Cfs1 furball

[aleatorylamp]

Hello Rince33,

That looks fantastic! Very good work. Thanks very much!

I just got the files and installed them to have a look. Very authentic looking colours
indeed. It´s impossible to get those colour tones with the standard 256-colour pallette.

A nice enhancement to the model! I bet Smilo will like it very much too!

Incidentally, about the windows on the lower right side of the nose are on the nose
texture bitmap (the lower left side has none), not transparent, as it was impossible to
get them to show more or less correctly.

Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

[Ivan]

Except for the Light Blue-Gray on the underside, the other colours can find a pretty close mapping on the FS5 palette.
I ran into the same problem when trying to paint the underside of the Me 109E-4. Either it was too Blue or no Blue at all.

Hello Rince33,
you did quite an excellent job repainting the Dornier. If Aleatorylamp has no objection, perhaps you should upload it here as a repaint (with proper credits of course)? It would not hurt to have another couple entries in the CFS1 downloads area.

Hello Aleatorylamp,
I believe it is quite possible to build the windows on the lower nose section as glazing rather than as textures. It gets a bit complicated and quite expensive in terms of AF99 Parts though which is why I figured that project had to be done in sections.

- Ivan.

[aleatorylamp]

Hello Guys,
It would be a great idea to upload the Do17z2 with the newly improved textures,
and of course also with a possible lower right transparent window improvement,
so please do feel free to proceed accordingly!
Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

[Ivan]

Hello Aleatorylamp,

The transparent windows would be a serious rework and for that amount of work, I would probably do better spending the time on my own version of the Dornier 17Z. The project that Rince33 repainted here is your baby and you are still around to fix things if they bother you enough.

The attached screenshots show the sections that exist for my Do 17Z now.
The Nose section was done once but I found that I had miscounted the number of frames and had to start over to get the spacing right. Most of it is just tedious work except for the telescoping rear section of each engine nacelle which I haven't figured out how to do yet.

The final assembly became much easier earlier this year when I finished working on a spreadsheet to calculate the parameters for translating AF99 Glue Parts to SCASM parameters.

- Ivan.

[rince33]

Thanks for the kind words guys. A while back I created a graphics mod for Rowans bob(http://a2asimulations.com/forum/view...p?f=10&t=68079). I took a stack of in game screenshots of the il2clod dornier and patched together this skin from the those to create a skin for the rowanbob dornier model, a fun project.




AND THE OLD SKIN



AND MY BOB2 RESKIN OFTHE HURRICANE AND DORNIER, ALSO USING IL2CLOD SCREENSHOTS.





MY BOB2 STUKA RESKIN


I'm now keen to see what these would look like in cfs1, they would be low res though.

[Ivan]

Hello Rince33,

It is pretty obvious you know what you are doing. It is a pity those don't look like CFS1 models. If they are, I would suggest uploading them so others can benefit from your skills. My own paint jobs tend to look more like cartoons in general. No highlights and very little contrast or shading.

By the way, what was the mapping problem you saw in the upper rear fuselage of Dornier 17?

- Ivan.

[rince33]

Hello Ivan.
Those were Rowan's Battle of Britain and Battle of Britain Wings of Victory models. I'm going to try and skin some of the cfs1 models with those textures but it won't look that great down sizing textures from 1024x1024 to 256x256 as you can imagine, still, I'm curious. I'll have a look at your me109 for starters.

This photo wasn't of the end product so there were other issues that I can see that were cleaned up before I uploaded the textures.


The texture glitch is there:

[Ivan]

Hello Rince33,

I believe when you attempt to texture "My" 109E-4, you will have an extremely easy time of it.
All the textures are square and are a constant scale across related parts.... Mostly.
The Wing Root / Fillet section is a different scale from the Wing because to fix that would have required some serious remapping.
If you find any problems, just let me know.

The image you posted for the Do 17 mapping problem doesn't display.

- Ivan.

[rince33]

Sorry about that.

[aleatorylamp]

Hi Rince33,

That´s not really a texture mis-mapping issue. It´s just that the mid-fuselage top
component, and the rear-fuselage top structure, are textured with the mid-fuselage
and rear fuselage textures respectively, which are both side-application textures.

I´m afraid this causes the straight line perpendicular colour divisions on fuselage top surface.

The 2 attached blueprint screenshots show the respective top fuselage elements in light blue.

There were already 15 textures, so unfortunately I couldn´t put in an extra top/bottom
texture for the top fuselage, and I matched the camo pattern on the fuselage top
surface with the wings accordingly.

Update: On 2nd thoughts, a top-bottom texture wouldn´t help either. Where would one
put it? The markings on the sides would then be distorted... The only way is to paint the
textures with colour shapes like I did originally (shown on the leftmost screenshot).

Update2: I was trying to adjust the pattern on the mid-fuselage bitmap No. 6, the one
with the markings, and got confused, because the front fuselage bitmap No. 1 also needs
a pattern adjustment.
The division between the darker and lighter portions of the new textures would have to
be like the ones I had originally. Here´s a fourth screenshot showing both the old and
the new bitmaps.
I´m trying to adjust it myself, and I´ll post the bitmaps as soon as I get them right.

Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

[aleatorylamp]

Hi Rince33,

It´s a difficult one, this alignment, not perfect by any means, and not
exactly like your colouring, but it´s my modest contribution to trying to
align the texture pattern a bit better. I wonder...

Granted, the fuselage part is not dark there... a tentative fix, as it were...

Here´s a screenshot, as well as the altered bitmaps No. 1 and No. 6, as a
possible improvemet for pattern alignment.

Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

[rince33]

Hi Aleatorylamp

The section in front of the tail plane looks much better but I don't like the bit at the main wing, it breaks the continuity of the orange line section.
This is a good compromise:

[aleatorylamp]

Hello Rince33,
Very good, I agree with you there.
And thus, the fix has improved!
Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

[rince33]

Hi Ivan

Work done on your me109 thus far. The spinner will be yellow.

[Ivan]

Hello Rince33,

Regarding the Emil: Not bad at all.
I do see one issue though: It appears from the screenshot that the Cross on the Starboard Wing is just a touch further forward than the one on the Port Wing. Is this actually the case?
Which Geschwader Emblem are you planning on using for this repaint?

My original paint scheme was really one for nostalgia reasons. I found another Monogram Me109E kit in my stash, but after this model for the simulator, the drive to build the aeroplane in plastic is not quite as strong. The kit I found as a replacement is even older than the first kit.

- Ivan.

[rince33]

I created this from a skin that I'd previously edited from Il2 cliffs of Dover screenshots. The generic Il2 skin did not have specific squadron markings . I would probably have to change the colours slightly to adapt it to a specific squadron . I may have a version without the yellow nose texture, I'll check. This is wip so there are some texture issues that have to be corrected, and textures still to be edited.

[Ivan]

Hello Rince33,

I presume you saw that there were two Spinner textures. One is for regular player flown aircraft with full animation.
The other is for AI flown in which the propeller animation seems to disappear. On some add-on aircraft with animated spinners and the like, the spinner disappears which is pretty odd looking. This aeroplane project was also a first test to see if the SCASM edit idea I had would address this problem.

At this point I only know how to animate one spinner and prevent the other from vanishing. Perhaps I will learn enough to animate the other as well at some point.

Take it for a spin and see how much fun it is to land on a short island airstrip....

- Ivan.

[aleatorylamp]

Nice work, Rince33!

[rince33]

Hello you'all.


Thanks aleatorylamp.


Ivan, I did wonder about that second spinner texture.

You guys are creating nice models here. This sim is underated, it definitly deserves more attention and I was quite surprised it even ran on win7, yeah I'm still running on that os. Bob wov2, another favourite of mine, won't run properly on Win8/10. I have another hard drive that I will use for win10 when I absolutely need to go there.

I haven't tried landings yet, I'm trying to squeeze in the odd raf campaign mission every now and then when I'm not busy with textures and real life. I'll give it a proper spin today.

[aleatorylamp]

Hi Rince33,

I´m glad you like our models, even though they are made with the now over-20-year-old AF99, and not with Gmax or FSDS3. However, in all this time, we´ve learnt how to squeeze the most out of it, largely thanks to Ivan´s insight and abilities, so results are quite satisfactory.
Our main difficulty seems to be with textures, so it´s great you have jumped in!
...and I´d say that good textures make up for 50% of the value of a model!

Regarding my hardware, in 2012 I managed to get hold one of the last new motherboards and AMD quadcore CPU´s (APU, actually) that catered for Windows XP, so fortunately all the old sims, Aircraft Factory 99 and Aircraft Animator work flawlessly. The last two can´t handle 64bit OS.

Cheers for now,
Aleatorylamp

[Ivan]

Hello Aleatorylamp,

Thanks for the compliment, but there are a bunch more people besides myself that are or were doing some pretty creative work with CFS1. The reason I have stuck with CFS1 for so long is that although its graphics are not quite up to modern standards, they still are not bad for visualizations and the flight modelling that is possible isn't that different from what is available in some of the more modern simulators and it is really the flight simulation aspect and being able to reproduce realistic flight performance that I am interested in.


Hello Rince33,

One of the things I forgot to address about the you-tube videos is that while both the 109 and Spitfire both have very narrow landing gear, the 109 has wheels which are canted in relation to the ground. When the aircraft first touches down on just the main wheels, the wheels are more or less aligned in the direction of movement, but as soon as the tail lowers, the mains have a substantial toe-out and stability is not so good.
I believe that the CoG is also much further back from the mains on the 109 than on the Spitfire which also adversely affects directional stability.

Attached are a couple images to show what the box art for the Monogram Me109E looks like and what I was going for in my released paint scheme. "Erika" was just there because the song just stuck in my head. I installed an old German font to be able to get the lettering to apply to the side of the Me109E-4.
The Monogram model kit looks much more like a Me109E-3 but the E-4 was the current standard of this very interesting time period.

- Ivan.

[aleatorylamp]

Hi Ivan,

"...and it is really the flight simulation aspect and being able to reproduce realistic
flight performance that I am interested in."

I agree with you. It´s one of the reasons I prefer them to any of the newer sims.
FS98 and CFS1 do seem more sensitive to adjustments to the .air file, and also,
you don´t have check all the time that something in the Aircraft.cfg is overriding
your fine adjustments!

Cheers,
Aleatorylamp

[Ivan]

Hello Aleatorylamp,

Just because I find CFS1 "Mostly" sufficient for my purposes doesn't mean that I don't find problems or issues that the newer simulators don't address better.

I believe having parameters in Aircraft.CFG override the parameters in the AIR file makes for an easier time for most people.
Most people deal better with labeled text fields rather than a decoding a bulk binary file with no distinct fields. It also allows for easier method for a quick experiment and leaving a comment as to what value was changed and what the prior value was. It is pretty hard to do that in a binary AIR file.

There are a bunch of features that the newer simulators have that make CFS1 show up poorly:
Directional Propeller Rotation
Lateral and Directional Trim for Gauge Tokens
The ability to offset the CoG of the aircraft from the Origin of the visual model.
The magic sizing problem of stock versus add-on aircraft visual models.

Today, we look at AIR files as composed of many recognizable fields, but there are still many of the fields that have effects that we simply don't understand. People have spent years trying to decode these records and even now, every so often, I find that the interpretation of a field is not correct. This kind of a binary file is not something that the average person will have much success in editing without a great deal of guidance. I believe it makes more sense to limit the common edits to a simple text file.

In the last few months, I personally have hit at least three or four AIR files that do something that I can't figure out.
The Short Stirling seems to have a problem with starting Engine 4 when started in the air instead of on a runway.
I believe I have an idea why but don't want to spend the time to experiment.
The A6M2 by Steve Gandy seems to have a strange pitch down moment that I can't find the cause for. It can be tuned to have less effect, but still shows itself at times.
The ASh-82FN engine on the La-5FN that I am currently working on has an odd power curve that I suspect indicates that the real engine had a fuel or air restriction that limited power. There should be a way to simulate this not unusual situation but I don't know how to do it.
The Me109E-4 that was recently released originally lacked the ability to be steerable on the ground. I managed to edit the AIR file in a manner that enabled steering and didn't create handling that was too terrible but there is an rolling effect that is also there that should not be and if I try to tune that out, the ground handling gets much worse.

Keep in mind also that I have more experience than most people in working with AIR files and am still running into these issues.
You also have worked with AIR files for years and we still can't seem to agree on how to handle superchargers or propeller tables.

- Ivan.

[Ivan]

Hello Aleatorylamp,

I saw a post from you this morning in this thread when I was on my iPad but didn't think it was worthwhile to respond without a real keyboard. Seems like you changed your mind about the message.

- Ivan.

[rince33]

Good day y'all. I'm still working on the 109 skin. I've downloaded 1% stock aircraft replacement mod and Ive only tried the hurricane so far and its quite sluggish compared to stock flight model. What do you guys think of it?