Greetings from South Africa
Thank you for letting me join.
I come from an era where you had to feed computers punch-cards and then go for lunch while it solved a simple math problem.
Purchased a German copy of CFS1 which I found in a bargain bin while I was over there for work. That was it . . . I was hooked . . .
got all of them in succession. CFS1, CFS2, CFS3, FS2000, FS2002, FS2004, FSX ( I'm too poor to own a computer capable of running the latest Flightsim )
Spent some time many years ago on CFS2. Got Gmax , built a plane etc , then ended up Fiddling around with FSX, since it was easier to mod and
tools and information was more readily available. Got busy with work and family and only recently decided to dust off the old CFS2 disks (somehow it stayed my favourite )
After playing for a while, I thought I would embark on a mission : Make the AI planes flyable, re-write all the stock missions with bomber escorts so that I can play them as a bomber pilot
and build a CFS2 Bomber Pilot campaign.
That is more or less where that idea ground to a halt.
Bomber missions must have been all about navigation ( How would you find your target if you could not navigate ? ) , there must also have been some missions where pilots had to manage
their fuel very precisely, otherwise they wouldn't make it home. My missions would have none of this warping bull , you would have to fly them every mile and land your plane to be successful.
So , the initial to-do list was :
1. Get AI planes flying
2. Go through the entire Campaign and find all bomber escort missions
3. Re-write those missions from a bomber perspective
4. Build a Bomber campaign from those missions.
I got as far as point.1
After that I decided that we will need ADF in the cockpit and on the airfields for navigation. So I installed Visual Studio and started to figure out how to do C-gauge programming. Built a nice set of gauges
Autopilot, ADF radio & Compass , a few fuel selectors, a Fuel gauge, a Re-fuel/Dump gauge, a 4-engine Thrust Control for the B-24 since I could not find a proper one anywhere , some ordinance
handling stuff for selecting and dropping rockets, bombs, torpedoes etc. . Then decided that proper Bomb scopes would be nice, so embarked on a venture to write a bomb scope that works on first
principals , calculating the drop point with Newton's laws of motion. Got it working pretty well for level bombing from 5000ft and up, still struggling with the one for dive bombers ( the Fish-eye effect
of the SIM view is something I can't get a handle on , so shelfed that for the time being)
Then I thought that I would need a tool to place NDB's all over the place . . . .long story short , I am now in the process of writing an Airfield Creating tool ( Something in the lines of Martin Wright's MkAFD , but
with a graphic interface, and creating runways from scratch instead of placing stock runways. It connects to the Sim through FSUIPC , and places runways, NDB's, Infrastructure and creates the Facilities data
and futures a comprehensive airbases.dat editing function. Almost done with it, just have to figure out the Structure of the GSL file , cause I want the option of making the placed infrastructure part of the Global Scenery.
With this I can literally have a 3-runway airfield with a background clearing and infrastructure and NDB , updated facilities data and airbases.dat files inside the game in under 5 min.
As you can see, I get sidetracked easily, and end up fiddling more with mods than actually flying.
I will be hanging out in the CFS2 section, and will be asking for advice and info from the veterans around here.
Cheers
RingTingTing