The nearby clouds are big white blocks. I've tried several resolutions, all the detail levels, and different aspect ratios. I'm running WinXP with an ATI/AMD HD4870 video card with the latest drivers (10.11). I don't have this problem with YAP2. Here's a screenshot: How do I get clouds that look like clouds in Rising Sun?

I'm going to wait and see if anyone else has this same problem before offering a solution. It is the Environment.INI that controls the clouds but TGA's that control their shape. There are other settings that can cause that on an individual machine. The reason I want to wait a few hours is to see if the installer put things in the wrong place for everyone or if we are dealing with just your set up.

I need some sleep. I will check this at first light.

Hang on. We will fix it.

Thanks. Get plenty of sleep.

No takers yet. Let's try both approaches, the one I fear most first...a screwed up installer going out to everyone.

Look in your Flight folder. Tons of stuff in there. Ignore the .dll and .CAT files.
Is there an ENVIRONMENTSYSTEM.INI? Is the date 7/8/2008 5:44 PM?
How about the date of the FLIGHTENGINE.INI? 8/31/2010 1:14 AM?
Do you have the following files?
CLOUDLAYERBOTTOM2.BMP through 5
CLOUDLAYERTOP2.BMP through4
CLOUD1.tga
CLOUDinc.tga
CLOUDscat.tga (Deuces, why did you name it THAT?)
midCLOUDinc.tga

If so, you have Deuces clouds from YAP and that part is done.

If you run YAP2, you have enough computer to run Rising Sun except for this one caveat:

Pearl Harbor is the thorn in the side of flight simulators. It is an extreme graphic scene. Look at Pacific Fighters' original offering. Oleg isn't blind or stupid. He can add. There was no way to pack in all the detail with the computers of the day. TK made similar choices. But even gaming computers will hiccup at Pearl Harbor. Rising Sun is at the edge of what can be done. We know, we added detail until things started breaking down in strange ways. (Did you know you could shut the whole machine down?) So, since this is a picture of a Zero in Kaga livery, I am assuming you are flying Yoshio Shiga's mission...our first. Does this happen in the vicinity of the Japanese carriers (which are loaded with planes and men) and go away over open water? or does the mission open with square clouds as I suspect?

Open the mission.INI and change Scattered to Clear. Save. Run it again. What happens? Then try Broken. Then Overcast. (Then put it back like it was. The air was clear to scattered but hazy at dawn that day over Oahu.)

When the mission opens, there is usually a slight stall while your computer gets used to the load. (props stop, ships stop, speech keeps going on inanely) In about a half-second, you are running. At that point, in the cockpit or with the cockpit "disappeared", how is it running? Check the smoke...and the neighboring planes' idling props. Smooth? A little sticky but okay? Or a hard stutter? If it is not running well at that point, you may need to tone down your game settings for Yoshio Shiga, Kakuchi Takahashi and Juzo Mori. They all run into a fully loaded Pearl Harbor with smoke and flame and sound. When you get out of Pearl, you can crank it up. We knew that we had to do Pearl Harbor with ships and planes and terrain we would never use again. No simulated desert terrain or flat steppes...full-on video game hell. But the fight is the rest of the theater. We expect the computers to groan again at the Nakajima aircraft factory in Doolittle's Raid.

The last possibility is that those are rare Cumulo Cubus clouds found only over Diamondhead at Waikiki.

Try that and let me know on this forum so anyone else can see the process.

John:

I've got exactly the same prob - blocky white squares for clouds a la Curious142's screenshot. I'll try your ini file stuff above and see what happens.

I've got Rising Sun installed to a clean install of Strike Fighters Gold with the latest update.

I also get the blocky white squares with the Burma missions so its not just the Pearl location that's doing it. My compouter runs YAP2 with zero probs

Otherwise this is a totally awesome sim - well done!!

Bill

UPDATE: Just checked my Flight folder. This is what is there:

Environmentsystems.ini 7/8/2008 8:44 PM
Flightengine.ini 8/31/2010 4:14 AM

There are no cloud files BMP or tga

Zerocinco, the ENVIRONMENTSYSTEM.INI file and the FLIGHTENGINE.INI files have the dates in your post. There are no cloud files BMP or tga that you mention in your post. I could not find a file named mission.INI anywhere. I opened the file named 411207a_Yoshio Shiga.msn and changed the WeatherType entry there. The clouds looked reasonably normal to me when I had the WeatherType set to BROKEN and OVERCAST. Obviously there were no clouds when I had it set to CLEAR. I am not having any problem flying the mission regardless of the WeatherType setting. There is a split-second pause when there is a large explosion. Also, the big blocky BROKEN clouds are present in all locations (Burma, Wake Island), not just Oahu. So, it would seem to appear (to me anyway) that my only problem is that I don't have Deuces clouds.

Until John gets you guys straightened out, I can provide the missing cloud textures. Grab this file and dump them into your flight folder File Here

Ahhh, Sir Deuces, Thank You.

Deuces, your files seem to have done the trick. I have nice fluffy clouds now instead of big white blocks. Thanks very much for making your cloud files available here. Also, I would just like to mention that I just downloaded the RS installation file again and the missing cloud files are still missing there. Did everyone who bought and downloaded RS, except BillD and myself, somehow get the proper cloud files in their download? Are there different download links for those who bought just the download and for those of us who bought both the download and the flashdrive?

I will prepare a fix. They must have been omitted somehow.

Thanks, Deuces.

That did it Deuces - mucha gracias!!

To zerocinco and the rest of the team - thanks again for this totally awesome sim!

Bill