good morning guys!
as we still do not have a dedicated CUP thread for error reports, suggestions etc, I will post a few things here:
1) the Music: bah I hate this standard IL2 march music; it is just plainly awful; but solution is at hand, Simon has released a great set of new music files way back for newTFM IIRC and these work here as well! so if you also want to have new music at virtually no expense, just get yourself a copy of the new music over at the newTFM thread, drop into your JSGME folder and activate
2) the GUI: I like the new screens quite a lot, but I did like the older ones even more; simple solution-just rem out the !0000_WAW folder and you will get the old Trudigan pictures from ModAct back; alternatively, choose any of the GUI mods available here and drop those into the above mentioned folder maintaining the correct names and structures-should work also (but I did not test that)
3) addon planes: I have started to modify the planeset of WAW quite a lot by now; loads of planes missing (for no obvious reason), while some birds are there that I will never need in my WAW; while I basically agree with slipper, I hate waiting for an addon that might come (or never show up at all), so I have developed a workflow that has already worked back at the newTFM times for me;
all one needs is a tool called WinMerge, a backup folder, sound knowledge about the basic how-to of modding and patience;
so I have started to add certain planes and planepacks, name them all starting with 00_AIR_.... and place the respective entries into the ini files;
the good thing is, should Simon decide to add those planes in sfs format all along, I should just need to remove the 00_AIR_..folders from the WAW folder as the ini entries will be there already; if those planes do not get added at all, I still have them at the cost of marginally longer loading times;
I have already dropped in the plane.ru and weapons.ru files from my 4.12 TFM install as they are way more comprehensive than the ones in WAW currently;
now you might say "what if the air.ini gets changed with stuff you do not have in the modded WAW?" easy easy little Padawan-that´s where my workflow and WinMerge gets onto the stage;
just take the air.ini from the last addon pack and compare it with the air.ini in the new addon pack using WinMerge; WM will clearly mark out the differences and you can copy and paste from WM into your air.ini (of course only the stuff that is new and not already contained in your actual maybe even modded air.ini)
same is true for plane.ru and weapons.ru; it is really as simple as that;
using that method I found the reason for the 60% crash in WAW within 2 minutes..... (the Mustang entries if one remembers...)
so you see, modding WAW is not different than modding any other version and if think about it a little and work dilligently and patiently, it will cause no troubles at all;
of course before I add anything, I make a copy of the whole STD folder and store it somewhere in a safe place to be able to roll back easily;
this is even more important if you decide to add....
3) ships: the same as said about adding planes applies here, but you need to work with more ini files and may run into troubles with certain ship packs and their class files; I had troubles adding the CVL pack and the RM Caio Duilio, but got sorted both, the first cost me some nerves, the second one only a tired smile..
for the CVL pack I just used the class files from 4.12 TFM and for the Caio Duilio I have left them out completely as the necessary ones seem to be in CUP already;
other than that, the messing around with the ini files will be the same as when adding planes;
so if Simon decides to add more content ship wise, I will have to compare more ini files before dropping stuff in, but thats about it... again, quite easy;
4) objects: I have not added any of those yet with the exception of the stuff necessary to avoid the 70% crash after WAW pack #7;
but workflow should be comparable to adding ships and aircraft
5) maps: Darwin does not work and from reports above it seems La Chute will not work either; I have tried to add Darwin manually but no noy, so I think we will have to wait for Simon to adress this one;
other than that, i have only added the WHC repaint of Hawaii; quite easily done as well; just need to remember that the all.ini has changed too to avoid future headaches
6) my suggestions: first of all, I would readjust the time frame for the modules, although I admit this might also need a major reshuffeling of the content and might not be plausible at all therefor;
my suggestion: DOW 1914-1925, TUP (the uneasy peace-just my suggestion) 1925-1939, WAW 1939-1953, JTW 1953 to now;
I do not like the idea to end WAW at 1946 as Korea for example involved a lot of planes from WW2 and also a lot of weapon systems that were used in the world war;
the only additions (sim wise) were the early jets and those carried the same armament as their prop cousins from earlier times had used already;
also with ships, most of the USN warships came from WW2 so it would be great to have them available for mission building too;
same for a Taiwan scenario - loads of prop jobs and a few of the early jets up to Sabres with the first Sidewinders...
the inter war period, represented by SCW for 4.10 users could be expanded into a complete inter war set, as there is quite a few interesting scenarios that could be developed by mission and campaign creators (Peter aka Poltava is quite famous for his great campaigns using not often trodded lanes)
so to come to a conclusion, it might be a good idea to maybe not only unify the map content for all modules, but also the ships and objects so that only the plane sets may vary, because they are the most easily moddable content; I do not shy away from adding ships to other modules, but it takes quite more time and I can tell you I have spent the better part of 3 days now already to get WAW into the form I want it to have for my purposes; I certainly will not spend that amount of time again for adjusting JTW (well, maybe not now) as to be honest, if I want to fly modern or Vietnam era jets, I go the DCS FC3 or SF2 way as IMHO both are much more tailored for the 1960s onward jet stuff than Il-2 will ever be; in no way to I want to degrade the effort, the great guys who created all the modern content for IL2 have put into their work, i simply just feel that Il-2 is and will be a WW2 (plus/minus 10 years) flight sim; there are quite a few important WW2 planes that are still missing and it would be great to get them into the sim... but as said, just my two cents and my respect goes to the great guys who create all that marvellous stuff we now are able to discuss about;
cheers
phil
Author
Topic: Community Universal Patch C.U.P. (Read 515406 times)
