Lexx_Luthor

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.

Skate:: That is very interesting. Are afterburners visible from longer distances at night? SF runway and aircraft lights have always had a kind of reduced distance effect -- ie... lights dim with distance much less than expected to compsensate for the utter failure of computer monitors to model light intensity and eye sensitivity. Did TK extend this to effect emitters as well? Back in the SF-1, to get afterbunny plumes to show up at long distances at night in wide field of view, I had to super size them, like in the screenshot below (SF-1). Unfortunatetly in day time up close, they look like volcanoes as another suggested, hence the name Volcano Mod.

52:: I hear stories of backup external drives failed on people souls. With the recent drop in long term reliabily of even internal hard drives, I'd be paranoid enough to make multiple independent backups on (at least) several hard drives. I learned the easy way. After my first computer years back, which I built myself, kinda (long story), I made backups to floppy disks, yea that long ago, because it just made *sense* somehow. I spent months programming a space combat simulator, and it just made sense to backup the source code on floppy and in time, extra spare hard drives. I guess I'm just like that is all. However, I did have a first brutal "lesson" that taught me I was right to be backing up my really imporant big stuff. To avoid hard drive grinding, I always loaded the DOS Su-27 Flaker 1.0 game into the Microsoft DOS ramdisk. One day I spent hours making a thousand plane mission, and the mission editor froze up. Had to reboot. Lost it all -- but only a few hours work. After that, I would often exit the editor and with a quick batch command, copy it to the hard drive. How often? Whenever I got paranoid about losing what I had just done, I backed it up. Paranoia about losing stuff has always been my guide to when to back up. Since then, all my stuff is backed up independently on DVD, thumb drives, but BY FAR most importantly, on about two dozen old internal hard drives for very long term storage stored in more than one location.

Pureblue:: That strip is fascinating. I "solved" the problem in SF-1, for me, by eliminating airfield LODs entirely, and just paint them on a terrain tile, making special airfield tiles like you would a city tile or something. I did this mainly because I ran settings that caused airfield lod flickering in my game, and I needed super primitive simple airstrips and its easier to get them to blend into the terrain when seen from any altitutde, just by painting them.

Yea looks interesting Gesp thanks.

Nope. Can't find it. Where did you see it? I found this rather soft language... Looks interesting if it can be taken to the 1950s. Thanks.

hehe Monty when I did my first "real" FM, for Timmy's MiG-9, I made it challengingly realistic, but I got so depressed when the AI always turned to stall speed I gutted the whole thing, crying over every painful slash, and simplified it to match Player and AI performance. Basically, I limit the gees (through the aerodynamics, not the quickie variables), so the AI can't turn hard so it keeps its energy up. One rationale for this, as player plane, is that most of the time you don't pull hard, very rarely in fact (it hurts) unlike in the games where we like to turn hard all the time. I should have put that FM up for download as an option but didn't think of it. ugh You may like this story, don't know if I told you yet, it concerns changing the FM in your Yak-28P. Back in SF-1 maybe 2006 I found the Yak could not get much over m=1, so I had to make it "faster" at high altitude. I had never touched an FM before. But I had an inspiration. In the real story, Yak copied the Su-15 intakes and fuselage to make the Yak-28-64 (year 1964) so it could go faster, put the engines in the fuselage did he. The -64 fell in a ditch being taken to the test field, and fittingly proved slower than the Yak-28P. Yak got out of (real) fighters after that. I had a different experience. Using that hyisteorical example, I copied Boopidoo's Su-15 fuselage and pasted it into the Yak fusealage. In my case, it worked. Yea I actually thought of the old story when I did this.