i have set both D/E versions to climb at 11000m from breaks release in 2 mins with 100% fuel
with 20% fuel the time is about 1.35
climbing from 1000m at 1000kmh in default (100%fuel) it can reach 10k in 42 sec wit an average climb speed of 214m/s
cecking Historical results of operation High Jump the XF4H, that climbed at 12k in 77s from break release, so faster then these F4s
during the test for FM i have build a model able to reach that results with 20% fuel, but i think, contrary to the assertions of McDonnell Douglas, that the plane used in High Jump operation didn't was totally stock (expecially in takeoff performances), then i created a model less exuberant
the top speed is not 2250, both version can go over 2350 if you use propely the trim 
Yeah, the aircraft was still accelerating but I got impatient.
@Herra Tohtori
Indexed textures are preferable to 24bit. There are more colours in 24bit but if you convert it to indexed mode correctly your eyes can't actually tell the difference. We paint all of our skins in 24bit and save in indexed. 24bit is only required for tga's that need alpha channel. Otherwise indexed should be used, it is the game's native format and it lowers processing time as well as memory space. Cockpits run smoother all in indexed mode than with large 24bit file sizes. All of the cockpits in the jet era package have indexed tga's unless they require alpha channel
Incorrect on almost all counts.
Indexed textures are severely limited on what they can accurately portray. Indexing a texture will always decrease the quality, and depending on the content of the original image, will have either banding, dithering, or both effects when the original image has more than 256 different pixel values, which they almost invariably do.
Subtle blending effects such as airbrushed camouflage suffers the most. Close second is human skin and baked-in highlights. These types of details suffer from banding and you most definitely can see it, and there's really nothing you can do about it.
24-bit colour texture also scales up much better than indexed texture. Indexed textures end up with more pixellation on close range rendering, while 24-bit textures tend to be smoother (depends on the rendering method and content of the textures themselves, of course).
24-bit textures are RGB textures with no alpha. They have 8 bits per channel, and three colour channels, ergo, 24 bits. If you have alpha channel in the mix, then you have an RGBA texture which has four 8-bit channels, making it a 32-bit texture.
If alpha channel is required, you have to use 32-bit RGBA texture.
If no alpha is required, you can make do with 24-bit RGB texture, which is a lot better than indexed texture.
Indexed textures are not IL-2's "native" format. IL-2 uses many formats for different things. It seems to me that the only thing that 24-bit TGA is/was not supported was the additional skin system, which for some reason only accepts 8-bit indexed bitmap files.
The most probable reason for this is that the game was made in 2001, a time before widescale adoption of gargantual hard drives and high-speed internet connections. So, the game developers decided to make the additional skin system only support 8-bit indexed textures, to limit the hard drive space taken by the textures, and to limit the download times on servers with skin download enabled. The internal workings of the game have, according to my understanding, used 32-bit TGA from the get go for textures that have transparency, and 24-bit TGA for most textures that don't need transparency.
On the topic of performance, the only differences between indexed texture and 24-bit texture of same resolution is this: Because of smaller file size on disk, the indexed texture is loaded slightly faster and has slightly less CPU overhead than a 24-bit texture of same resolution.
However,
these things are largely meaningless with today's computers.
-Hard drive space is not a problem (textures can be bigger without filling the hard drive completely)
-loading times are not a problem (read and transfer rates between HDD and memory are very fast and getting faster with the emergence of SSD's)
-CPU overhead is usually not a problem (there's not much of a difference anyway).
-RAM is not usually a problem considering people usually have quite a bit more of it than when IL-2 was originally developed (the only problem here is the limited memory address awareness of IL-2 which can mean running out of memory that the game can access; however with large address aware modifications, I believe this particular problem is pretty much solved)
As far as the process of rendering things goes, this is what happens inside your computer:
-game wants to use a certain texture. It looks through the file tree for where it is supposed to find it, and then if it finds it, the texture is loaded into memory.
-to render the texture, it needs to be passed to the GPU, or graphics processing unit on the system.
-graphics cards, however, cannot just eat a file and spit out game graphics. They need the file in certain format.
-to make the GPU understand the texture, the image needs to be converted to uncompressed bitmap data
-this process is done on the CPU and what happens at this point is that the indexed 256-colour file and 24-bit, 16-million something colour file end up as a bitmap of perfectly identical size.
-the raw bitmap data is passed on to GPU, which then uses it to render the game graphics.
You'll notice that as far as the GPU goes, it's completely irrelevant whether the original texture file is an indexed file or 24-bit image, both end up occupying the same amount of VRAM and give the exact same performance
You
can enable S3TC mode in il2setup.exe, which is supposed to (badly) subject all textures to S3 texture compression, or DXT compression as it is also called. This does reduce the memory footprint of a 24bit texture to approximately 1/6th of the original, however it usually ends up looking very horrible and in my opinion is not worth using at all. All it does is reduce the VRAM load, which is not usually a problem in the first place, and causes some additional CPU overhead as the game needs to convert all textures to S3TC format, and GPU memory is rarely the limiting factor with IL-2 - usually the bottleneck factor is CPU single thread performance.
These technical reasons, in addition to superior quality, are why I think that 24-bit TGA files should be used instead of indexed bitmaps or indexed TGA files.
Mind you, the ideal solution would be if the game supported DDS files (or Direct Draw Surface), which can be passed directly from hard drive location to GPU's memory without much CPU or RAM overhead, and the OpenGL API will take care of rendering them. DDS is a wonderful file format and supports many compression methods, both for RGB and RGBA type textures, and would make IL-2 modding so much better, but I suppose adding such core functionality to the game is not possible without modifying the source code to add that as a texture format.
But we digress. If you want to continue the discussion about texture file formats and how they are used in the game, we should do it in another thread and keep this thread dedicated to development of the F-4 Phantom II.
Author
Topic: F-4 Phantom II's released v1.31 for Jetwar1.2 (17/10/2012) (Read 284889 times)
