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Menrva

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Everything posted by Menrva

  1. It is not. This is about the stock TW IcelandNA terrain, and both Reykjavík Airport and Keflavík Naval Air Station reference their own airfield data.ini file, like all of the other airports recreated specifically by TW for this terrain. Simply put, this may well be a bug with the airport's data.ini file referenced in the terrain's targets.ini. This is what the stock terrain includes and uses for Keflavík Naval Air Station, extracted from the latest July 2013 version: ICELAND_AIRFIELD7.INI Same for Reykjavík Airport, it uses this: ICELAND_AIRFIELD6.INI
  2. View File Ethiopia, African Horn (1977-1990) Ethiopia, African Horn (1977-1990) Terrain December 13th, 2021 (1st Release) by Menrva >For Strike Fighters 2, Recommended Full-5 Merged I am proud to present a brand new terrain made from scratch! Initially proposed in private by tiopilotos, I later decided to create it in order to offer an accurate playground for different conflicts never recreated in Strike Fighters. The terrain completely covers Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti, and a great portion of Somalia and Yemen. The tileset, based on JSF_Aggie's Desert repaint and Centurion-1's Desert 4 add-on, has been greatly expanded with necessary transition tiles. Expect long and very accurate river courses and all major lakes, the reddish deserts of the Horn of Africa and the green highlands of Ethiopia. Numerous target areas, such as civilian airports and airstrips, have been added in order to expand playability, targets of opportunity and year range. This terrain features a fresh new 250m resolution heightmap (instead of the stock 500m resolution), allowing for greater details and precision in elevation changes; overall it provides the whole terrain with a better look. The terrain spans from July 13, 1977 (the beginning of the Ogaden War) to May 21, 1990 (the day before the unification of Yemen). This terrain is adapt for historical scenarios such as the Ogaden War and the Second Yemenite War of 1979 between North Yemen and South Yemen. Targets reflect Real World events as accurately as possible. Off Map Airbases have been added and long range AI flights can be generated from them. Having SF2NA is a must, as I have enabled naval ops; if your mod folder contains American, British and French aircraft carriers, sometimes you'll see fleets being generated in single missions. Ground Objects are not included. You can obtain the most needed ones from Wrench's old Eritrea/Ethiopia terrain release. >Credits (in no particular order): -Wrench, for working on Wingwiner's original Eritrea terrain, producing new target area layouts. -swambast, who provided me with invaluable help in tracking and fixing common and uncommon bugs. -gerwin, whose TFDtool has proved to be essential in today's terrain making. If the terrain is pretty accurate to RL it's also because of him. I included his very nice Airfield 7+8 Addon Pack, too. -mue, for the improved shaders he made, which I have included and reworked for the terrain, and for the tools he made for SF2 modding. -luk1978, for the waternormal bitmap he shared at the SF2 screenshots thread. Your mods are very interesting! -JSF_Aggie, for his great Hi-Res Runway Textures v2.0 which I included, and for the hi-res desert tileset. -Centurion-1, for expanding JSF_Aggie's tileset with more variety for the Desert4 terrain by Piecemeal. -tiopilotos, for his continuous support in all my terrain modding efforts. Thank you very much! -Stary, for old .TOD files which add trees and buildings on some tiles of this terrain. -Gepard, for his great tutorials about terrain making, in the SF1 Knowledge Base at CombatACE. It's a gold mine! -krfrge, who has produced a tutorial for recreating SF2-like planning maps, which prompted me to work on templates and my own high quality planning maps. Thank you very much! -comrpnt, for his Approach and Airfield Lighting Pack mod packages for SF1 series, which I reworked and included. Although scratch-made, the terrain makes use of most objects and target layouts from Wrench's Eritrea terrain; because of this, I included the ReadMe file from that package, to the end of giving proper credit to everyone involved directly or not. >Disclaimer: This is a freeware; yet it can be redistributed ONLY in other CombatACE mods/mod packages. Any changes to the terrain package's files and/or any copy-and-paste attempts of their contents are NOT authorized if you plan to release them in other mods. But permission might be granted to those who request it to me at CombatACE. This terrain may NOT in any way, shape or form be used in any payware additions. Submitter Menrva Submitted 12/13/2021 Category Full Terrains  
  3. Just FYI, it was a long-thought choice for me to decide which country had to be Red, which had to be Blue. I'll keep things as they are in the release package, because Ethiopia back then was ruled by the Derg and it was a huge ally of the Soviet Union. During the Ogaden War, Ethiopia was supported even by East Germany, Cuba and South Yemen, while Somalia had some kind of support from the US and South Africa. Of course, reality is never black and white, it's all shades of grey, but we cannot have properly neutral or third-side countries in the game, so such choices had to be made. Of course, for personal use you're free to make your own tweaks, no problem with that. Just know that it wasn't a random, arbitrary decision on my part, it's actually the result of much research into the history of these countries. Little trivia: ThirdWire got alliances wrong in their default global nation.ini file. IIRC South Yemen was made Blue side, while North Yemen was Red. This is historically wrong, and the terrain reflects the correct alliances, with South Yemen actually being Soviet-aligned.
  4. I'm back. Thanks for your support, gents. It's been two tough weeks for me, but things are starting to look nicer again. Looking forward to fly in Strike Fighters skies soon and make new mods with time. Take care everyone.

    1. paulopanz
    2. guuruu
    3. UllyB

      UllyB

      I am glad to hear that bro. Letting yourself go into your creation work , from were you left it, it will make you feel much better with time passing by.

    4. Show next comments  42 more
  5. I'm through a serious health issue. I try to keep my spirits high, but my conditions worsened much, it's not looking good.

    Love you, people. CombatACE has been an important place for me in the last decade. I grew up from my teen years and later provided mods the community is enjoying to this date.

    Hopefully I'll get through this thing. Wish me luck.

    1. Nuni

      Nuni

      Hey friend! I know it is easier to say it than to do it but never give up man, keep on fighting and remember that you will always have your international combatACE family here to support you!  :good:

    2. Stratos

      Stratos

      Try to keep your spirits up! Your CA Family is here to support you on this hard times!

    3. UllyB

      UllyB

      Man I am sorry to hear that. I don't know if you know but two years ago, before releasing the TU-160 Blackjack, I was diagnosed with cancer (rynopharinx type) and my life took a serious turn back then. Two years followed, I made chemio and radio therapies (I went into inferno and back) and slowly I'm recovering (I didn't recover completely and some issues will stay with me for the rest of my life, unfortunately) now. What I am try to say is, whatever it is, don't give up, fight it and make sure the ones you love are there for you, it will count a lot. I wish you all the best friend. Whatever it may come, your work and contribution here on CombatAce will never die.

    4. Show next comments  42 more
  6. Progressing very slowly, until I fully regain my health...
  7. Thanks for reporting. The terrain features many third-party objects, some of which are pretty dated. There's a possibility that crashes are related to such very old 3d models casting shadows. If it's the case, a simple fix would be to remove shadow rendering from said objects (though to narrow down which ones is going to be tricky). Missing terrain 3d models and/or textures do not cause crashes to desktop, Strike Fighters 2 has shown to work in such instances. Please try setting Shadows settings to Low and see if it improves. Apparently this issue is also system related, since some players seem not to experience the issue, while some other do. Crash logs always point to the game's graphics engine library using DirectX 10. This could be video driver related; a member of the development team experienced the issue from time to time when Nvidia drivers got updates, reinstalling them seemed to solve the CTDs on his end. EDIT: I just reread your post. The Scramble mission uses an entirely different, smaller and low-res terrain, with little to no 3d objects on the terrain. So this should be more video driver related than anything, as mentioned above. Try to reinstall/update video drivers as well as the DirectX June 2010 redistributables from Microsoft.
  8. True, that should be the only difference indeed. Then we should get rid of Unlimited settings just for Shadows; anyone can customize settings, but those end-users who simply select the Unlimited preset would have the issue. I wonder why TK added shadows to TODs. Sure, in his stock terrains there are very few TOD objects, but the engine rendering issues about them remain.
  9. Very interesting. I wonder if we could trick smaller TOD files into not having shadows, or some other solution to disable their broken shadows on Unlimited settings.
  10. Not really. If you put Shadows settings to Unlimited, TOD buildings do cast shadows, but it's incredibly bugged. You'd get a lot of shimmering and z-buffer fighting.
  11. Thanks to you for the very kind words! Indeed, all of us in the team have worked much on it, with quality and historical accuracy as our main aim. Sadly SF2 does not even support true IR images for DTVs in cockpit. Someone in ThirdWire's Discord server is playing around with ReShade (a suite of third-party effects, a post-processing injector) in order to enable a NVG-like green filter in-game by key press. It's not an ideal solution, but I may consider it for a future update.
  12. Nope, not yet. I don't think a skin would be released for a 3d model that is not yet available. This skin should be for that ripped model from Ace Combat Assault Horizon. Apparently it is still shared elsewhere or via PM. Totally agree. In case a file is not approved, the uploader should be warned with a quick message about the reason behind it.
  13. TODEditor

    Most still wait for Half Life 3, while I was waiting for this, and Mue delivered! This is what I consider the last remaining tool we terrain modders needed to complement gerwin's TFDtool and Mue's Target Area Editor. You have my gratitude for this one!
  14. Did you know this!

    Yeah, I heard the story before. Maybe I had read an article about it on The War Zone site much time ago.
  15. I'm 27 today. Getting old, but the wide blue sky forever stays the same... :pilotfly:

    1. Stratos

      Stratos

      Happy Birthday mate!

    2. Nuni

      Nuni

      Tanti auguri amico!! (Scusa per il ritardo). Salute! :drinks:

    3. UllyB

      UllyB

      wow you are young (I'm more than twice your age), happy birthday and keep up the good work.

    4. Show next comments  42 more
  16. Mod package has been updated to Version 1.2; now in-game speech subtitles reflect the callsigns of the included speech languages.
  17. Sorry Kevin, don't spread wrong news. The ODS 30AE mod is free for everyone since December 24th, it does not require a susbcription anymore.
  18. @orsin Nice! Later I'll download it and check it! Do know that me and Gerwin fixed alpha channels on some other .tga files. I haven't uploaded a new version yet. If you plan a new AI remaster, I'll send you the latest files.
  19. Probably most of you already know of this, but I just discovered this story thanks to a newspaper article. Thought about sharing it with any few other youngsters like me: Pardo's Push: An Incredible Feat of Airmanship (historynet.com)
  20. Version 1.0

    295 downloads

    Ethiopia, African Horn (1993-2028) Terrain December 13th, 2021 (1st Release) by Menrva >For Strike Fighters 2, Recommended Full-5 Merged I am proud to present a brand new terrain made from scratch! Initially proposed in private by tiopilotos, I later decided to create it in order to offer an accurate playground for different conflicts never recreated in Strike Fighters. The terrain completely covers Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti, and a great portion of Somalia and Yemen. The tileset, based on JSF_Aggie's Desert repaint and Centurion-1's Desert 4 add-on, has been greatly expanded with necessary transition tiles. Expect long and very accurate river courses and all major lakes, the reddish deserts of the Horn of Africa and the green highlands of Ethiopia. Numerous target areas, such as civilian airports and airstrips, have been added in order to expand playability, targets of opportunity and year range. This terrain features a fresh new 250m resolution heightmap (instead of the stock 500m resolution), allowing for greater details and precision in elevation changes; overall it provides the whole terrain with a better look. The terrain spans from April 27, 1993 (the day Eritrea declared independence from Ethiopia) to December 31, 2028. This terrain is adapt for historical scenarios such as the Eritrean–Ethiopian War and for territorial disputes between Eritrea, Yemen and Djibouti. Somaliland is still considered as Somalia since Somaliland is not officially recognized, though you can spot the Somaliland flag over some of its cities. Targets reflect Real World events as accurately as possible; for instance, some airfields will appear at a given date, cities change their name at a specific year and so on, all according to Real World changes. Off Map Airbases have been added and long range AI flights can be generated from them. Having SF2NA is a must, as I have enabled naval ops; if your mod folder contains American, British and French aircraft carriers, sometimes you'll see fleets being generated in single missions. Ground Objects are not included. You can obtain the most needed ones from Wrench's old Eritrea/Ethiopia terrain release. >Credits (in no particular order): -Wrench, for working on Wingwiner's original Eritrea terrain, producing new target area layouts. -swambast, who provided me with invaluable help in tracking and fixing common and uncommon bugs. -gerwin, whose TFDtool has proved to be essential in today's terrain making. If the terrain is pretty accurate to RL it's also because of him. I included his very nice Airfield 7+8 Addon Pack, too. -mue, for the improved shaders he made, which I have included and reworked for the terrain, and for the tools he made for SF2 modding. -luk1978, for the waternormal bitmap he shared at the SF2 screenshots thread. Your mods are very interesting! -JSF_Aggie, for his great Hi-Res Runway Textures v2.0 which I included, and for the hi-res desert tileset. -Centurion-1, for expanding JSF_Aggie's tileset with more variety for the Desert4 terrain by Piecemeal. -tiopilotos, for his continuous support in all my terrain modding efforts. Thank you very much! -Stary, for old .TOD files which add trees and buildings on some tiles of this terrain. -Gepard, for his great tutorials about terrain making, in the SF1 Knowledge Base at CombatACE. It's a gold mine! -krfrge, who has produced a tutorial for recreating SF2-like planning maps, which prompted me to work on templates and my own high quality planning maps. Thank you very much! -comrpnt, for his Approach and Airfield Lighting Pack mod packages for SF1 series, which I reworked and included. Although scratch-made, the terrain makes use of most objects and target layouts from Wrench's Eritrea terrain; because of this, I included the ReadMe file from that package, to the end of giving proper credit to everyone involved directly or not. >Disclaimer: This is a freeware; yet it can be redistributed ONLY in other CombatACE mods/mod packages. Any changes to the terrain package's files and/or any copy-and-paste attempts of their contents are NOT authorized if you plan to release them in other mods. But permission might be granted to those who request it to me at CombatACE. This terrain may NOT in any way, shape or form be used in any payware additions.
  21. You might want to check my Speech Enhancement mod, in there I include other languages (including Italian, but no French) with correct or mostly correct dubbing. The mod you linked adds mostly random phrases in such languages, as such it is only for immersion and far from being correct for native speakers (I'm Italian BTW). As such, I won't include such random dubbing in ODS for quality consistency. Thank you for the positive comment! They are a rarity these days, so we're glad to hear others are enjoying our hard work! Take care.
  22. Never heard of this issue before. Make sure that no third-party AV software interfere, and run the installer as admin. Make sure that all content gets saved in the "X:\Users\YourName\Saved Games\ThirdWire\OperationsDesertStorm" path. I recall few had issues in other language versions of Windows; the stuff apparently would get copied in a different Saved Games folder for no reason.
  23. I think it's pretty complex to implement, at least for me, since Inno Setup makes use of Pascal language (not exactly what I'm into). What the installer does automatically is find where the SF2 game directory is (but it does not verify if all three games are in it). To run a check on all required .CAT archives is problematic to say the least; we have so many versions of SF2 (including the Complete Edition which only installs one registry key, not all separate ones of all included games), some do clean installations from the latest July 2013 installers, others install outdated versions and then apply the latest patches afterwards. To verify checksums of those CAT archives is simply not possible given these circumstances, I think they would differ in the case of manually patched games. Anyway, this issue is only related to elo82 as far as I can see. Most issues that were reported are about CTDs, and those are due to DX10 and Nvidia drivers. I state pretty clearly which SF2 games are required (inside the installer, in the download page and even on the custom DVD cover I created). Thankfully most users are not dummies and can read. In the future I may look into it, maybe add some more checks for the presence of the SF2 executables of the required games (though that alone does not suffice), but now I'm too demotivated to work on it once more all by myself. That being said, thank you for your detailed suggestion, Erik!
  24. Thank you, Steve. That was useful indeed. The DXDiag shows two problem signatures: nvwgf2um.dll (which should be NVIDIA D3D10 Driver) and GraphicsEngineDX10.dll (which is Strike Fighters 2's DX10 library for the graphics engine). This has nothing to do with the mod, sadly. Nvidia driver updates randomly cause game-breaking issues on old games like SF2 where the DirectX 10 implementation was done rather poorly. I strongly suggest the following: reinstall DirectX runtime libraries from June 2010 (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8109) and reinstall/update the Nvidia drivers on your end. Also avoid setting the Effects to Unlimited in the game's options. Hopefully this will sort the issue out.
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