Stary

Hello Menrva! yes I seen the new fitting color in ODS 30, splendid job all the team! as for clouds I don't see much that can be done apart from extending their draw ranges and minimizing flicker/disappearances out of camera frustrum, which I have looked into and might have some tweaks -with the sacrifice of number or size of the individual clouds, sadly, but that is something I might look into in my limited spare hobby time.

Hi gang, one of the reasons I sort of stopped caring for the series couple of years back and went my way of not flying combat flight sims was plethora of controversial movements by TK around 2010-2013 period -followed by lack of QOL updates and Thirdwire's focus on mobile market that followed; one of these design decisions was locking clouds altitudes at unrealistic and immersion killing levels of over 14-16k feet ASL which made game less of a fun or challenge turns out solution was very simple hack of vertex shader in ENVCLOUDS.FX which you will find attached in this post, just drop it into your mod's Flight folder, overwrite if asked tested with stock clouds, SARCASM 1.5 and excellent Menrva's realSKY Environment -which I am looking at modding a bit on my end technical blurb: this is simple vertex shader hack that pushes the vertices of clouds plane meshes downwards in world space by user-configurable value: const float4 P = mul(float4(input.pos.x,input.pos.y,input.pos.z - 1900, 1.0), g_mMeshToWorld); // position, world-space where 1900 is world-space units (= meters), all the hack does is feeds the shader skewed z (z being height in SF series, as things should be) value of course there are some issues with intersecting with close range terrain meshes (near_scene) so visual glitches might ensue at times but that was the reason TK pushed them up in the first place Also, if this or other method was posted earlier apologies, haven't looked around much the forums. Cheers, Stary ENVCLOUDS.FX

hello my name is Mek and I haven't been here in quite a bit that's nice, really nice please work on it

Just for clarification, Stary is the younger looking guy We had awesome time with Derk and his family, thank you!

Why have I never thought of that old school touch and go rearming/refill? Must be memory leaks. @NIELS I very much understand your stance mate but the amount of work and the can of worms issues it opens when you factor in AI, mods ability etc is really big. Also the maps are really really compressed as Menrva points out. There are more important things if you want to attract new players, like lack of polished 3d hangar plane selection/loadout management scenes ye olde Novalogic sims / Aces High style etc. TK sort of heads in that direction with mobile offsprings but it is more due to differences between engines used. The SFP1 one doesn't really allow that, sadly. Interesting thing with that F-16 cockpit view in SFMC mobile reinforcement pack though, sort of if like TK is testing new ideas there.

Quiet be Jules with pointing the obvious anti-Chinese bend there or you'll get us banned again. I re-read that 2014 topic in it's entirely, the guys pointing that the video is most likely faked in video editing software... gosh. Crowdfunding eh? Is SF2 on GOG and Steam since say, 2012? Humble bundle once a blue moon? GamersGate? Itch.io even? Noooo? Then good luck with any crowdfunding in the future. Playerbase is a thing only if you try your best to build yourself one. These days it's game Discord and Twitch channels. If TK is still living in 2002 modem-and-Altavista-search era it's his choice. Want to argue? Is this harsh statement? Show me the latest "Strike Fighters Legends" official launch trailer on Youtube, please. Or the shiny cinematic high production values "SF 2 Complete" one going viral via network of CombatAce aficionados, how many views does it ha... ahhhh, riiiiiight. See my point? Yes, still nice to see TK still pushing the semi-necessary update next year but there are other things that would give him more revenue. Like rebranding/re-launching the possible Win10 edition to break the SF-stigma (I can argue it is a thing) with say added seated VR to it, even limited in capacity. Ever played the House of the Dying Sun, Il2 BOS or even something casual like Overload? Works great with standard controls, mouse even (but can't beat VTOL VR or XP11 in terms of immersion). (And for the VR-haters, sorry the tech is battle proven and stays. Don't like VR? Go back to 2015 with your hate and try harder next time. You lost iteration 2 E3D6 61FE) Avionics -apart from floating immersion killing HUDs- and FMs are still rock solid as these are when you compare it to anything post-WW2 that is not DCS. Because there is nothing like this on the market. Not yet. Someone finally will notice the gap, TK. In -flight refueling? Players don't give a crap about in-game refuelling to be honest. Ohh you do? Delusional lot. Sorry to break it to you but you're minority. Three times the charm novelty not worth the resources that could be put into better presentation first and foremost. And don't even think again about making it "moar realistic" in times of DCS. Just don't. It's futile.

Contrary to popular beliefs I am still around, but nah, never worked on Su-25 one, Su-22 I had in hiatus for 3+ years so can't say if and when given my current modding break/leave.

some SF2: Israel action

TY

also I know you can't really tell what was TK's last response but would love to hear that

Nah not dlls, of course not. Shaders, lots of things can be tweaked in shaders. Shaders are not core game files I'd say. Tools to automatically adjust things in HFD as the clouds altitude >>maybe<< possible fix I propose. If that is right track and doable. External tool. Injectors are external tools too not binded by any EULA as far as I know. Otherwise I wouldn't be legally able to post my ReShade-enhanced screenshots back in the day I used ReShade in my Korea install. Or fly payware WW1 opus magnum WOFF is. Check WOFF development and CFS3 engine code injectors especially around Phases 2-3-up to Ultimate Edition. Different engines and approach the Unity-based games and SFP1/WOX/SF2, not that I made such point at any stage (about TK "not being into PC anymore"; find it irrelevant) I am the sane person here, I don't talk about rewriting code lol. Think of better ways to spend 50k he wasnts for source code. Tweaking things is possible to an extend. I see alot of people like to throw into air things that are utterly unrealistic at all like A2A refuelling (shees you guys) Things I would like to see in SF2 are to some extend doable. I like to focus on things I would like to see in SF2 :) but let's not steer from Mue's topic here.

Not really PFunk, depends on the scale and exposure. We're niche within niche as the not so accurate saying goes. But consider this -bloody YAP was pirating and reusing stock TK's carrier decks textures for own models and getting cash from selling that and no one in Austin,TX blinked. Heck even Ubi didn't bother about ripped SH4 hull n' portholes textures used on Rising Sun ships.

Enoc what do you mean? Framerates? Nah I think not, you'd end up with unchanged internal pipeline after all.

Dear Blackbird that is something I planned for few years. Specifically to pay from my pocket to some thirdparty HLSL shaders guy for firstly (always take small steps in such cases) simple things like diffuse-derived normalmaps on terrain, better clouds lighting/transformations, maybe some terrain additions etc. This option still stands even with lesser interest in SF2 on my side. Still, I want it upgraded at some point. Because let's be honest upgraded SF2 in VR would be awesome to fly. And I refuse to go back flying in 2d. My testings from past -posted even here at some point in summer of 2016 IIRC- indicate that clouds height pass infamous December 2010-b and 2010-c updates is tied with terrain's encoded maximum altitude in HFD file, matter of hacking the terrains into thinking the max alt is -customizable value-, the engine it seems treats that as base level for clouds height (call it z axis) spawning; the HFD file has range of altitudes the terrain has, say from 0 to 2600 meters, then if the highest value is mountain peak at 2600 meters then the engine apparently adds some values (and those seem not the clouds bases from environmentsystem definition) to push clouds higher and avoid clipping issues with alpha-based objects (sorry TK if you read this Sir, I'm calling this lazy problem solving) As for avionics updates, we have to thank fellow Team America here that booed and called faker the poor chinese (?) guy (MLRacing was the moniker) who hacked the libraries back in the day driving him off from more modding and sharing.

now that is something neat for sure

yeah that too, then another one is the vertex counts from terrain's data ini on dynamic TODs spawning, been fiddling with those in the long gone past to hilarious results

pffft never heard of those

Congratulations! Well deserved!

Yes Kevin, basically that allows you to manage TE's memory issues you would encounter when having too large tilenametod.ini files, then TE would simply stop reading from these inis and output empty (zero bytes) TODs or wouldn't write to inis at pressing SAVE button. Also worth mentioning this is what I encountered while working on very dense experimental sort of sets with numbers of per-tile objects in 500-1000 ranges.

my God it's full of necro... (posted because I have nothing to add and just wanted to show my activity)

I bought it, still have to install it though. Skyviper is it much different from the mobile version from 2013-ish?

NOW MUE GET ME YOUR TOD CREATION TOOLKIT!!!!!!! DAMMIT WAITING 2 YEARS FOR IT!!!

As for the object creation panel, the size is self-explanatory, cast shadow is shadow cast option :D and size deviation is just that, randomly between placed objects (this works on TOD saving, no size deviation saved per object in ini file IIRC) The other fields are for textures coordinates from as far as I remember 0.0 being top left and 1.0 being bottom right of texture. Texture coordinates 1-4 being sides and coordinate 5 being flat roof. Easiest way to find texture piece position on texture is launching it in PS and using percentage ruler at 10 percent grid or something similar.