Lexx_Luthor

Green tiles everywhere may be from incorrect numbering or labeling in Texturelist. TE defaults to I think the first tile type defined, not sure. You could poast your Texturelist you are using now. There is a sneaky little numbering snare, in that... Given [TextureTypeList]'s TypeNameXYZ=tilename, where XYZ is an integer, XYZ = ( 1 + TextureType= ) = ( 1 + TransitionTo=). Like in my terrain: Sea's TypeName XYZ is [001], but Sea's Textype = 0 and TransTo = 0. If you miss the shift of 1, its all wrong. ---- OK now i really have a problem !! Why is it that... I know, it gets worse and worse. Until one day, it all works. And you start to think, its not so bad, because you forget how hard it was to learn, which is why I'm not sure how to help now. Here is my TE Learning thread back in 2005 where Deuces pushed me screaming and kicking into figuring all this out. ~ http://combatace.com/topic/8781-terrain-editor-and-hfd

Oh man this is a good one... 24 March 2011 ~> http://www.kforcegov.com/Services/IS/NightWatch/NightWatch_11000066.aspx

Lt:: Fire is a relatively rare form of computer data loss. I'll just take this opportunity to poast its a good idea to keep some data backups off-site, maybe two locations beyond the home base. That alone ensures multiple independent backups -- you can have 20 backupts at home, but if you get one fire, one flood, one tornado, one hurricane, one mudslide, one earthquake, one volcano, one asteroid, or if you live near a Georgia swamp, one megaton (well, that's still debated) and if so (swamp life and asteroid life) keep some backups at least a state or two away. ah...back OT...I never tried Battletech, but always thought it looked immersive.

Sid:: Whiskey? The two of you offer traits that offer independence and freedom. That's not what the powers that be seem to want over here, or anywhere. Ruggbutt, I know what you say, but the low wage guys have neither the power nor connections to be causing a problem. If there is a problem, it has to be somebody else. By your own claim of competing against companies using Mex workers making low wages, we won't find a money trail by following "illegal" workers. Rug:: (1) Eliminate Social Security as ID. (2) Americans should not need ID. (3) Eliminate sales and "income" (and property) taxes. (4) Eliminate mandatory insurance. (5) Eliminate many other things that distort and rob the free market of Adam Smith (such as eliminate Real Estate and return to Land). Interestingly, Smith never used the word capitalism. It seems that Marx popularized that word. That tells me a lot. These are your problems, and none of them were forced on you at gunpoint, Chekist style, by "illegal" workers. America became great with none of those things, with no War-On-Drugs which today sends backpacks of drugs over the border. Since then: monotonic national and social decline -- don't confuse this century's US debt expansion as wealth creation -- American assets have been looted while Americans borrowed book keeping entries. There's nothing anybody can do about this thing now, except lash out at somebody making low wages. Every nation or Empire goes through its stages, so I see this as natural. ... Agreed about the fate of "illegal" Costa Rican and Brazilian workers caught in Mexico. That is Mexico's loss.

I dunno. If he's not in any real danger of being deported, it would be for very embarrassing media coverage( ). Without that, the man is done. The great Greek philospher I hate that word. lemme see... Bueracracy -- red line Buaeracracy -- red line Buearacracy -- red line Buereaucracy -- red line Bureau -- NO RED LINE Bureaucracy -- NO RED LINE -- THAT'S IT!! Reading so much about Soviet Union, you'd think I would know how to spell that without having to struggle. Its one of those words that just fail me. Burocrates :yes:

Silverbolt +1 But there is something strange going on with immigration and "citizenship" -- a racket -- follow the money. But hard working guys are not criminals.

There's nothing new under the SF Sun. WW2.gov "promised" philippine soldiers they'd get US citizenship if they continued to fight the Japanese. They fought, we lied. We always do. The fact the guy may not be labeled a "citizen" makes him even more an American. However, the old sailor buys into the label, so give him that at least.

I thinks that is... FogColor= You can try get its colour close to the the distant ground's colour, or make it more bluish and less brilliant to match the bottom of the sky panels. If I recall, the FogColor fills in the otherwise blank band between the chopped flat Earth horizon and the bottom of the sky.

Julhelm:: I don't keep up with this region, but I always thought those photos of Hamas made them look like criminal mob organization, so maybe voting against them would get legs broken, or worse. This just came from Nightwatch... 23 March 2011:: That could make sense given so many other nations in the region started to protest their own .govs after Tunisia. Even weirder: A few years back, I saw, and lost, a Haaretz newspaper article that claimed, if I recall, that "religious" Hamas was created by Israeli intel to counter the Arafat's "secular" PLO, but things went bad since then. I dunno about that, but it reminds me of like we (USA) lost control of our anti~Soviet ally Been-Laden (past tense?). I always remember reading about how Palestinians and Israelis worked together in private economic association but were forcibly split up by Israeli.gov. I do know there are always a few souls on both sides profiting from Forever War, and the common men and women on both sides pay the bills. Yea, everybody over there, protect yourselves and dear ones.

EricJ:: Interesting. I should hang out in the mission forum more. Could it be simply lack of familiarity with TKMD ... idiosyncraties (lol sp?). I use KMD like breathing air but its so natural now, and I don't even think about using it. But it took time to get there.

Casey the Punisher

Okay, I was into this, but did something really different. Back in the early 90s, I had an idea ... pure shiny rocket. I started with a very tiny one, the smallest Estes tube, about 6" long, and wrapped the finished tube with sticky backed shiny aluminum mylar. Same with fins. It was a rough first start. Within a year, I was rolling my own body tubes out of large sheets of strong art paper, epoxying and adding a bit of fiberglass for strength in loaded areas including the ends where tubes want to start unrolling. I rolled the paper around standard Estes tubes (from 1.6" to 2.4" I think were the sizes, its been a long time now) as a standard size guide, then poked out the Estes tube leaving a strong paper tube, secured by tape until the epoxy cured. I then sanded the seam for the next step. Next step, I would lay out a sheet of *very* thin mirror finish mylar, brand name TOPIX found in art and hobby stores, of any colour you could imagine -- it came in rolls of purple, red, gold, blue, green, aqua, copper, etc..., infinite list of shiny mirror reflective colours. This thin Topix material was easily damaged however, so I placed the thin shiny stuff between two sheets of thicker clear mylar. I had tried acetate, but found mylar to be much stronger and less temperature susceptible. I would then roll this sandwich around the paper rocket tube -- very tightly. A simple line of clear 3M tape front to back along the seam secured the whole mylar wrapping, thus securing the paper body underneath. The result was a mirror finish body tube of deep colour, the Topix fully protected from any damage or temperature changes (crinkling under expansion or contraction) by the mylar surrounding it. Fins:: I cut balsa fins, nothing new here. But then took double sided clear tape and lined rows of tape covering the fin surfaces. I then laid out flat that very thin Topix coloured mylar -- shiny side down, and lay down the fin and double sided tape on top. edit *- - (I also epoxied various mylars to balsa -- I forgot how I did this now....its been too long. ...Anyways, my fins also had a mirror finish as well, of any colour. Interestingly, the tape seemed to provide a sort of protection against bending, although the unprotected metal was easily damaged. All in all, everything seemed to come together in a synergy kind of deal, but it took a long time and lots of experiments. I then epoxied the fins to a temporary Topix wrapped tube, with a massive fillet of epoxy. That is the key here. I let cure, slid off the Topix with fins attached, then peeled off the Topix leaving pure metal mylar on the concave shaped cured epoxy. I then attached the fins to my rockets with double sided tape, the tape mating between the concave Topix coated epoxy and the mylar body tube. The theory behind taped rocket parts is design and build for it...here plastic on plastic, and most important, the observation that one NEVER "slides" tape off a surface; one must PEEL tape off. My designs would never allow sliding, thus the tape held the fins firmly in place, as well as the body tube wraps, and the removable engine mount and removable launch rail guide (more on them below). The tape peeled *only* when I did the peeling to remove something or to do damage repair. "D" Engine mount -- and recovery system: It was all one combined removeable system for use in all my rockets of the same build style and base tube size. The engine mount was three tubes.... ...the first tube was of course the tube the D engines slid into, very short, about the length of a D engine. Using standard Estes engine rings, I mated this tube to what I called the firetube. The firetube was a long Estes tube that carried the ejection gases to the fiberglass wadding (yea, and its re-usable). I cut large balsa rings to mate the firetube to two (2) short lengths of the same stock Estes body tube that I rolled my paper body tubes around, one very short tube length ring in front near the recovery system end of the firetube, and at the rear, a somewhat longer length. The two tubes allowed the engine mount to be inserted into the rear of the body tube. I secured it by a most fascinating method. The rear end of the rear mating tube was wrapped on the outside by a short but thick layer of shiny gold sticky mylar. This provided a stop when inserting the engine mount, and prevented forward thrusting of the mount. The inside of this rear mating tube was covered by the same gold sticky mylar. This gave some heat protection, but the main thing, a small strip of shiny gold mylar was used as tape, being stuck to the inside of the rear mating tube's shiny gold mylar coating, and extending out the rear to be folded over onto the outside of the rear of the body tube's mylar wrap, firmly securing the engine mount in the tube and preventing it from moving being ejected back out. Because tape won't slide, I could secure the engine mount with a single small piece of tape. For ejection, the end of the engine mount's firetube had enough space left to -- get this -- insert a pretty shiny gold safety pin at the front of the firetube (epoxy reinforced there), in front of the front firetube's ring. The ejection cord was attached to this pin, and the other end to the nose, for designs that came down in one piece. The parachutes were hexagons cut out of the very thin Topix mylar and of course were shiny mirror finish, and interestingly, I found these to be more reliable on opening than standard "mushy" plastic Estes parachuts, and I never needed baby powder. The fiberglass wadding was also attached to the safety pin, so I never had to hunt down the wadding, it came back still attached to the engine mount. It took a year to develop, but was a fast setup once done. Get to the field, insert the engine mount chute/wadding first, attach to nose (or upper body tube), then strap on the guide rail. More on that later. After flight, remove the engine mount and guide rail and put them on another empty rocket ready to go. Next, nose cones I would wrap the thin weak Topix mylar between two thicker sheets of clear mylar, all in a cone shape, then cut the base of the cone to fit on a tube -- a short length of the Estes tube of the size I rolled my fuselages around, so obviously it will be a good fit. A round balsa plate was epoxied into the base of this as a piston to be ejected from the main body tube (for larger designs, a forward body tube would have this ejection plate. The plate of course would be mylar coated like the fins, as I liked to think it helped heat protections, but mainly it looked good. The whole rocket was shiny mirror finish deep colours from top to bottom, and to a large degree even inside. The engine mount could be removed in seconds and place in another rocket. The launch rod guide was a pair of rings mounted on the ends of a roughly 12"x0.5"x0.5" balsa piece, sanded on top of my body tube to get a perfect concave sanded fit to the body. This sanded area was then epoxied and let cured. One strip of clear tape applied to this ensured a good connection for the launch rings. For a dozen or so rockets like this, I used only one guide rail and one engine mount, but alot more than 3 parachutes because I liked to try different colours of shiny stuff. Everything was reusable, even the fiberglass wadding. In the end, all my rockets used a single D-12-3 as they were heavy. I built them for looks, and launch site functionality, but not flight performance. They were all empty shells, the heart being the single system of engine mount and recovery in one package. These rockets didn't get high enough to need more than 3 seconds of coasting, and I didn't want to lose them haha. They were for looks, but man did they look. I built a "black brant" looking sounding rocket type design, with alternating gold Topix sheets and just flat black painted paper appearing between them. Black and gold body with alternating black and gold sided fins -- all the gold a mirror finish contrasting with the flat black. I wish I took photos of these now, but never did. Oh well.

Ding Ding!! That would be the easy way for the school organization, except for a little "problem." This is a great example of why private video cams carried everywhere are so important.

Second step is done! I am okay with this, 12,000 kilometers, full scale. Its mostly seamless where I had to copy-paste and rotate or stretch terrain to fill the gaps. The only real problems are some good distortion in north west India, and some touching up may be needed in northern China. To get a great seamless copy-paste, Lake Baikal is about 60km too far north. I can handle that. Recall from the above pic, a gap cut right through the giant lake. It will have to be textured manually which is a snap since its all at 466m level and a quick colour fill in the texture.bmp file can fill the lake perfectly with 0-meter sea level ocean tile -- I think SF can only use one (1) terrain type having specular water sun/moon reflection. Next step: On the height map bmp, fill in dozens of near sea level lakes with zero altitude blue colour -- the Aral sea for a large example which TE sees as 33 meter high land in my height field scale. KMD mission editor: One way of looking at this, all the world's oceans are here -- Atlantic, Pacific, Indian oceans, as well as some of The Meds, and of course the complete Arctic ocean which is the important one here. I used a darker blue for water in the TE heightfield view which I use for Planningmap in KMD, and the darker blue brings out the small islands better. Hawaii was added in case its useful: IRBMs can't reach it, and any ICBM (or submarine) development will almost surely be discovered by SAC recon. Although Hawaii should be off this small map( ), I moved it on stage. Its too close to Alaska but that's not the point. Hawaii is the correct distance from Lake Baikal (in USSR) which I use as a standard measuring point.

Yea, sorry, after hexing the lod, F-104 canopy frame does seem to be all one mesh. For those who don't know (I didn't until a year or so back) -- recall Anita, blonde gal from ABBA? From 1969

Start:: Get another, or two, or how ever many until you feel no concern about it. Always assume *one* will go down. Right now, you have one. Consider it already failed. --- Best is a top line tape drive if you can afford it. Few can. I can't. Next best is go out and BUY a few small hard drives, perferably older ones if you can find them, 20GB maybe. Hard drives have fallen in reliability over the last 6 or so years in the rush for high capacity. If you don't want to handle hard drives directly plugging them in before booting and unplugging them when shutting down when you want to make backups, next is... ...those "convenient" external hard drive boxes but I never touched them. I am good with my old hard drives, and I tolerate no 3rd Party circuit boards so I don't use external hard drive enclosures, and I've witnessed too many crying and tearing of clothing over failed external hard drive backups. If you go this way, get several of them for multiple independence. Next is DVD, but they are low capacity "new floppies," and make a lot of multiple copies because, unlike the CD or DVD disks the big media corporations use, the common consumer blank media we buy in the stores tends to lose data more quickly -- or so I've read!!!!! I don't know if that's true, but it makes some sense, and I assume its true just to be SAFE and conservative until I learn differently to my satisfaction. Last would be flash drive if you have to rely on that. Its by far the most convenient but I don't fully trust it yet. However, its far better than doing nothing. One tip I learned lately with the newer drives (250GB here)... the more data you have, the more chance of a tiny bit of seemingly small data corruption: but one bit error and a whole LOD or terrain file may become unusable. I think this is what happened to me last year. For some reason, the F4D lod failed to show in game, and my backups didn't help. I had to re download it. Since then, I have not backed up to some of my backup hard drives since I don't want to risk backing up corrupted data on my working newer hard drive to my more reliable old small hard drives. Sometimes you can get un-used shrink wrapped small hard drives for cheap, for example at computer shows, like last year I picked up a half dozen 2.5" 40GB laptop drives and use them for multiple independent backup from my desktop. I plug them in (with computer OFF) and copy stuff to them and plug them out (after computer SHUTDOWN) as the months pass by, slowly cycling through them and other drives, but I handle them *carefully* and plan to build a small portable rack for some of them so I don't have to handle them directly so much.

Veltro thanks for all your stuff. Its amazingly fantastic. I must say you in general have consistently the most deep 3d detail in your canopy frames. You know I'm weird with how I play with a chopped instrument panel inside the 3d models. I'm sticking to SF1 for now in yet another clinical display of weirdness. If you ever do a Martin XB-68 (PDF, scroll down) paper plane (not the ICBM), that would be another temptation to go SF2. 68 discussion ~> http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,479.0.html

TK's F-104 canopy mesh Moves are simple. I did it two ways here... Scroll down a pinch ~> http://bbs.thirdwire.com/phpBB3w/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=4410&start=96

Skippy:: I can assume that easily, but I didn't know that explicitly, because I don't care. Its off the radar, so to speak. One of the big problems I see is old games are not releaced from the "invasive" DRM -- or are they? What if Steam goes out of business and then the games don't work? Or is that not a problem? The real problem for me is is lack of time and interest. I have neither for any game except TK's SF -- the only game I have -- although I do play Master of Orion 1, from time to time, when I plug in my DOS 6.22 hard drive and boot from that. What's cool is all that still works. I still work and run Fortran 90 stuff I make, and it runs under a 32 bit extender. So I run a 64 bit processor (AMD) using 32 bit software on a 16 bit operating system. The old grafix cards won't work though since they changed the voltage on the PCI slots, but it doesn't hurt much for what I do. Master of Orion 1 does have an early form of DRM, but its not invasive. During gameplay, the player is asked to identify the name of one of the ship models used by the game. If you have the paper manual, you look it up. Obviously this isn't very secure, but it came on maybe 4 floppy disks, its that old.

UK, don't bring a gun to a knife thread. UKWidow:: That's a silly comment, but yea I did poast a silly comment; a popular joke here in USA about Britts restricted to spoons only, which may be wrong. Sorry about that. If I recall, there are blade length restrictions, but short knives are allowed -- or was that another country like NZ or somewhere. I don't recall.

I never had a problem with Steam. I never will have a problem with Steam. I have never considered buying a "steam" game, and I never will. I have always purchased and supported ONLY independent developers or small publishers that avoid Steam like behaviors. I miss out on alot of games, but looking around, I see I'm not missing anything out of life because of it. Starve the beast.

B-57 too lol. Fellas, optimize the Il-28 for the role. If no radar (this is about 1950 or so), delete the nose guy and add cannon -- nose glass mesh could be covered with a blank decal matching the aluminum metal skin. Pour fuel in the bomb bay for long flights over polar waters. I would say maybe delete the tail gunner -- but -- with a small plane like that, how would that effect its flying ability?

Il-28 patrol day interceptor, rebuilt and optimized for that role. Roundabouts 1950 or so, SAC and NAVY have long range Elint crawling all over Soviet borders, to support strikes against USSR, and you need a long range interceptor to get at them, especially in the north, assuming they are un-escorted, which is a good assumption for really long range missions over water. No Sidewinders (or Atolls) though -- so sorry. Although I wonder what the range of the MiG-15 was with the extra large super duper tanks.

Dave, its said that over in the UK, they can only carry spoons in public. Or have their spoons been "restricted" as well? How far they have fallen. There's a reason the Blade Comparative Evaluation (B.C.E.) scene in that Croc Dundee movie was so popular.