Greetings!! I was going to burst your bubble on the .ini settings, but figured I would wait for the Flyboy perpetrator to come forward.

LB2 remains one of my favorite sims of all time and I plead guilty to being one of those occasional LB2 Multiplayers. Always fun, though modern technology has made it difficult.

Search these forums for "router bug" and you will see what I mean.

We have managed to get stable MP LB2 going with the aid of Hamachi to overcome the "host cannot be behind a router" issue but lately (well, probably as of a year ago) that has been flaky also. There are some other similar VPN/IPX emulation proggies out there for gaming, but I haven't tried them.

If your LB2 fever ever spikes, let me know and we can try to arrange something. I am your neighbor in NJ, and though I have been MIA from online gaming for awhile, it is usually possible for me to be around in the evenings starting around 20:30-21:00 local (US Eastern) time.

... and here comes one out of the woodwork. My ol' mate Recluse!

Thanks Recluse for the warm welcome as well! And thanks also for offering a potential MP game. I think it would be really awesome, and I would definitely like to try it out at some point in the near future! I only just got reinstalled last week and am making sure my system is stable and that most of the bugs are worked out or minimized. I think I've got it working fairly well, disregarding my other minor bug in the other post about over-torque values. The more I think about that issue, the more I am wondering if it is not an actual bug but a correction they included in the Anthology version of LB2 and was intended to make collective even more realistic.

Anyway, I'll look into Hamachi and the other MP setup stuff to see what it entails. I'll keep you posted. It's great that we are neighbors and in the same time zone! That's a big plus for MP!

Yeah, being in the same time zone is a big bonus for multiplayer. When I played with Recluse I think I was up until around 5am in the morning!

I'm a Longbow fanatic, but 5am would be tough!

For correctness and for the sake of anyone who might one day stumble upon these forums I just want to ammend what I said about the in-game "flight3.dle" crash:

On my system, it was NOT caused by the the 2.09e patch as I first said. I was wrong. It is instead caused by trying to re-fly a failed mission and modifying the waypoints, loiter time and targets of the various flights. It does not always happen, but I can say that if I fail at a mission many times and each time modify the flight plans and then try to re-fly it, inevitably the game will crash from "flight3.dle" page fault.

Now I must say, that I do not know if this is the case with the default 'Fallen Cresent' campaign since I have been flying the Azer2000 patched version of 'Fallen Cresent'. This bug used to ruin my campaign back in the Win98 days and I incorrectly thought it had something to do with my graphics card back then. I can now confirm that it only happens for me when the mission details have been modified -- something that I do a lot when flying the Azer2000 campaign solo. When I do re-fly and DO NOT mess around with the mission details the game does not crash.

Just thought I would add this to the collective knowledge base here.

That is a very interesting observation, Victor1_9er. I believe I have had people come to me before with the 'flight3.dle' crash, but I always responded assuming that they'd made a cock-up of applying the patch or something. I hardly ever used to modify the flight paths and details, so me noticing it wouldn't have ever occured. I'm not quite sure that I'd ever have narrowed it down to such a common and natural task though.

You, sir, really do have an eye for detail.

Well, To be exact I've had the 'flight3.dle' crash also happen when I've [alt]-[tabbed] out of LB2 and come back. That can happen even when I didn't fiddle with the flights on a re-fly. And to be fair, it has also crashed my game out-of-the-blue for no apparent reason. But 90% of the time if I get that crash and I didn't 'tab-away' from LB2 I am probably on a 're-fly' mission cause I did something stupid and don't want to give up yet.

A lot of times I will construct a mission around a set of objectives that are all close together. Like an insertion, a recon and say two different SAM/AAA strikes. I'll create a meet-up of all 8 helos and use the time-on-target and loiter times to get all the AI pilots to arrive and depart at the same time, and we'll all escort the insertion blackhawk or run CAP around one of the flights taking out an air defense site. It's even more insane if the Azer forces are flying crazy CAP missions in the area. I recently had a scenario where there were 6 enemy helos, and all 8 of my choppers flying around fighting each other...oh and I forgot to mention I called in in airstrike on the first set of Havocs, so there was an F15 circling the carnage!

I don't think I had ever heard so many stingers fired at once. Everyone was yelling 'Fox 2' and at one point I think a havoc took like 4 or 5 stinger hits as it was going down -- hilarious and awesome.

Now, when one spends that much effort constructing the mission and you realize an unknown ZSU-23 just over the hill is ahniliating your other flights, right after the meet-up, it's natural (if a little unfair) to want to adjust the mission on the 're-fly' to put in a SEAD objective to take it out, or to route the waypoints further away from the menace. Yeah it's cheating. But it's such a waste to throw all that hard work away. Back in Win98 days, I used to 're-fly' missions many many times -- sometimes as many as 11 times! Constantly modifying things on the re-fly to try and get my AI pilots to survive and increase their AI rating. I would get so pissed when on the 11th re-fly the 'flight3.dle' crash would wipe out my game and mission anyway. LOL

It's one of the main reasons I stopped playing LB2 back then -- cause I would get so demoralized that all my AI pilots were always KIA. I could hardly ever win most of the mission objectives of my squad and it felt like Azer2000 was just too hard flying solo.

That would be an F-16, sir!

Don't worry, I won't keep correcting you, I just like to develop a kind of 'theme' with some people. And as you have a very keen eye for detail, I thought I'd point out when you make a blatant mistake!

There's certainly nothing wrong with playing how you do, by going back and re-flying the mission in the hope of better results. I used to re-fly some missions once or twice, but never as many times as you did. It just gets to a point where you have to kind of be satisfied everything went as well as it did, and move forwards.

And like how some players used to play the original Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, it's very tempting - because of the ability to plan before the mission and have AI choppers - to go into the mission planner and try to execute the perfect mission while just sitting back and watching the AI complete the mission. Plus, where the AI pilots gain experience, there is that kind of role-playing element to the game. It's almost a game on its own just planning the mission, if you do it to the lengths that you have done, and I'm sure that it's very rewarding if it succeeds.

Oh, and when you've finished the Azer2000 campaign, you might want to try out some of my missions. In one I put in so many enemy units that I ended up having to remove some because I exceeded the game's limit! I can also recommend some good missions by other people. All found on my site, of course!

Doh!
Bugger me! I keep making silly mistakes on here...you can keep correcting. I make no claims to be an expert!



I have found I can't just artificially raise the AI pilots rating artificially by changing their number. The game must have some way of calculating it and I don't want to mess around too much with it. But I have been bringing the KIA pilots back and their ratings have been improving. It's fun to have the other flights become more adept and better able -- it is a lot like role-playing because it becomes more about developing the skill set of the whole squad.



I'm definitely going to have to check some of those missions out! Sounds really cool!