Hi all,

In a case of extreme nostalgia, I have spent a lot of time working with F-15 Strike Eagle III and have figured out a lot of the file formats. I have so far only documented a little of what I've figured out online - see strikeeagleeye.sourceforge.net and click on the "Reference Manual" link - but more information will be coming soon.

I think I have figured out enough to make a Tornado-style mission planning system and then, while you are flying, plot your current position on a map and provide steering cues so that you can do things like avoid known SAM sites and avoid mountains instead of the game's original scheme where no mission planning is available. Whether I can actually find the time to implement all of that is another matter, so for now I'm just aiming to document everything I have figured out including the map and 3D model file formats.

I know it is a bit of a stretch, but I hope someone out there thinks that this is cool

I definitely think it's cool. In fact, last year, Recluse and I used dosbox and flew F15 SE III front seat back seat, online. Worked! We also used it to fly some Falcon 3, and saw that the graphics in SEIII were much more servieable after all these years than the muddy looking F3.

So, rock on with your bad self, doshea!

Thanks, I'm glad one person in the world is interested! Just kidding, I see lots of people have visited the site, thanks!

I have updated the page with a bunch of extra documentation, added some pictures (one screen shot of the game and one screen shot of my tool to view the 3D objects), and fixed up the formatting so that Internet Explorer users get the same effect that Firefox users were, i.e. the document should look very much like the original game manual.

PS Bought the Hornet add-on for Falcon recently and fired it up to make sure it worked and yes, the graphics weren't pretty

Thanks, doshea. Will check out the site again.

Yes - you see what I mean about the relative clarity of the graphics in F15SE III versus Falcon 3? While neither have much relationship to later sim's graphics, at least on modern machines, SEIII grpahics seem more serviceable today. Too bad, as the guts of Falcon 3 seem to work pretty well still and have the all the vaunted campaign and detail it was reknowned for back in the day.

Good work, doshea!

F15SEIII was my first flight sim on an IBM PC in 1992. All I seem to remember doing though, was blowing up the crossed swords statue thing, then returning to base.

Thanks! Now you mention it, I think that when I wasn't flying proper missions - i.e. I was wasting time, like I did a lot in lots of different games - I also liked attacking the crossed swords!

Lucky I wasn't playing in campaign mode or I might have noticed how boring the "destroyed" crossed swords looks



When "destroyed" they just seem to get pushed over:



Of course, if you are playing the game properly, you wouldn't have much time to look at the scenery when flying over downtown Baghdad

After having read your excellent 'Reference manual',I noticed that the palette system seems to be similar to EF2000/ADF/TAW in that the RGB colours are described in the range 0-63 instead of 0-255 which might be expected.

Do you know whether there was any particular reason for this, given that EF2000 came out in (I think) 1996?

According to http://www.shikadi.net/moddingwiki/VGA_Palette, this is because (standard - not "Super") VGA only supports 6 bits per colour channel and 2^6 = 64. When I wrote that bit of the manual, I thought it was strange too, but having read that web page I do remember there being only 262,144 possible colours. I'm going to add a footnote explaining this for anyone else who wonders what that is about!

Thanks for reading it
David

Thanks, that explains it nicely.

I have one problem with your manual in that it invokes a profound sense of shame in that we haven't documented the work done with the TAW data files (next forum down) in the same thorough way.

I don't think the total number of possible colors was that big of a problem since it was used with a palette system which meant the total number of colors you had at one time was fairly small. Unfortunately I don't remember what that number was off the top of my head. Whatever that number was it was reduced even futher if you were using part of it for color cycling for things like fire, afterburners and such. If you were doing time of day transitions like we did for Fleet Defender so you had nice sunsets, you lost even more colors.

I think doshea's site talks about this a bit.

Elf