Zomba

Calm down girls.

No doubt someone is kissing the gunner's daughter over there.

Doesn't really make any difference to me in fps whether I run it or not. No stutters or anything.

High speed jinking in the weeds is where that would shine like a glossy turd.

Track files that actually record accurately would be rather fitting.

As a photographer and one of those despised photoshoppers I can suggest that it is not advisable to use apparent shadow angles as a reliable indicator to whether or not an image is a comp job or not. Different surfaces may be at different angles than they appear and can strike shadows that don't seem right and may lead you to draw incorrect conclusions. If they are out by miles which some very sharp and others diffuse, then maybe then, but generally don't bet the house just on shadows. A famous case of this is some of the Apollo moon landing photos having odd shadows leading some over enthusiastic conspiracy theorists to believe they where being lite by poorly set up stage lights in a studio. Where in fact it was case of rising and falling ground that wasn't apparent in the photo causing the shadows to diverge and/or converge.

Yeah, it's called WarFX Particle. The dev for it totally reworked it from the ground up for Arma:OA and even though it is quite extensive on the visuals it has surprisingly little extra load on the CPU/GPU. I never get the quick stutters if I quickly look away and then back towards the effect. Even when it is going hammer and tongs with dust billowing up from a Chinook and mortars landing around us.

Damn, Hellfire, just damn.

First of all use notepad++ when editing LUA. There is less likely to be bugs introduced. The failure to save is just Windows thinking it knows better than you. I'm guessing you are using Windows7 or Vista? Either turn off UAC or just save the LUA to desktop and then drag it from there into the folder. A good rule of thumb is never overwrite original content made by ED; make new stuff so if you make a big mistake then it won't break anything. As always, backup your A-10.zip and the liveries folder before editing. Have fun with it. :)

Just to clarify a little, when making your rivet texture it may pay to do this in a seperate project and then just import the resulting flattened white rivet skins into your main project when it is ready. I typically do everything in the same project using various masking techniques, but it takes a bit of time to learn how to do this and is somewhat outside the scope of trying to bang together a few skins for fun.:thumbup:

There are a number of ways to get the underlying skin texture to show through. Which one you use depends on the sort of decal you are using and where it is going. A simple way to get things pointing in the right direction is to simply set the blending mode of the decal to 'Multiply' and reduce opacity to about 80% or so. This will let things through from underneath, but it also can end up changing the colours of the decal depending on what it is. I took 5 minutes to throw together a quick guide. With the rivet layer what you basically are doing is replacing most of the grey paint with white. When using Multiply blending it ignores white and thus lets the underlying texture to show through. Sorry it is rushed, I have a heap of work to plow through and couldn't spend much time on it.

Also, if you want to have the dds unwrapper integrated with photoshop then try out http://developer.nvidia.com/object/photoshop_dds_plugins.html It only works for Photoshop 32bit. With this plugin PS just treats dds as any other file type. My suggestion is to find the clean unmarked textures in the bazaar/world/textures/a-10.zip (Can't remember what name ED uses for them and don't have the time to look) and save them as a tiff master template. Use Tiff over PSD as it is unversal and less prone to bug out. The unmarked textures in a-10.zip are of an old and dirty aircraft. I took the textures from one of the squadron skins and removed all the markings and use that instead. When you want to make a texture pack all you need to do is open up your templates and edit away. Save them as a new project as tiffs until you are finished. At this point just save the finished product as DDS using DXT 1 with 1 bit alpha and 'Generate mipmaps' selected. Keep your new project TIFFs, even though they are quite large in size. I always find mistakes in textures when loading up the new skins in DCS and it is much easier to go back into the original TIFF and fix it than to pull apart your DDS file as it is not multilayer like a TIFF and therefore much more difficult to fix in many cases.

The textures can be a bit of a pain to edit as some of the textures for the parts are scattered around a bit and can be hard to track down. Getting the texture to line up on the intake side of the engines require slicing the added maps so that they would line back up when rendered in game. Here's a vid of another. If you have pulled apart the dds files and had a look you will notice that the Kangaroo on the side in the vid goes across two texture maps. Fun and games lining that up.

Turning out to be quite the badass update.

A friend of mine that is a pilot with the RAF once said that he was more afraid of the Crewchief than he ever was of the enemy.

Looking at the beta5 work list there has been a massive amount of work done. Beta4 runs like a fly on crack on my current system, would be cool to see what the difference is.

Never underestimate the abilities or prowess of a fly on crack.

Siefex, yeah mixing different spec RAM is a bit of a no no. Sometimes it works out and all is good with the world, but often it can be a fierce beast and turn on you when you are not looking.

Oddly enough I began as a solo not wanting to hinder others in MP, but when I got asked to join in MP I found everyone to be very patient and helpful to a new pilot trying to get to grips with things. My learning curve went up dramatically due to their tuition. Everyone does what they can to spread the knowledge around and to help newer players increase their skill. And of course you pass it on in kind. I find the general attitudes of players to be very positive, which is almost polar opposite to popular FPS MP, where you would quite often be ridiculed for being a noob.

I hear you there. I don't visit public servers, but instead just have a group of friends in a squadron where we populate a TS channel we have. You jump on any time and some may be there just gas bagging. Someone throws up a server and we all join in for an excellent mission. I suggest you do the same, it's lots of fun and you don't have to put up with lone wolves or no comms. Team work with a wingman is a lot of fun.

Well, ED only have so many resources. They achieve a hell of a lot, but only so much can be done at any one time.

Good point nomdeplume. It's just nowadays there tends to be more gravity in online experience. Flying a throw together mission with a few friends in a squadron is lots of fun. Those SA-11s and 10s are diabolical.

Honestly, how many people would be cut off from the net, see an ad for A-10c WH in a local mag, get some friend to DL it for them and have them burn it and send it to them so they can install and play? :dunno: It makes for good comedy. :)

How many of those total purchases go the usual game route and get played for a few months then left behind? It doesn't really have much impact what the online habits of those people are as they are short term players. Perhaps the drop out rate could be improved if MP was more community based from within the sim to pick up these people? No doubt ED is pushing forward on those sorts of things. I'm more interested in the long term player base (Quite a small ratio?) and the ratio of those that are online for MP for any amount. My feeling is that it is quite high. Besides this, how on earth are you supposed to even know about this public beta, let alone aquire this sim, without being online? The forum link is front centre of the ED website.