Menrva

Some F-22s have taken flight again in the skies of the Strangereal universe... Mobius Squadron, 118th TFW, North Point, Independent State Allied Forces Mobius Squadron, 118th TFW, North Point, International Union Gryphus Squadron, No. 207 Squadron, Cape Aubrey, Aurelian Air Force

LOL! I have recently installed one of Novalogic's sims for it contained some details of a plane skin I'm working on. They are far from being good nowadays under many aspects, but the detailed campaign mission briefings are a nice touch I'd like to have in SF2, alongside 3d hangars. Off-topic: Stary, time ago I had sent you a PM regarding a project I am working on, and one of your past experiments might be useful for it. I know you're busy with RL, but if you could answer me when possible, I'd really appreciate! Maybe you didn't receive the PM because your inbox is full.

Hi, everyone. I had sent a PM to @Stary in regards to an experiment he had made in the past, which may be useful for the development of those two terrains I have showed. Until he responds to me, development of the terrains is halted. Stary, if you read this, please check your PM when you have time. Maybe your PM box is full and you didn't get my message.

I am with you on that! I really don't get the need for in-flight refueling. Users seem to forget that TW's terrains are not full size. All terrains are about 60% of real scale size. By asking TK for a feature like this, you also ask him to remake his terrains from zero in real scale. Not really worth the effort. I'd rather have a refueling and rearming the moment I land at an airbase, arcadish ala Novalogic's light flight sims.

22 years ago, flight testing of the F-22 began at Edwards AFB

It is, but keep in mind that what I show is work in progress. It was referencing another (missing) folder name, now the proper seat folder is referenced, it has been fixed.

Progressing on skin work for the upcoming F-22A Raptor addon. There will be a separate, huge skinpack featuring various fictional and alternative camouflages and paint schemes. Here below a comparison between the pre-production and production paint schemes and layouts. EMD 91-4001 Prototype USAF Lo-Viz Grey Among the featured paint schemes of the skinpack, there will be a recreation of the fictional USAF desert camouflage as found in Novalogic's F-22 Lightning 3 videogame. F22L3 features a fictional F-22 squadron (namely the 14th TFS, 9th AESOG) taking part in numerous dangerous operations all over the world, including nuclear strikes on enemy WMDs. Here below a comparison between Novalogic's original skin and the recreated one. Novalogic's F-22 Lightning 3 14th Fighter Squadron, 9th Air Expeditionary Special Operations Group

It's interesting indeed, I wonder about this too. As you may know, I'm working (together with other great modders) on a new F-22 Raptor add-on. The Raptor's serials are 3-digit, so you may want to add 3-digit decals for your YF-23. After all, both the YF-22 and YF-23 were born in the 90s in the contest of the ATF competition.

Ciao! Riguardo al creare campagne, includere tutti gli aerei e mod necessarie con dovuti credits agli autori è piuttosto arduo. Sto lavorando ancora sul terreno cmq; ci saranno due versioni, una per la Guerra Fredda, l'altra specifica per gli anni 90 e Allied Force.

Patience, my friend; good things require time: https://combatace.com/forums/topic/92360-scusate-il-ritardo-ovvero-terreno-wip/

Could also be, since the Mission Editor shows not allowed mission types. I had crashes with the Mission Editor when trying to edit saved campaign missions, on a stock, clean SF2 mod folder. My firm statement is that the Mission Editor is bugged on its own. Sometimes it crashes, sometimes it doesn't. It shouldn't crash on stock terrain files, but it does!

Thanks, I needed to smile a bit. Although it makes you think about what we humans are doing to Earth.

Thank you, Gerwin. I will let you know. I'd like to investigate other solutions heightmap wise, first. This hexedit fix is unfortunately global, and such high overcast layers would look wrong and out of place in the usual Earth terrains. Still, this bit of info you have uncovered will be surely useful to those experiencing such rendering bug. Now we know exactly how it happens.

@gerwin I successfully hex edited the .dll and it works, but only for the Overcast layer. The Inclement layer uses another value, I think it's something between 1500 and 2000. The problem is that this is a global change that would affect all terrains. I wish there was a more local way to fix it...

I understand, but as I said, it looks like it's the Mission Editor that is not meant to work with terrains having very few land areas. That terrain is mostly water. And I had also experienced rare crashes with stock SF2 terrains on a clean mod folder, I never understood why. You can ask Gepard for a fix, I hope he will find one. I, on my part, have thoroughly investigated the issue when working on a similar terrain and concluded that the Mission Editor does have some issues on its own.

Any update, people? There's so many fragmented updates by Cliff7600 and Crusader, in this thread. I wonder if someone properly updated the package. I had also remade the skins, available in the first page.

It also happened to me with some custom terrains I made, featuring few land areas. I even had crashes with stock SF2 terrains! TK never bothered to fix the Mission Editor, I'm afraid. So, Gepard can't do much about it.

Yeah... amen to that.

@gerwin Wow, that is very informative! Yes, I do some Hex editing and know about the file size thing (my proudest work of that type was to enable a disabled feature by hex editing the executable, for a very old videogame). Back to the issue, I was hoping to find an easier way than some potentially harmful hex editing (not user friendly, so to speak), but this is surely a huge step in the right direction! So, thank you very much! I am busy in the next two days, but I'll be glad to test and report back when possible! BTW, I am on the latest patch level, July 2013.

That's the kind of help and thinking I need. Thanks for the effort, mate. Keep in mind what I stated about the WeatherAlt statement inside .msn files. Manually editing that one works. The Mission Editor by TK only allows a maximum value of 20,000 for Weather Altitude, and it does not do the job in my case. It's all about finding which .dll applies this logic and its value and where. Could it be that it's hardcoded in the TerrainEngine.dll instead? I have no idea. Worst case is that it's hardcoded in the .exe, I guess. AFAIK, it's the Mission Editor thing that broke a lot of stuff, FAC included! I even tried to trick the terrain engine into thinking that the terrain's heightmap has different values than in reality, using HeightMapOffset statements inside the terrain's _data.ini. Nothing. PS: There's no way to limit selectable weather types, otherwise there would be no issue. I can only put WeatherChance values, and those affect campaign missions only. In the single missions menu, you can always choose Inclement and Overcast. I managed to disable the heavy fog on those two weather types for the Moon terrain. By being able to give an extremely high value to the Weather Altitude, even the Moon terrain would gain a proper feeling. PS No.2: if anyone like gerwin is willing to look into the matter, let me know and I'll PM you and send the terrains for troubleshooting.

It's not really that straightforward as 1977Frenchie says, though. The Desert4 terrain contains additional target areas and alters some names of original target areas, IIRC. To have a properly working campaign, target area names referenced inside the campaign's _data.ini file must be changed as well, and it's a time consuming job. Luckily there's a mod updating all Desert campaigns to be used with the Desert4 terrain, here at this link: PS: the above mod also requires the user to install an additional terrain update by Centurion1, which alters the names of airbases. All the required stuff is linked in the mod's page.

That's true, Wrench. However, 3d clouds' altitude CAN be changed with a specific environmentsystem.ini for high terrains. Those horrible Overcast and Inclement cloud layer bitmaps, instead, always spawn at a low altitude, no matter what. There's no way to get rid of those (it would be what I need for the Moon terrain) because the game is coded to have such layer anyway, in those Weather conditions. By editing a saved mission's WeatherAlt value, I can temporarily solve the issue, I can put the layer as high as I want. Unfortunately, that statement does not alter anything if put inside the environmentsystem.ini file, and that's something I would need; I need to alter such value for when the single mission is automatically generated by the game. But TK coded it to work this way, with such low values being assigned to those weather types. It seems the only real solution is to flatten the heightmap and get rid of those deep canyons, which ATM is a big NO from me. That's how I always imagined it, LOL! I knew that the sky had that kind of shape. By editing the environmentsystem.ini, with extreme values on certain statements (there's one about the sky's max vertex height, for instance), you can uncover how the sky is modelled. Anyway, the Cloud Layer bitmaps are another thing. Those only spawn on Overcast and Inclement weather types. Otherwise, they do not exist at all.

Think out of the box, they say. And I did. I saved a mission file, having inclement weather. Opening the .MSN file revealed the following Weather statements; [Weather] WeatherType=INCLEMENT WeatherAlt=2677.597168 WeatherThickness=480.078125 HasHighLayer=FALSE FogAmount=0.664001 ContrailAlt=8007.995605 StartWindDirection=57.425541 StartWindSpeed=7.938888 WindGustingAmount=7.626858 By changing WeatherAlt to an higher value, say 20000.0, I fixed the issue! However, what we need is for this to be applied before flying the automatically generated single missions. The way the game is coded, it always assigns such low values to WeatherAlt for Inclement and Overcast weathers. I tried to put that statement inside the terrain's environmentsystem.ini, but to no avail. Looks like I am on my own in this battle. Anyone remotely interested in those Moon and Mars terrains, please wish me luck on finding a solution.

But of course, Gepard! I have edited everything to achieve orange skies, custom dust clouds, different altitude for the 3d clouds, etc. I created specific environmentsystem.ini files for the Moon and Mars. There's nothing to alter the height of those cloud layer bitmaps, I'm afraid. TK locked their altitude, it's dependent on the heightmap's minimum height, as I already stated above. The only way to fix the issue is to lower everything heightmap-wise, to the point that such impressive canyons become much uninteresting. I don't know why TK should have made it like this. I know that stock SF2 terrains are not meant to feature such deep canyons, but it's such a wasted opportunity.

Unless someone in the terrain modding department comes up with an idea on how to overcome the issue explained in the previous post, I guess I will have to halt development. Such a pity, but there's no point in proceeding if I cannot produce things as they are meant to be. Unless there's some desire from users to have uninteresting terrains with almost flat canyons and craters.