Menrva

Truly outstanding!

View File Operation Desert Storm: 30th Anniversary Edition Welcome To Duty Built with the extraordinary expertise and dedication of modders from CombatACE.com, Operation Desert Storm – 30th Anniversary Edition promises to be the most complete total conversion ever made for Strike Fighters 2 by ThirdWire. Fly with more than 50 aircraft ranging from Cold War relics to the most advanced platforms. Gain air superiority in the mighty F-15C Eagle or challenge the Coalition with the agile Fulcrum. Support troops with the A-10A Thunderbolt II, bomb strategic targets with the stealthy F-117A Nighthawk, lead airfield denial operations in the iconic Tornado. Enjoy a beautifully rendered scenario on a scaled and accurate terrain. Fly over the lakes and rivers of Mesopotamia, the oil-rich fields of Kuwait, the mountains of Iran and Turkey. Take-off from aircraft carriers stationed in the Persian Gulf to watch over Kuwaiti oil rigs. Perform landings and patrols in more than 90 airports and air bases in the Middle East. Take part in different campaigns including the Iraqi blitzkrieg on Kuwait and the US-led liberation of the Kuwaiti Emirate. Discover how the Iraqi Army was one of the biggest in the world, through the eyes of American, British, Canadian, French, Italian and Arab pilots. Test your skills and abilities flying for the Iraqi Air Force during all stages of the conflict. Thirty years after, Operation Desert Storm still remains the largest air operation of modern warfare to date. Modders and flight sim enthusiasts at CombatACE teamed up to bring you a unique product in the lite flight sim world. Exquisitely detailed aircraft and paint schemes are delivered in a well-researched and thorough order of battle. The ODS 30th AE Development team would like to thank CombatACE.com, its admins, moderators and contributors. We are sure you will enjoy and appreciate this high-quality freeware product. From the aviation enthusiasts, to the aviation enthusiasts... and for the pilots of tomorrow. Minimum Requirements Required products from ThirdWire: Strike Fighters 2, July 2013 patch Strike Fighters 2: Israel, July 2013 patch Strike Fighters 2: North Atlantic, July 2013 patch Full support for: Mission Editor DLC Campaign Customizer DLC System specs: OS: Windows 7 x86 Processor: Dual Core 2.7 GHz Memory: 4.0 GB RAM Hard Drive: 17.0 GB Free Space Video Card: 1024 MB DirectX 10 Sneak Peek Disclaimer CombatACE.com shall at all times retain ownership of the Software as originally downloaded by you and all subsequent downloads of the Software by you. The Software (and the copyright, and other intellectual property rights of whatever nature in the Software, including any modifications made thereto) are and shall remain the property of CombatACE.com and of the respective developers/modders. In no event, unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, shall CombatACE.com, or any person be liable for any loss, expense or damage, of any type or nature arising out of the use of, or inability to use this installer or program, including, but not limited to, claims, suits or causes of action involving alleged infringement of copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, or unfair competition. The Operation Desert Storm: 30th Anniversary Edition modification does NOT comply with CombatACE's Freeware Licensing. Various contents of this modification are exclusive, as such you are NOT allowed to share, redistribute and/or make use of the mod and/or its contents for other purposes, without the consent of the mod's developers. Contents of the modification are the copyright of their respective authors. Notes about the installer Beware, the mod is available only in the ISO format. You can either mount it on a virtual drive, burn it on a DVD like in the good old days, or unzip it with 7-Zip or equivalent software. 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. If you have a previous version of the mod installed, please use the uninstaller to remove it completely. Clean installation is mandatory. You might want to make a backup of the Controls folder, so that you can easily restore your controller settings afterwards. Suggestions on common issues Make sure that you are using your dedicated GPU. By default, Strike Fighters 2 usually selects the integrated GPU you may have on your CPU, which is much weaker in terms of VRAM. In case you have frequent crashes or black/missing textures, I highly suggest you download and install the DXVK graphics wrapper (x86 DLLs) into your Strike Fighters 2 game folder: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk. You need a Vulkan-compatible GPU. The wrapper can greatly improve the experience with the mod. With DXVK I can play the mod on a mere Intel UHD 710, whereas without it the mod would always crash to desktop. Go to Sound and set Sound Channels to 32. We got reports that 16 is not enough and will cause crashes on some systems, due to the higher quality sounds included within the mod. The mod is pretty heavy for the game engine despite huge optimizations. Strike Fighters 2's engine is 32bit only and apparently does not manage VRAM properly; consecutive campaign missions might show black/missing textures on objects or cause crashes to desktop because the game does not release the occupied VRAM from the previous mission you played, thus the more missions are loaded consecutively, the more easily you may run out of memory. Set Ground Objects to Medium or Low, Horizon Distance to Near, and Shadows to Medium or Low. These are the most troubling settings. Avoid Unlimited settings as much as possible. If the mod used to work and suddenly crashes to desktop, updating or reinstalling video drivers should help. Make sure that DirectX June 2010 Redistributables are also installed, they are included inside the ISO disk image of the mod. Inside the mod folder, you'll find some extra text files. "(Coalition Order of Battle)" should be of your interest; the mod's terrain covers the entirety of Iraq, at the cost of not having all of Saudi Arabia; this means that a number of important units are based on airbases that are beyond the in-game playable area. With those units you always spawn near the target area, you'll never get to start from a runway nor to land on the assigned runway beyond the invisible wall. You have an entire list of the affected units in the aforementioned text file. By pressing ALT+N, the plane returns to base automatically. The mod is fully compatible with the Campaign Customizer and Mission Editor DLCs by ThirdWire. The Campaign Customizer might be an alternative way to experience those off map units I mentioned previously, since it assigns you to a random airbase of the in-game flyable area. Escort missions are often broken, this is not an issue of the mod, but a bug of the stock game; sometimes the AI flight you escort does not engage its target and keeps flying in a straight line instead of following waypoints, thus the trigger for mission success will never happen. Abandon the mission or retry it if the issue happens, sometimes it works. Pray for ThirdWire AKA Tsuyoshi Kawahito to work on a 64bit version of Strike Fighters 2, maybe even with support for DirectX 12. With that done, any out of memory issues should become an old memory. Submitter Menrva Submitted 01/16/2021 Category User Made Campaigns

Fans of ThirdWire's Strike Fighters, I'm glad to announce the Christmas release of Operation Desert Storm: 30th Anniversary Edition. This huge and quality total conversion has seen two Early Access releases this year, one back in January 16th and the other on August 2nd. Once available to site subscribers only, now we offer an updated version of the package to all CombatACE users as our Christmas gift, regardless of a subscription. There have been usual bug fixes and important improvements since the last release. Make sure to read the change log and all the details in the mod's download page once it's approved. You are not required to own a subscription, but keep in mind that the mod is distributed in a hefty, yet highly compressed 3GB installer which contains 15GB of contents. You will need a stable internet connection in order to download it. The mod cannot and will not be offered in a different form. A subscription grants you unlimited number of downloads for its duration and will support the site's hosting costs. The Operation Desert Storm: 30th Anniversary Edition modification does NOT comply with CombatACE's Freeware Licensing. Various contents of this modification are exclusive, as such you are NOT allowed to share, redistribute and/or make use of the mod and/or its contents for other purposes, without the consent of the mod's developers. Contents of the modification are the copyright of their respective authors. My personal thanks to the ODS 30AE Development Team, you guys keep inspiring me with your great works and continuous support! And special thanks to @Erik and to all admins and moderators of this great place that is CombatACE. Happy Holidays, pilots of the virtual skies!

TOD buildings, that is those that are specific to tiles, have no collisions like you say. We recently got Mue's TOD editor that allows greater freedom in adding buildings of more complex shape (not just simple rectangles), but some 3d modeling skills are needed. Previously, TODs had to be made necessarily with TW's terrain editor which is a mess to work with, very prone to crashes. Only few mastered workarounds with it, including Stary who made such highrise buildings as TODs in his GermanyCE tileset repaints. Taller buildings are definitely possible. I would like to make new TODs for the terrain in the ODS 30AE mod, and while with Mue's editor now it's easy to create TODs, I lack 3d modeling skills for adding different buildings at once. Taking them from other tile sets and retexturing them is another possibility.

While reinventing the wheel is a nice modding exercise for those who don't know how to add nations yet, I'd rather suggest downloading this package of mine which includes all Ace Combat nations with known insignia. I created it exactly for those users and modders who wanted all such insignia from the Ace Combat universe, ready for use. It also offers a good example on how to add nations in general, anyway. Beware, the above mod removes all stock nations, so it only offers those of Ace Combat. With it, the only task for skinners is to add decals properly like it is done for the stock aircraft of Strike Fighters 2 (for references, one should unpack the decals.ini file of stock aircraft skins).

Don't bother, that's not how this works. GroundObjectRole=AIRCRAFT does not exist in the DLL, it's not a valid value: https://combatace.com/forums/topic/91802-question-about-the-ground-object-role-function/?tab=comments#comment-742353 Simply put, TK programmed the aircraft's gunners to aim at other aircraft, ignoring anything that is not an aircraft. Without source code, nothing can be done about it.

@Muesli The numerous downloads are because this one is split into several files. Just like ODS 30AE is comprised of 4 different files to download, the counter is at least 4 times higher than it should be (not counting failed downloads which are restarted). It doesn't mean that 500 different users downloaded it, just like it doesn't mean that ODS 30AE was downloaded by 6,000 users (in fact, I bet the real number should be in the hundreds, not even the thousands). The download counter probably is the most useless of the stats, it's not a counter about how many users actually downloaded it, it's a number of how many times the download button was clicked (and with mods being split into 6 or 7 parts, it's easy to get a higher number out of a single user downloading it). As for the quality of this package, I agree it's not decent, but the author has respected the site's rules and the modders' wishes (even by compiling one of the most detailed credits list I ever saw). It can only improve over time after suggestions and after the author learns more about modding other aspects of the game. You're free to give a negative review, but please do so without being offensive, or it may have the opposite effect of making other users curious and download what you think shouldn't be downloaded. I'd rather have a messed up mix of mods including other modders' works in here, rather than seeing our own works being re-released elsewhere without consent.

You mean Gerwin's. From Mue we got other important tools, but not TFDtool. Keep up the great work!

"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.