USMC Capt. Joe Foss' F4F-4 Wildcat demirrored skin uploaded!!

[kelticheart]

A good day to everybody!

I just uploaded demirrored textures for The B24Guy's overhauled stock F4F-4 Wildcat. From an original 2004 work by Jose Manuel Lopez Fuertes, the repaint depicts the aircraft flown by USMC 26-victory ace Captain Joe Foss of VMF-121, during the "dark days" of Guadalcanal defense in late 1942.

Following the same philosophy I applied last year to do a series of historical Pearl era Japanese repaints, I proceeded to copy Fuertes' demirrored details of his repaint on the original stock skin/damage files. In the process, I removed most of the extended bitmap textures "bleed" effect. The repaint includes also my partially successful attempt to correct the stock mapping error of the elevators texture.

It's obvious that MS designers realized something was wrong and they hastily applied some unrealistic black stripes in the attempt to represent the fabric covering stretched over the elevator metallic interior structure. Regrettably, the resulting display shows such lines going sideways. I tried lighter colours copying them from the rudder texture and tried to guess a distorted shape that would be then displayed straight by the model texture mapping. Not an easy task, I gave up after the hundredth attempt to straighen them up 100%. I think they do not look that bad from a distance, I hope you like them.

Damage textures and alternative blurred prop discs included.

Many thanks to Jose Manuel Lopez Fuertes for his original work and to The B24Guy. Without The B24Guy's great overhaul effort carried out on CFS2 stock aircrafts, such "eye candies" like demirrored textures could not be accomplished.

This upload answers also to the need of preserving addon creations for CFS2.

Enjoy!
KH

[Talon]

Graet job Kelti.

Funny thing is I was just reading about the Marine Aces from Guadalcanal.

Maybe now Bobhegf can/will finish his Guadalcanal mission set.


Talon

[bobhegf]

After I finished all the missions I found the action reports for all the fighter missions flown by VMF223 VMF224 the Army P39s and VF5 from Aug20 to Oct11 42. VMF 223 was the 1st to land along with VMSB 232 with 12 SBDs on Aug 20th then came came 5 Army P39s on the 22 of Aug and 9 more P39s on the 27th of Aug 42.By Aug 30 1942 VMF223 was down to about 11 flyable F4Fs and the Army was down to 5 P39s when VMF 224 landed with 19 more F4Fs and 12 more SBDs.By Sept 5th 1942 when VF5 landed I think with 15 F4Fs and 8 TBFs along with spare parts for 2 more TBFs left in Aug., VMF 223 was down to 8 and VMF 224 was down to 11 aircraft and there were only 3 Army P39s were flyable. By Oct 1st 1942 when VMF121 landed VMF223 was down to 5 aircraft VMF224 was down to 8 aircraft and I am not sure what the count was for VF5.Durring all this time VMF212 had been putting in replacement aircraft and pilots with one of its loses being its CO.I think Joe Foss took comand of VMF121 between Oct 2 and Oct 11 1942 after there Co was eather WIA or KIA.By Oct 11 1942 all of the pilots left of VMF223,224,VF5,VMSB233 and 232 were relived and went state side for a long R and R. There are 2 names connected with VF5 one was Smoky Stover and the other was Cash Register. I found Cash Resgister`s bio on the net which was a big help. Cash Register was KIA later in the war and if you go to YOU TUBE and look up The Fighting Lady you will see what happened to Smoky Stover. The reason I was able to get the info was due to the action reports from VF5 and Cash Register`s Bio. I am not sure how many missions Register flew because the Bio delt more with how he felt about what was going on. By putting togeather the number of missions Smoky Stover flew which was 50, I figure he saw combat in about 32 of the missions which were flown between Sept 5 and Oct 9 1942. Not only did thies pilots fly alot of combat durring the day but had to put up with being shelled at night and I mean every night. My hat is off to thoes fellows.

The reason I never put the missions up was just about the time I would finish I would find more info and redo the missions.Because I ended up after all the work I had done with another hard drive crash and not only lossing all the missions for Midway and Midway scenery I lost all my Guadalcanal scenery and missions along with some new training missions a nice airshow mission and some carrier missions I had started. This all happened about a year ago and I just lost interest. Well I am back putting things back togeather eventhough I am using a pc that is not worth the metal it is made with. I am also in the process of getting info about what i will need to put togeather a good game computer with limitted funds. I am looking for or wanting to build a pc that will give me 150 up to about 300 FPS in CFS2 . I sure could use some ideas or info on what I need as well as the money involved. I can`t aford to spend alot because I am retired and live off of a fixed income.

[Rami]

Kelti,

Outstanding work! It almost makes me want to jump in to defend Henderson.

[Talon]

Kelti,

Outstanding work! It almost makes me want to jump in to defend Henderson.

But you'd change History and the Marines would lose.

[Worthless]

Thanks KH. I'll be changing out my old OH skin at once.

[Allen]

Glad to see some one other than my self doing some skins!

[kelticheart]

...eventhough I am using a pc that is not worth the metal it is made with....

Ah! Ah! Ah! Isn't that the case more often than lots of us would like?

Don't loose faith Bobhegf, and keep on trucking! A Guadalcanal-dedicated campaign based on historical facts would be a great addon, since only few stock missions cover that period.

Back to the hardware topic, here in Europe I very often found out that it's much cheaper assembling a pc from parts, new and/or used, than buying a ready package that, in my experience, it never comes 100% satisfactory under all aspects. Since US is the largest electronic market of the world, I would guess the situation is even better there. I assembled my net-dedicated pc with used parts and I am quite happy with its performance and overall, ridicolous cost.

Check into the used parts market, there must be one in the US that other members will be happy to point out to you. Here there's a huge number of kids who keep getting new components for their pcs in order to keep up with the very last gaming novelties and one can buy used hi-performing video cards, mother boards, HDDs, RAM banks, monitors and more in excellent shape, with very low mileage and with handsomely low prices. If I were you, I'd start browsing E-bay!

HDD crash is the dreaded event each one of us fears. Considering we have been building CFS2 for over ten years now, losing everything would be quite a shock! Check if your CMOS S.M.A.R.T. harddisk monitoring option is activated, download HDD testing utilities and check your HDD health at least every two months, keep your HDD clean from Windows garbage and defragmented at least every two weeks. If anything is starting to fail, these actions will reveal that something's wrong. I use Maxtor utilities to check my HDDs health, but even Piriform's Defraggler (Piriform is the company that makes Crap Cleaner, a great cleanup utility), which I do not like a lot because it may cause problems, still has a quick diagnostic that states the HDD health status.
Other actions that prolongs your HDDs life is activating the energy-saving feature via Control Panel that turns them off after a given period of inactivity. This will decrease greatly your HDD turning engine activity time, thus keeping it cooler. I set them to go off after 5 minutes, you will be surprised how many times your HDD will be turned off while running CFS2.
HDD cooling fans are also a great investment, expecially during summertime, even if we keep our machines in air-conditioned environments.

Besides, I bought three used 80Gb HDDs. After checking carefully they were in good health including a low-level format, I quadruplicated everything I downloaded on them, including three copies of my entire CFS2 installed structure. I keep one of them as a secondary HDD in my pc and I use very cheap EIDE/ATA external USB adapters/connectors to run the others. I also keep burned CD and DVD copies of the most important downloads on write-once only media, because I had bad experiences with re-writables. You can buy external USB HDDs, I chose a cheaper option.

Since having to format one's HDD and re-install everything can happen anytime, in this way I only have to do a CFS2 install from the CDs and then copy over one of my backups in order to have everything running as usual in little time.

Check also Cowboy1968's recent, very interesting thread here:

http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforum...omputer-s-spee

I hope this might help you and I'll be eagerly waiting for your Guadalcanal campaign!

Cheers!
KH

[mav]

Nice 1 Kelti!!!

[Ghostrider]

I had a patient who passed a couple of years ago, Clarence "Pap" Beasley, who flew with Joe Foss on Guadalcanal, and remained friends with Foss, and would go hunting with him every year. He also remained lifelong friends with Foss's widow until his own death. He also flew F4U's at Okinawa.

RIP Pap!