Sundowner

Pretty sure I did......somewhere....

What a crap day !!!! Encountered a SAM, Got a hung bomb, Refuel probe wont retract, 2 miles out lost electrics.....RAT deployed, Then the tower tell me half the runway is closed & I've only got 4000 Ft use-able. This runway is like glass when its wet....... Oh, did I mention it's raining aswell ???

Blimey, I thought I'd done those years ago.

You might as well, or the "historical accuracy " gang will be on your back mate. The re-enforcement plates started to show up in late 72 .

As far as I am aware, they were " in theatre" trails aircraft.

Are the crew too small ? or the model too big ? Something looks a little strange to me.

For the skins to show by just clicking on the LOD you need to have the actual skin files "loose" in the same folder as the lod itself, not in a skins folder. Otherwise you have to go through the lod viewer but first you can either add the skin folder manually to the aircrafts main .ini or run the game to add it automatically.

Proper, quality work.

Very old stuff sent to me by wpnssgt.......

Hands up who likes skinning ? Ahhhh, lots of you, well define skinning. To me it means creating as accurate a representation of the real thing as possible, colours, lines, rivets, vents etc, etc. But what about all the other bits ? you know, landing gear, wells, interiors of airbrakes & god only knows what else our great model maker has put there for us. But before all that comes the research....countless hours going through books searching the net for actual "in use" photos, even contacting crews that were involved at the time.( btw I've just sold off 145 of my books and deleted nearly 35,000 photos of stuff I'm no longer interested in.) Trust me I DO LOTS of research !! So to me skinning is much more that just replacing a few lines, rivets & some "historically correct " serials or whatever. But what really pisses me off big time is when somebody does that to an already available skin, mod or whatever and then tells you to overwrite the original authors work.....you have no rights to just say "my work is better than yours, so we dont need yours anymore. In my view a separate version should be made available so that the end user can make their own choice of what they like best, I know you can advise folks to backup their originals but some folks just are not clever.....Trust me, I know. The updated ODS30 mod is a perfect example of how to do things, its been created as a standalone mod with all the needed parts included within...... no overwriting of any-one's original work already in the downloads section. Some of you have been asking why I no longer post my work......well, the above has happened to me too often. Even the aircraft I've re-modelled from the old Alpha Sim freeware get a complete rebuild and remapped, I never use ANY of the original textures. Hard fact is unless you've skinned from an all black with green lines texture map showing the locations of the various parts, you are not a true skinner, you cant call enlarging a skin and the retracing all the lines etc for the higher resolution "your work". Your work is when you've had to position those lines and everything else in the first place.....just copying the old stuff is no effort at all AND if the original author got it wrong then so have YOU...no improvement whatsoever....good for the ego but not for the holy grail of accuracy, historical or otherwise. Sooo, what's caused me to say all this stuff? Well basically it's the ODS30 mod that caused me to notice it, I know I've painted a shed load of planes over the years, but I was shocked at how many are still using my original work in places, I know this because I used make custom brushes for "generic" stuff like access panels, hinges weathering & "stuff" shall we say. They are very easy for me to spot. I also painted a lot of aircraft I had no real interest in, so they just got a "something like" skin just so we could get it released. It's amazing how many are still being used. But before you all think I'm pissed off by this, well I can assure you I'm not ! I don't know if to feel flattered that some of this stuff is still passable all these years later or should I feel saddened that nobody has taken the time to cure all the inaccuracy's that I originally produced. The work being turned out by our current full on skinners and model makers is just simply awesome, way better than any of the old stuff. Just look at ravenclaw's weapons, holy moly, they make a lot of the models they are attached to look really poor. ( as a side note for DA, ravenclaw and I have worked together for many years, sharing max files, templates and generally doing everything we can for the good old F-4) There are a lot of models in the download sections that are perfectly good, they just need some nice new clothes.......not a few rivets etc but a total redraw It's all well and good doing "historically correct" (that always makes me laugh) but if the skin itself is not right well what's the point? Happy days.

@ Daddyairplanes, You are right, I've been more and more pissed off over the last 12 months or so but it all stems from the same basic thing & that is the overwriting of someone else's work, sure, if you dont agree with the colours,decals fonts or whatever of a particular model, then certainly go ahead and make your own, that's why I've uploaded so many templates over the years, I've wanted folks to do their own thing and upload them for us all to use but I did'nt intend them to replace my original work like has been done too many times. I was hoping for multiple uploads of the same skin in different users versions of what they feel the best colours etc are, it's called freedom of choice. And that's exactly how it used to be done, we all had respect for each others work, there was no need to try to "compete" as it seems now. In the F-15 thread you basically said that I'd used a colour picker on a photo to get a colour reference, LOL, Trust me I've never done that! But I've done just about every else, fs numbers, hex values & god knows what else. (try skinning on a monitor calibrated for photography work, that will really mess with your head) But I can state for a fact that if lets say five of us used exactly the same Hex values or fs colour chip on a skin, at least one of us would say that the colour looked a little "off", not wholly wrong but just now how they would have chosen it to look....hence the need for more of this variety as apposed to the ego pushed version of things we've been seeing just lately. Also what I dont want to happen here is for folks to think that there is a rift between me and you, because in my view there is not. You know why I decided to stop uploading any more work, but seeing as you've done a huge amount of work on the MF factory Boeing 707 and C-135 series of birds I'm going to use you as an example but users please be aware that this happens all over the downloads. My statement is how would you feel if tomorrow I re-released a full on remodelled and remapped version of 707's & C-135's and did it so that ALL of your hard work was to be overwritten as it's junk/crap less "historically accurate" Like I said DA this is'nt aimed at you personally there's a few offenders on here and they know who they are. But lets move on, my health is screwing me over a bit more just lately as some of you know, but with the recent announcement from Gkabs to take a look at redoing some of the older models we've been in contact with a view of me supplying some of the many max files I have sitting on various drives for him and his team to work their magic on so hopefully we'll be seeing new not a re-hash of my poor old 20 year old attempts. Btw any of you want to make custom brushes etc for the likes of nostep/nopush marks weathering or anything it's really easy to do just ask.......just think of all those little yellow marks on JASDF planes......loads easier than copying layers.

I have all the FastCargo updated F-15 models and some cockpits, if you want I also have most MF factory stuff which I know you would do a good job with. And a load of "other" stuff you might be able to use. pm me if you're intrested, no problems if you're not.

At long last....this is what is needed...

Which were made from my originals.......lol, it's amazing just how much of this old stuff is being reused over and over. I dont have a problem with it, but it's about time some-one did a "complete" redraw of of all these old birds.

We probably would have but our main man died................... RIP Ollie, your work is sorely missed, as are the many chats we had.

Have a look for the old ThirdWire Exporter notes, I think they are in the downloads somewhere.

I got my copy of Strike Fighters Project 1 shipped over to me just after the Wallmart release. Anything with Phantoms got my instant attention..........I "played" it for around 6 months then thought I'd have a go at this skinning lark, I uploaded my first skins to Avsim. In those days SimHq was the place to go & once SF P1 had got itself established a forum was soon set up over there but there still was'nt really anywhere to upload your work to other than Avsim....that's when Don aka Column5 setup the website as seen above. Most of us "modders" were in touch with each other behind the scenes using msn messenger or ICQ and that's the way we got stuff done, files were shuffled about between us so fast it was sometimes hard to keep up, I'd sometime have up to 10 skins on the go at any one time but tried to have one finished completely new ( as is, started from scratch, no lines,paint or anything ) skin a week, either for my own choice or for TMF or whatever project was on the go at the time. Those were the "good old days" always something new coming out, I'm mean "completely new", not like the re-release of a re-release that we get a lot of nowadays, there was always something to look forward to......then TK would release a patch which resulted in the mad scramble to see what's new and what had got removed or ended up broken. It was all good fun though, and even though most of us old heads have moved on or even worse died (RIP) it's good to see that we do still have an active community to keep the old girl alive and kicking. There are still plenty of quality mods available here to keep folks interested and that's what counts. But we must also remember that without Erik providing this haven for all our work then the whole Strike Fighters family would of died off a long time ago. So a big thanks to; TK Modders past and present Erik And good old "joe public" for enjoying what we do. Blimey......it's taken over 2 hours to type this lot up....

My graphics card is a Radeon RX580 8Gb . Last night it was freezing after every third edit, it would actually save the TOD but I could'nt open another, nothing worked. Strange thing is that I could still exit the TOD editor by pressing the x in the top right of the window.....I did'nt need to close it via task manager. Then I'd just restart the editor as normal again.

Does anybody have issues with the TOD Editor "freezing" after editing 3 or 4 TODs ? I cant remember if it's always done that for me or it's something new. I just have to exit the program & restart it, but it's a bit of a pain when I'm trying to edit 300+ TODs. I'm using Win 10 Pro.

But you still need an "old" and no longer available legally version of max to use the TW exporter. The whole SF series owes it's success and long life to three things; 1, TK making it "user friendly" in the first place. 2, The "leaked/stolen" F-4E model. 3, Dodgy software.

But what was used to create the models...........

@Menrva Sorry mate, I understand where you're coming from and like I say I was'nt trying to cause any rifts or ruffle any feathers. This is the modern age and sadly morals and ethics mean nothing where the internet is concerned.

It's not worth losing any sleep over piracy issues really. Do you REALLY know how many models and skins etc have been and still are created using pirate copies of 3DS Max and Photoshop ? There would be an awful lot less pages of downloads here at CA without them. Not trying to be argumentative or anything, just stating a fact. A lot of folks here get all wound up about piracy issues while being fully guilty of it themselves.

Yup....animated rotors etc.. random screenie for the reply