Smokes

How do you make them longer? i tried tinkering around with some files in the 3do folder but caused unstability. Anyone know or could anyone have a look?

[philip.ed]

Hi BP.
I don't have the game, but if the file-structure is the same as Il-2, then this may be determined in the.eff files (which you can open in note-pad). If this is the case, there will be written lines followed by numerical values. The values may determine, for instance, opacity, the transition time of the effect, how long the effect lingers etc.
In Il-2, many of these lines were found to have been calibrated in way which didn't give optimal visual aesthetic (for instance, looking at videos, some smoke effects in CloD just disappear without dissipating. I don't know if this is a bug, or if the effects-modellor got lazy with the parameters).
I don't know if you are able to find these files or not

Yeah I found the .eff files and attempted to change a few values but it seemed to cause instability when i altered some values to see if I could change how the smoke looked.
When I say instability it seemed (could be unrelated of course) that as i increased say DistMinMax values it seemed to cause my sound to be knocked out, maybe due to particle limit?

But anyhow there seem to be 2 main smoke files that control aircraft smokes (this is a guess) these are labled as generic (Generic_0 & Generic_2) the other two are labled as Chimney and Locomotive.

File Generic_0 has twice as many options as Generic_2, 2 contains no life values or colour etc, this maybe of course that it uses the values from Generic_0.
Anyhow do you think that particle limit could knock out the sound?
I found that sounds with more than a 2-3 second track length cause sound drops and so there must be limit to sample length and sample amount, at the moment the game probably only has 2 sample sounds for all explosions, all engines use merlin prs, all twins then use twin left and right prs. There is 1 sound for every GUI type option and ingame functions such a switches and canopies open/close, levers, pumps etc basically the works, that shocked my beyond belief. I have never seen a game so sparce in content in this way before. Stock IL2 had probably double the sounds.

If i could find a way to add and define samples to the prs files I could create a full and I mean full sound set, but I wouldnt even know where to begin on that one

[philip.ed]

That's odd; I never had an issue with my sound in Il-2 when tinkering with the effects
Very strange indeed. To me, chimney and locomotive refers to the smoke used for both. However, it is possible (as you allude to) that they control the effects for more smoke types (for example, if I created a .tga file for the smoke in Il-2, I could change all smoke types to use this file). As .eff files go though, I can't see the benefit of this in game...

Very strange indeed. I wish I could play the game so I could have a look myself! Otherwise, there's not much I can say.

fair one mate, well better solve this sound issue I'm getting the feeling its to do with sample length.