Lexx_Luthor

This could be a Worst Airplane Scene thread. My worst is in, I think, the movie Fail Safe, where they send fighters (F-102 but I may be wrong) to help somebody (don't know, don't care) and a controller orders the fighters to go to afterburner. They cut to the fighters launching rockets. That was supposed to be going into afterburner. Like FC, I stopped watching the movie at that point. I had extreme difficulty getting that far.

Other shots of that. I searched tube for "rocket sundog" and got these... ~> http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=rocket+sundog&aq=f

streak, it seems, that's a new one, never been seen before by anybody, well according to what I read anyways. What happened was a sun dog, ring around the sun, got "evaporated" by the rocket's shock wave. The shock randomized the ice crystal orientation. In the sun dogs, the crystals align aerodynamically as they fall and so act together collectively on to make sunlight into rainbow colours (say like DVD surface -- ah sorta). But with all the crystals shocked into random orientation, the effect vanished. Well that's what they said anyways.

Not bad at all. If you look at the snow~boarder action (well ignore that) and look toward the sun, just above is a portion of a contrail hanging in the sky, and you can zoom in on it. Not content with that, but stretching across the entire sky on the sunside is a more faint but much wider "old" (even ancient) persistent contrail sheet turned to cirrus. I love skies like this. Thanks!!

baff:: mmm .. SID are you running non-stock clip distances in your Flightengine.ini? I always used to have flickering problems because my weirdo mods required radically ramped clip distances. I fixed that by painting airfields on tiles and did away with LODs (and nobody makes primitive hard-to-see "frontline" airfield LODs). But I just tried a stock LOD and, well, no more flickering. Maybe it was my old 9200 video card. I dunno. -- WRENCH:: Something new (maybe) and major for me. In TE, have you noticed at high zoom levels, you can center the mouse cursor in the screen and press down on the scroll wheel, and a little arrow appears and you can do very fine scrolling navigation with mouse position? I always had problems in my larger maps (10,000km+) where at high zoom levels the scroll bar navigation was not suitable -- skips over too much terrain or the scroll control snaps back to its origin. Now this mouse nav works great even at the highest zoom on my largest maps. I am so happy.

pre--ww2 sounds different got Link?

Lucky, in addition to Enviro ambient control, you also can control the general brightness of terrain in isolation ... with no effect on objects, just terrain. In whatever terrain_DATA.ini file, in the [Materials] section, is... [NormalTextureMaterial] : : AmbientColor=1.000000,1.000000,1.000000,1.000000 DiffuseColor=1.000000,1.000000,1.000000,1.0000000 : : Ambient controls the terrain tiles' colour (along with Water tex block), and Diffuse controls the colour of the sunlit sunside slopes. I try to maximize the latter effect, especially near sunset, keeping Diffuse always 1,1,1 but making Ambient darker. I have not seen any effect by modifying the last number, just the first three numbers (Red, Green, Blue). I used to go into a photopaint program and darken all my tiles, and then do it again until I was happy, and then do it all again when I changed my Enviro lighting. But terrain_DATA allows a one step control in one swift stroke.

The old tga vs bmp thing? Question: After turning it on, as the radar sweeps, does the screen get progressively more green and more saturated? If so, we had an issue in old SF-1 PATCH where TK went all radar.bmp on us, and all the old mod airplanes radar.tga's sweeped solid green and would not erase previous sweeps. Every mod airplane radar.tga had to be converted to bmp.

Looks good so far. Keep us updated or Temporally Enlightened.

mmmmm Looking real quick, just woke up. Try... [DEMImport] : : Resolution=2 : : Not sure exactly what that is. I use 2. I gotta rush off, I'll look again tonight. Later Sid, are your airfields centered in the airfield tiles? Check this by running the game *without* transition tiles -- just the basic full up square tiles -- and look at where the airfield is in the tile.

Sid, poast your TE config file preceding the [...Material] sections. And, poast the first [paragraph] of your terrain DATA file. Don't poast the whole things.

I've seen terrain overlaying airfield LODS, and it may be the airfields are not placed right. Wrench, maybe this is related, but, have you ever seen the CityList and Targets airfield coordinates not matching? I mean, they can differ by 1km to get the airfield to be centered in the airfield tile, at least with even numbered kilometer size tiles. I've only ever used 2km and 4km tiles. I was just experimenting with 5km tile sizes, and for the first time, the coordinates match perfectly, without one or the other needing offset. I wonder if 3km would be the same (3km is a nice compromise between 2 and 4 kms).

I think F-102 made a brief but rather embarrassing to watch appearance in Fail Safe, but if I recall my movies correctly (never finished that one) that scene is just too embarrassing to talk about. On the other hand, my fave was watching Captain (black and white jeapisode) Tony Nelson climb into a T-38, fly around in F-104, and taxi back in F-106, or some permutation of that order. I wish we had magic like that over The SF. Another one probably little known: In the final lepisode of season 4 LEXX, President Priest and (First Companion I suppose) Bunny takeoff in Tornado, fly around in (Euro type) Tornado, and F-4, and I think F-18 too, and then follow Prince's instructions to eject from F-4.

Very interesting read, very interesting thread from the start. Thanks for poasting this. !!

Some of the cargoes are very immersive to play, especially using Open Cockpit method and so you are surrounded by the great supermodels' 3D canopy framework. Its not just a model, its a supermodel

FC, you may like this with Open Cockpit for B-70, and if not, I made a neat little .ini discovery although it may not be new (...Wrench??). I finally decided to tackle the meshes in NormanKnight's F-111 cockpit, something I have avoided for 4 years. Almost all of the meshes are independent, so it took some time, 48 minutes to be exact. I timed it for the challenge, and that's before I debugged it all, which included figuring out any parent/child mesh relationships. There are some. They need knowing. I know them. I can poast the Moves if anybody is interested. I dropped the entire cockpit out of view, and Moved *everything* else back up, needle by needle, knob by knob. I made 165 mesh Moves in F-111 COCKPIT.ini, but I pared some back -- things I don't need. I'm leaving those in though in case others may want those things, like mirrors, hud, canopyglass, for examples. I also did some repainting with B-70 cockpit photos in mind, but I can't share that w/o permission. I did some lite grey~ing around, and copied over the pilot's main display in place of the co-pilot's 3D radar boot. For B-70, I doubt I'll need the gunsight control panel right in front, but I'll figure out something to do with it. ======================================================================================= OPEN COCKPIT with FC's B-70 model. F-111 cockpit chopped to fit inside the model is the best I can think of for B-70. I faked a moving map in place of the radar, because with multi-crew aircraft, I prefer the game's radar pop-up display, and so allowing more cockpits without radar screens available for radar equipped multi-crew aircraft in general. ...FC, nice clam ejection capsules... Most of the cockpit sits far below, out of normal sight. I'd like to get the side panels back, but they are fixed to the canopy frame. --- In a desperate Move of my own to keep things from getting too messy in .ini, I tried this to save "space..." : : [Move164] Type=AIRSPEED_INDICATOR NodeName=needle_climb MovementType=POSITION_Z Set[01].Position=9 [Move165] Type=AIRSPEED_INDICATOR NodeName=radar_screen MovementType=POSITION_Z Set[01].Position=9 : : That's it! If you need only re-position and no animation, just the first SET line is needed. The game sees this as enough information for fixed position. ----- ---- --- -- - In addition to CombatAce F-111 section, Mike Werner hosts F-111 cockpit for SF ~> http://www.schmidtwerner.de/products/f-111_pit.html

Ahh....it was EmptyInertia= Increase it significantly, by an order of magnitude if needed (add a trailing zero before the decimal). At the time, I figured, there was some confusion on how to calculate this.

Its fixable. I just forgot how. I'll keep looking fouga.

Play with PitchDamper. I found a fix for the cargo shakes some time back. I forgot it. But, what I did was in the FM data file, a single variable. Maybe -- try increasing PitchDamper near the top under [FlightControl]. Experiment around. Or maybe that's AI only, but whatever it was, I increased it and the shakes went away. Try it and poast back. Its a problem I'll eventually have to solve as my SF game gets going. MEEE TOOO !!! (well, SF 2006, close enough)

I was too ready to tell myself it was one of those New-SF kinda things and obediently accepted it. Then that bubble floated.

Wrench is right. Its probably too many decals. You can take out some decals if you know how. Its in the Decals file in the skin folder. ---- FC, well guess what? Recall I found the XB-70 partly transparent in The SF-1. Well, a thought bubble about The Wrench and his poastings popped into my head, and it was the decals. Do'h

Gep:: Like Heinkel's Goebbel's He-113? It worked too, as many RAF and VVS pilots reported fighting it, or so they thought.

Good thinking FC. For the B-70 "A" version, I think I'll stay with F-111 pit, if only because it more closely matches what we saw from the XB-70. Now, on the other hand, for the "B" version, or some later version, you made me think a bit more clear here. B-1 pit would be better. I'm thinking, if you transition from B-70A to B-70B, or whatever newer version, you get a new cockpit with many new visual distinctions -- something that screams loudly "playing B or C..." in addition to FM or avionics differences. Thanks man!

Okay, for longer length, you have to change the weapon data. Then you don't have the same missile anymore. (1) BoosterDuration= or (2) BoosterAccel= Increasing one or two of these can make the missile go farther before rocket burnout. So the smoke trail is longer. You also can have smoke made by the rocket coasting...the In Flight Effect. I like NO trails for after rocket burnout, but others do. Unfortunately, sustainer visual effects do not work, at least not in SF-1.

What you mean..."longer" Longer in length? Longer in time? -- time we can do You can increase ParticleLifetime. But, if you do, you may want to change *some* of ParticleSize and ParticleColor TIME values to match....the TIME values are decimal fractions of ParticleLifetime...ie...ParticleColor[04].Time=0.8 means that color happens at 0.8 of 30 seconds -- that's 24 seconds -- in this case. If you make PL 60 seconds, maybe make PC[04].T about 0.4 .... this would make the same colour appear at the same time after the rocket launch -- 24 seconds. Experiment to Taste. The last final TIME should still be =1.0 ... that is the end of particle lifetime ... in the original case; 30 seconds.