I recently decided to reinstall LB2 again, and found myself wanting to play the azer2000 campaign. Thankfully I am using my old Vista laptop that mostly works with LB2 aside from an occasional debrief crash. Been troubleshooting it, but it only happens once in a while seemingly after I bring back to life KIA pilots with the pilot editor. But it could also be from my joystick, or even dgVoodoo settings.

Anyway, that is not why I am posting.

I came across this old post:
http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3139343/3.html

...and saw the pics with the cockpit canopy damage. Flyboy mentioned it being a secret INI setting somewhere, but I couldn't find it. Does anyone know where this setting is?

Thanks for your help!
~Victor1-9er

I was of course refering to the mug shot below, but perhaps it was a photoshop job. In any event, I just found it interesting and searched my INI files for the setting but had no such luck finding it. It could be because I installed from ISOs I made from my 4 original Longbow Anthology CDs. From the anthology LB2 is 2.09F right out of the box. Funny to think that I loved this sim so much, that at one time I owned all 3 original releases: AH-64D Longbow, Longbow 2 and eventually Longbow Anthology (which included Longbow Gold 3DFX).




This is still my fav flight sim of all time.
Thank you, to all who made it possible to still play this mighty game once in a while!

~Victor1_9er

If you take shots like that youre a deadman anyway. LOL I actually own those too...

Yeah SilkMan, you are right! lol. As I said just more a curiosity then anything. As in, can LB2 really do that? But let me tell you, I had some fun tonight...

...heard the call 'Enemy fighters are detected in your area', so I ducked down behind a hill and waited for the Mig to fly over. Was hoping I could get a lock tone on him right after he passes over but before I know it, two Havocs come rolling around the side of the hill and light my wingman up with missles, before I can swing around and with TADS and go to guns, they riddled my cockpit with bullets. MFD's start blanking out, APU is on fire, and over the chaos of it all, I hear my CPG yell: "GET US OUTA HERE!"

Hahaha...You gotta love LB2 sometimes. I haven't touched this game in over a year and for some reason I decided I want to reinstall and play around. I got bored playing instant action and like a challenge so I thought I would try and see if I could stop the sporadic debrief crash on my system. It seems I have the problem minimzed for the time being. So I got even more ambitious and figured I'd try and conquer the Azer2000 campaign. That is if I don't get frustrated with the occasional debrief CTD and random control freeze up. So far it is going alright.

I'll let you know how it goes. Damn shame this message board has gotten so quiet. Kind of sad actually. :-(

~Victor1_9er

LOL. You've been had, mate!

LOL, thanks Flyboy. That's what I thought!

And just so you know, on this single-core 32-bit Vista Home Edition laptop, I'm going through the Azer2000 Campaign just fine so far. 8 missions and I've only had 1 debrief crash. On my system I discovered that the pilot editor program was not correctly bringing KIA pilots back from the dead. Evidently there are two values that must be changed in the .dat file, mainly: 'Condition=2' for KIA must be changed to 'Condtition=4' and also the 'Replace' flag must be set to false. Dead squad pilots get a 'Replace=1' and it should be 'Replace=0' but I noticed the pilot editor progie wasn't correctly changing this flag all the time and consequently on my previous test campaign I was getting a ton of debrief CTD. Now I just use notepad to manually restore KIA pilots, and all seems stable so far.

I know you are not playing anymore, but I thought I would add my experience to the collective knowledge base here for whatever it is worth.

~Victor1_9er

Victor1_9er, let me start again, this time by welcoming you to the forums! I normally start with a welcome to any new names that appear here but I thought it would be fitting with the context of your post to just come in and let you know you had been fooled! After all, my initial reference to the 'secret' INI settings that you refered to was indeed a shameful plot to trip up unsuspecting newcomers!

That's an interesting 'bug' that you found with the pilot editor program, I have only ever used it once or twice for test purposes so I don't have much knowledge of that program or any mishaps it may bring. Thanks for your contribution and for adding in the details.

No, I don't play LB2 now but that doesn't mean I don't keep coming back here to comment and help out. And of course any contribution is always welcome regardless of if I'm playing, or around the forums, or not.

Sorry for fooling you with the 'secret' INI settings and shot-up cockpit glass! (chalks another 'kill' on ownage list)

Thanks for the warm welcome. I joined about 2 years ago when I found my old mothballed Longbow Anthology CDs and manual. After some google searches discovered this forum as well as your site and Positive G's site. I was hooked all over again. I was so psyched I could play this sim again. But I had yaw and stall problems, debrief crashes and flight3.dle crashes (the latter from incorrectly installing the 2.09e patch over the Anthology which doesn't need it).

So in 2010, like any good Longbow sim pilot, I bought a new Saitek controller, which fixed my yaw problems, used turbo to fix my blade stall problems, clean re-install to fix my flight3.dle crashes. And at least for now seem to have a good stable set of dgVoodoo settings and that are letting me go through the campaign.

BTW I have never successfully completed the Azer200 Fallen Cresent campaign since back in the day on my Win98 machine I had a Monster3D 8MB graphics accelerater card and the game crashed all the time mid-flight from a flight3.dle crash. I had all but given up back then but I discovered that whenever I had died and edited the mission parameters to try and get my squad to beat back those pesky Azer2000 forces I was setting myself up for that crash. I noticed the same holds true still, that if I mess around and try to refly a failed mission many times and have changed the mission waypoints and strike details a lot, that sooner or later on the refly my game will crash. Of course playing the Azer2000 patch solo is really really hard, so can you blame me from all the mission editing and reflying? lol

Someday would love to play a MP campaign, but sadly I think there are fewer and fewer LB2 pilots around and with each passing year that chance grows smaller and smaller. At least now that I know how to bring back my fellow KIA squad pilots I've got a fighting chance in Azer2000 missions!

~Victor1_9er

I don't know if you heard about Kevin 'PositiveG' Speichts along the way, but he sadly passed away in 2009. His website, at its original web address went away, but luckily I had the whole thing saved for personal reference so internally re-worked it and uploaded it to my webspace... http://digitality.comyr.com/speichts/lb2/

It's interesting that you say your Saitek joystick fixed the yaw issue, did you have the problem with slow or no yaw using the keyboard?

I have played the Azer2000 campaign but I think that was as far back as when I had my Win98 or XP PC. I don't think I ever tried it again on my later PCs. I remember it being hard, and highly doubt that I ever completed it.

There are a couple of guys here who get together every now-and-then to have a go at LB2 multiplayer. I'll let them come forward instead of name-dropping, if they choose to. I've only ever played LB2 MP twice, and it was fairly disappointing for me because it wasn't until the Windows 7 era that I gave it a shot, when I was encountering all my problems with game stability, control bugs and stuff.

Yes Flyboy, I had heard about the passing of PositiveG from these boards. Thank you for letting me know, and thank you for preserving his site! I would never have played this sim again without the hard work of Kevin, yourself, and others.

As for the joystick yaw issue:

Yup, I have almost zero yaw controls when I use the keyboard tail rotor buttons. Once I purchased and then set up the profile for the Saitek joystick, I had full yaw controls, working just as I remember them from years ago. I can totally understand anyone who wouldn't play the game if they can't get this fixed. In my opinion the game is unplayable if you don't have good working yaw control. I can't rememebr if I actually programed the joystick 'twist' to be yaw or if was just recognized as such. I'll have to look and get back on that.

The Azer2000 campaign is insane. SAM and AAA mixed in with your standard armor deployments, and they almost always call in their own air support if you start attacking.

On an interesting side-note about joysticks and crashes: The other day when I was testing my over-torquing rotor issue in my other post, I decided to uninstall and then reinstall my joystick software to see if I could max my over-torqing. Anyway I went back to playing my campaign a short time later, and started getting the debrief crash almost constantly.

Then I checked and noticed I had two joystick services running in the background that were set to autostart at boot: ProfilerU.exe and SaiMfd.exe.

As soon as I turned of SaiMfd.exe (and disable both from autostarting just on principle) my debrief CTD stopped. I only need the profiler to be running to play the game with all my buttons mapped, and I can start that manually when I decide to play. It seems the other joystick service was contributing to my debrief crash.

BTW is just awesome when you can switch between air and ground, TADS and FCR, switch targets,change MFDs, give your wingman commands all from the joystick buttons!

Well, I don't have my game setup for MP and would need to look into the requirments for that since I am behind a router but have no problem port forwarding and such. So I will let the MP pilots here gauge my ferver and perhaps some day will join their ranks!