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It's taking shape...

Waiting for the moonlight...

As far as I know it will not cost money. The founders of YAP, John Shelton and Mike Figursky, are no longer with us. The revamp was done in their honor and the new team acquired access to the YAP site. From what I know they have been in contact with John's family. More details here: http://yankeeairpirate.net/john-shelton/ and here: http://yankeeairpirate.net/yap-revamp-works/ This revamp also includes some of my mods, I gave permission to include them as long as it is not payware.

Your remod is for the old version of Julhelm's 3d model (from 2006 I think), which is pretty different and low-poly. As I stated, this one I'm reworking is an HD model that was only released as part of the RSR mod. It never got remodded nor re-released so far.

OFFICIAL USAF DOCUMENT CLASSIFIED: TOP SECRET Ground Strike Mission Orders Ha'il - Jan 17, 1991 PRIMARY TARGET INTELLIGENCE SUMMARY: Saddam's Elite Republican Guards are known to be the primary threat to our ground forces when the ground war begins. Accordingly, CENTCOM has ordered the destruction of these units by our air forces to commence immediately. OBJECTIVE: Photograph the Rep. Guards at Baiji SECONDARY TARGET INTELLIGENCE SUMMARY: An experimental search and tracking radar system is being installed at an enemy SAM site. Sources indicate it may already be operational. Detailed, low-altitude photos are required as soon as possible. OBJECTIVE: Photograph the SAM radar at Al Kumayt I usually don't like what ifs, but a funny take on the ODS 30AE mod brought me to rediscover @Julhelm's fantastic F-19, which was released as part of the RSR mod by eburger68. I've been making lots of changes to it, including adding proper hit boxes and collision points, reworked skins and aircraft characteristics and loadouts meant to resemble the ones of Microprose's F-19 Stealth Fighter game. Julhelm's original F-19; missing hit boxes and featuring a bubble canopy Reworked F-19 featuring a caged canopy ala F-106 (by repainting the canopy glass), proper hit boxes, more collision points and reworked skins (euro camo skin by kblomkvist, no markings skin by yours truly) It still features two weapon bays (unlike Microprose's exaggerated four bays), but with properly reworked limits; you can have 4x Sidewinders or 3x AMRAAMs in one of the bays, 2x bombs and AGMs (sometimes just 1x), depending on overall weight and size. A 20mm cannon is on the nose with 680 rounds, and an extra 1,900 lbs fuel cell has been added for a total of 11,800 lbs of fuel; non-afterburning engines. An (invisible) arrester hook has been added since Microprose's version could also operate from aircraft carriers. I'll be asking Julhelm for his permission to eventually re-release it, with due credits to him of course. I wish the 3d model could be edited, so we could have a proper caged canopy instead of a painted bubble canopy, as well as a visible arrester hook. We have no proper fictive cockpit for it, ideally I'd like to have the canopy frame of an F-106 and MFDs of an Hornet.

Not exactly. If the campaign is set to NavalCampaign=TRUE, then you'd get only day missions during the campaign. TK's cheap solution for not bothering about proper illumination for aircraft carrier landings at night.

It doesn't work. I had added the HELO role to helicopters when we still had those in the ODS 30AE mod. It doesn't do anything. You can use it but helos will still behave like fixed-wing aircraft. I think TK considered helicopters for SF2NA as AI-only before dropping the idea for good. BALLOON_BUSTING is one of First Eagles' mission types. Those don't work in SF2, they must have been disabled or cut in the game code.

TK is pretty much gone game development wise, that's what I gather. Even the Discord server he created is now abandoned by him. There happened some phishing scam posts which we users cannot remove from the server, they still stand there waiting to be removed by TK (plot twist: they'll remain there). If anything, I'm glad my purchase went fine when I did it. Are you sure you didn't get the email in the spam section? Soon after payment an auto-confirm email by TW is sent, it's automatized, not something TK has to send manually to each buyer.

910129 OP-1 Siege

No idea, I don't know on which airfields you spawn. Anyway, don't bother. The terrain needs to be updated to the latest version which is included in ODS 30AE. I lack time due to RL unfortunately. Some day I'll manage to update it fully.

Before the Storm After the Storm A-7E skin by @yakarov79, F-16C Block 25 skin by yours truly.

Since nobody cared to fix the cockpit, I spent some time with it to produce a quick improvement. Original data; built-in gunsight (3d model nodes) and misplaced viewpoint. Improved cockpit; lighter reflections, gunsight data as in all usual SF cockpits, fixed misplaced viewpoint. Here it is: Hawk_Cockpit_Improved.zip By no means this is perfect, but at least now it is usable and the gunsight matches where you're firing at. The gunsight textures come from an old package by paulopanz, IIRC. This fix will be added to the Hawks within the ODS 30AE mod in a future update.

Please ask @swambast for permission. Even though it's included in my IraqWA terrain, he made it clear with me that it was to be exclusive for my terrain only. So before a release, double check with him. I have no problem with it being used elsewhere, but I'm not the owner of his work.

Though it's not perfect, at least it seems it's an improvement for night missions. I wonder if the DTV could be improved via shader. By default TW makes use of twColor1.FX. However, it seems in the game files there is an unused FltDTVFilter.FX shader. It doesn't work but I wonder if the code was a work in progress by TK. The game does not feature true IR images so black and white FLIR still is not a thing.

These are unused but working BlendOp options as found inside the GraphicsEngineDX10.dll: MODULATE_AND_ADD_SRC MODULATE_AND_ADD_DST MODULATE_MUL_2 MODULATE_INV_SRC MODULATE_INV_DST My discovery was dictated by my hunger of finding a proper solution to the DTV filter which does not work properly in-game with night environments, especially with the much darker nights of my realSKY mod. Below you'll find a comparison between stock filter material data and the custom one using another BlendOp: Stock MODULATE, day Stock MODULATE, night Unused MODULATE_MUL_2, day Unused MODULATE_MUL_2, night The main drawback of MODULATE_MUL_2 is that it doubles the MODULATE option, so at day the image is lightened too much than the stock MODULATE. Mind you, the screenshots were taken with the realSKY mod on Unlimited settings, so the post processing effect adds bloom to already bright areas. However, at night MODULATE_MUL_2 brings a big improvement as you can finally see the ground and its objects more easily. PS: Please admins, pin this topic. The unused BlendOps I found work just fine, and may be useful to other modders willing to experiment with them.

@Stary Yesterday I graduated and the IT engineer in me has been thinking about the rendering issues of your shader hack. I think they cannot be solved for good without some major hex-editing (no idea where). I'll try to explain what might be happening: your shader hack successfully moves the rendering of clouds to a lower Z value, but clouds as an entity/object are still thought by the game to be in the original, hardcoded altitude. This is why they disappear abruptly from the top border of the camera; on stock altitude values, clouds beyond the top border of the camera disappear without us players noticing. By moving the rendering of clouds to a lower altitude, we see this clearly because the disappearance behavior is still triggered by the hardcoded value TK has put. I cannot claim this is exactly what is happening in the game code, but given how it happens it makes sense to me. Needless to say, I'd love to be proven wrong, or that we manage to find that one hardcoded value that needs to be changed.

Alright, whatever suits you. It's just that this is a pinned topic on a specific matter but now it's cluttered with something else. You could have sent Stary a PM instead. Thanks anyway.

Some trivia... All river tiles are displayed in red, all road tiles are displayed in yellow. Thanks to @gerwin's latest TFDtool, I was able to calculate some stats. Since 2017, I placed manually one by one: more than 8600 rivers tiles, more than 1100 road tiles, more than 2000 city related tiles! This is just the tip of the iceberg, not counting other thousands of tiles that have been placed manually on the tilemap to better reproduce coastlines, islands and lakes. Adding roads to Eastern Europe is out of question at this stage, thankfully all farm tiles feature some kind of dirt roads so those will do fine. The terrain won't be completed anytime soon due to RL and time constraints, so I may consider releasing it as a beta sometime later. As it is now, it features "only" more than 140 airports, more than 100 SAM sites and more than 70 EW-GCI sites. City target areas exist but have no targets at this time.

@Stratos No offense, but maybe you should remove these posts starting from your question (and including this post I wrote), as they are not pertinent to the topic which is about clouds. Like Stary said, this is a crude shader tweak and it comes with rendering issues. Avionics are a totally different matter, we cannot create new functions for them from scratch. We have no source code and reverse engineering the avionics DLL library files is not feasible. Besides, during the development of ODS 30AE I tried my best to see if we could reproduce IR images for the DTV screen filter via shader. I discovered that TK did NOT implement some DirectX 10 blending operations which would be needed for that. Point being, we've beaten this horse already. Only TK can change things for good, and he won't.

Unfortunately, after further testing, it turns out this is due to the effects folder, rather big out of necessity. It puzzles me a bit as it should be totally unrelated, but it seems it is not. The game is bounded to 32bit, as such it is more limited in handling so many extra effects. There's no easy fix on the horizon.

Nope, not possible. On campaigns you can control that to a good extent, but for single missions it's just Blue Side and Red Side. Simply put, each usable runway needs a specific target area and runway data file. If you want to achieve something like you say, you still need to create two separate airport target areas, but for one of the two it may be needed to specify an invisible runway 3d model, since the proper airport 3d model would be added by the other target area.

Well, on a careful look, editing the z value on the shader as you've shown makes this issue apparent especially on the top border of the camera. Without the altitude tweak, clouds on the top border of the camera/screen no longer disappear abruptly, so this is an issue of the altitude hack. I've been experimenting and looking for a solution, but nothing positive so far. Multiplication values cause no issues, in fact I even added those to x and y properties of input.pos, and they can bring some interesting results. This is a test package I made for use on realSKY, after I experimented a little with values: realSKY_clouds_test.zip For each type of weather there is a different EnvClouds shader, so the look of clouds in each weather type can be customized separately via their own shaders. On Overcast and Inclement, clouds have been (unrealistically) added close to the 2d cloud layer (whose altitude and gameplay effect is terribly hardcoded), giving it a puffier 3d look as you approach it. Below shots show it clearly. Unless the bug with clouds disappearing abruptly is solved, this will remain a test package only. It's a pity, clouds look much better at realistic altitudes, but TK made it harder (if not impossible) for us modders to bring positive and bug-free changes, so "thank" him for that.

I watched it yesterday at the cinema with a friend. I really enjoyed the movie, and I think the storyline is decent compared to the first movie, even better on some regards. Sure, there are quirks and inaccuracies here and there, some noticeable CGI stuff, but overall I had low expectations and it surprised me a bit. Loved the aerial footage and some poignant scenes with characters. The movie objective was to be enjoyable and I think it succeded in its purpose.