I assume “Balkans 3.0” is just a texture and model swap and is still using the old broken campaign correct?
Latest posts made by Hub
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RE: New Texture Balkans
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Dirty Vipers
Hello folks,
Are there any skins available for Vipers that look like they’ve had a few years of hard use put through them? Dinged up paint, fluid smears, carbon soot on the gun port, etc… I’m flying a campaign out of Osan with relatively old Block 40s that have been getting into pitch battles and gun fights for days now and they still look like they just rolled off the assembly line. Crew chiefs are good, but not that good.
Thanks!
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RE: Balkans 3.0 a Functional Campaign
I’ve been flying around in “Battle for Balkans - Stand Alone” for a bit and you folks have done a bang up job. Its one of the slickest looking theater setups I’ve ever seen, very high production quality. I get the point of limiting AMRAAM load-outs on F-16s given how disruptive they can be in a PvP engagement, that seems like a good balance choice but is it normal for only F-16 squadrons to have more than MK-84s in their air to ground weapon inventories? Its sort of amusing to see Strike Eagles flying around with nothing but MK-84 hung all over the bird, but limits the ability of AI flights to carrying out the taskings the ATO is generating for them. Do non-F16 squadrons receive supplies of other stores as the campaign progresses or was the intent to restrict the AI’s ability to participate in the air war and place heavier emphasis on human controlled F-16s?
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RE: Iff you could have one thing in the next update it would be. (Archive)
These are somewhat technical and contain assumptions about how the rendering engines works that I can’t verify.
I’d like cockpit displays to be anti-aliased. MFDs, especially the FCR in CRM/ACM modes, shimmer rather badly when looking out the canopy or if you place your FOV further back making them hard to read. This is likely a result of the MFD pages using textures with limited resolution blitted on to another texture that is rendered on the polygon(s) making up the MFD screen; to many texels in to small a space causing the rasterizer to smash your lines. This is particularly bad if the MDF textures aren’t mipmapped. That’s probably not an easy problem to fix without replacing the Render-to-Texture MFDs with an actual line drawing generator that can be anti-aliased by the hardware. Direct3D 9 doesn’t provide readily available line drawing APIs even though the hardware supports it, though there are some helper functions in the D3DX library. All of this could also be as simple as enabling multisampling on the texture sampler used when doing the MFD render-to-texture pass depending on how the art assets are made. Video MFD pages like the TGP and GM/GMT FCR modes could benefit from automatic mipmap generation, it wouldn’t be expensive on modern hardware with the limited texture resolutions used for the MFDs.
TGP/Maverick video rendered using a different depth buffer. Currently when looking at far off objects with the TGP you get considerable Z-Fighting occurring due to loss of precision in the depth buffer. Its not normally noticeable from the cockpit because the objects are too small to see clearly with the naked eye but is very noticeable with a zoomed in sensor. My assumption is that far objects viewed through a sensor are being rendered with the same depth buffer settings used for our view from the cockpit. Since the TGP/MAV views require an extra rendering pass anyhow to get the texture needed to render on the MFD screen and Z-Clears are nearly free it may be possible to specify a clipping volume specifically for the TGP/MAV Render-to-Texture display where the far clipping plane is just behind the terrain and the near clipping plane is a few meters ahead of the “camera” position, then do the render. This would mitigate or probably eliminate completely the Z-Fighting seen in sensors. Depending on how LOD levels are determined it may even be possible to render higher LOD levels for objects seen in the TGP/MAV assuming distance to camera or distance to near clipping plane is part of the equation used to determine object LOD level. This is a technique frequently used in rendering software where objects need to be rendered correctly over massive view distances. The entire view length is chopped up into multiple view spans and each span is rendered in a separate pass with the near and far clipping planes proportionally pushed further out on each pass to maintain depth precision.
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RE: Balkans 3.0 a Functional Campaign
That sounds great folks, thanks for the replies. I’ll give Battle for Balkans a try.
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Balkans 3.0 a Functional Campaign
Good day folks,
I was wondering if the Balkans 3.0 theater has a functional campaign? I know there have been issues in the past with older versions of Balkans having unwinnable campaigns due to ground units not moving or other issues Does Balkans 3.0 require any other files or is its a nicely packaged stand alone theater?