Lexx_Luthor

Love the shiny raw metal. Thanks

I'm still waiting on the Great Pumpkin -- the Thudwire flayable Red cockpit announcement. However, TK did once talk about flayable Red -- in due time. On the other hand, TK last year said "no strategic game" -- ever. So ya'll be playing Thudwire Red cockpit long before you play Thudwire Strategic Air Command cockpit, which is probably never. He'd have to change the game big time for that. I know.

This is a good point. malibu:: You got tricked into the myth, promoted by space combat game developers, that space combat should be compared to 20th century air combat. It should not be. Space combat is best compared to 20th century surface ship-ship combat, but without air units. Yea its about turrets in 3D instead of 2D, but far more other things that would never apply to air combat. Think ships and fleets manuevering for position or evasion. You can have "space carriers" but the carrier based space fighters are not the equivalent of airplanes, but the equivalent of small combat boats. The smallest and the largest space combat vehicles are the same class of vehicle -- like a small boat vs a battleship -- and not different classes of vehicle like the flying dive bomber vs boats/ships. Okay. I suppose a game could be made where "normal" space ships operated in NORMAL space, but "space fighters" and "space bombers" operated in hyperspace (or whatever) where space ships could never go -- like neither PT boats nor battleships can fly. Only the small hyperspace vehicles can take off into hyperspace, like only airplanes can take to the air. The rest of the space fleet stays in normal space, like a naval fleet operates strictly in water, unlike the air planes. I guess you could call airplanes hyperwater craft since they go beyond water. A game like that could be neat if you can accept the concept of hyperspace or whatever.

Interesting. For laker marks, I use the 104 pit, as it gives a "wrap around" look like the Canberra pit, but something with an older IAS guage would be better. In my fictional game, I'll need the 104's RWR. I'm really butchering the Canberra marks in my planeset, for example, something I call E.9 will be anti~SAM. Trying to fit my fictional marks to replace unneeded hysterically correct marks. I have not tried the F-86 pits for RWR possibilities. The clock should work but I love having a cockpit clock. However, I found that if I can live without cockpit clock, I can set the mission advance time to a fraction of a second in Flightengine, so I can see the "new" time displayed when I advance the game clock, without changing the time other than a millisecond. For some reason, TheSims developers don't offer a dedicated an in-game clock display to simulate pilot wrist watch or something. But this reduced advance timing workaround works over the SF.

UGH. Well at least they don't seem to put other souls at risk out there over the water.

lol TK should code up some Speech that goes @$%!&*# Not that big of course.

Trim guage would be neat. Does the smiley face work?

When I was a squish, we had an almost white German Shepard, but not "white enough" apparently so she was sold for cheap by the breeders and we got her. Lady. We had a Siamese cat, Potato. I also called her Plump. She wasn't plump but she DID seriously look like a potato. Lady assaulted Potato daily while Potato was on her back. Potato would paw up Lady's face, but never once a claw appeared. Lady would chew her, well, gum her up, with never one tooth bared. After each attack, Potato was all wet, fur melted down dripping with Lady's saliva. That was their play. Best dog, koolest kat.

Pfunk:: I'm thinking all you had to do is detail a central portion of a map, leaving the rest blank flat terrain out to the edge, with working airfields with a stock LOD having no ground objects (nor lighting) nor defenses, far beyond the play area of interest. You will never see these airfields in normal play. But that's another point: Off map spawning is not a great idea when you play the units spawning. Granted for some things (B-36 for example) that could be a prohibitively long way off, depending on speed (B-70 for speedy counter example).

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Yea I loved the K-7 Athalons. For years I ran MSI 6378s as they carried an integrated Trident video chipset. That sounds bad but Trident had one of the fastest 2D video chips around -- not 3D -- so Trident (and MSI in general) was bashed by gamers whining on hardware forums but you ignore them. I did tons of Fortran programming in DOS and my Fortran compatible grafix talked to the Trident -- very fast 2d. Still use it when I run my old stuff. Interestingly, for software using x87 maths like my (1990s) Fortran, the old Athalons are actually faster than the new Intel i5 2500k Sandy. Intel just dropped support for the ancient x87 is all, begining as far back as Pentium 4, while AMD did not. For the SF and any other Windows stuff that uses the newer maths, Intel rules now though. Its amazing the jump in the number of AI aircraft/surface units I can run in SF-1 now under Sandy Bridge ... thousands instead of just hundreds. --- Your box is great, but you really need to upgrade your AGP card (or is it PCI?). Get a used replacement, say 9800Pro even, or X-something. The 9600 is really holding you back, and a used replacement should not be too much. Dunno. Look roundabout.

Wow. That looks cool if you can get it working. I'll take a look at my Canberry pit. For future stuff, search for a free hex editor or two. I use two complimentary editors. One is bland but has a useful text search feature, the other offers superb visual font/colour customization that aids in manual searching LODs, but no text search (they are limited free versions). Then, goto Thudwire and read the first 3 pages of this thread ~> http://bbs.thirdwire.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=4410 . The rest is fluff.

No OUT file included. You can look at the pit LOD with a hex editor and get mesh names. What kind of thing are you looking for?

Wow. What are your upgrade options? Can you build a box from inexpensive, say, 2009 era parts, which would be *astonomically* faster than what you have now?

Bricks freaking granit rocks. How they bounce up and spin round in the air at the end. Good harnesses. Remeber fellas, backup your stuff and buckle your belts on the road.

harry:: Interesting. For an important enough target the costs can be justified, as I suppose the case here in the Falklands. I play strikefighters and mod it for classical Strategic Air Command vs PVO and the background requirement for lots of expensive refueling is going to be one of the "equalizing" methods for the background. In my game there's going to be tons of refueling for bombers and escort fighters, ECM support, recon, SAM suppresion, etc... as well -- a simple one-strike won't force a surrender of a dug in determined opponent but air ownership over time might, or might not. Imagine if 8th AAF and RAF had to do several one or more refuels on their missions to Germany and back, bombers and escorts included.

Driving back from bakery today in heavy traffic, nearing a bridge being built with a good 200ft crane poking high in the sky. Far beyond were cumulus clouds -- you know, flight sim clouds -- moving, then stopping. WhaaaTF??? The clouds they all just stopped dead. Then they were moving again. Just watch the traffic, I didn't see anything, move along ... actually sit there in neutral. Then I looked at the crane again, and the clouds were moving. The world still worked. Then the clouds stopped again, frozen in place. Ahh. It was the crane moving a little bit, either from working (guys were there) or, as it was a quite windy day, the top of the crane might sway in the wind although you might not *see* that itself, and on occasion the crane's movement would match the apparent motion of the clouds, making the clouds look motionless against the crane. I was measuring the cloud motion against the crane. Bad move. Incidentally, a minute before this, I was sitting in traffic and "felt" I was moving backwards and I had to force myself to look aside at something else (concrete wall barriers). I was measuring against the car just in front -- Very very bad move ... a good way to roll back into sombody's front bumper if you interpret that as the car ahead moving forward. Had a quite visually confusting day. When I climbed radio towers, on the guy wire types, on a good gusty windy day you could FEEL the swaying at the top, but with the ground so far below, you could not see the sway. That was always a rush.

FC I remember you doing that. The balls are not responding to the SF lighting of sun, moon, and effects, like objects normally do -- think of Radarfacility by grumpapotamus and the SF sun shining on the dome in grump's screenshot there. - How far away could you take the camera from the balls and still see them?

Yea she's great. Nice store there. How's it going?

FC how far could you see them? -- your 3d clouds that is. Now I'm doing 2008 I need to hop on that balloon.

Stary, game object LODs vanish about 10km, no matter how large or what distance variable is set -- at least in SF-1. Terrain detail is another story, with no limit to draw distance except practical performance. If 3d clouds can be part of the terrain LOD, they may be visible to maybe a hundred km....like some of these... ...scroll down to Russia 2001, and Southern Nigeria 1999... As 3d objects they should look wonderful under the SF Sun.

eraser, would the new bump mapping allow added terrain detail without added hits? Icebergs or sea ice come to mind for one application. I wonder if real 3D cumulonimbus storm clouds can now be added to terrains. IL-2 had its fluff clouds fixed to the terrain -- when clouds were turned ON, every IL-2 game run had the clouds the same positions in a given map. Skate, tga's work fine. Its the effects design that often uses too many tga. We have to optimize the tga usage in effects for boxes of various performance. Shucks in my weirdo mods years back I went out of my way to limit TGA numbers, and I was using a low end budget card. Now with a great performance card, I may need to go back and ramp up the TGAs.

I don't remember. I went to making my own bmps and importing them, instead of importing the downloaded geo DEMs straight into TE. It all depends on the new terrain setup variables...under Flle ~> New ... the New Terrain Dialogue box. It took a few years before I used that. In fact I think it was Gepard's tutorial that pointed me to that dialogue box. TK did a fantastic job on TE, once you learn it.

Gepard:: Its amazing the fun that can be had with setting up dense super-missions in a mission editor, with rearm/refuel available. In the IL-2 (Pacific) the weirdest moment I had was sitting on a Japanese deck admiring the scenery and the ship's AA guns start firing outside my cockpit and I look up at the pretty sky and see tiny flak puffs WAY up there, then little dive bomber pixels coming down, getting bigger, and pulling up, then SPLASH BAM all crap broke out on deck. Sadly, Oleg (nor TK) never understood the fun nature of rearm/refuel in a combat flight TheSim. Midway 1942 was the ultimate Battle of Rearm and Refuel between two carrier fleets.

Interesting. Stwa, try a map centered on the Celebes, the most fascinating spot in the ocean. Make it 1000km or preferably larger. Very nice mountainous jungle islands. If it wasn't for my main project, I'd be doing a SW Pacific campaign about 1960 with USSR+China (manpower) replacing the late 1941/early 1942 Japanese....except nothing can replace A6M2 range.