Menrva

There is an issue with the water shader, it's never darkened properly during night. I haven't managed to solve it yet. So, for the time being, I reverted to Mue's terrain and water shaders with the addition of @Stary's fantastic pseudo normal effect, and I also added it to the other water shaders of the lower graphics settings (Stary's pack didn't cover those), so now coastlines appear properly with the pseudo normal effect even on water settings lower than High. I also made 5 different cloud FX shaders for each weather type, they keep Stary's changes and make clouds look different in size etc. depending on the mission's weather type (the latest version of the realSKY mod is needed). The zip attached here is packaged for the ODS 30AE mod, but shaders could be used elsewhere: Stary-Menrva's ODS30AE Shaders 2025.zip HLSL shaders are not my thing, so I hope others more experienced with those can look into what Stary did. That guy has made interesting shaders for the HUD, you may want to look into those. His work combined with yours could really improve the look of aircraft HUDs and radar displays.

@Stary fantastic stuff! I look forward to trying your shaders and make the best use out of them! I experimented a lot with shaders during the development of Operation Desert Storm 30th Anniversary Edition, but never got this far. Thank you for your works on Strike Fighters, they are much appreciated By the way, some years ago someone experimented with creating PBR shaders for Strike Fighters 2, they're available on GitHub. Their implementation is rather broken here and there, but they also introduced nice results under specific light conditions, so they may be of your interest: https://github.com/Zackin5/StrikeFighters2-PbrShaders

You just created an account, so no. Free downloads are enabled to free accounts only after they've been active for a while, more details in the topic below:

It is official The new DID is not related to the original company, but they seem to have acquired rights and, from what I understand, they are overhauling F22 Total Air War to be a new, different product based on the original game, but with updated tech and so on. The programmer behind TFXplorer (the tool which allowed to explore the world of F22 TAW) is assisting them with all main code of the game. This was just a small sneak peek, it is to be considered a work in progress. Many of the game's features are most likely to be remade from scratch given the original game was heavily hardcoded and using much outdated tech and proprietary formats.

It's normal, all vanilla terrains of Strike Fighters 2 don't feature target areas for Blue Side SAMs. You need to test the launchers on custom third-party terrains featuring support for Blue Side SAM target areas. The game randomly decides which SAMs to spawn depending on the nations allowed for a terrain, year of the mission, and other factors. Nothing wrong with the mod by @simonmiller416, it should work as intended on some third-party terrains.

Nope, I don't get the request. Maybe it's because I'm in the European Economic Area? I tried with both Chrome and Brave browsers.

Distrust browsers and AV software, they label everything as a virus these days, especially with the use of AI machine learning. It is one of the many steps towards the enshittification of the internet.

Why shouldn't it? With graphics wrappers I can even play games for Windows 95. It simply won't run optimally for today's standards since it's a 32 bit game using outdated DirectX 10, but it works.

What Wrench said, it's not happening, it's vaporware, the web page for it was last updated 5 years ago. Not to mention that we're almost close to a Windows 12, Windows 10 about to be decommissioned. TK prefers to work on a cheap mobile game, apparently that guarantees him a steady flow of money.

I generally agree, but are we seriously talking about uploading dozens of thousands of files elsewhere? I'd like to see a discussion about how to make CombatACE more sustainable for Erik given the exorbitant server costs, because if this site dies, all of the files and informations hosted in here will disappear overnight. Sure, I can upload some of my own mods elsewhere, but I don't own the work of others nor have all TBs of content from this website. To see a community of end-users scattered for downloading mods is not a problem I'm worried about (I frankly don't care, most users are only worried about getting stuff without even caring of posting a thank you note or a review), but to see modders lose a place to reunite and discuss with hundreds of useful topics and threads, that is a problem I care more about. I agreed about @Erik adding a subscription paywall to downloads for the website because it was either that or the site would have gone 404 the day after. I'm afraid the site's servers are plagued with performance issues, so I feel like this hard decision only bought CA some time before it eventually dies. Let's discuss about how to save this place from dying, preserving all of its history and content, and how we can feasibly make things more accessible for all users, so that we get closer to a win-win situation instead of a lose all situation.

What Wrench says, it's not true that Blue SAMs don't work, they work alright. SAM launchers in the terrain's targets.ini must be added as SAM_LAUNCHER. That's the generic tag that spawns working SAM launchers. You can't tell the game to spawn a specific SAM, this decision must be left to the game engine with the generic tag. Working Blue SAMs are featured in my terrain packages and in the ODS 30AE mod; try flying an Iraqi aircraft towards Saudi/Coalition airbases and you'll be facing AAA and SAMs.

No. As I already explained previously, @Nightshade/PR should check the in-game options. Each mod folder has its own Options.ini. It's very likely he's not using the dedicated GPU in SF2NA. There's an option in the options menu screen to select the proper GPU and graphics settings, including resolution and aspect ratio. I have nothing else to suggest.

All fine on my end with the latest 580.97 Nvidia drivers. Make sure in the game's options that you're using the Nvidia GPU. SF2 has a bad habit of selecting the integrated GPU instead, and I used to have such crashes with Intel's integrated GPU.

I recommend to keep expectations low. With these disassembled codes we can infer how things have been done, but in no way we can simply edit and recompile such codes so that they work in the game. We lack a lot of info for that, you can't infer that info from disassembled codes alone, a source code is always needed. At best it can be of help to someone who wishes to reverse engineer the whole game, but I don't see anyone around willing to spend two-three whole years for such an endeavor. It's certainly helpful to modders for understanding what the game does under the hood.

Amazing findings through Ghidra disassembling with AI! Please consider changing the title of the topic, it is misleading. People may think these are found original source codes, while they actually are codes reconstructed by a disassembler.

Ideas are cool but feasibility is what counts, and here I see none. Unless we get a source code by TK, remaking a game with from scratch (or even by porting all SF2 assets into a new engine) and with all those ideas/features would require an expert team of developers working on it for several years. And to have it for free, after all such amount of work is also not a realistic choice, time is money.

My sincere apologies for the wording of my post. We've already dealt with many users complaining about subscriptions or who had the wrong impression that downloads are a granted privilege after a few posts are done, and that made me wrongly compare this situation with those. I had suggested the same long ago. Sadly the owner of the website is nowhere to be seen, it's been a rather long time since he last appeared, and that is pretty worrying. I think only he has the function of posting and pinning stuff in more prominent places like the front page. You're right, I messed up. Lesson learned.

Downloads are only available to subscribers, those that buy site subscriptions. Sorry, but posting "several useful threads and replies" does not suffice, and it's pretty arrogant of you to consider those few posts as useful and that they should grant you anything. There are people here who contributed hundreds of mods over several years. Joining in and saying hi is of no real use to the website's hosting costs.

Simply add an exception to the executable of TFDtool in the settings of your AV. This is not an issue of TFDtool, it is AV software that is cancer these days, anything triggers them if it's not a signed executable by paying third-party.

Make sure you have downloaded all parts fully (first three parts are 999MB, last part is 685MB) and that 7-Zip or WinRAR are updated to the latest version. Usually older versions of those software cannot unpack something that was packed with newer versions. EDIT: I downloaded all parts on my end and unpacked them with 7-Zip v24.09 with no issues. The problem is on your end:

@GKABS We're all with you, mate. My thoughts and prayers are with you and your family. Keep the fight up, you're great.

I found this posted in a Discord server, it's another preview of the J-36's weapons bay, more plausible if you like: