Nice find.

So these mods have +0 in the hex as just the first notch that you see in the sim menu. I did both cgold and resource ppfs.

On Clouds, you just put it at 2, as four in sim (3 in hex) backtracks one, anyway.

Object detail is a bit odd. Up to 4 in the hex (five in the sim), you get definite improvements. Not quite sure at 5 (six sim). 6 (seven sim) almost seems to backtrack, but I'm not certain. Framerates still decrease. 7 moded hex (eight in the sim) either gives corrupted objects or goes so slow it appears to freeze. If I'm patient enough to bump it one more to 8 (nine in the sim), framerates seem to decrease even more, though if there's any actual detail increase it's subtle again. 9 in the hex (ten in the sim), causes a crash on my machine. So for me I just have these two hexes at +8 max, unless I plan on backing out to the menu to cycle it past each time. FPS suffers so much with object detail, I mostly just keep it on the minimum. A little more does seem to help at longer ranges.

Terrain detail and terrain resolution both work fine on mine modded in the hex to 9 each (10 in the sim, with the first block black). These make the biggest visual difference. If this was running at even higher resolutions and in widscreen, these levels of detail would be modern... especially for the night missions Needs a fast machine. I'm wondering what the fastest single core CPU, motherboard, bus, and memory you could get would be. Maybe all flash based HD and Xenon core? I don't know, but the idea you could be getting 60fps on some monster computer, with even just integrated graphics chips and all this stuff maxed is appealing.

Fantastic possibilities. Too bad the stereoscopic only ever worked at low resolutions, as not only would it be in 3D, but would antialias in a way.

Amazing gameplay. So much atmosphere. Anyone with an X52 who hasn't yet tried the GlovePIE stuff, man oh man. What a difference it makes in deepening the experience.

Take off with the slider down for hover and slow creeping flight.

Go to standard mode in the middle of the slider.

If you get to a flat area, like a lake or river canyon, move the slider up top for cruise mode and twist for the coordinated turns. Switch altitude hold on at min alt and it's so well behaved.

Get to the target area and go back to slider all the way down to creep in with hover hold on.

Reverse this on the way back. A nice mission to use these techniques: the special forces airport strike.

One thing that I'd like to point out so that these 'hack' mods could be made more accessible and distributable...

Instead of each person having to hexedit their own .pff files - obviously the files are really too big to upload the hacked versions of ('Cgold.pff' is 56.5 Mb and 'Resource.pff' is 144 Mb), wouldn't it be better to find the actual file(s) within the .pff files that you actually have to mod out? Note that the .pff files are merely archive files that house all the loose game files (images, sounds, videos, etc).

So if you could pinpoint and mod the file(s) that you are actually modding in a hex editor, these would be just a matter of a few kilobytes compared to the whole 100+Mb archives. Then they could easily be distributed online.

These PFF viewers/extractors might help:

FwO Raven's pff utility v0.7
http://www.dfreload.com/forum/files.php?action=file&id=135

PFF3 Manager v1.1.0
http://www.dfreload.com/forum/files.php?action=file&id=124


Note that I have now setup a Windows 98SE virtual PC and can play CG again!


Reticuli - could you please check your PMs and get back to me?

Virtual PC won't boot from the DVD/CD drive on mine. I even turned off the networking and floppy within the Vpc settings and it still keeps saying "please boot from blah blah blah". I've got a win98 op system disk in there.

Is Vpc and win98 really going to improve framerates that much, considering Comanche is already pretty low level coded? How much a fps increase are you guys getting?

I'm not running a virtual PC to get better framerates, I'm running it so I can actually PLAY Comanche Gold. On Windows 7 you can't even start the game. If anything, there is a drop in framerate as virtual machines don't always make full use of the host computer's hardware abilities.

Also I'm not using a Win98 OS CD. I'm using a pre-archived .vhd Win98SE file that loads directly into Virtual PC and there's NO NEED for an original OEM CD. I then just load my CG .iso image file into Daemon Tools and it comes up in the virtual Win98 as a CD drive.

I will write an article shortly about this whole Virtual PC/virtual hard drive process and hopefully more will be explained then.

Well it's worked on two PCs for me so far strait into Windows XP without a hitch. I guess I just need a faster PC.

The AI in Comanche is nice. I just had a dozen helos hunting for me, then chasing me down canyons egressing from the first pair of scuds I blew up in a night desert mission. Talk about cat and mouse...

JSTAR picture kept a good track on them behind me as I stayed low and they went high above the canyon walls. Led them right into my tank and SAM column halfway to the base. Still, their search patterns as I was forced to begin my attack as they converged was pretty neat, so I made a run, greased the scuds from the opposite direction I came in from, and took out 2S6s as I went.

Using the radar altitude hold, the various dynamic glovepie modes, and flying along the gradual contours of ridges and hills makes Comanche unique. You can fly all the way up a mountain that way by spiraling up.

Hug a hill and you can even avoid being painted with your bay doors closed, gear up, and wing stubs off... at fairly close ranges. So much variation and different routes of doing things here. Deep strategy potential. I think people discount it because the switchology is lacking or the graphics system is different than they're used to. It's functional. And you do, after all, have discrete control over the bay doors, which adds another thing you have to keep track of after a launch.

With object detail on 4, you can see the enemy sufficiently at long ranges. You just have to get use to the scale of sensors and weapons being reduced. Yet it's all proportional and a highly thought-out balance. Must have taken a great deal of test playing.

So Reticuli - are you ever going to actually address my direct questions? See PM and above post.

I'm pleased that YOU like CG so much. I have always said that I feel like it is a more realistic representation of what the real Comanche would have been like compared to the one in EECH. The one in EECH is basically the Longbow flight model - and indeed the flight model in most parts of the Russian helos too. The one in EECH also seems a little too 'raw' for my liking - like being able to dump a skip-load of chaff and flare at every least-little opportunity is the total opposite of what the Comanche would have been really good at - stealth. And although the Comanche would have indeed used the Longbow fire control radar - and also a version of the TADS no doubt - the sensors would have been a lot more integrated and 'user friendly' compared to the AH-64D Longbow's systems. The workload in the Comanche in EECH is so high, that it is actually HARDER to contemplate things than in the Longbow. It shouldn't be this way.

In CG, even intense battles seem somewhat sombre, compared to other heli sims. I believe this really sums up the elegance and sophisticated-ness (lol) of the Comanche. And although the sensors and weapons have somewhat shortened ranges compared to their real-life counter-parts, like you say, everything seems really well laid out.

I don't believe that the seeming 'simplicity' of the avionics should deter hardcore sim fans, as I've also said before, the Comanche would have been fully digitized and highly automated in operation, therefore the crew would have had more time to think about the mission and strategy and not have to worry about scrolling through dozens of MFD pages.

I like you, Reticuli, I really do. There's just something about you. I love the way you just drop in a little review of CG every time you talk about something about the game internals. I also love the fact that you, like me, can appreciate this sim. You really seem to get a flavor of what the whole Comanche thing would have been about, made all the more special because there's a certain air of mystery about it. Now please just answer my bloody questions!?

Living here in the good old US of A for quite a few years, I can certainly appreciate this "bloody".
Made me laugh, thanks Flyboy.

Jaeger

Oh, it's terribly simplified and the entire battlespace is in midget form. And you can't roll the damn hello. All that p---s me off. But it's a kick arse fun time and, I agree, requires you to use strategy and intense focus to beat these hectic missions. Like using rad altitude hold at 10ft off the ground and 170 knots a bat out of hell on train tracks (safe because the tracks don't vary much in alt) to chase down the chem weapons shipment. Enemy Engage's alt hold feature works now, but you really have to baby sit it on rough terrain. No amount of switch-backing will save you, possibly because it's based on your radalt directly below. CG seems to take an average or the greater of two between below and a vector in the moment of travel. EE's is also over compensating and slow to respond. Its yaw modeling is also completely terrible. Love 'em both, but for different reasons.

Honestly, I think CG having no time acceleration or autopilot improves the experience. No laziness. Both are features I'd like to turn off in all sims, because I can't resist using them and then it hurts the gameplay.

There's also something about this voxel stuff that, while crude, forces the eye to focus and engages your attention. I find myself in textured polygon landscapes, even the near-photo resolution ones, having my eyes glaze over and get sleepy, even after the first few minutes of being wowed by them. Add very long flight times to the IP/Kill box, and Enemy Engage often leaves me bored. Voxel is organic. It might be crude and unrefined looking on the surface, but with a reduced-size battlespace and the weapons/sensors scaled as well, yeah it works. It's also fantastic in forcing your eyes to strain to pick out targets amongst trees and clutter. Aside from targets just disappearing, polygon sims have a difficult time with camo. Voxel is like simming in Lego Land, but the legos are super small.

Object Detail at 4 definitely improves your ability to target ID at distance. I think the next notch or two improves fine details on tanks and such. After that it just seems to add voxels without actually making things more detailed. Remember, though, clouds beyond 3 reverts to 2, so for all I know beyond 5 or 6 on object detail that might be happening.

****

I'm not sure if I still have Apache Air Assault on my computer. It might be on the other hard drive after the motherboard fried. Many of my sims (heavily modded stuff) are for the other OS install and aren't accessible right now. Some of my other sims will run, but don't like my new graphics card. The only Janes title that works, for instance, is WWIIF. From what I remember, Apache Air Assault was very arcade, frustrating, unpredictable, and unrewarding. I agree it does run pretty fast, though. I don't think I got past the first segment of the first mission.

You're perfectly free to do an article on this subject of modding Comanche Gold on your helo sim website. Heck, most of the stuff at the top is taken from that other web page.

Don't ask me anything about extraction or beyond the most rudimentary hex editing or GlovePie scripts. No, you can ask, but if you want some details I'll have to start making stuff up :-P I really don't know anything about how the PFFs work and have no motivation at the moment to find out. Sorry.

Did you ask something else I couldn't track down the PM or email for? Chime back in if you need to.

Did you ever get Blackshark? Are you continuing your own flight sim coding?

jaegermeister - glad you liked my use of the English language!


Reticuli - No, I asked if YOU would do an article, not ME!

The PFF thing is a breeze: add, edit, delete. That's all there is to it really.

No I never got DCS:BS, never had the desire to. And in order to continue my own flight sim coding, I'd have to have started at some point. I don't know if you're confusing me with someone else, but I have never done any 'coding' for anything, let alone a flight sim. It's the websites that are keeping me busy, and I thought Combat-helo was going to but that fell through for me.

Did you ever post instructions for this whole GlovePIE/PPJoy thing for use with CG? I just did a search but nothing came up (it may have been before the forums got revamped and may now be lost or the link lost). I wouldn't mind putting instructions for that on my site.

I think you've answered for yourself now. Don't leave it so long next time you see the PM icon flashing, huh?

Oh and one more thing, do something about your AVSIM Library sig link would you? It just takes you to a login page and it's no good for anyone who's not a member!

Become a member. It's free! The instructions for CG's GlovePIE stuff should be in the zip. I can't email you the entire zip due to bandwidth issues in the boondock out here (out of Vegas), but I could do a portion of it that is CG related if you want. I might have only already posted some of the early Enemy Engaged PIE stuff in that forum. The Blackshark ones have their own thread on their dedicated site. CG doesn't have its own forum, so maybe I just didn't think anyone was that interested.

The most user-friendly GlovePIE for CG is called something like "Comanche FBW nonlinear". With the X-52, you put the slider at the bottom for wings leveling and clears the other modes. Slider in the middle for a crude attitude & rate command / attitude hold. Slider at the top gives you a crude rendition of the Comanche's cruising mode (a real life flight law mode that came out of ADOCS and some of the other army lab flight research human factors research) where L/R on the SAC did side-slipping and the twist controlled coordinated turns. Pitch attitude hold is still on. That works nicely with radalt hold. It's just missing a Speed Command Mode in the pitch SAC axis, but we'll forgive that.