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Everything posted by Menrva
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MIG 19 Farmer assigned to blue side!??
Menrva replied to csb's topic in Thirdwire: Strike Fighters 2 Series - General Discussion
Not that far from reality, though -
MIG 19 Farmer assigned to blue side!??
Menrva replied to csb's topic in Thirdwire: Strike Fighters 2 Series - General Discussion
This is not an issue nor a mistake. The countries of Paran and Dhimar are fictional and both are allowed to use a pool of Red and Blue side aircraft by design in the stock game. This only applies to stock aircraft, or in better detail, namely to those who have ExportedToEnemy=TRUE in their data.ini file. This behavior is also kind of realistic. Some Middle East countries (Iraq, for instance) had access to Western (British and French) aircraft, as well as Soviet ones. -
It is my greatest fear, instead. They are working on drone swarms, which are data-linked to fighter jets. It's not a fantasy, it's only a matter of when. This might lead to even more desensitized military actions. Warfare belongs to human nature, like it or not. If we really have to fight each other, I'd rather take to the skies and press buttons myself, not let an artificial being do the dirty work.
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Question about close formation flying...
Menrva replied to Muesli's topic in Thirdwire: Strike Fighters 2 Series - General Discussion
I thought as much, either this or a modified Formation.ini file in the Flight folder. Old terrains don't include needed airfield .inis and this results in weird behavior for AI during taxing and takeoff. -
Stary Hollywood effects
Menrva replied to UllyB's topic in Thirdwire: Strike Fighters 2 Series - General Discussion
They are not missing, they are stock game's TGA files. They can be extracted from FlightData.cat. Always repeating the basics, here... -
Game keep crashing on every map
Menrva replied to UllyB's topic in Thirdwire: Strike Fighters 2 Series - General Discussion
TK has no reason to be bothered by this issue. Bomber aircraft were not meant by him for player use, they are for AI use only. There are more important issues that TK should fix instead. -
SF2 Nations Expansion Pack
Menrva replied to Menrva's topic in Thirdwire: Strike Fighters 2 Series - Mods & Skinning Discussion
This is a fork of the Nations Expansion mod I have released; it includes only original nations (and respective aviation services) of the Ace Combat universe, AKA Strangereal. There's a roundel of my own creation for a nation which got its own mobile game and flag. There's also the logo of Project ACES, serving as insignia for a generic Merc faction. The rest is based on official sources and references from all AC games. -
Version 1.03
1,442 downloads
Libya, Central Mediterranean (1980-2011) Terrain February 13th, 2018 (1st Release) by Menrva >For Strike Fighters 2, Recommended Full-5 Merged This is a complete remake of the Libya terrain made by Dave and further tweaked by Wrench during the years. The entire terrain has been retargetized and hand-tiled to a great extent using a different, more complete tileset; Sicily, Greece and Tunisia no longer are barren, deserted lands as seen in the original. Major rivers have been added and mimic Real World courses as accurately as possible. Numerous target areas 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 June 28, 1980 to October 31, 2011 (the official end of NATO's Operation Unified Protector); it is designed for Operation El Dorado Canyon, the Gulf of Sidra incidents of 1981 and 1989, Operation Odyssey Dawn and the subsequent Operation Unified Protector. Also, a specific Red Side target has been added inside Tunisia (Blue Side) territory, meant for Operation Wooden Leg. Targets reflect Real World events as accurately as possible; for instance, some airfields won't be available after a certain date and/or will change name according to historic changes. Off Map Airbases have been added and long range AI flights can be generated from them, if you have SF2NA. All main targets have been placed accurately in their Real World locations. Expect to see temples at historic sites! Ground Objects are not included. It's up to the user to find and obtain anything that can be useful for the proposed terrain's scenarios. >Credits (in no particular order): -Dave, who had the idea of recreating such an important scenario in the Strike Fighters world. -Wrench, who kindly allowed me to improve upon his work by giving me a blank cheque and trusting my capabilities. Thank you, sir! -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! -MigBuster, I have included some of his great hi-res textures for runways. -Gepard, for his great tutorials about terrain making, in the SF1 Knowledge Base at CombatACE. It's a gold mine! -tiopilotos and Stratos, who supported me during the terrain's development. Thank you, guys! -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. Because the original terrain was born from Dave and was tweaked numerous times by Wrench, I included the ReadMe files from the original packages, 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. -
A Tool request
Menrva replied to Wilches's topic in Thirdwire: Strike Fighters 2 Series - Mods & Skinning Discussion
You're welcome. The tool does work. Sometimes, it sets too many tiles surrounding the airbase to Tag=0, so I manually set others to 1 or 2 where appropriate. -
A Tool request
Menrva replied to Wilches's topic in Thirdwire: Strike Fighters 2 Series - Mods & Skinning Discussion
Wilches, TFDtool already does this! Read the included readme files. You can set all Tags to 0 or as appropriate (meaning all airfields are set to 0). I am a terraformer, there's no other trick I use than this. Whichever target area uses an airfield.ini file, it gets surrounding tiles set to Tag=0. -
A Tool request
Menrva replied to Wilches's topic in Thirdwire: Strike Fighters 2 Series - Mods & Skinning Discussion
Nope, AFAIK. If you hit a water tile (and Tag=2) the aircraft explodes. You can always set water tiles as Tag=0. The stock GermanyCE terrain from SF2E has the entire tilemap filled with Tag=0 tiles. The result is that you can land everything everywhere, even on water. Again, with TFDtool it can be fixed easily. -
A Tool request
Menrva replied to Wilches's topic in Thirdwire: Strike Fighters 2 Series - Mods & Skinning Discussion
No, it means tilemap TAGs. I tried to explain it in the past. A tile with Tag=0 is treated as landable, with Tag=1 is treated as (bumpy) land, Tag=2 as water, so the plane explodes when on it. It exists already, it's TFDtool. gerwin added this function on my request. Just download the newer version at his site. -
WIP Mega THREAD!
Menrva replied to ErikGen's topic in Thirdwire: Strike Fighters 2 Series - Mods & Skinning Discussion
A fork of my nations expansion mod. Only a few will recognize these (fictive) insignias. -
WaterMap bitmap secret
Menrva replied to UllyB's topic in Thirdwire: Strike Fighters 2 Series - General Discussion
It is the easiest thing ever, yet you guys are talking about it as if it were black magic. The water bitmap is 8bit, and Photoshop is known for messing them up during saving. If you want to create a working water bitmap, you must use the exact colours from IcelandNA's water bitmap. Open and save the water bitmap in Microsoft's Paint, and that's it. Sweden does not have enough water space (red), so any water bitmap will not work good enough. The terrain is only 60% of RL, and the sea areas are too small for the in-game fleets which are used to wide open oceans. You might make a _water bitmap which spawns ships over water, but on such terrains you'll see them over land occasionally, it's guaranteed. Better not to feature something broken. If it worked with no issues, I would have included a working _water bitmap for that terrain package I released, don't you think? Besides, it is only used for game-generated single missions. For campaigns, you can have fleets regardless of a _water bitmap, because the campaign data must contain the fleet's coordinates on the terrain. I'm not going to explain any further than this. This matter was discussed to death countless times, and any being with a functioning brain will use the search bar of CombatACE to find any relevant threads containing the key-words water, bitmap, fleet, etc. -
Sounds...
Menrva replied to Wrench's topic in Thirdwire: Strike Fighters 2 Series - General Discussion
Or likely, an "inexperienced modder" hacked into Wrench's account. Well, what do we know? -
Wierd sinking planes
Menrva replied to Wilches's topic in Thirdwire: Strike Fighters 2 Series - Mods & Skinning Discussion
@Wilches Please, remove your previous post where you mentioned (with huge font) my terrain, otherwise it will be confusing for others. That other terrain from the Odyssey Dawn mod is a modified version of Wrench's original, and has got bugs of all sorts. Mine is a complete remake from scratch with even more additions and airfields. You might want to modify the campaign's data.ini to use my newer terrain. No point in fixing something old and broken. For the curious, that issue is not always dependent on the flattening of areas of the HFD (as Wrench stated), but can also be due to the TFD. Each tile has a Tag value. Tiles where airfields reside should have Tag value 0. Usually, that bug happens when Tag value is 1. With gerwin's TFDtool, it can be fixed. But as I said, better use a newer terrain. -
Strike Fighters 2 Complete Edition until July 19th 2020
Menrva replied to MigBuster's topic in Thirdwire: Strike Fighters Series News
Thanks for not going into details. Most of us already know. TK could have made a separate 64bit executable like many developers did for their games, but he didn't... -
Strike Fighters 2 Complete Edition until July 19th 2020
Menrva replied to MigBuster's topic in Thirdwire: Strike Fighters Series News
First of all, I was talking generally, I didn't say explicitly that SF2 is 32bit, but guess what? It is. It's a game from 2009. Back then, 64bit OS were not exactly common. TW would have killed themselves by making a product which works only on 64bit. What's the point if only a smaller audience would actually get to play it? Agree to disagree. You basically suggested rlwicker1967 to upgrade the PC to have 16GB RAM, a top of the line graphics card with 8GB VRAM etc. Basically, a super gaming PC which is adapt for much more complex, modern videogames. SF2 is an old game (2009) which uses a game engine that dates back to 2002! It does not perform well because it's not optimized properly, not because rlwicker's PC is not adapt. He's not trying to play Digital Combat Simulator or Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. Strike Fighters 2, for how it looks, should work much better than it does on mid-end PCs. Again, another ignorant statement. Nobody uses FAT32 anymore, fragmentation issues are minimum on NTFS systems. Defragmentation on NTFS will not solve any bottlenecks or hiccups dependent on the load on GPU or CPU, on bad programming or outdated libraries used by certain videogames. -
Strike Fighters 2 Complete Edition until July 19th 2020
Menrva replied to MigBuster's topic in Thirdwire: Strike Fighters Series News
This is bullshit. A 32bit OS will not allow you to use more than 4GBs, even if you have 16GBs on your machine. The same applies for software executables. Softwares which have been compiled to work natively on 64bit OSs will use more than 2GBs if available. If they are compiled as 32bit executables, only 2GBs (at max 4 in some instances) of your 16 will be allocated. It has been explained numerous times, Strike Fighters 2 is poorly optimized. The engine is outdated, it looks like a game from early 2000s, and yet it performs poorly on systems which are way powerful. If TW will make the next edition of the game work natively only on 64bit OS, together with latest DirectX 12 libraries, many will see improvements on FPS without the need to buy a super PC with NASA specifics. I have other videogames which look way better, and they even perform better than SF2 on my low-end machine. -
static planes on Carriers
Menrva replied to UllyB's topic in Thirdwire: Strike Fighters 2 Series - General Discussion
Not really a mystery; if he is using my Nations Expansion mod, SovietNavy has been added to it, so it works. TW should have separated the Soviet Air Force and Soviet Naval Aviation, but didn't. -
Strike Fighters 2 Complete Edition until July 19th 2020
Menrva replied to MigBuster's topic in Thirdwire: Strike Fighters Series News
You actually pre-ordered. Check with TK, maybe you can cancel your pre-order, and just pay the difference for the Complete Edition. My bet is on the original 29 DLCs, ported. Work on new ones is not impossible, but I guess it depends on how well SF2 sells. -
Strike Fighters 2: Windows 10 Edition up for pre-order
Menrva replied to MigBuster's topic in Thirdwire: Strike Fighters Series News
I agree with @yakarov79. I also get @Nyghtfall's point. TW created some decent aircraft 3d models, but the terrains? Dear heavens, they are atrocious! Not just visually, but also taking into account historical and geographical accuracy. The Vietnam terrain from SF2V is an absolute mess, which reminds me that I have yet to complete the WIP rework of it I have. So, I'd rather have important fixes from TW, game engine wise. Terrains? Hell no, leave those to me and a few others who put passion and research into them.- 183 replies
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Version 1.07
1,562 downloads
Iraq, Western Asia (1980-2003) Terrain February 13th, 2017 (1st Release) by Menrva >For Strike Fighters 2, Recommended Full-5 Merged This is a complete remake of the DS/IR terrain released long time ago by Wrench. The entire map has been retargetized and retiled using a whole new tileset, combining tiles from JSF_Aggie, Stary, Centurion-1 and my bad transition tiles. All major water bodies, lakes and some minor rivers have been hand-tiled. The Caspian Sea coast had to be hand-tiled as well. Numerous target areas 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 September 22, 1980 (the beginning of the Iran/Iraq War) to May 1, 2003 (the end of major combat operations of Operation Iraqi Freedom); it is designed for the Iran/Iraq War, Operation Desert Shield, Operation Desert Storm, Operation Desert Fox and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Iraq is Enemy, Iran is Friendly, other countries are Friendly as well. Due to limitations in the terrain engine, and not wanting to make three different terrains, I opted to set Iran as Friendly together with other countries such as Saudi Arabia. While you might see US planes spawn in Iran during Single Missions even if the 1979 Iranian Revolution already happened, it's up to the users to play with missions in the editor to fix any historical oddities. Targets reflect Real World events as accurately as possible; for instance, after the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, Kuwaiti airfields are set as Neutral, enemy targets appear inside Kuwait, etc. Some airfields won't be available after a certain date and/or will change name according to historic changes. Various Operation Desert Storm expeditionary bases and FOBs have been added, and will appear only during Operation Desert Storm dates. All main targets are in their Real World locations (I tried to be as accurate as possible, to such a level that even surpasses ThirdWire's stock terrains). Shiraz Int'l Airport and Prince Sultan Airbase are beyond the Wall. However, if you have SF2NA, long range AI flights can be generated from such airbases. Ground Objects are not included. You can obtain most of them from Wrench's original Iran-Iraq terrains, or from other mod packages. >Credits (in no particular order): -Wrench, who reworked the original terrain and provided the CombatACE community with plenty of mods and scenarios to play with. He gave me invaluable advise, the tools I needed and introduced me to the beautiful, exhausting world of terrain modding/making. Thank you, sir! -swambast, who offered to build two high quality 3D models (Mosul Dam and Mosul Grand Mosque), featured for the first time in this terrain, it's an honor! He also provided major help in tracking and fixing common and uncommon bugs. If the terrain is stable (no CTDs), it's his merit! -Nyghtfall, for creating 3d models of the Kuwait Water Towers and Kuwait Freedom Towers. -tiopilotos, for providing reworked .tga tiles with new alpha channels. Much appreciated! -Spudknocker, who helped me complete the 1980-2003 beta version of the terrain, providing additional target areas. -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. -MigBuster, I have included some of his great hi-res textures for runways. -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! -Crusader, who provided me with the info I needed about ODS and other stuff related to targets. -JSF_Aggie, for his high quality DS tileset, which I have expanded with my horrible transition tiles. -7eleven, who directed me to a website filled with Desert Storm related info. -Centurion-1, since I used some tiles from his Desert 4 Mountain Regions+ Addon. I tried to contact you for permission, but it seems RL got in your way. Your WIP mod about the Iran/Iraq war gave me the motivation to complete this terrain. The least I can say is thank you. Best of luck, mate! -Stary, because his tilesets are pure art. I borrowed a few TODs and tiles from his excellent IsraelME tileset. -Gepard, for his great tutorials about terrain making, in the SF1 Knowledge Base at CombatACE. It's a gold mine! -Stratos, who supported me support during the terrain's development. -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. I am totally sure I missed someone, especially because the terrain was born from Wrench's original ones. So I also included Wrench's original readme files from his IR and IR2003 terrains 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.- 12 comments
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Files disappearing ?
Menrva replied to UllyB's topic in Thirdwire: Strike Fighters 2 Series - General Discussion
I'd say on random. I'm stuck at the latest patch level for years and I remember it has happened to me, before I gave the .inis the read-only property. Not sure what triggers it. I know for a fact that the game refreshes such .ini files for new texture entries each time you run the executable. Maybe that's the culprit.