The Return of Squiffy

[Squiffy]

Thanks for the warm welcome. I got my system running last night finally. A few things came up... First, I left the cd1 in the drive of my old rig! It's long gone recycled at Best Buy now. But I did find the Firepower exe on Old Games. Got it downloaded and sure enough it's running. The program architecture is a little different and I have CFS3 running in my downloads folder. I did have the ETo expansion on my external hd and started copying over files. Aircraft work ok, working on my HOTAS Cougar...making progress, but when I copied the ACC airfields over to assets, the main facility tiles dirt and outline are not displaying properly. It's like I have a highly dithered missing file. I see them in my assets folder and they look ok. Including some of my revised airfield skins. Scenery is a little fouled up too with wrong skin sections and crazy black backgrounds. Most everything else is OK maybe some shoreline/water issues. So I didn't follow the whole ETO install and that's probably part of the problem. More later...

[Squiffy]

I'm helping out in the neighborhood next door today at work. Chaos and stress, but not too bad... Not good though on 4 hours sleep. Back to normal with CFS3 late night hours! Ah well, I may just reinstall or delete the ACC 47th stuff and start from scratch. Pitty was, I just repainted the fall foliage trees before the old mobo crashed.

[Squiffy]

So here's a drunk screenshot of Debden. I realized I didn't have my 2psheets.dds file anymore, which was needed on the airfields. Otherwise the decal dithers everything out it seems. But I still have trouble with the scenery skins. I might be missing something in the scenery files. Terrain is light too. I could use a set of power budgets for scenery and textures. My Cyberpower gaming rig has a nVidia Geforce GTX 1060 and i7 quadcore. 8 gigs ram I think. It smokes and actually doesn't have a liquid cooled cpu like on the old one. Lotta good that did since the modo fried anyway. So here is the shot. I need the AvHistory planes and sounds. This D type sounds like a B with a lame Allison engine And you can see how the terrain and facility tiles are pranged up. I played with the scenery budgets and made some progress there too.

[Squiffy]

And to note... I have Firepower installed in the Downloads folder. No CD thingy patched. User app data folder shortcut. Lots of stuff in my assets folder that can be removed. It has not crashed yet. Runs fine. I did have issues with CH Control manager for my pedals. Win10 doesn't like the keyboard mapping and kills the whole controller when it's mapped. So I can't get differential braking, only full set at zero, off at max toes out. Weird and I thought about inverting the axes but that gives Win10 fits. Unmapped it's OK just annoying with no toe brakes. I may delete back to vanilla and try the ETO installers. May be good fun if we get another snow day. Haha. Oh and I have NOT installed DirectX9 because it's a new Win10 gaming rig. Should I? Gotta get more sleep and rest my eyes, but it's good to be back. And I made a fake 2psheets.dds file of some dirt to fix the .mos problem of dithered out airfields. Now they display as you can see in the screenie but with other issues. Cheers!

[Squiffy]

So I went through the ETO install last night but missed a dialog box along the way. I watched the videos from the aussie site and tried to make all the path changes to my firepower install. Something got pranged along the way, and I made it better then worse by copying the missed dll files and then running the Install swapper on it's own.

I looked at the .bat calls, and I noticed that the 1939 call was in there bu t seemed to be missing in the xml files or such. Is that because 1939 is the default? I ran the start exe/bat in order and at one point after I copied the dlls, it was saying can't find EULA. I copied that over from firepower and it didn't work. So I will delete and try again but I have to be careful as I am losing sleep and straining my eyes. At least I am not yelling at the XBox, which is what I was doing these past couple years, as well as driving real cars

The thing that made me want to try CFS3 again was seeing a documentary on the Mosquito and some live videos. I did fly the cannon ship lat night but the crappy stock FM was really annoying.

So Chime in when you can, I'll be running the snow blower yet again tomorrow!

[Squiffy]

No snow yet. New ETO install on top of C: drive. Several .dll got missed again in the install. I found them and copied them over. It gets further in to the start phase put hangs on a missing font error -"Ariel will be used instead" and then hangs looking for something....splash.xml. Yes a .xml file! I have a feeling the installer does not like installing from anything but Win 7 and earlier and Program Files(x86), even though all the docs and apps say you can change it. Anyone know where I can find that ~/splash.xml file? I will look on my laptop since that highly modded Squiffy/ACC/Av History install is still working. Firepower on my new Win10 desktop still works but has cacca FMs. Unfortunately, the terrains and mosaics and scenery are't so easy to copy over.

Thanks.

[Pat Pattle]

Hi Squiffy,

It looks to me like your qclocation files might be messed up or you're missing some folders. This is what the Debden ground texture should look like:

[Thudman]

been there. done that. The installer does not copy all the required files over from the vanilla CFS3. You will have to copy them over as the "missing" messages pop up. You will eventually get all the pieces installed but it might take some time.

[Squiffy]

Thanks, this is exactly what I noticed. But I don't see how the EULA and font calls would cause trouble if it works fine under firepower. Maybe the folder locations DO matter relative to your vanilla CFS3? Another problem file is the something/splash.xml. What the heck is that! I gather it is about splash screens and they do change. I am thinking my dl package was corrupted for ETO. Where does the splash.xml live?

And Pat, I haven't been able to get new Debden loaded properly because the ETO sim is not running yet. I copied some airfield folders over into assets into my firepower install. I have good terrain and airfields now just not the new airfield tiles under ETO.

Also... the above screenie is of my Firepower install with ACC airfields in assets. A holdover from when my twice old rig could not handle the ETO. The Win7 machine since then only got the assets paste and no real ETO install. The font in question is the OCR font. Optical character recognition? Really? I guess it helps for vision challenges but never noticed it before.

I have also barely seen the command screen run any dir stuff, just the era swapper and spawn swapper. GSL and install swapper has been the biggest headache. It's probably the folder paths but I have tried both a twin path next to my firepower under downloads as well as the top of the C: drive pure and simple. Does the ETO installer have to be anywhere close to the CFS3 install? The installer seems to be lacking the "origin" setting while concentrating on the "destination" settings.

[Thudman]

There are a three splash .xml files located in the animation folder. They are a_ditched_h_splash, b_ditched_h_splash, and g_ditched_h_splash. I also ran into files missing from the uires folder. it was a slow process finding everything but I did get everything working eventually.

[Squiffy]

Thanks Thud. I'm on the path. Found the dialogs folder missing in ETO which includes the dlgsplash.xml and others. Also the fonts folder missing. I'm going through them and will look at the animation folder too. Thanks. Got further into the ETO launch but still hangs on "splash" screen haha. I'm making sense of it. Maybe we should make a sticky with a list of the problem spots with missing files which may be due to simple data transfer issues. Especially under Win10.

[hairyspin]

The above posts have been moved from the Windows 10 sticky thread. Carry on!

[Squiffy]

Duly noted Hairspin!

Good news. My archived copy of the ETO install on my E: drive actually works and I had no idea. I had copied over the files to my new Firepower install to repair the ACC airfields I was piecing together. Low and behold it starts from the .bat with all of the number selections as it should. This is off the E: drive and the old .exe in whatever "modified" state it was in

But then I found my qc dogfight mission was respawning which I never liked, and had always changed it so I could land in peace. When I changed it in one App Data folder it had no effect so I knew something was still up with the Win10 folder architecture. Sure enough, along the way, either by the installer, or when I tried to make the AppData and MyDocs folders independently, I ended up with two versions of the app data folder at the top of my C: drive when the new simple version should have been. I couldn't tell which was working util I saw the spawn issue and made changes. I had also run the Install swapper independently when my install for ETO did not work from Firepower and I got all those file errors. The AppData folder that seems to be in command is the one with the CFS3 ETO Expansion__________ extension.

C:\Users\johnk\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\CFS3 ETO Expansion_________ ... even though I am running from my E: drive!

So in the end, I have an old install of ETO working on my E: drive and I am trimming it out now to my liking. My scenery sheet is still fouled up I have no clue hoe that happened. I think the layout got changes in the modding over the years and somehow I got out of step of missed the right file. The stock one is better but still not right with nasty trees and such. It either a few lime green trees and white houses or nice brown houses with cubist abstract jumbling when trees should be.

Here's a shot of my Cripes P-51 after pounding some Doras.

[Squiffy]

I was also getting CTDs that were either weather xml related or maybe aircraft. But the aircraft would always load ok after ward in the ui movie as well as the weather. But I found files missing on one of the installs and copied them over. That fixed it. It must have been in the old E: archive which is what I have been using now that I know it works. CTDs but no stated errors. The weather files fixed it.

[Squiffy]

Great! Proper trees and enjoying the music too. So this is better than my Firepower install now because it has all the added planes. Still not sure if it was the .dds, the .mos, or the .lso!