play so I'm not that embarrassed by them. As for the other things, I always ask myself "Am I playing the game or am I just looking at the plane?" It's tempting to include a lot more detail in the model, but it eventually slows down my install of FE. So I try to find a balance. Ripples in the wings really slow things down on my machine so I choose not to include them. I make planes that work well on my computer and that's what I upload. I am running on Windows 7 and, with high graphics and shadow settings, I get 15-20 FPS with about 20 other aircraft in the air and a good level of ground detail in the game. I try to keep my mod file sizes similar to the original FE objects (probably a little bigger) and that works well on my machine.

Thank you for your feedback. I have always believed that you can't improve if you don't know you're making mistakes, so I have always tried to be welcoming of feedback. I will admit that sometimes it's hard to take, but over the years it has helped me improve. When I started making planes for FE and uploading them at Combat Ace, the community was very welcoming and respectful of all the modders. I received at lot of helpful comments during those years which helped me get better at making models. I miss those days. At some point things started getting competitive - people started talking about raising the quality and deciding who was best. I remember modders who would swear at people who tried to correct them. We lost a lot of modders in those days and everyone seemed to get overly cautious about offering critique. Some even tried to shut down all critical comments. Instead of outlawing all criticism, we should try to teach when criticism, and modder response to criticism, is appropriate. There is a way to offer criticism without being offensive. Respecting the work that someone put into a project, even a flawed project, is important. Making a suggestion in the form of a question is easier to take, at least for me. ("Have you considered doing...?" instead of "You should do..." ) In the end, we won't get new mods unless people are willing to share their efforts, and I know from experience that even simple mods take a great deal of effort. Let's a least respect the generosity of modders for sharing their work. With that said, does anyone have comments about my two recent planes?

I'm looking forward to these. Thank you.

The Fokker D.VIII has been uploaded. I included a small grenade loadout, three skins, and my skinning templates. My thanks to Ojcar for making the FM and for test flying the plane. My thanks to Mue for making the LOD Exporter utility for Blender.

View File Fokker D.VIII This plane is for FE2 only. The Fokker D.VIII was a parasol wing aircraft produced at the end of WWI. The plane featured a tubular steel frame fuselage with plywood covered wings. It was powered by a Oberusel UR-II 9 cyl engine and armed with two Spandau 7.92mm machine guns. The plane entered service as the Fokker E.V, but was pulled after structural failures of the wing. After fabrication problems were resolved, production continued and the plane was renamed the Fokker D.VIII. The D.VIII entered service in October of 1918. Pilots found it agile and easy to fly. Because the plane had a light weight and low drag, it was fast in spite of the 110 hp engine. After WWI, Poland captured 17 aircraft, but only 7 were in a condition to fly. The plane was used in the Polish-Russian War and then used as a trainer after 1921. Because the Armistice that ended the war forced Germany to disarm, the Fokker Company moved (back) to the Netherlands. The Fokker D.VIII was used by the Dutch Air Force into the 1920s. I added a loadout for 4 grenades. I have included three skins, one for the Germans and two for the Poles - each with appropriate decals. My skinning templates are included in the download. Credits Thanks to Ojcar for making the data file for the Fokker D.VIII. Thanks to Mue for making the LOD exporter plug-in for Blender. Installation Instructions For FE2 - Unzip the file, The "Fokker" folder contains files to be placed into your "Aircaft" folder and your "Decals" folder. Copy the two folders named "FokkerD8" into the appropriate folders in your mods folder. Submitter Stephen1918 Submitted 04/07/2026 Category Fokker  

Yes, I'll include my skinning templates in the download, but I doubt if they will match von Deutschmark's layout so the old skins won't work on my model. We have some good FE skinners around here now, JulioJunqueira, Trotski, Eugene2, among others. Perhaps they will take up the task of creating new skins for the D.VIII.

I've slowly been making progress, I'm having to unlearn a lot of things I learned for 3D Max because Blender is different. But, the cockpit is nearly finished, still tweaking the skins. I've made a German skin and am working on a camo for Poland.

Yes, Laton made a Fokker D.8 almost 20 years ago. It used the old FE1 pilot and it used the cockpit from the Fokker D.7. Von Deutchmark made the skins. I considered just making a cockpit for it, but it wasn't rigged to accept decals and all the skins were on one sheet. I'm using his FM as starting point, Ojcar will upgrade the FM when I get the model finished..

As I recall, in "Blue Max" they were acting like a monoplane was a radical new concept and so it failed, and killed George Peppard, during the test flight. We of course know that monoplanes had been around since before the beginning of the war. The writers may have been thinking of the Fokker D.VIII when they made the film, but it was not named and it's failure in testing was not realistic.

Looks good.

Your Cambrai has a lot more stuff in it than mine.

I'm still thinking of the Polish-Russian war. This is the Fokker D.VIII, which was released during the final months of WWI, and was used by the Poles and other nations, in the years after. The model is pretty much finished, now I'm working on the cockpit and the LODs. Then I have to do all the FM stuff - min/max extents, collision points, remove and detach nodes, etc. I'm planning to make a German skin, and maybe a camo.

Any comments? This is a learning experience for me, so your input, positive and negative, will be welcome.