Lexx_Luthor

In the original DOS Su-27 Flaker sim from 1995, one of the most fun and challenging missions I made was a deep strike into heavily defended Ukraine territory, far beyond the map edge. The mission editor let you scroll beyond the map, although it was blank terrain it was usable for all aircraft and surface units for long distance missions. I setup maybe 50+ total of long range S-300, medium range and short range SAM sites. You could fly either high or lo, the different SAM types presenting a different challenge to your use of the RWR. Up high, you had to find a path between the longer range SAM sites, taking your time to navigate with the RWR. This took much longer to accomplish the mission since so many SAM sites could see you, and left you vulnerable at low altitude if enemy interceptors appeared. Down lo, you had to fly at 50 meters or so, and most of the time the RWR (and IR missile warning) was silent, but if you did fly into a SAM site, you had to turn HARD to get away -- and you could not gain much altitude in the sudden evasion or alot of long/medium range sites would see you. But evasive manuevers at 100 meters is not easy (although not so bad with the 100% flat featurless sea-level terrain off the map edge). An additonal challenge was randomly appearing enemy intercepts, either with or without randomly appearing GCI radar sites that in the Flaker sim alerted AI fighters to enemy aircraft out to about 60km (for AI set to "intercept" or "GCI"). The hardest part was learning the value of minimum afterburner use, since the mission was designed also to challenge fuel management. The neatest thing was taking off into the setting sun at that base in the northern Crimea and arriving in enemy territory as it started to get dark. The best part was surviving with enough fuel to get home, hopefully with enough fuel to allow an afterburning retreat if enemy interceptors followed you home, and an out-going friendly intercept that would cover your return near the Crimea. The high level mission could be similar to what SR-71 and hand crafted missions could allow over the SF series. F-111 or (upcoming) Su-24, or B-52 or B-57, would allow low level stuff. We have the RWR ability in the sim, but as far as I know it does not tell you if the threat is SAM or airborne.

With well crafted hand made missions, you could look from 80,000 feet and see the larger air warfare unfolding@home far below... Flying with FoxMonter's F3H Demon cockpit instrument panel inside Pasko's U-2 external model's pilot compartment, looking down on cirrus clouds and B-52 contrails in the weeds at 40,000 feet. :yes:

Much larger maps are possible. We do need 3rd Party dynamic campaign engines that offer new gameplay and air warfare features. All that is needed is a map-wide combat results text file that can be read by the campaign engine, instead of just Player squadron as we have now, and even that is not output to a readable file as far as I know (not sure, but I never found it). Lowengrin's dynamic campaign saved the FB/PF sim for many of Oleg's customers, and could do the same here. But without a map-wide combat recorder, all Lowengrin can do is create "editors" to "edit" the stock dynamic campaign engine

Lazboy:: Wow. That is interesting stuff. Any game loading and/or in-game performance changes?

Right. There must be more than one glass object to Move. Also try one, or both, of... Instrument[046]=Move2 Instrument[047]=Move3 : : ...and similarly use... [Move2] canopy_glass_sides : : [Move3] canopy_glass_rear : : These additional names are found in the cockpit LOD file with a hex editor. I ought to do a Brain Base thing on this basic subject.

No WoI here yet....so... AI beaming player radar: Does the AI beam AI SAHM missile attacks? Or is this feature restricted to AI beaming player plane only, or perhaps player squadron's aircraft? When I get any flight sim upgrade, the first thing I do is run tests on the AI vs AI, no player involved (player sits on runway across the map) with a mission editor for creating test setups. Right now, no Paypal so no WoI for me yet!!

GrViper:: When you start tinkinering around with the sim, its not so lite after all. When you stretch it to the breaking point like I do with grafix, or streakeagle with FMs, it may be the most hardcore simulation out there today. I don't have THE PAY PAL, so no WoI here, maybe get somebody to buy it for me, pay them back, or wait for an equivalent SF upgrade, or better if TK would take mail order and send a download key or whatever it takes. Until then, I can philosophize and theorize -- MiG-25 recon...player perhaps, but maybe more interesting would be Israel attempts to catch -25s after takeoff or before landing, or Arab MiG-21 flights to cover the low and slow MiG-25s against Israeli anti-25 missions. That could be an interesting series of missions -- long range strike against a heavily defended flying aircraft target.

kuk, I thought you might like this one... I saw your link from last page...strange indeed. kukulino:: I DUNNO :dntknw: Maybe some Tu-128's flew missions there, but I thought -128 was used in the Far East and the North. Dunno.

Very interesting. If you would, czech out Paladrian's description of problems with this cockpit method here... Paladrian @ ThudWire ~ http://bbs.thirdwire.com/phpBB/viewtopic.p...0&start=192 :: One big thing: I'm running an old ATI-9200 video card, although with a more recent (9800Pro era) driver. Maybe the newer cards work different from the old, or ATI differs from Nvida. The -9200 is the only card I ever had, although I did use my 9800Pro for some time until the fan went. Never bothered with it again.

Woah, I never use shadows but that could change. Those shadows look darker than normal, correct? ...need a new video card first though. I'm still running ATI-9200.

File Name: Siberian Sky -- The VOLCANO MOD (for strategic air warfare) File Submitter: Lexx_Luthor File Submitted: 19 February 2008 File Category: Effect Mods << "I spotted an afterburner plume at twenty miles." >> This is the only quote I recall from a Vietnam War air combat book I read back in hi~school and I forgot the title and author. The author spotted the afterburner at night, against the stars if I recall, and said it was a MiG-21. They (F-4 crew) locked it up and downed it with a Sparrow. The VOLCANO MOD attempts to address, or bring attention to, a long missing feature in all combat jetsims: long distance visibility of afterburners especially at night. To do this, we oversize the afterburners as the sim, along with every jetsim it seems, does not model the brightness intensity of afterburner plumes. The same philosophy was used in sizing the recent 3D Rocket Exhaust effects, making larger flame plumes optional for missiles on a sliding scale of selectable effects sizes. With the smaller of two oversized afterburner systems here, I can just see a MiG-21's pixel sized R-13 afterburner flickering from a little over 20 miles using 30 degree field of view (FOV) and 1280x1024 screen resolution. I believe that higher resolution would allow longer visible distance for any given FOV. The full size screenshot shows very late twilight F-106 AI squadron takeoff to the South, using the smaller size afterburner system. The yellow arrows point to aircraft in full afterburner following the AI leader. The VOLCANO MOD uses specific engine names in aircraft DATA files. Any engine afterburner can be done at any time with a simple calculation. A list of engines currently modelled here and simple formulae for calculating their afterburner data are in the instruction file. These are some of the engines that will be of use in a mythological strategic strike/intercept campaign (Siberian Sky), and include engines that were used, or could be used, by Strategic Air Command (SAC) and manned Soviet Air Defense (IA-PVO) from the 1940s to the 1960s. ThirdWire thread discussing grafix for classical era strategic air warfare: Volcanos erupt on page 3 ~> http://bbs.thirdwire.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=4964 "VOLCANO" was a name used by one or two of our Old Timer SF simmers some time ago who poked fun at an early experimental closeup cameo screenshot that I poasted (it looked pretty bad). The name stuck. v1.01-------------------------------------- *** ADDED TO INSTRUCTION FILE, but the replacement Zip file does not seem to upload here. So... Grafix position of the afterburner may need to be changed to taste. This is done by changing the vector ExhaustPosition=[x,y,z], where... -x is left, x is right. -y is back, y is forward. -z is down, z is up. The numbers are in meters. I prefer the burner flame as close to the nozzle as possible, but without interacting to cause flickering of nozzle/flame. -------------------------------------- Click here to download this file

streakeagle (page 2):: Thanks! TK's beats every other sim hands down in the terrain avoidance capability of AI aircraft. Its phenomanal to watch. Is TK taking advantage of this directly now, or has he always? I never played SF+ campaigns or single missions, only KMD testing. Any chance of testing the AI to see if TK has made AI aircraft supersonic dash with afterburner possible? How do you ever test the re AI aircraft without a mission editor to create specific conditions for testing?

streakeagle:: Does this statement -- especially the low level radar performance -- apply to Player plane only, or to both Player and AI aircraft? I'm thinking that AI aircraft sharing low level radar restrictions might allow the Player to use new tactics.

Use the much smaller MiG-21F-13 and add a drop tank for nose. How to do the ventral intake, I dunno.

FastCargo, hopefully you might have made an error in NearClipDistance= From the first page of the ThudWire thread... [NearSceneClip] FarClipDistance=100.0 NearClipDistance=0.05 I'm using 0.02 now because I later ran into some very tight external model pilot compartments. Your T-38 may need something smaller than 0.10. If you did make an error here, then I hope your T~38 project is back on! :good:

I'd love to, but I'd need a beta tester or three before I share with downloads, as it can be pretty deep stuff (not always though). Full instructions for the ThirdWire B-52 with ThirdWire A-6 cockpit are given on page 2 of that big thread. This can be done at home now by anyone who has THE WOV. Many -- but not all -- of my external model and cockpit combinations use either a 3rd Party cockpit panel skin, a 3rd Party external model skin, or both, that require skin changes. These skin changes may need artist permission before offering up for download.

Anything 106 make my ears twitch. I made some very interesting changes here, scroll down some ~> http://bbs.thirdwire.com/phpBB/viewtopic.p...0&start=168 Also, clear canopy top is possible...

I can flatten airfields. How large? I found that the 2x2 kmkm flattening for smaller fields is unreliable, so I go with 4x4 kmkm as standard.

Try a much higher number, see what happens.

File Name: *update* v1.11 Siberian Sky -- Experimental 3-D Rocket Exhaust File Submitter: Lexx_Luthor File Submitted: 10 February 2008 File Category: Effect Mods *** Note added August 2013: Decrease the particle generation rate in case of slow flying launching platforms, such as helicoptors or WW2 fighter bombers, to avoid too high density of smoke particles which look bad. ** June 2010. Updated to include the ancient Smoke3.tga. I had always thought this was game stock. I was wrong. Somebody, I don't know who, made the Smoke3.tga for the old Weapons Pack but that pack seems not used much today. So I include it now, finally. ** I'm using 7zip as file compression. I first saw it at Column5's Cold War downloads pages, so I tried it and love it. 7zip ~> http://www.7zip.com/ This project is part of a planned series of grafix effects that may be used in an attempt to simulate classical era strategic strike/interception (Siberian Sky). In 3D Rocket Exhaust, large numbers of 2D images combine to form 3D flame and smoke trails. The goal is immersive smoke/flame seen from the cockpit, and long range visibility of flame (night) and smoke (day). There can be a cpu performance hit with large numbers of missiles firing off within the defined MaxVisibility distances. Description, development, limitations, and possible employment or improvements of this and future grafix effects are at the ThirdWire webboard thread below... ThirdWire thread ~> http://bbs.thirdwire.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=4964 PROJECT USE PRE-REQUISITES: (1) Know how to work the sim's weapons and the Weapon Editor. This editor and some basic tutorials are found here at the CombatAce. (2) Know how to work the Cat Extractor to extract encrypted text files for editing. This extractor is found here at the CombatAce. ----------- V 1.11 has Smoke3.tga included. V 1.1 has... (1) One additional step smaller rocket exhaust effect, and two effects for smaller unguided rockets -- U1 and U2 are made with greatly reduced particle density in expectation of large rocket volleys. (2) Better naming system .... R1 (the new smallest effect) to R8 (the old R7 of v1.0).... also U1 and U2. (3) Hopefully better instructions. Click here to download this file

EmissionRate controls the fire and smoke particle density. Have you looked at the ThudWire thread about this? --- *UPDATE* --- I just uploaded a replacement file. This has new smaller effect...R1...but all other Rn effectst are shifted higher....the old Rn are now R2 to R8. Unguided rocket effects are U1 and U2 which are the same as the new R1 and R2 but with double EmissionRate (half the emission rate!) for performance if large number of unguided rockets are fired. Hopefully more clear and more extensive instructions.

Czech out the readme file.

Take a break from it. Just....start with R2, and divide by 2 the four numbers talked about above.