TonyE

Any plane using an Intercept or Escort loadout is given an air to air gun, 3nm range, 4 bursts. The notable exception is the A-10 where Brad uses a series of missiles to simulate the big bad gun. The Air to Air gun engagements will happen automatically if your plane is close enough to the enemy long enough and in the right position. So most gun Air to Air engagements must be micro-managed rather than hoping for the game to take care of them for you.

Tony forgot one other small tidbit, radar detections are only run once every 30 seconds

I'll add a little fuel to the fire by agreeing that the RCS numbers aren't perfect, but it is our duty to nudge Brad as we see fit and argue for changes to better reflect what we think is reality. Two factors came together to really help enemy planes sneak up on the player. 1. Loiter turn rate was vastly decreased by us quite a while back, before the new radar model if memory serves (it should be in the release notes somewhere). HC does model a 60 degree radar arc for non-360 flagged planes. So that F-14 that used to be doing impossibly tight circles giving great radar coverage is now doing somewhat lazier circles, leaving gaps in coverage. 2. The new radar model allows so much more stealthy platforms and many gradations of stealthiness next to what we had that getting used to it takes some play time. Brad is quite open to informed disconsent about RCS numbers and other database values, give him some good test cases and reasoning to change a value and often he will, not always, but often Take care all, and keep up the game chatter!

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agreed with Brad, but I don't have the H4 experience to back up the opinion with precedent setting cases.

One more comment on this (at present anyway). Turn off Animations (Settings menu, Game Options) if you play with a modified commondb.rsr file (i.e. edited images). The image editing procedure listed in this thread happens to work but by doing this we are leaving the commondb.rsr file without some information that the game expects in order to show the animations correctly. Thankfully if the animations are turned off, we get what we want.

Brad, I was thinking about the request as well. The request is very open-ended and a solution will be mired in controversy unless this becomes an ongoing project. One must define not only the year or date more specifically, but also the world situation when the base scenario happens in order to get somewhat realistic base sets of platforms in the scenario. Was the carrier visiting down in Florida or up in the 'colonies' when the scenario starts? How about the escorts? Anyway, personally I would be more than happy to have a prototypical set of surface groups from each generic timeframe to work from. My need for the right revision of the A-6 electronics for the particular date of the scenario isn't very important to me, but an F/A-18 load vs an A-6 load is important to me. More ideas? Tony Eischens

Great article Brad. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Interesting sites you frequent .

Not sure where you got the idea that 255 was the old limit, not that is matters. Moral of the story being that people were smart enough that if they were going to increase from 255, they sure would not have stopped at 4096. The original limit was 4096 aka 4095, halved to 2048 as a shortcut to get the editable database going for EC2003+WestPac. In those battlesets there is an internal ID and a disk ID for each item, hence 4096/2. Anyway, if you would be kind enough to start another thread with a quick recap of your crazy idea of swapping csv files I think a public discussion would be best at this point.

Hi Greg, The csv files are a handy place to make custom filters and such and they allow anyone to write a database editor, just provide the correct data in the csv files. However, the limitation on quantity of items in each annex is driven by the game, not the pfBuild2002.mdb database editor. So editing the csv files directly won't alleviate the limits at all but I imagine you could do some interesting filtering (i.e. filter records to create a database per scenario or something). I see potential but making such a beast effective in the way of increasing loadouts see in the PE (platform editor) would be quite a bit of work, but doable.

I've been wrangling some code and am wondering what you all think...

I wonder what the range on such a beast will be, and accuracy at various ranges. I'm guessing the range is still very short as compared to active sonar even. Someone prove me wrong, then we can worry about modelling it!

Hi Larry, The game isn't getting mixed up and using the backed up commondb in commondb.bak. This is still the problem we were dealing with long ago and is not related to the game or database. It is related to the battleset path registry entry or registry corruption on your machine. I'm sending you an e-mail with a utility to reset the battlesetpath. 1. Extract and then run the utility (which is a simple installer) 2. Double and triple check that the new commondb.res is in the same directory as where you installed 2005.b06. 3. Using explorer, browse to the location where you installed 2005.b06 and run the GE from there (Winharp32.exe). Report back to me via e-mail or the forum, or HULL . Once it is working you can post the procedure that worked for you publicly.

Pete, The message log contents is saved to the file MessageLog.txt in your HC directory.

Nice run-thru Jan! Also note that the game likes 16-color images best, but will tolerate 256-color unless they get too big. Any image editor with the features you need (cropping, resize, color depth change) will work. And last but not least, you may want to obtain the permission of copyright holder of the images you are using.

The PE guide helps me too. Remembering what everything does is difficult so the guide is a nice quick reference. Thanks Sincerely, Tony Eischens HC Programmer CIC Lead Programmer

Is this version available yet? The 'no evasion' version is not yet available outside of the beta testing group at AGSI. Maybe possibly this weekend but I've said that many times before

Me too boys, haven't had time to figure it out yet. Let us know if you find the magic fix.

Radar PD is used with the die roll (random number 1 to 100) to determine if a detection is made assuming all other prerequisites are met (i.e. radar model says a detection is possible) So you should see general patterns but different results on each test with a given PD (PD should be between 1 and 100 of course, a PD > 100 doesn't make sense, nor does 0 for that matter) Tony Eischens HC Programmer CIC Lead Programmer