TonyE

When you open the Scenario Editor, please click the Battlesets button. Is it showing the location of HCCE? If it isn't, change to that location, open up a scenario. For good measure, then close the SE, go back in and see if your platform is there.

What I would do... 1. Keep the old directory until HCCE is released and you have that configuration working. 2. You already copied the db_utils folder over, great. 3. Copy pfData2002.mdb and pfBuild2002.mdb into the HCCE folder. 4. Copy start_edit.bat and end_edit.bat into the HCCE folder. 5. Run start_edit.bat to create the commondb folder and associated files. 6. Go into the PE (pfBuild2002.mdb) and do an import, this will overwrite what you see in the editor with the contents of the HCCE database from AGSI. 6a. If you are given security warnings about the database, get to the Tools menu, then Macros, then Security, set the level to low to kill security warnings (at your own peril but generally safe, malicious Access databases aren't exactly the attack of choice for nasty people). 6b. For some reason I cannot get the prompt about Access 97 format being read-only. I've seen it and it can be ignored (you can still edit the data, you just can't change the layout/design of the platform editor itself). I recently updated to Office 2003 SP2 and wonder if that message went away then. Caveats: The PE does read registry entries on occasion (the battleset path) and I'm not confident AGSI is aware of this and made the changes. Wacky and almost surely doesn't apply but the actual pfBuild2002.mdb file could be marked as read-only, right-click the file and do properties, if Read-Only is checked, uncheck it and click OK. Let us know how it works out and if you figure out the 97 format read-only message (or more specifically why it doesn't always appear).

Each year Ed Ladner has taken it upon himself to conduct voting for the Pooner of the Year and the induction of a new Lifetime Pooner into an awards section on his web site. Ed handed over his site and Pooner duties this year. Please vote at: http://www.harpoonpages.com/poonervote/pooner-Intro.php Only votes cast through the above system will be counted but kind words on this forum about your choice is a grand way to recognize the contributions of your nominees. The winners will be announced the first week in January. Voting closes within a couple hours of the new year. Spread the word, please post your own version of this message on other sites so that as many Harpooners can be reached as possible. Please contact pooner@harpoonpages.com if you have difficulties with the voting system. Sincerely, Anthony Eischens HarpoonPages.com (Dr. Who's Harpoon Pages)

Each year Ed Ladner has taken it upon himself to conduct voting for the Pooner of the Year and the induction of a new Lifetime Pooner into an awards section on his web site. Ed handed over his site and Pooner duties this year. Please vote at: http://www.harpoonpages.com/poonervote/pooner-Intro.php Only votes cast through the above system will be counted but kind words on this forum about your choice is a grand way to recognize the contributions of your nominees. The winners will be announced the first week in January. Voting closes within a couple hours of the new year. Spread the word, please post your own version of this message on other sites so that as many Harpooners can be reached as possible. Please contact pooner@harpoonpages.com if you have difficulties with the voting system. Sincerely, Anthony Eischens HarpoonPages.com (Dr. Who's Harpoon Pages)

Hmm, are you making this scenario in a EC2003 battleset and not one of the earlier ones? I can't remember but some of the early battlesets may have some restrictions.

True, they won't run quite like that anymore. Still it brings a chuckle to my mouth when I see a convoy doing 40mph over the Alps

Here

I happen to agree with Brad on this one. If I had free reign within reason to change the existing behavior, I would only allow the DP status of installations to show after thorough BDA or pre-strike recon, similar to the way you don't see weapon counts until a firm detect is made on a unit.

Let's see, I'm now running to my Mig-23 out on the flight line hoping that I can get in the air and into position to shoot down that straight-winged reconnaissance plane heading into Romania from Yugoslavia. Best I toast him before he takes any pictures! How is that for a fine story?

pretty sure this is wrong, but the Charles de Gaulle?

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.