Been away for many years(from this forum) and am at that point in retirement/downsizing where you start throwing away your old stuff… was about to pitch my Suncom F-15 stick/throttle when a wild hair gave me the idea to look for a gameport to USB converter. Turns out the first one I found had a user review saying how well his Suncom Talon gear worked with it. Woohoo!!
So the next thought was how about my dual Masterpilots? I see PS2 to USB adapters too.
So are any people here still using Masterpilots?
Latest posts made by Crossup
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MasterPilot Consoles
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Proposal to change the entire process of tiling theaters…
I would like to discuss the possibility of changing F4 from the current tile limit to something that would support unique tiles, allowing actual photo accurate theaters.
Years ago I was able to use tiles generated by FLY!2(the sim) terrain tools to tile a small Hawaiian Island with photo real terrain in F4. It worked nicely but of course just the very small island used all 1024 tiles so I knew despite how good it looked that getting the graphics into F4 was only a small part of making unique tiling work, not to mention to replace the tile “sets” concepts inherent advantage. But as we all know that system seems to have its own issues, at least with the original F4 tiles. At that time we had a dozen versions of F4 and it didnt take long for it be obvious to me that F4 needed too much other work, to do anything about tile limits and upgrading the terrain.I know what I’m proposing if possible will likely be a big project but among the advantages would be the ability to tile theaters in the time it takes your PC to process say a million tiles thru a script. Infinitely faster than hand tiling and likely within an order of magnitude of CATE speed.
So other than dealing with paths and types, the tile number limit what other problems would using unique(or at least MANY more that 1000)tiles present? -
RE: I'm back….
Yesterday was officially my last day, so that means my F-16 is back on duty…just have dig out those rudder pedals
Thanks Ranger, its SO nice to have a fold to return to, its an amazing community and sim
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I'm back….
Now less than 2 months to permanent retirement, I’m looking forward to finally having time to get back into F4. Was floored to recently get a request to join my long dead theater group.
While no doubt I will have to spend a lot of time getting up to speed with BMS33, I would still very much like to get Hawaii working.So a couple general questions…does the naval aspect of F4 work any differently/better than 3-4 years ago? Has there been any changes with terrain re: palette, resolution vs theatre size restrictions or things that make terrain makedly better?
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RE: WIP - Hawaii Theatre
True,but it is a BIG job to do so…on the other hand we’ve had 15 years IRC a guy single handedly wrote the first DirectX graphics module, not long after someone said how it would take a team a year to do that. A lot of people probably dont know that the orginal code ran a million lines…bound to be more now and its enormously intertwined…
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RE: WIP - Hawaii Theatre
Ok, totally forgot I had a Yahoo Hawaii theater group. So fortunately several screen shots from my test of using hires tiles from Fly!2 still exists. Also now realize the ole memory is not too accurate….I was doing this testing from Xmas 2001 to May 2002. That is actually before I made SP3 and BMS compatible versions of Hawaii.
From the descriptions my memory was correct too that I did have a working campaign and tested the terrain while playing it…while it worked, missions were generated VERY slowly and I never figured out how to accelerate the action.
Enjoy… -
RE: WIP - Hawaii Theatre
Well, I’ve looked high and low and have concluded that my screen shots of my photoreal, imported from Fly!2 terrain pictures died with Frugals. Still have to rescue some old harddrives at my old house and check them, their the right vintage. BUT I did find a page of tiles in my TerrrainView folder which are the some of ones my photoreal test photos used. Should give you’all a taste of it
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RE: WIP - Hawaii Theatre
DAVE,
I did Hawaii in 2003 :D, out of 7 billion people on earth how many can say they did Hawaii for F4?
So yes, I’m one of the Frugal gang…like so many here, pretty amazing sim that can keep peoples interest for 15 years.
So I see you’ve stopped working on Hawaii…I’m getting old but HATE leaving projects unfinished. My Hawaii was complete as far as function and I did the mods so it ran on the orginal BMS, FF and the oldies like SP3 but rather than spend endless time tweaking stock tiles to make it still look like Dueky(hey remember him/his tiles?)I decided to break new ground with new tiles. Not just any old tiles but photorealistic ripped out of FLY!2. A bunch of super guy helped me with tools and info- notablly the guy who wrote CATE, he did custom programs for me and BaldEagle. But as one guy, I just didn’t have the time to master object construction, manufacture tiles, and of course ran into the limitation of the EXEs back then. So while I succeeded in importing the tiles and getting things working enough to take pics, 4096 tiles just didn’t get the job done and I had issues with LOD’s and custom airbases etc.WOULD love to see if we could get a state of the art Hawaii finished, I still have most if not all of my work/tools/files as I keep all my old drives/arrays. Just snagged a HP Prolient DL380 G5 server to pervert into a killa workstation(using it for this message- Dual Quadcore Xeons at 3.16ghz, 16gb ram, SSD and Raid5 drives, EVGA GTX660Ti) so work goes ultra fast- this thing can serious make chit happen NOW)
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RE: WIP - Hawaii Theatre
WOW, its a seriously small world….you just helped me get BMS working…
We have some thing in common that only the two of us out of the entire world can say…BTW, I’ve used this handle since F4’s original release, care to take a guess what my claim to fame is?
Currently the project, on my end, is suspended.
Due mostly to the Tile Limit in Falcon BMS.There is also a noticeable FPS hit when using PhotoReal image’s for the tile’s.Maybe some Falcon day???
demer