Daidalos Team's Room -QUESTIONS AND REQUESTS ONLY on IL2 Authorized Addons

[Eldur]

Originally Posted by ElAurens

Insuber, the cowling guns on the D XXI are very deep in the fuselage and fire through quite long blast tubes between the cylinders. It is very hard to see the muzzle flash.

The guns are indeed there.

This came up over at UBI and one of DT pointed it out.

I've done a screenshot of that, because it's great! I'd be very happy if it would be changed to that muzzle flash behaviour in other planes with "hidden" weapons like the 109/Yak engine cannons or guns put behind the engine in a similar manner.



And yes, I've gotten the Revi finally. Obviously just refly won't produce another sight, one has to start loading all over.

And I've nearly come across another problem, which should be easy to fix. The screenshots start at grab0000.tga *every* time I fire up Il-2, resulting in overwritten screenshots. Apparently, recording quick tracks inflight does not overwrite existing files as it's clever enough to look what's there already and take the next free number. And that's exactly what I expect from the screenshot feature as well.

Originally Posted by Igo kyu

How did you do that, and did it actually show on screen? I've got a pivoting 1600 x 1200 LCD, I tried that and it didn't work. I'd be prepared to play Oblivion and my other games at 1200 x 1600 so long as I could fly at 1200 x1600 in IL*2. If I recall correctly the left of the screen was brighter, which isn't ideal, but I'd really like a higher rather than a wider view in IL*2.

I've got a CRT and it could show me such a resolution, although it was completele out of aspect and halfway off the screen. For making screenshots it was sufficient .
For your display the conf.ini should have this:

[window]
width=1200
height=1600
ColourBits=32
DepthBits=24
StencilBits=8
ChangeScreenRes=1
FullScreen=1
DrawIfNotFocused=1
EnableResize=0
EnableClose=1
SaveAspect=0
Use3Renders=0

Maybe you need to set ChangeScreenRes to 0.

The brightness issue comes from the TN panel type. It's the same issue with up/down in default alignment. A MVA/PVA panel would "fix" this, but it's quite expensive.

Originally Posted by csThor

Default skins are hardcoded and stored in an entirely different format so there is nothing to change here. The only things that make your skins folder bloat like that are custom skins.

I just came across this... will there be more new default skins in future? Some are really bad, especially the A6M skins.

Originally Posted by WWFlybert

1024 x 1024 .gif about 561kb .. not quite the reduction of .png, but consistant indexed palette with .bmp

I think it's a moot point however .. try to buy a desktop HDD less than 250GB these days !

HDD space is not really the point, as it's widely available. But they have to be loaded into RAM. The smaller they're in file size, the more fit in. By the way, is it possible for the DT to do something about memory usage? More and more systems around have bigger amounts of RAM that is not used. Some stuff could be loaded right away if there's enough free space to avoid stutters.

[Novotny]

And please get around the issue that FOV is defined by the width which basically means the wider the screen, the less you see. Wide resolutions do NOT add FOV to the left/right, but they substract FOV at the upper and lower edges.

Thank you Eldur, however I am perfectly aware of how an FOV works and cannot see how I had demonstrated a misunderstanding.

You might wish to have a look at San's fix for IL2, which illustrates the issue quite succinctly.

As for wide-screen uptake - I haven't seen a CRT in the UK for years and personally sold off my last Iiyama I think 3 years ago.

I don't care for a debate about this; I merely wish to ask TD if they could consider implementing wide-screen support.

[dflion]

Originally Posted by Insuber

Sorry if this has been answered before: the Fokker D.XXI should have 4 guns, as mentioned also im the 4.09 guide. The in-game Fokkers have got only 2 guns. A mistake or I'm missing something ?

Regards,
insuber

Hi Insuber,

You will find the the 4 wing gun version of the Fokker D.XXI under 'Allied aircraft' and the the 2 wing gun version under 'Axis aircraft'.

DFLion

[Lucas_From_Hell]

"unless you have alot of custom skins in"

My Paintschemes folder has 18,8GB on it

But, dude, it's worth it

Well, maybe the .PNGs could work. I don't actually care, anyway

[Mhondoz]

WWFlybert,

You are right

First, I checked the size of the whole PaintSchemes folder, and this was about 2 GB. Second, I converted all BMP files with the batch conversion tool in IrfanView. But since many of the skins has the same name (void.bmp), when dumped to the same destination folder of converted skins a lot of files were overwritten. That made the PNG folder a lot smaller than it should be, and my hope for size reduction was too optimistic, sorry about that and thanks for correcting me WWFlybert.

I have now realized that IrfanView has an option to create new sub folders in the batch conversion, and I have done the test again, so this result should be more accurate:



Not so large difference as before, but still significant I think.

A change to PNG could be carried out as part of the installation process of a new patch, like the 4.09 default skins patch. Then all default skins in BMP format could be deleted and replaced with PNG. Reducing download and installed size. Custom skins would not be touched, but over time custom skin providers could start to supply their skins as PNG.

Just a thought

[csThor]

Default skins are hardcoded and stored in an entirely different format so there is nothing to change here. The only things that make your skins folder bloat like that are custom skins.

[Mhondoz]

Ahh I see I thought the default skins were in the Skins folder too. The 1.70 GB skins are installed with a clean 4.09 though, no custom skins installed.

Thanks for the clarification csThor.

[WWFlybert]

regarding image file formats ..

one problem with .png is that it changes the palette indexes when converting, which might then cause a programming problem with the graphics engine

.gif on the other hand, retains the same 256 color palette as 256 color .bmp and retains the same transparency index

1024 x 1024 .gif about 561kb .. not quite the reduction of .png, but consistant indexed palette with .bmp

I think it's a moot point however .. try to buy a desktop HDD less than 250GB these days !

[Spinnetti]

Originally Posted by Mhondoz

WWFlybert,

You are right

First, I checked the size of the whole PaintSchemes folder, and this was about 2 GB. Second, I converted all BMP files with the batch conversion tool in IrfanView. But since many of the skins has the same name (void.bmp), when dumped to the same destination folder of converted skins a lot of files were overwritten. That made the PNG folder a lot smaller than it should be, and my hope for size reduction was too optimistic, sorry about that and thanks for correcting me WWFlybert.

I have now realized that IrfanView has an option to create new sub folders in the batch conversion, and I have done the test again, so this result should be more accurate:



Not so large difference as before, but still significant I think.

A change to PNG could be carried out as part of the installation process of a new patch, like the 4.09 default skins patch. Then all default skins in BMP format could be deleted and replaced with PNG. Reducing download and installed size. Custom skins would not be touched, but over time custom skin providers could start to supply their skins as PNG.

Just a thought

For me, a bigger improvement would be to allow shortcuts to skins. Right now, a skin may apply to many sub-variants of a plane, resulting in MANY copies of the same file. I had hoped shortcuts would work, but of course, they don't.... Sure would be nice! (I have 15.4g of skins!)

[GF_Mastiff]

don't know if this was asked but why wasn't 6DOF implemented in the 4.09m?