Menrva

I had noticed you posted about the matter soon after that post, so it was no longer needed in my view as I was already replying to your latest with a more exhaustive post. Man, I never thought I would cause all these issues with this! My apologies to you. Next time I'll mind my own things, it seems I only cause trouble.

I'm sorry you got offended and show such hostile attitude, that was not the point of my post. I don't recall I explicitly asked you to spend hours to remove those guidelines. I just wanted to tell the community about this oddity with .jpg and Photoshop. Up to you to consider removing them before exporting or not. If you do not, no problem, I can do it (and already did) on my own. Peace, man.

I just speculated without any clue that they might be behind the issue Flogger23 explained; he confirmed they are not related. I totally agree about being ordered with layer names, that's what I do as well. You're misunderstanding my remark about bad practice; it's not a problem if those .jpg skins weigh more on the HDD, but it's a problem the moment SF2 takes longer to load countless custom .jpg skins for dozens of custom 3d models, especially on older PCs and hardware. So, any optimizations on this end should be taken into account IMHO. The same issue about loading times is clearly represented by the resolution used for specular maps; if those are saved as 4K (excessively), a mid-end system takes much longer to load a simple mission with the affected aircraft.

It is free. We currently are restricting downloads to recognized modders and subscribers of the site; CombatACE does have important costs for hosting files and all of the forums, and it's a "home" for us modders to discuss and work together. If it's not supported, eventually the site as we know it would disappear. We modders would like to keep this site alive. At some point it should be available for download to anyone, but it depends if you're willing to wait an as of yet indeterminate amount of time. A 1 month subscription to the site should be reasonable and grants you unrestricted number of downloads for all kinds of mods. Just to make things clear, we modders don't get any revenue from what we do and release here (and rightly so, we produce mods in our free time just for the passion and love of creating things and letting end-users enjoy them). All the money from subscriptions goes exclusively to cover the site's costs. The ODS 30AE total conversion is pretty much an extra for subscribers, you're paying for the subscription service, not for the mod and its contents; it currently is one of the most comprehensive and high quality freeware packages available for SF2. It is still being developed and improved, the current release is just v0.9 after all.

Are you using guide lines in Photoshop? They are common use with templates, they usually have a cyan colour. If you export a texture file in .jpg format or anything else, guide lines are still kept as info! They are not needed and only increase overall size, and might be the issue behind what you're dealing with. I've seen tons of skins with guide lines into them and that's a bad practice; they are not visible in-game or in a simple image viewer, but reopen them with Photoshop and guide lines are there as if they were in the template. Always double check and remove them.

I wonder if it could have been part of the Iran-Contra affair, after all Iran still received American equipment such as MIM-23 Hawk launchers back then.

In all honesty, it's even worse, this one is on the WHO. Here in Italy we're in the middle of a scandal, it seems there's corruption among some WHO officials. Our pandemic plan hadn't been updated since 2006, despite there had been other epidemics in later years (H1N1 and MERS to name a few). I remember when the WHO (Tedros Ghebreyesus) said it was all fine back in Autumn 2019, that China kept the epidemic under control. Not even two months later, we saw the truth ourselves. The Chinese do have their responsibilities for what happened, then I look at Brazil and I don't think the West can consider itself 100% clean, the situation was even worsened. Had this started in Brazil or in another country with lunatics in power, we'd find ourselves in this sh*t anyway.

That's your main problem; there is no ultimate weapon pack. There's ravenclaw's Weapon Pack 2 (a version 3 is in the works) but there are many other weapon packs dealing with different ordnance and countries; rather often you might encounter different folder names and 3d models, but both refer to the same weapon type (some weapon mods feature Soviet missiles with NATO names, others feature them with their Soviet naming convention and outdated 3d models); you can even find things like R-552 and Matra550-2, but they are actually the same thing and only one should be featured. To make things worst, sometimes weapons which seemingly are copies of one another may contain specific station codes so that they are used only by specific aircraft, and so they may be needed. To make things even worse, you'll find weapons with alternative skins/camos, and copies and copies of rocket pods using alternative rocket types, and those usually are needed as well. IMHO, limit yourself to the stock weapons. If you plan to expand with custom weapons, it's a minefield. For the ODS mod we've released, we've spent much time removing any unwanted/double versions of the same weapon, and even now that we're working on a patch we find ourselves removing some, adding some, all while tweaking dozens of aircraft files as well. My point is, save yourself some trouble and enjoy the game, or you'll end-up in an exhausting loop at some point. Just for reference, in ODS we currently have 448 weapons. Imagine that number x2 or x3, considering all other time frames and conflicts featuring older and newer ordnance.

That is happening because you only edited the .ini file, while the .dat file is still that of the original game, hence you get the original names. You must re-save the .dat file with TW's Weapon Editor. The .ini file is just an interface for the Weapon Editor, the stock weapon data that is truly read by the game is held in the .dat file.

I'm glad my parents got their first shot of the Pfizer vaccine days ago, on May 4th they should receive the second dose. My strong 90-year old grandmother already got the second dose, all went good just with minor fever soon after. I've been living in a stressful situation so far; my father had been dealing with a rare blood disease since November 2019. Last December he successfully underwent a bone marrow transplant; despite that blood disease seemingly gone, he's much weak at the moment and apparently he got hit by Crohn's disease, which made him lose much weight. The hospital deemed it safe to vaccinate him (and my mother since she's qualified as his "caregiver"); I feel somewhat relieved. I could get the vaccine as well I suppose, but I'm always home these days, and Italy does not have many vaccines either. I'm just 26 year old, so I'd rather wait the elders get it first, they are the most exposed to the worst symptoms of the virus. As Nesher said, the vaccine is no guarantee against this b*tch of a virus, so safety measures must be followed in any case. I'm afraid there are lots of stupid and ignorant people though. If the virus still exists to this extent, it's because of human stupidity.

No. WeaponData.ini must be put simply inside the Weapons folder. That should be the only file in your Weapons folder, if you only want stock weapons with new names.

Why? The Rockeye is a stock weapon. By doing what you did, you actually created another copy of the weapon, and you modified this copy, not the original weapon. If your plan is to rename all stock weapons, your Weapons folder must be clean, you must edit only the WeaponData.ini file. Any other weapon subfolders you add may create additional, unwanted copies of stock weapons

Just lower graphics settings. The mod features many custom 3d models with high quality 2K and 4K textures. If your graphics card is not good enough, it can easily run out of memory. The mod does not work with Intel's integrated graphics card, you must use a proper GPU. Your Event Log is useful, as you can see the crash is due to GraphicsEngineDX10.dll, which is the game's library responsible for the game engine using DirectX 10 libraries. DX10 was implemented rather poorly in SF2. I am hoping a proper Win10 update for SF2 happens, so that mods such as this can perform better on all PCs. That being said, a patch is in the making; the mod's quality has been improved even more and many bugs have been fixed. No release date yet, we're taking our time to do some quality work.

I replied here: https://combatace.com/forums/topic/95630-operation-desert-storm-30th-anniversary-edition/?page=2&tab=comments#comment-782128

Nothing like that is possible; each menu screen uses a specific dll library which contains just the needed functions, and that one you mention simply does not exist. I had already thought about what you suggested, it would be very clever to select subtypes and year improvements in a separate list. Unless we get a source code from TK himself, this is just a dream.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-55286092 It's an interesting story! Have a look.

You already have it, It's the CVN-68. SF2NA does not provide separate carrier 3d models if they are part of the same class. The CVN-68 is the first of a series of Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. Inside the CVN-68_names.ini you'll find all other ships of the same class being named. Decals are dynamic according to ship numbers.

Well, indeed they are, but there's nothing comparable to TAW still today. Both games have their pros and cons and bugs. In TAW, dealing with avionics and MFDs is the most important part, while SF2 emphasizes flying and combat maneuvers. In TAW you can even play as a AWACS controller both in scripted missions and in campaigns, and decide to take over control of whichever F-22 is airborne. If there's a flight game I'd really like to see it remade with modern technology, that is TAW. Innerloop's Joint Strike Fighter is another old jewel but with incredible graphics for the time, unfortunately it's unstable on modern systems no matter what.

I don't think that's what he was referring to, Kevin. Some users wrongly believe that the Terrain Editor can automatically add rivers and roads using .ini lists; this function was never implemented in TW's Terrain Editor, despite it being shown in the GUI. For cities it's a different matter, city lists do work to an extent. The only way to properly add rivers and roads is to place each single tile manually via TFDtool. There's no easy way.

ThirdWire's Terrain Editor does not have working river and road list functions, so there's no need of a tutorial for something that simply does not exist. All road and river tiles in all custom terrains are placed manually by us creators with gerwin's TFDtool. You can get an idea of how time consuming and tedious this is.

I wish there was a user-friendly TOD Editor, it's the last tool that (we few) terrain modders need. Just dreaming...

I had already mentioned it in a thread: https://combatace.com/forums/topic/93329-a-total-air-war-for-the-f-22/?tab=comments#comment-754835 It's a community patch which adds many mods and missions. You need to spend some time to find the right settings for your system, though. That game is a jewel, but it's far from being perfect.

As I said...

I have no idea what's the problem here, more than 100 downloads and you're the only one having issues with it. Please, update 7-Zip to the latest version or even try WinRAR. I don't understand why you're trying to unpack it in the first place, with Windows 10 you can open .ISOs just as fine as if it was a disk, just right click the archive and Open with File Explorer.

Yeah, but you're doing it wrong. You must extract all files first, you cannot run the .exe from the archive! Unpack all files into the same folder, then you can run the installer's executable.