Menrva

Ah okay then, thank you very much for the fast response, Erik. I swear this is the last time I insinuate that something does not work as intended, the site works and looks better than ever.

Erik, I updated some of my terrain mods, but they seem to be stuck in a Pending Approval state, it's been for quite a while. Not complaining, I am not in a hurry, I just wanted to make sure that it's not a site bug. A new upload I made did not take much time to be approved, so it's just the updated uploads taking longer than expected. Thanks in advance! Regards, Rob

This should happen since you don't have one of the referenced stock SF2 terrains; you might have another SF2 title, like SF2E, or SF2V or SF2I. Some of my terrains use the stock Desert terrain files as a base. But don't worry, there is an easy fix. Inside the terrain folder, find the terrain's main .ini file (for instance, IraqWA.ini), and open it with Notepad. You'll find that the referenced CatFile is the Desert.CAT. Since you might not have SF2's Desert terrain, but some other stock terrains, enable a different CAT instead. If you have SF2E, you have the GermanyCE terrain, etc. So, double slash the Desert.CAT line and enable one of the different CAT files from the list below, according to which SF2 game you have: CatFile=..\Desert\Desert.CAT //CatFile=..\GermanyCE\GermanyCE.CAT //CatFile=..\VietnamSEA\VietnamSEA.CAT //CatFile=..\IsraelME\IsraelME.CAT I should have added such info on my ReadMe files. But by now most of us have all 5 SF2 titles combined, so... Still, if you don't have the .CAT file a terrain references by default, and you use another one in its place, you might see some other objects missing. Runways are common to almost all stock .CAT files (with the exception of IcelandNA), but other objects like windmills, bridges, etc. are only present on certain .CAT files. Apart from this, no other major issues, I think.

Thank you, master! I would have liked to add naval ops by default, but no matter how good the water bitmap is, I had carriers spawning over land. By default I activate naval ops where the bug does not happen (for instance, they work perfectly in my Madagascar terrain remake). Users complained of carriers spawning over land, and I do not want to take credit for TK's laziness over such bug. Wrench helped on this one too! He offered me some specific port tiles for Valletta and Tripoli, which I had to rework for the IsraelME tileset. I am rather happy about the results! I just wish we had more different hires tileset repaints around. The beauty of Strike Fighters is that we can make each terrain feel unique, granted that we have different tilesets for each one. We'll see what the future brings. I am grateful to the CombatACE community and members for what they have provided during the years. My terrain remakes are a humble way of saying "thank you" for such support to our beloved Strike Fighters series.

@bubu I couldn't quote what you said because you wrote it in the review section. Anyway, thanks for the question; I intended to leave the USAF off the limited nations list, as this only affects single missions, so you can add USAF planes in campaigns with no problems. I deactivated the USAF because the majority of planes we have is American. I wanted to give priority to other nations this way, or we would see way too many USAF planes spawn in the terrain.

View File Libya, Central Mediterranean (1980-2011) Libya, Central Mediterranean (1980-2011) Terrain February 13th, 2018 (1st Release) by Menrva >For Strike Fighters 2, Recommended Full-5 Merged This is a complete remake of the Libya terrain made by Dave and further tweaked by Wrench during the years. The entire terrain has been retargetized and hand-tiled to a great extent using a different, more complete tileset; Sicily, Greece and Tunisia no longer are barren, deserted lands as seen in the original. Major rivers have been added and mimic Real World courses as accurately as possible. Numerous target areas have been added in order to expand playability, targets of opportunity and year range. This terrain features a fresh new 250m resolution heightmap (instead of the stock 500m resolution), allowing for greater details and precision in elevation changes; overall it provides the whole terrain with a better look. The terrain spans from June 28, 1980 to October 31, 2011 (the official end of NATO's Operation Unified Protector); it is designed for Operation El Dorado Canyon, the Gulf of Sidra incidents of 1981 and 1989, Operation Odyssey Dawn and the subsequent Operation Unified Protector. Also, a specific Red Side target has been added inside Tunisia (Blue Side) territory, meant for Operation Wooden Leg. Targets reflect Real World events as accurately as possible; for instance, some airfields won't be available after a certain date and/or will change name according to historic changes. Off Map Airbases have been added and long range AI flights can be generated from them, if you have SF2NA. All main targets have been placed accurately in their Real World locations. Expect to see temples at historic sites! Ground Objects are not included. It's up to the user to find and obtain anything that can be useful for the proposed terrain's scenarios. >Credits (in no particular order): -Dave, who had the idea of recreating such an important scenario in the Strike Fighters world. -Wrench, who kindly allowed me to improve upon his work by giving me a blank cheque and trusting my capabilities. Thank you, sir! -swambast, who provided me with invaluable help in tracking and fixing common and uncommon bugs. -gerwin, whose TFDtool has proved to be essential in today's terrain making. If the terrain is pretty accurate to RL it's also because of him. I included his very nice Airfield 7+8 Addon Pack, too. -mue, for the improved shaders he made, which I have included and reworked for the terrain, and for the tools he made for SF2 modding. -luk1978, for the waternormal bitmap he shared at the SF2 screenshots thread. Your mods are very interesting! -MigBuster, I have included some of his great hi-res textures for runways. -Gepard, for his great tutorials about terrain making, in the SF1 Knowledge Base at CombatACE. It's a gold mine! -tiopilotos and Stratos, who supported me during the terrain's development. Thank you, guys! -krfrge, who has produced a tutorial for recreating SF2-like planning maps, which prompted me to work on templates and my own high quality planning maps. Thank you very much! -comrpnt, for his Approach and Airfield Lighting Pack mod packages for SF1 series, which I reworked and included. Because the original terrain was born from Dave and was tweaked numerous times by Wrench, I included the ReadMe files from the original packages, to the end of giving proper credit to everyone involved directly or not. >Disclaimer: This is a freeware; yet it can be redistributed ONLY in other CombatACE mods/mod packages. Any changes to the terrain package's files and/or any copy-and-paste attempts of their contents are NOT authorized if you plan to release them in other mods. But permission might be granted to those who request it to me at CombatACE. This terrain may NOT in any way, shape or form be used in any payware additions. Submitter Menrva Submitted 02/13/2018 Category Full Terrains

Terrain package updated to Version 1.04; among minor additions, the terrain's folder has been cleaned up of many unnecessary files. Users are advised to remove the previous version completely.

Terrain package updated to Version 1.02; among minor additions, the terrain's folder has been cleaned up of many unnecessary files. Users are advised to remove the previous version completely.

Terrain package updated to Version 1.01; major updates to the whole terrain, now it matches my usual quality standards; check the Changelog for more details. My apologies for the rather broken Version 1.0 release.

Terrain package updated to Version 1.03; among minor additions and fixes, the terrain's heightmap has been remade from scratch, and the terrain's folder has been cleaned up of many unnecessary files. Users are advised to remove the previous version completely.

Are you talking about zachtan's skin? No, it's Belkan. Belka is a fictional nation of Ace Combat's alternative universe, referred to as Strangereal. Mandatory screenshot: Hot dogfights over the icy Bering Straits...

I was aware about viper63a's aircraft upgrades. They are a must, although the Hercules use the old 3d model, not the latest we have. So, it could be useful for the package you are preparing, but in regards to the campaign .ini files, I'll have to remake them almost from scratch. About the US Army, I have the US Army Aviation as a separate nation, in my custom mod folder spanning from 1948 to 2018. I can add it for our standalone ODS mod. At least the Apaches will fly for the Army, not USAF.

I have no words... That is A-MA-ZING!

Make sure they are downloaded completely. If the problem still occurs, then you have to update WinRAR or 7-Zip to the latest version. Each change in the compression algorithm screws up older compressed packages. Some users reported the "file is corrupt" problem with some of my terrain packages as well. Just update your compression software and you're good to go.

The only major change would be the campaign name in the dropdown menu list, since other countries had their own name for the American Op. Desert Storm. There is no point in dividing, AFAIK. However, when I'll work on the campaign .inis, I'll make sure to rework mission types probabilities as realistically as possible; in the original ODS mod, depending on the squadron selected, I even got CAP missions against many Iraqi planes well inside Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain. Much unrealistic. So it's on the “to fix” list.

My Iraq terrain has been cleaned up of unnecessary files, all textures converted to .jpg (only a few .bmp textures remain because they are retextures of stock objects); the updated terrain package will be released later this month. In terms of space conservation, indeed we should remove all unnecessary files and convert all possible textures to .jpg format. I have not seen FPS improvements in using .jpg textures instead of .bmps. But at least the mod will be lighter. I can try to update the campaign to work with my terrain, but I will wait until all planes and additional objects are complete. The one in ODS uses wrong, low-res textures. Paulopanz made hires textures for the Su-25 (one specific skin for Iraq too, IIRC). So we can update ODS with this one at least.

Thanks for the news about eburger68! There is quite a lot to do in regards to updating the ground war. I added more cities and targets, so we can really improve it in terms of realism. If we could have OOBs for the Iraqi air forces, I can see about updating the campaigns' airbases for both the Coalition and Iraqi units.

I already contributed, if I can say so, by providing a much better terrain, complete with ODS specific targets and correct locations for every airbase: https://combatace.com/files/file/16395-iraq-western-asia-1980-2003/ The campaign can be adapted to it. Since there are additional airbases and specific ODS Iraqi and Coalition strongpoints, OOBs are necessary in order to update the campaign correctly and provide a scenario as realistic as possible. While I can provide help with the choice of terrain's targets for the campaign, someone else must take care of strategic nodes, I am not much expert with their editing. So I am in, as long as this terrain is used in place of the old one, which was very very inaccurate. I also made a 2003+ version of the new terrain, should we ever want to update CombatACE's Operation Darius; just a thought. In other news, does anybody have news of @eburger68? I really admire the work he has done on so many campaign packages. His help would be very important.

-S-

That wasn't real A-A refueling, it was more like using a bug back in the days of SF1. Since official terrains are only 60% of Real World size, I see no point in A-A refueling in this game. Also, I would love to see better avionics for modern planes, but it's not an easy task, it's like creating a whole new .dll from scratch, not really something that is doable without source code. What we can do, however, is to do what Stary said. There are things which TK locked or simply disabled in some way, like the clouds' height, or the FAC Snoopy which I like to think it can be brought back, at least just for immersion. Not to mention many statements inside the game's .dll files, which would be interesting to see if they are developed to a a certain extent or not (mostly they aren't from what I've seen). I don't want to hijack Mue's thread, so what do you think about creating a new thread about this, guys? People like Stary have much knowledge to share, it would be a pity to let all that info go away. I am willing to learn new tricks, and I am sure I am not the only one.

I'd really like to see TK's post about it. Unfortunately, he locked the game here and there, but still, many things live inside the game's .dll files, although most functions are non-working. Maybe the FAC (Snoopy) can be brought back, among other things. The only problem is that only Mue has shown the kind of interest and expertise we need for such things, like improving the shaders and creating new plugins and tools. I am sure there are other modders with that expertise as well (gerwin's TFDtool is a great example, and his powerful tool is still undergoing interesting updates). We could create a group of people interested in the things Blackbird mentioned. Avionics can wait IMHO, since I'd really like to see the bugs we already have being fixed, if possible. Strike Fighters 2 is still unique in its genre. Granted it does not age that well graphically, but it's the only game that, thanks to the community, can span from pre-WW2 era (not counting First Flight) to our modern times. We have dynamic campaigns, lots of scenarios and planes for many of the world's countries. In few words, it's an anthology of aviation history!