Ebs

Falke, glad you got it working! Any chance you could send me your mission so I could take a look at what's breaking the ILS in there?

I just started the Mission Editor, added an A10c at Anapa as Player. That was it! I didn't save it. What exactly is the problem? Can you talk me through the steps you're taking? :)

I have it from an inside source that the new patch will be released on _________ at _________ . Seriously, ask my mum if you don't believe me.

Thanks very much for the kind words guys. Rhino that site is bookmarked now, thanks very much! Headspace, that means a lot coming from you. Thanks! I just recorded a track of me landing at Anapa runway 4 with Tacan and ILS for another user, but I'll post it here too as it serves as kind of a tutorial for using the mod. Hope it helps someone :) Anapa-ILS.zip

Falke, I just recorded a quick track of me doing an ILS approach at Anapa starting on Base Leg. Check it out and see if you're missing something. AnapaILS.trk

Cheers Falke, Do you mean a specific ILS station or just in general? I made sure all the ILS beacons were working before release, but it's quite possible I missed one or two! :)

Yes! Nice one tempest!...btw you know SHIFT+P shows the pilot in BS2 right? Any chance of a recolor for the default camo? I was thinking about doing this recently, but yours is ace. :)

Alright I added a tutorial for adding TCN/ILS here - http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=101088 I also released the work I've done so far as a 'mod' over at http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?p=1667492 (paulrkiii, you'll be pleased to know that reading that tutorial thread requires the least amount of effort possible)

This TINY mod adds TACAN and ILS stations to more airfields in DCS world. Extract the zip to your DCS World folder (make a backup first) or use JSGME to install. NEW TACAN STATIONS... Airbase, Code, Channel, Callsign. Anapa (URKA) 28X "IAN" Gelendzhik (URKG) 33X "GNV" Krasnoda P (URKK) 47X "KRD" Min Vody (URMM) 30X "MNW" ILS added to... Anapa Runway 05 109.1 Krasnoda P Runway 05 110.7 I've tried to use real world information wherever possible. This mod is multiplayer safe! Example of Anapa The original thread that inspired this mod is here - http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=100800 A short tutorial on adding more beacons is here - http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=101088 I would encourage anyone who's interested to add more TACAN and ILS beacons to DCS:World to complete this project! I've attached the mod to this post. it replaces one file in your install! Take care, Ebs Ebs TACAN mod.zip

This is a follow on to the discussion in http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=100800 JorgeIII and Alfredo posted real-world IFR charts for the airbases found in DCS World. The problem is, we only have 5 TACAN enabled airbases in the sim so this inspired me to take a look at the game files and see if it's possible to add more. It is!, read on to find out how. If you're going to try anything in this tutorial, download a program called NOTEPAD++, it will make your modding life much easier. The main file we need to take a look at is DCS World\Bazar\Terrain\Beacons.lua This file contains a list of Navigational beacons for the entire DCS:W map. At the top of the file we see Includes (dofiles's) for other files that we may be interested in. BeaconTypes.lua and BeaconSites.lua may come in handy later. At line 983, the airbase section starts. Let's take a look at the entry for Anapa. [batumi] = { -- UGSB Batumi (Georgia) runway = { ["13-31"] = { side = { ["13"] = { [b][color="red"]ILS:frequency(110.3, 'ILU', math.rad(3.0))[/color][/b] }, ["31"] = {} } } }, airdrome = { { type = BEACON_TYPE_AIRPORT_HOMER, callsign = "ЛУ", --ОПРС frequency = 430000.0, position = coordinates("41'36'50N 41'36'24E 126"), }, [b][color="red"]TACAN(16, 'X', 'BTM', {x = -355664.4, z = 617386.8})[/color][/b] } }, Let's start with Batumi as the listing is quite short and the airbase includes tacan and ILS. Batumi contains two 'blocks', "runway" and "airdrome" The runway at Batumi is along 130 degrees and 310 degrees, ILS is enabled on 130 degrees. If you get in range of Batumi and switch ILS to 110.30, you'll hear a morse code broadcast spelling out "ILU". with me so far? :) The TACAN entry is in the airdrome block and you can tune your TACAN to 16X to get to the airbase. This is basically all we need to know in order to add working ILS and TCN beacons to airbases that don't have them. In Beacons.lua let's find the entry for Anapa [Anapa] = { -- URKA Anapa (Russia) runway = { ["04-22"] = { side = { ["04"] = { { type = BEACON_TYPE_ILS_FAR_HOMER, callsign = "АН", frequency = 443000.0, }, { type = BEACON_TYPE_ILS_NEAR_HOMER, callsign = "Н", frequency = 215000.0, }, }, ["22"] = { { type = BEACON_TYPE_ILS_FAR_HOMER, callsign = "АП", frequency = 443000.0, }, { type = BEACON_TYPE_ILS_NEAR_HOMER, callsign = "П", frequency = 215000.0, } } } } }, airdrome = {} Don't freak out! This looks a lot more complicated than it is. Within the Anapa entry we again have two 'blocks'. "runway" and "airdrome" The runway block deals with ILS and the Airdrome block deals with TACAN. Anapa has ILS marker beacons located along the approach to the runway. When ILS is enabled you'll hear a beep when passing over these beacons (just like in real life) However, there's no code for ILS at the moment so let's change that. We can take a look at the realworld aviation chart for Anapa and use the information from there to add our ILS. (http://aviadocs.net/aip/html/eng.htm) from that website table we see that the ILS for runway 04 is operating on 109.10 with a callsign ID of "IAN" so our ILS line needs to be ILS:frequency(109.1, 'IAN', math.rad(3.0)) and we'll put this in the entry for Anapa in runway 04 ["04"] = { { type = BEACON_TYPE_ILS_FAR_HOMER, callsign = "АН", frequency = 443000.0, }, { type = BEACON_TYPE_ILS_NEAR_HOMER, callsign = "Н", frequency = 215000.0, }, [b][color="Red"]ILS:frequency(109.1, 'IAN', math.rad(3.0))[/color][/b] }, Fly to Anapa and you'll see that you can make an ILS approach on runway 04 with marker beacons and everything. The morse code spells out "IAN" too. Nice! If you look at your Divert page in the A10c CDU you'll also see this frequency for Anapa in the info. (the chart also specifies ILS for the opposite end of the runway "220", however it only seems to be possible to add ILS approaches for one direction of the runway in DCS:World(as of now!)) While we're at Anapa, we may as well add a TACAN station right? right. The TACAN beacon is added to the Airdrome block. Right now, Anapa's airdrome block is empty so we'll need to rewrite it (using information from other tacan enabled bases) This is where things get a little less realistic. TACAN is like a military version of a civilian VOR beacon coupled with a DME. Military aircraft can't communicate with civilian VOR's but we can get around that with DCS World. In real life Anapa uses LOM and LMM markers (no VOR's) but it does have a DME...for me, that's close enough! :D so, let's add a VOR to Anapa, and assign that to a TACAN channel. BeaconTypes.lua contains a list of available beacons to add to DCS World and here's the list of Airdrome beacons... BEACON_TYPE_NULL BEACON_TYPE_VOR - this has a model in game. BEACON_TYPE_DME BEACON_TYPE_VOR_DME BEACON_TYPE_TACAN - this has a model in game. BEACON_TYPE_VORTAC BEACON_TYPE_RSBN - this has a model in game. BEACON_TYPE_BROADCAST_STATION - this has a model in game. As we're adding a TACAN beacon, we should probably use BEACON_TYPE_TACAN, but the VOR model is larger and has a red light on it...so let's use that. (there doesn't appear to be any difference in the type of Beacon that you add, they all operate the same way. We can glean some info from the previous Anapa table to make this more realistic, in particular the information for the DME. using this info we have a Airdrome block that looks like this... airdrome = {[color="Red"][b] { type = BEACON_TYPE_VOR, callsign = "IAN", --ОПРС frequency = 112700000, --realworld frequency position = coordinates("44'59'42N 37'20'26E 1"), --ingame position }, TACAN(28, 'X', 'IAN') [/b][/color]} Load up the game and you now have TCN and ILS at Anapa. The position coordinates are the physical coordinates ingame for the model to show up. This has no effect on how the beacon operates. Tacan will always point to the Centre of the airbase no matter where the beacon is located. Also this line doesn't match up with real world coordinates. Although it's not too far off. What I did was use the ingame free camera to locate a spot on the ground that matches with the reallife beacon position, note down the lat/long and insert that here. hence 'in game position' I hope this information has been helpful. I love the flexibility of using lua files to mod the sim. There's tons more stuff to figure out just with the beacons alone but hopefully this guide is a start. Take care, Ebs.

Tempest, if you mean the ones I made I just uploaded them to Ricardos thread. http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=1667125&postcount=84 :)

This is amazing! Thanks Ricardo. If anyone's interested in the external views textures I posted earlier I've just uploaded them as a zip to mediafire. Simply unzip into your DCS World folder or use JSGME. The mod contains replacements for most of the liveries but not all. Abkhazia armee de terre 1 armee de terre 2 armee de terre desert France Armee de Terre 1 France Armee de Terre Desert France Armee de Terre 2 Israel IAF camo 1 Netherlands RNAF wooded Russia Standard Army (Worn) Russia Worn Black Russian Standard Army Turkey Fictional DOWNLOAD EXTERNAL BLUE COCKPIT TEXTURES HERE

You're right! I can't believe I missed that, thanks. Haha! Thanks for the kind works, I believe there's a 'damaged vor' model in the files but I haven't tried it out yet. As for the install, it's a simple file replacement. easy! Here's what I've done. Added TACAN to... Airbase, Code, Channel, Callsign. Anapa (URKA) 28X "IAN" Gelendzhik (URKG) 33X "GNV" Krasnoda P (URKK) 47X "KRD" Min Vody (URMM) 30X "MNW" ILS added to... Anapa Runway 05 109.1 Krasnoda P Runway 05 110.7 A couple of airbases have ILS for the same runway (and sometimes different runways) unfortunately, they're bugged and don't work in game. I don't know whether to just release what I've done so far and post a short tutorial so other people can add Tacan to the other airbases. Or wait and finish the lot. Any thoughts?

BTW, while I'm here I have a question. I used TACAN channel 48X based on the following table from aviadocs So I'm not even sure it's right. I just saw what appears to be a tacan channel and went with it. That's all :) So any additional information would be greatly appreciated.

So here's an update. ILS and TACAN is indeed possible for every airport/airfield. However, there are limitations.... Each airfield only has 1 active runway. In the case of Sochi-Adler this is 06/24 the additional runway 02/20 cannot be added for ILS (I tried a lot of things) These are some of the available beacons that can be added to the airfields.. VOR DME VOR_DME TACAN VORTAC RSBN BROADCAST_STATION Right now, all of the beacons act the same way but there's only models for VOR, RSBN and BROADCAST_STATION...so these will show up in game. I input the real DVOR long/lat into the sim files but the actual model doesn't appear in the correct position in game. So, I slewed the freecamera round in game, noted the coordinates and used these. This way, the model shows up in the correct position relative to the airfield. Check it out... THE NEW VOR AT SOCHI-ADLER If you search Google Maps for "43.454508,39.962103" and zoom in, you'll see the real life DVOR at Sochi-Adler. The placement of the beacon has no effect on the TACAN operation with the A-10c...The needles always point to the centre of the airfield regardless of beacon coordinates. I used TCN 48X with the call sign "ISO"...a really cool touch is that the morse code broadcasts this callsign when in range. Now onto another airport.... ;)

All in good time fellas, all in good time ;) The plan is to mod every airfield with correct VORTAC and ILS and release it all as one big package for the community...I'm not holding anything back right now because the truth is I've made very little progress. Alfredo I already have the real world positions from your charts and other charts available on the web. what I'm looking for right now is some info on real world approach procedures. Right, back to work at Sochi-Adler for me ;)

Not quite sure what you mean there Paul. If you mean that you'd like to know how its done, then there's tons of stuff possible via modding the sim files. In the case of additional tacan beacon its "just" a case of figuring out exactly where they should go.

Hi Alfredo Thanks for that information! Helps me a lot. I'll hopefully get some more work done on Sochi later tonight. As you can see by my screenshot above, it's possible to mod the sim files to add a tacan station to an airport that doesn't have one. By default, Sochi doesn't have a tacan in the sim. As for the x y channels there's a short table in the dcs sim files and a larger lookup table in another sim that I'm thinking of using. Is there a good tutorial on ifr approach procedures somewhere on the net that someone could recommend?

Hey Guys, I sent a rather long PM to JorgeIII last night. But I only now noticed that he's 'away on a hunting trip' so I'm not sure when he'll read it. So here's the basic idea of the message I sent him... I've been wanting to get into the IFR concept of late (even bought FSX recently for this reason!) so this thread obviously piqued my interest. After seeing those charts and reading that only five airports have Tacan, I decided to look around the sim files and do some tinkering ;) After a bit of trial and error (and quite a few swear words) we now have a functioning Tacan beacon at Sochi-Adler...and it even shows up in the CDU I just chose 32X as an example. It appears possible to mod in ILS, TCN and DME beacons for every aerodrome in DCS:W but as I said, I'm an IFR newbie, so I'd appreciate a bit of help in translating the charts. Is TCN basically the military version of VOR...can I just substitute the VOR for the TCN? I'm thinking of working with Sochi first. getting both ILS beacons up and running etc before moving on to the others.

JOHNSON, sorry if I riled you up. I didn't mean to. The 'right right' thing was just a joke. I understand now that you started this thread and submitted a ticket as you couldn't figure out a key combination that isn't used by any DCS World modules. No problem! Some good suggestions from others here. I personally use a German keyboard (set to English in Windows) so there's a few extra keys on here not used by DCS. one of those is my TIR centre.

Do you fly FSX or Prepar3d? Is it possible for TIR to load a profile every time you change a plane in FSX?

as Luzifer mentioned it's all under DCS.exe. There's no seperate 'exe' for the different modules. I personally use the same TIR profile for all the planes (you only have one head right?....right??) ;) I'm sure I saw another Hotkey in the TIR software for changing profiles on the fly? try that? I personally don't think there's much of a problem here. Worst case scenario is that you have to alt-tab everytime you want to change your TIR profile.

SkateZilla, that app was already posted in the very first reply. Btw, IControl is great but definitely on the pricey side. Takes a bit of setting up. But at least there's a lite version!

Sorry dev, checked this thread last night and again in the morning and missed yours and skulls posts! Nothing is wrong in your post, I just narrowed it down to those three files. I'm also a bit frustrated with how ED chose to map the textures. One part that pissed me off constantly in my own True Blue pit was the overhead panel and how it's mapped to a part of the footwell. I see Ricardo also has this in his new pit. Ricardo, I'm assuming you're basing your new pit on the photos from englishrussia? One detail I liked about those pit pictures is that the bottom half of each wall is painted black. I tried to do this myself with my recolour...I even started adding rivets before I got bored! :)

May I?... ;) The files you need are in Bazar/World/Textures/ka-50_general.zip and it's ka-50-c_p1.bmp.dds and ka-50-c_p2.bmp.dds For the back panels of every ka-50 livery. Now the bad part is that we also need an additional file from each of the liveries that you want to change to blue. This file varies a little bit by name but a few of the liveries have the same file. e.g. \Bazar\Liveries\ka-50\Russia Worn Black\ka-50-paint1-def-03.bmp that contains the majority of the external cockpit view. (the file also contains the texture for the belly of the chopper) So, just to repeat ka-50-c_p1.bmp.dds and ka-50-c_p2.bmp.dds for back panel external view \Bazar\Liveries\ka-50\Russia Worn Black\ka-50-paint1-def-03.bmp for each livery.