Menrva

Somewhere over the legendary skies of Porco Rosso... Island tiles courtesy of @tiopilotos

@Stary Just FYI, someone was working on PBR shaders for Strike Fighters 2. They seem promising, but no updates since last year and so far they break some things. Worth having a look at though: GitHub - Zackin5/StrikeFighters2-PbrShaders: Experimental PBR shaders for Strike Fighters 2

I'm so thrilled to see you, Stary! Thank you so much for this fix, indeed something can be accomplished by editing shaders; I made a slightly modified shader for changing in-game text color which is hardcoded for subtitles, it's included in ODS 30AE. Thanks! I do plan on updating it in the future, so if you wish to contribute some tweaks to it or have any suggestions about it, feel free to PM me. Welcome back! PS: Admins, please pin this topic! This should be pretty useful!

Today I just resumed some terrain modding, so I had a look at what you should add to all your concrete taxiway 3d models. Check the below statements in bold. [TargetType027] Name=Runway1 FullName=Runway ModelName=airfield1.lod TargetType=MEDIUM_RUNWAY ActiveYear=0 TargetValue=1000 UseGroundObject=FALSE DamagePoint=140.0 ArmorValue=0.0 ArmorType=0 RepairRate=10.0 StartDetectChance=100 StartIdentifiedChance=50 IncreaseDetectChanceKey=10 MaxVisibleDist=50000.0 ZBufferOffset=6.000000 FlatObject=TRUE DamagedModel= DestroyedEffect= DestroyedModel= SecondaryChance=0 Keep up the great work! I know well how tiring and annoying adding roads, rivers and lakes could be, still have the Balkans in my hard drive waiting for more work. On a real scale terrain like yours it's even more time-consuming, so big respect for what you're doing.

Usual z-buffer issues. Make sure that the 3d models of your concrete bits have the same statements of stock TW runways in the _types.ini. I don't recall exactly the names of some properties, but one was about being flat and the other about a z-buffer offset.

Sorry, I'm late to the party, have been in hospital. What Gepard says is right. If the terrain has a big time span, one in which Red Side has no carriers nor cruisers up to a certain date, then it would work as intended. But the moment you fly a single mission in a year when the Red nation has a carrier available, it's back to a naval battle ala SF2 North Atlantic. Just an opportunity to consider, my Nations Expansion mod adds Soviet/Russian Naval Aviation as a separate service. The terrain could be limited to the Soviet nation only, while all that is navy related is given the SovietNavy service I added with the mod, by editing each object's userlist.ini file. That way, it's problem solved, it would work just fine and you'd get only Blue Side with carriers.

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

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  

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.

Progressing very slowly, until I fully regain my health...

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.

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.

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.

We'll look into it, thanks for reporting.

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.

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.

Yeah, I heard the story before. Maybe I had read an article about it on The War Zone site much time ago.

Mod package has been updated to Version 1.2; now in-game speech subtitles reflect the callsigns of the included speech languages.

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.