Lexx_Luthor

These are the high altitude lakes north of the Himalayas. Heavy picture, click here ~~> http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d178/Lexx_Luthor/144/Highlakes.jpg Lake Karakul above is seen in the upper left corner. There are dozens of these things, hundreds if we go smaller but that strains the resolution of even this map. --- View of a few Tibetan Plateau lakes from 20,000 meters. The first raw pic has the lakes at sea level. The snow covered tiles form a plataeu at 8500 meters altitude -- everywhere on the map. This is fixed later by swapping in a "real" HFD as seen on the right. The long narrow thing on the left side of each pic is the left wing (bare metal) of USAF U-2. These were supposed to be cockpit views, but I didn't get much cockpit.

Lake Karakul in Tajikistan. Its listed as 3900m elevation, and I get 3901m in game, which includes the one meter free camera height. I got lucky there. This is the lake seen from 19,000 meters. The first pic is the "false" height map. The tiles are correct, but the height map is butchered as a code for Texturelist tiling. We fix that in the second pic, where a "true" height map is swapped in. This is one of the "cool" places on the map I love, but there are hundreds of "cool" places and I'll never be able to detail them all. The nice thing about swapping around HFDs is that I need hundreds of small lakes, and (larger) rivers.

Okay the deed is done! Screenshots next or it didn't happen. It took like 5 minutes to attach the 7z at 99MB.

Okay, I'll do it then. I see ravenclaw's Buccaneer (tried it last nigtht, wow!) is 150MB , so I should be able to upload a summer map with bmps for 100MB.

Okay, its 140MB total 7zipped, but dumping winter, I get down to 100MB. I figure two uploads, one for game terrain, and one upload with three TE friendly bmps. The terrain 7zipped up is 35MB. The three bmps are 64MB.

Done! ... "my big map..." What map? Put up or... I figured do, or get lost. I finally got this tiled up to near what I always hoped to get, with blank colour coded tiles, but not textured. For years I've avoided tiling this since I knew it would be impossible. And it was. But I did it. Its now a prototype map, not just experimental. It works. I have a summer and winter tiling, both preliminary. Should I put them up in two (2) uploads, or both seasons together in one swift stroke? Right now 7zipped its all well over 100MB. That inlcudes not only the HFD and TFD for game, but a number of 12000x12000 pixel bmp files that others can use for TE. I use a number of big bmps since I swap out HFD and TFD files for the finished game map, since I import one (butchered) bmp as a kind of Texturelist code for tile mapping, and another "normal" bmp for height mapping, and then do it again for another season. One can browse The PhotoBucket link here (I think) for some of the bmp files and TE views. Its all "auto textured" in TE. I spent tha last few months getting the thing to auto tile like this, not wanting to depend on manual tiling for any of this yet. There is still much to do however. Public, 144 ------> http://s35.photobucket.com/albums/d178/Lexx_Luthor/144/

white I hear ya man, but it doesn't explain the blowback. Sometimes these losers terror their own .govs, often when those corrupt .govs are puppets we install or prop up. Communist chinese are targets of Xinjiang terrorists, not that Communists have many freedoms to be attacked for, but they are meddling with local cultures, as commies tend to do. Blowback comes down to basic street sense. Yea, dirt farmers in Pakistan may only see the effects or end results of US banking (actually, global banking) when their nation is put into debt which means poverty which means terrorist recruitment which means blowback. Same over here ... many see the lost jobs and homes, but they don't understand (ask them) their own banking system nor legal tender laws that force, by politico's law, every soul into dependence on bank debt. I have, however, noticed the complete disappearance of those [ XYZ Bank Me ] bumper stickers on soccer moms' SUVs. And that is today's good news. --- eraser, found something new (for me). I was looking at the Azores for use on my big map, and stumbled on an old war -- Liberal War -- Portuguese constitutionalists vs absolutists. Well that turned interesting, since one of the top RN admirals of the time took command of constitutionalist fleet, along with RN sailors. The UK politicos and rear echelon navy lords hated him for that. ~> Admiral Sir Charles Napier ... played a primary role in the Star Spangled Banner battle as well. I guess sometimes really good guys can be on the wrong side lol.

This dialogue has always been my fave, slightly modded for SF here ~> http://bbs.thirdwire.com/phpBB3w/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=8693&start=16#p54407 I modded that script before I knew 2NA would have the Reds already camped on Iceland with local bases. Oh well.

76, lets make a deal. You know a Deal deal. Maybe you're a republican. I'm back running now on my big map, solving some thorny issues I knew I'd run into, so if I upload it, you upload that La-200. My map needs 200 for obvious reasons. Well if Dave approves but hopefully he won't remember approving anything in the morning. Deal?

There has always been some copying of basic ideas, since its art after all, and these souls were extreme artists. How about missiles? Okay R-3 = AAM-N-7 but usually everbody had way different looking missiles. I like the Red missles since I like big fins on missiles and old cars. I tend to thinki that auto engineers copied the big fins of early rockets for the 50s cars. Both eventually lost their big fins.

76:: If you didn't know the Show Filter Options at the bottom where you can set 25 planes per page and so reducing the current SF-2 aircraft list to a mere 18 pages, now you do. I rather enjoy browsing, looking for something, but stumbling on stuff I did NOT know about, that I can use, and might not have discovered if not for having to browse roundabout.

What's your fave pit? F-105 panel I think has always been the best Thudwire thing, ever. Ever think you'd see it in a game? Once you learn the basics of extracting hidden files, you can do things like change the player's view limits so you can actually see outside the right window of the A-6. Its very nice and I don't know why it was hidden. Some pits like WoV's A-6 won't let you turn off the dark canopy "glass" but there are hidden ways to do this. Be careful cos this game can become very addictive if you get deep into it.

Correct erasur, at one level they are the "blowback" -- a technical term for those in the business so to speak -- reaction against the giant banks' and civilian politicos' foreign policy. Best Quote, ever, never thought of it like this before.:: Fred Reed, USMC ::

lol The best ladder is a truss work like that. I like that ladder. I used to climb 300ft to 450ft ladders like that -- guy wired towers. I hate pegs though, everybody does. Ever seen the pic of the NAVY pilot trying to navigate the pegs on the side of the Demon fleet interceptor?

Yep. Not just turn radius, but play time also. B-70 was to cruise at M=3, and without afterburner, I think? It was to get its best range at that high speed, waveriding, while lower speeds would not wave ride, and so cost more fuel for the distance. So any B-70 flight across the map would take just a few hours, counted on one hand, far less time than B-36, B-52, and even a refueled B-58 which cruised subsonic until near the target. Is all this Correct Thinking? One interesting analysis I read about was that the B-58 was intended for use against a tight defense system, a defense that was located near the target, which the plane would sprint for over the defense. But, with the Soviet spacing SAMs widely across the land in the 1960s, far between targets, the B-58 would have to fly over these defenses at slow speeds until the near-target sprint. I've read that this contributed to the short service life of the plane. Not sure if this is true. Any thoughts?

Sun, could that be somehow related to the Sticky Runway problem? ... ie... if the first city in Targets.ini has a runway, planes get stuck in it like molten tar. Back in the day, I noticed Thudwire's desert Targets had cities *without* airfields listed first. That was a clue for me.

An irrational conundrum, and possibly a new terrain oddity. I tried extending this thing farther .. "north" .. by an extra 1,000km to get in some good continental USA, but got snared by an interesting limitation to either TE, or the game itself, or my settings. To grab some USA, I made this 13,000km map size, with 3km tile size, and it tiled up okay in TE, but the tiles in the newly added area would not show up in game. A day later, they showed up in game, but getting close to the northern new tiles dumped the game, just like how the game dumps if we get too close to the northern/southern border when Horizondistance < Border. But this did not effect the southern border. Strange. Changing to the next integer tile size, 4km, fixed everything. But I think I want smaller tile sizes for more terrain detail -- nicer coastlines, vastly more sea level lakes get auto tiled, etc... so I found that a 12,500 map will use 3km tiles, but not 13,000km. That extra 500km will have to do, enough to get the states of Washington and Montana playable at least. Apparently, as maps grow larger, there are minimum limits to tile size in game, and the game won't display rows of tiles that exceed some number related to map size. For 13,000km maps, the smallest tile size is 4km. I tried doing a 12,000km map with 2km tiles, but it didn't work in game, 3km tiles were the smallest there. I recall once tiling a 12,000km map with 2km tiles, but that was SF-2006, and I don't recall a problem. I'm doing this over SF-2008 now, so something may have changed. Recall that Patch 2008 was when TK hid the map edges from view, causing the game to dump in situations where we could previously see the edge and beyond -- the Great White Abyss -- so this is possibly a result of that change. 12,500 kilometers, the largest map we can do with 3km tile sizes over the SF-2008...

This explains it...maybe, although Bain talked about taxes owed to HMG. Seems the HMG could save thousands of Pounds by just letting the MiG-17s do the strikes for them. On the other hand, their pilots might try to hit the targets. Aden Protectorate:: All around just weird.

lol mee too

Very in depth indeed. Thanks. Lots of sandy desert stories by squadron there. Amazing airplane, apparently quite weather sealed. This is fascinating, and weird/sad -- me I'd go home rather than "fly" for civilian politicos....under the Anecdotes button, 8th Squadron, Chris Bain... Pay your taxes fellas hehe. Lots of stuph there thanks.

Make your own weapons text ini file, starting from nothing, just the weaps you want, and run it through WE2008. That's what I did. Keeps things alot simpler. Mine has only about 100 weapons so far, but it will eventually end up with maybe 300 (with drop tanks and jammers too). Thudwire is nothing like the big mega game developers in this respect, in fact just the opposite of them, at least back in SF-1 2008 and earlier. Do you know the very most simple basics of file and folder management in any Microsoft operating system past or present? If you know, you have your answer.

Brain:: Interestingly, the Nightwatch has been offering insights into the western MSM and Syria, for example this poast from February. Good read, but note the comment of an eventual "engame" to the regime. Much more at Nightwatch front page ~> http://www.kforcegov.com/Services/IS/NightWatch.aspx

You could use, say, one of those blunt nosed bombs, bury it in the fuselage and point it up so just the nose is showing. But you'll have to use it as fake weapon, which can be rotated. Pilots can't be rotated (I think).

B-52 was the plane, and KC-135, that brought Strategic Air Command back home, well for the most part, inside national borders. A long and unique read on the role of SAC overseas basing until the B-52 and KC-135, massive PDF file, 280 pages... ~> Strategic Frontier: American Bomber Bases Overseas, 1950 - 1960, by Kurt Wayne Schake

That's an interesting point. The correct intended souls to be seen are trained to not look, the unexpected souls stare back at the bustographers. I figure NK represents the ideal dystopian society often seen in scifi.