Menrva

"Only" 13 years since I joined CombatACE. Glad to be part of this community, some very good folks I got the pleasure to learn from, work with and dream new mods on.

A bit of clarification to be precise. When there's no transparency in the texture (regardless of the file format) and it gets HasWater other than 0, the water bump map effect is applied fully. TGAs are required for mixed areas, where the ground requires full transparency, while water areas must not have any transparency at all, or can have slight transparency just to obtain a less pronounced water bump map effect. If you use a JPG for the sea tile, then you must make sure that all coastline tiles have water areas with absolute zero transparency. If those have a little alpha channel value in their TGA textures, then you get the visible edges Blade showed.

My suggestion is not to join that Discord server. It's abandoned by Third Wire aka TK. There is no kind of moderation in there, no moderators and the admin (TK) is not active in it since years. Anyone can spam pings and posts, verbally abuse other users and so on. I left the server when one user figured this out and began throwing out racist insults. There are better Discord servers by fans about flight sim games in general. The one by TW actually deserves to be taken down.

Until we get compufat's, you have mine, same principle, updated ace888's skins with those extra parts and details. There's still some finetuning to make before a release. Feel free to send me a PM in case your 3d model gets updated again.

I have no idea what you're doing wrong, this is straightforward stuff. 1) You must download all four parts fully. 2) Next, you unpack ODS_30AE.zip, preferably with the most recent version of 7-Zip. 3) Once unpacked, you should have a ODS_30AE.iso file, its size being 3.77 GB. You must open it with Windows Explorer. 4) The ISO gets mounted on a virtual DVD drive, you execute installer.exe and that's it. Alternatively you can unpack the ISO, but all files must remain in the same folder as shown below. I can't help more than this.

I see a lot of confusion on the matter. The problem @citizen67 showed is what @Gepard already described, it's a custom airbase made of several separate objects for runway, taxiways, etc., as such the issue is only due to a wrong placement of a taxiway object over the runway object. Stock TW airbases are monolithic instead, taxiways and runways are all part of the same 3d model. When terrain overlaps it's an entirely different issue, it may be due to improper flattening of the heightmap or due to the TAG value of the tile being other than 0, both errors are fixable with TFDtool.

I already explain in the download page how the installer works: The installer will automatically detect your installation of the required Strike Fighters 2 games by reading through the registry keys. Game folders that are copied from or manually moved from where they were originally installed are not supported. You need all three aforementioned Strike Fighters 2 games and they must be installed with ThirdWire's original installers, not manually copied from other sources nor moved elsewhere after installation to other folders or drives. If you do not meet any of these requirements, installation cannot proceed and you are on your own. If you install all required games properly, the installation of the mod will proceed correctly as intended. The installer then lets you choose where to install the mod folder; you can even install the mod on a different drive or partition than the one where Strike Fighters 2 is installed. No further user input nor manual edits after installation are ever required; the installer takes care of creating all proper links to your desired path for the mod folder. After installation is over, simply run the mod by using the created Desktop and/or Start Menu links. You should do a clean installation of Strike Fighters 2 Complete Edition. The only reason it fails is because the registry key does not exist or points to a place where the game folder does not exist anymore or where the game folder does not contain all required games. If you previously installed SF2 Europe in one place and SF2 Complete Edition in another, that causes issues. Uninstall all SF2 games and simply reinstall the Complete Edition.

@paulopanz, I think @Sundowner took it that way because you described aircraft with painted serial numbers as a real waste. His latest releases are exactly aircraft with painted serial numbers. Probably you weren't aware of this, I haven't seen you around in a while. @Sundowner I understand you probably got hurt by such post, but please give the benefit of doubt before throwing rude accusations, and rather ask explanations to statements you don't agree with. I hope this was just a misunderstanding, you both have contributed to the community in different ways, we don't need another conflict. The package was approved by another moderator and I don't see anything wrong with it, all authors are fully credited. The statement by paulopanz about other aircraft mods could be removed as it is not pertinent, or be worded differently if it was explaining that the Strikemaster skins were made by Pete with painted serials and that he gave permission to paulopanz to rework them with decals.

This, and the owners of the original payware YAP site died years ago. I understand Gepard is hurt by the fact they monetized upon his free work, I'd also be furious about it in his place, but they're no longer with us, so it's pointless to beat a dead horse now. IIRC the old site is still up just for history, the store shouldn't be working anymore, the RW team should have removed links to the store. The RW team is comprised of end users who had bought YAP products in the past and now are updating them to SF2 for free. So when YAP monetized upon stuff that shouldn't have been monetized in the first place, the end-users also got screwed for paying for contents coming from freeware sources. I keep repeating myself, I think I explained several times that RW is unrelated to whatever wrongdoing YAP did in the past. I think it's time to move on. If people refer to the old SF1 version of YAP, Gepard has all the reasons to be angry at what they did. If it's about RW, Gepard can ask them to remove his works if he doesn't want them to be reshared outside of CombatACE. I see RW is pretty cautious about crediting like @daddyairplanes explained.

We've been modding the game for almost two decades. The short answer is no. Without source code, we cannot improve the game engine more. Even though SF2 is newer than CFS3, its graphics engine is pretty limited and more basic than CFS3's.

Interesting! I'm not exactly happy with the values I chose for the F-22 add-on we released, even because at the time I couldn't test it against other comparable stealth aircraft. If you have any suggestions for the F-22, I'll add them to the list of fixes and/or improvements.

No ini file, the texture is called inside the FX shader for water. You cannot change the format for the waternormal texture file that the shader wants, unless you unpack the FX shader with Mue's extractor, edit it and include it in the package.

@ravenclaw_007 such care for details, I'm truly amazed! Top notch creation as always!

I couldn't agree more. It's unfortunate that proper artists are losing jobs over sub-par, soulless AI creations. AI should be a very last resort when it comes to making art, it shouldn't replace the artistry of people from all over the world. AI generated images do not give me the same vibes. I have great admiration for modders who create exquisite models and textures, throughout the years they encouraged me to learn more and do something of my own creation. AI generated content does not inspire me to grow and learn more.

I've already thought about this for the ODS 30AE mod, but you'd need to spend money for those AI services that generate audio speech files, I haven't found viable freeware sources, and you'd also need a lot of patience and free time as a single complete speech pack requires more than 1,400 audio files. Do it for several languages, and you'd need to multiply that amount for each language/accent you intend to have. Those services cost money and the ones I had seen do not allow to automatize the creation of several audio files in one go, so they also cost in terms of time. I'll probably consider it at a later time, but that would mean spending my own money and what little free time I get over something that only few Strike Fighters fans would appreciate all for free. EDIT: That being said, it surely is the easiest way we currently have to make a more professional speech pack, but not as easy as I'd like.

I would never do a LOD based terrain, performance wise it is terrible, one of the reasons SF2NA failed at launch. I definitely prefer the old system of heightmaps and tilemaps, much friendlier and easier to work with. Had the LOD terrain engine been optimized more, then it would cool to create some interesting things like underground and undersea tunnels which are impossible with the old terrain engine. There is only one modder who tried making LOD terrains, and that is Stary. He might be able to answer some of your questions, but these days he's rarely around here. Last but not least, I want to remind that my terrains are not covered by the freeware licensing agreement. As long as you take the heightmap only for reference, that's okay, otherwise you're not allowed to copy my work without permission.

We're all using DX12 on Win11. The DX version supported by your graphics card and Windows system is totally unrelated, it does not mean the game is running on DX12, the game engine of SF2 is built on DX10 and it remains at DX10. Unless TK ever updates the game to make use of DX12 and 64bit (not gonna happen), we're stuck with this situation, an old game engine limited by a 32bit executable and outdated DX10 tech. That's why I'm talking about wrappers, those sort of emulate older DX libraries with current technologies. There's no such thing as a DX10 to DX12 wrapper, the only one that works in SF2 is DXVK, which makes DX10/9/8 games run with Vulkan rendering.

Things change over time, DirectX 10 is now pretty old, and current video drivers for graphics cards clearly give priority to what's new. My only suggestion is to try the DXVK wrapper I link in the ODS 30AE download page; in converting DX10 to Vulkan rendering, it makes graphics a bit worse but it seems it reduces black textures and crashes to desktop by far. Before I bought my dedicated Nvidia GPU, I was using the integrated one by Intel which is very weak. I couldn't even load a mission in the ODS 30AE mod, but once the wrapper was added, I could finally load missions.

Unfortunately it happens also when the game runs out of memory, and like it has been said before, it happens in large mods and objects with several high resolution textures. When textures become black randomly on parts that usually appear textured, that's when the game has memory issues and is close to a crash to desktop. It happens to me in ODS 30AE with consecutive missions unless I reload the game after each mission.

It is so. However, even by resizing textures in the ODS mod (and I resized thousands of them for objects, weapons, pilots, aircraft, etc., it was no joke) the issue still happens. Some aircraft still feature 2k resolution textures otherwise quality would be compromised. The problem is also about mapping. An aircraft with a single texture takes a smaller toll on the game's memory compared to an aircraft mapped with 10 different textures. A mod tends to feature many more aircraft and ground objects with such mapping. We can get rid of crashes with even lower resolution textures, but that comes at the cost of compromising visual quality. I wonder if increasing size of the stack in the DLL and in the EXE would make any difference. There's a tool to do it: https://joeduffyblog.com/2006/07/03/modifying-stack-reserve-and-commit-sizes-on-existing-binaries/

Don't bother, it happens randomly on my system with an RTX 4070 Super as well. It's a problem of the game's DX10 renderer, it's old and video driver updates can at times cause issues to it. The game's stuck on old DirectX 10 and it manages VRAM badly, so terrains and mods with several different objects and textures make the game run out of VRAM with consecutive loading of missions in a single playthrough. Without chances of TK ever updating his games to current DirectX standards and to 64bit, you can only hope for video driver updates to mitigate the issues. A DLL from SF2 also cannot get corrupted out of nowhere unless you've been playing around with it with an hex editor. A DLL from another SF2 installation to the same patch level won't solve your problem, it'll be the same one you have. Look for updated video drivers and reinstall DirectX 9 June 2010 redistributables, there's nothing else you can do. At some point in the future DirectX 10 will be so old that graphics wrappers for it will be needed. You can already try using a Vulkan wrapper, not sure if your GPU supports it though.