My Dearest BoB-
I'd like to edit your cockpit sights used in the 109 and perhaps- it needs cleaned up and sharpened for my eyes.
Anyone know the pcx file that I could edit or re-create?...
or is it encoded and I'm stuck with the default sighting crosshairs/lenses?

Oh yeh- that reminds me:
Any BoB flyers here that adjust their guns bullets to merge at a closer distance?
I've been testing different distances. Being a winning rifleman, wingshooter and a gunsmith by trade, I have a sound
knowledge base of interior, exterior & terminal ballistics.
How does BoB II model the flight characteristics (Ballistic Coefficients, Bullet momentum, Bullet Rise/Drop)???
I know how far (lets say) 100 or 200 or 300 yards appears from the tail end of a Spitfire/Messerschmidt...
When I adjust the bullet merge distances for 100, 150, 200 etc, (and targeting sighting is set to LOW, by the way)then it appears that the sim itself is NOT modeling the distances correctly as viewed thru the cockpits gunsight/general cockpit view/display-
And I know this from years and years of wing shooting, target shooting at great distances, years of flight simming where gunning was my first nature.

I know & hope the BoB pros will chime in on this little factor I'm testing thru.
Before you do though, I do take into account the aircrafts constant moving, wind effects, stable/unstable shooting platforms. For example, in the training section of 'Follow the Leader'....
The instructor is in front of me (appearing to be well under 100 yards)
He hits the gas...I hit the gas....
He banks/dives...tells me that I'm a loser....
So I full throttle & close in to what appears to be about 60-70 yards....I can clearly see the bullets as they criss-cross their paths in front him when I'm shooting just a little high...as I pull down, the impacts aren't clearly defined, and that's not my argument. I know that BoB's damage wasn't full-blown modeled and I don't have a problem w/that whatsoever. And since I'm fond of going for oil pans, wingtips and elevators, that's fine by me. I assume I struck an oil pan or punched a wing when the smoke streams.
So I proceed to let him have a taste of my feedback on his opinions.
Now, I see that one squeeze of the trigger lets go 3 rounds.
In ten cases of the above scenario, one 2 second burst ripped him to confetti.
I couldn't see what exactly was ripped off of his craft, it was just debris and smoke...then nothing-
The other nine cases, it took me more than one burst to render his craft useless and his craft heads for the dirt.
Six of those events he was able to eject.

Mind you, I was using the default setting of 250 yards (LOW target size).
Now on the spitfire, we have (IIRC) 8 gun ports, 4 left-4 right...spaced about 12 feet from the cockpit's centerline.

If you do the math, something is amok here. And my wingshooting skills are unquestioned and I know there is a bullet flight path problem that lies beneath BoB II and this needs addressing very soon.

Forever in my heart, BoB
Ed

There are several "bullet" entries in bdg.txt, and I'm afraid, as I keep my bdg.txt
through years of patch updates, that I don't remember the default values. Search the
manual, and you'll see descriptions - bullet gravity, dispersion, lifetime etc.
It may be you need to adjust them to realistic values.

You see, we get what coding help we can, and one of the areas we're weak in, and
it must be admitted it's a low priority, is GUI coding. That is why all our control
advances and embellishments get lumped into bdg.txt instead of a beautiful new
GUI options page with rollover helps and indicated defaults and whathaveyou.

Regarding gunsights, Stickman is fluent with that, and you can find much discussion
over at A2A. We know how we want them to work, but we haven't got a graphic coder
who can make it happen - causing the illuminated bullseye to appear at infinity
in regard to its parallax behaviour, while still only existing in the 3D world
when the gunsight glass intercedes between the bullseye and the viewers eye. It
basically requires creating a separate 3D world containing only the gunsight, and
"logical-or-ing" it into the main 3D world via a mask, which follows the position of
the glass. Failing that, we do what we can, painting a texture to appear like the
incandescent filament, and hovering somewhere over the engine cowling.

I read ya PV...but I don't see what the parallax issue is involving. When I speak of parallax, its usually refering to a lensing system issue...(focal point variances)- which, consequently, throws your aim off due to the false imaging you receive thru the given lense(s)-
Now, it would be my guess that at that time, the sighting system was no more than a sheet of etched glass,
tempered w/lead...
But I might be getting too technical here and throwing the readers off so lets do this-
From the photo link below- How far would you say the aircraft in front of me is ??



My current sight in BoB is dialed in to merge paths at 127 yards.
With the default 'medium' target size, most users would be able to pummel the bogie up front.
Change your target size to 'small', and your kill percentage goes down a few fold.
In my experience w/shooting and judging distances, the aircraft in the photo above is no more that 60-70 yards away.
So I want to know what the diameter of the sight would represent @100 yards...From there, its a simple matter of interpreting scale to quickly determine your target's distance so you can compensate bullet drop at x-given ranges.
And in the very same photo session, I can lay down on the trigger for 3 seconds(sometimes 2), and he is total confetti.
Further, the lead graduations one would use on the sight lense just don't seem to be calibrated correctly.
Hence, I wanted to practice gunning, take photos, analyze and come to an average, then re-draw what I believe would give the user a better sighting system, thusly, saving his ammo.

No, the Revi gunsight was a very advanced piece of optical equipment.
Made in switzerland, and supplied to both sides, the device had a clear
sheet of plate glass inclined at 45deg to the line between the pilot
and his foe. Beneath this was a vertically mounted optical column,
with lenses arranged to project the image of an incandescent filament
in the shape of a circle-and-plus-sign gunsight, which was reflected
by the angled glass plate into the view of the pilot. The lenses were
arranged so that the image of the filament was placed at infinity, thus
it was only in focus when the pilot looked into the distance, to see
his foe, much better than a close up gunsight which would be so out of
focus as to be useless in a cramped cockpit. The other benefit of the
focus at infinity is that this means that the filament is not only in focus
seemingly at the same distance as the enemy craft, but it actually acts as
if it is hovering there in space - if the pilot moves his head, the
image stays fixed relative to the distant aircraft, it does not move with
the glass in the cockpit. In fact, if the pilot's head moves too far to the
side, the image of the filament slides off the side of the glass, and
thus disappears, but all the time seems to hover in space in the far distance
at a fixed location.

Regarding the use of sights, have a look at this file, just about the only
one I ever thought to grab from www.ww2airfronts.org before it suddenly
disappeared:
http://www3.telus.net/v1ncent/bob/bagthehun.zip

It states the wingtips of a fighter should be touching the illuminated ring at 100yds.
I don't know if this was adjustable, I have a vague memory of that being possible
with some sights. Anyway, Stickman would know about this stuff. You should enquire of
him at A2A.

Thanks PV...now we're digging into parallax (another word for picking nat s#it outta pepper). Good explanation for those reading and don't know what the subject of parallax is and how it will trick a gunner's perspective. And infinity would be the only sensible way to calibrate a sighting system to be used in an environment such as aircraft. albeit, I always see the graduated dial under the lense and wish I could adjust it for spits & giggles.
Actually, tell Bud & Dux to consider this idea at their labs.

Alas, as I understand it, much of the aircraft models for BoB2 were built
by contract modellers who supplied the finished work compiled into BoB2
binary form, but not their 3D-modeller software work files, and they are
long gone, so we have no easy way of adding functionality to the cockpit
equipment. It would require some very skilled coders and modellers working
together to basically rebuild the entire cockpit model, before we could
have control to make any changes.

This is unfortunate, as there are a few little bugs we'd love to crush in
the existing cockpit models, let alone adding more functionality. The new
IL-2 CoD spit has the revi adjustable, beautifully done with the graphic of
the dials animated, and the result - it indeed alters the size of some portion
of the image, so you can set the wingspan of your target of interest, then set
the range to match your convergence range (and the little wheels move accordingly)
and thus when the target wingtips touch the markers on your sight image, your
target is at convergence range. It might be possible to add a widget to BoB2 in
some sort of popup that could change the gunsight image in steps, but it would
be a lot of work, and would still look rather crude compared to the CoD version,
as the adjustment wheels would still not be moving.

LMAO, well then that sorta brings us full circle.
I wish I could just tweak the cockpit sight(graphic) to do some testing.
After all, precision shooting really doesnt fill the bill, but as there are numerous sighting optins in the shooting industry (skeet/trap), it would be fun to just try a smaller circle losing the center dot.
Are you using CoD? I bet its sweet, but I'm not gonna try unless I find a good price.
I can run WoP fine, but something tells me that CoD could bring my end down.
Just like Flaming Cliffs 2 would bring me down unless I removed half the candy.

You can find the graphics by stepping through the image
files. There are several folders. The likely ones would be
those with "cockpit" or some abbreviation thereof, in their
names. (Personally, I think the current images have done a
brilliant job of emulating the appearance of a projected
incandescent filament.) As I noted in another thread, you
need a viewer that understands .dds, which means pretty
much anything beyond the default µ$ widgets bundled with
your OS. If you are intending to do some image editing, I
would expect you know your way around this stuff already.

Yes, CoD has some issues, you need a very strong machine
to run it. I have it, mostly to see how they did their
terrain - like everything else they do, it is inconsistent:
some parts are brilliant, others are horribly wrong, and
some are sort of generically whitewashed. As it is an immense
region to detail properly, I won't hold the whitewashing
against them - heck most of France in BoB2 is a lawn, because
we don't have anyone volunteering to work on it - but I
really have a problem with their use of the completely
engineered and industrialized postwar coastline between
Calais and Dunkerque, rather than the proper period wild
shoreline of dunes. It seems they just used google images,
and didn't bother to do any research. Shocking, for the
central region for the activity which purports to be the
subject of their sim. If it was west Normandy, or even
a ways into Belgium, it wouldn't bother me nearly so much.
But vast dredged industrial container handling harbours of
immense postwar scale just scream anachronism, right in
the middle of the action.

True True on the mixed ...
Back to the above, I'm having to teach myself working w/256 index colors. Not my strong point.
I do like the glowing filament appearance, myself.
I got the viewer you suggested above. Had been using Acdsee for a long time, way too long, apparently.
So I saw that the landscape was DDS files...like Direct Draw something or other.
So I don't know what to do.
Do I just begin w/a regular pallet..implement whatever graphic, then convert to index colors...then what?
My photoshop (that I'm aware of) doesn't know what to do with a DDS file.
I'm sure you're astute to PS..my experiences lie in tga,png, bmp, jpg, gif(to a degree)and pcx (to a degree)
How big of a map of France are we talking about reproducing-
That is....how much landscape, before the axis hits the wall(end of map/programmed arena?)
And I guess we're talking tiles again, so what would you guess would fullfill a minimum team of graphic volunteers to get a jump start on the France landscape issues?
Then again, I guess the task would be immense and that might explain your shortage of volunteers...dunno? Help me understand your task/needs better via pm.

Please be specific. I would be tickled to help in any way that I could...Esp while I have this free time on my hands. Just remember from above, I need a crash course in working/saving into different file extensions.

-Ed in 'Bama


PS- saw something about converting targa to dds...
and I guess I can grab a PS pluggin and see how that goes...
More to follow.

You don't need to be limited to 256 colours, only BoB1
was so limited, but the old textures made their way into
BoB2, just converted from .x8 (Rowan proprietary) to .dds.
The later .dds files when the terrain was reworked, are
full 24bpp, which is .dds standard.

I think you'll find that current photoshop handles .dds
just fine. Anyway, as long as you have one widget which
can read and write in .dds, that's all you need - do your
work in whatever editor you prefer, sending it the files
in a format it can understand, then pass them back to the
.dds capable viewer and save as .dds from there. There are
several types of .dds, some with separate alpha layers, but
the terrain textures are simple DXT1 files, one layer. Your
file save routine will ask you about this, I expect. When
.dds was new and uncommon, I used a program called DXTBmp,
by MWGraphics, which I think is still out there. Now, gimp
recognizes .dds, though I may have had to fetch the plugin.

If you are keen on getting in and actually painting up the
textures, a few things you should know. First, you should
note that they are all tileable, that is, if you stack up
instances of one tile to fill a block, the edges all match
each other, making a seamless surface. Yipes, (I'm re-editing
my reply in response to your edit...) if you are
interested in digging in to terrain work, you should know
the scope of the possible work is immense, so we just hack
away at little bits. Making textures is but a tiny part of the
process, although it is an epic amount of work in itself.

If you want to get an idea of what it all entails, start here
http://www.a2asimulations.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=8731
and then browse this zipped html file:
http://www3.telus.net/v1ncent/bob/BoB-Terrain-tutorialV2.zip
which provides some numbers on what is involved. For a quick
idea, a standard terrain texture represents 1.44km square,
and the BoB2 map is 738km on a side. Of course about 45% of
it is water, but still, it is quite a lot of territory. Here's
a map of the original Rowan work, you can see which parts were
detailed and which were lawn. we've filled in a bit of Pas de
Calais (a block with diagonal Abbeville to Dunkerque).

Currently we are limited to the number of tiles I discussed above, and
pretty much all of the are dedicated to the anglo side of the channel
as you can see from the map above, Rowan did no texturing in France.
We are presently working on hijacking a single tile, img0031, which was
some sort of odd orphan in the Rowan scheme, to use as a generic french
field tile - the french fields are so different from english, that our
standard set don't work very well in France. (We'd like to have a whole
french set of tiles, but that would require reworking the whole terrain
engine system, which in turn requires more coding skill than we have
presently available.) With that one tile, we could possibly slide it in
here and there to make France look more believable. Beyond that, work on
France requires a lot of research and preparation, followed by detailed
editing of the land-use maps which the Rowan terrain engine uses to
generate the terrain. This is all expplained in the links given in the
last post. These days I rely heavily on TARA - The Aerial Reconnaissance
Archive - for detailed information on what the terrain looked like in
1940, as you can see in the linked items.

If I were to choose where i thought more work were currently needed most
usefully in France, I would say any of
> improving the accuracy of the detailing along the coastal region south
from just south of Boulogne down to Treport, and inland at least 4km
> adding new detail west from Treport, along the shoreline for any fraction
of the way to Le Havre, and inland at least 4km.
> detailing Le Havre, its harbour, and up the Seine at least 10km.

You Got It. Since there isn't a deadline, that'll give me some time to get a handle on what you pointed out above.
I grabbed a little viewer called XNView....
Also found the NVidia plugin for PS...and yes, it asked me 5 different options just at the start of opening the DDS file.
Then I just grabbed a burner sponge to darken my initials on img0004 for a test. Then it asked me 1500 options about saving...
So I scratched that idea until:
A- hopefully you would reply-
B- google my butt off trying to learn a graphics system employed into BoB-
But I did follow your suggestion about using the older tiles.
As I mentioned, Bob looks so much more tranquil and pleasant as you fly around the fields, spotting the hayfields, the sheep & cattle, Mom's old farmhouse next to the tree line (next to the airfield,of course)
Dawn or Dusk patrol w/1940s music playing in the backdrop when all of a sudden the sky fills w/flak.

One thing for sure, if you ever get lost, just look for the flak.
And I need an address pm'd to me so I can send a payment to the staff (BDG)...If I'm gonna suggest this, and ask how about that, and get answers...then its only fair that I send some kind of donation.
I guess BDG is over in England, so if their gas is still running over 8 US dollars, someone in the group might be thankful for a few gallons.
Better catch me while I'm in a generous mode. When the morphine wears off and I'm crippled up again, I'm really not a nice person to be around. Being an animal lover, I run an animal rescue that can turn small choirs into huge tasks (since the surgeries)...that will pass hopefully by Christmas.

I'll tell ya one thing-
I never thought I'd see the day come when my flight sim collection was narrowed down to one.
Currently I have Falcon:Allied, IL-1946, Wings of Prey, and, of course, Bob.
I proposed to Bob early in the week and she said she would think about it.
Then she caught me fooling around w/WoP....
So WoP is off the drive....that saved 25Gbs...and a ton of visual confusion.
IL w/o a campaign is taking up 6Gb...(yawn) and those AI pilots yakin' their heads off all the time.
Falcon is somewhere on the drive, I can't remember where it is...!!!
My God, and I'm a Falcon nut....been married to Falcon since 1991.



PS- and all the while, I would see someone labeled 'MudMover' and just assumed that their strong point was ground attack-

OK. A few things. First of all, as a fully volunteer
organization of the open source spirit, if not exactly
the technical details (the commercial sources of the
software weren't quite able to bring themselves to
that level of magnanimity, so the source access agreement
has a few hooks in it that Stallman et al would have
problems with, though it doesn't impact us at all,
cuz we're still left free to hack to our hearts' content)
we don't even have a mechanism to accept money, which
only makes sense as we don't have a place in space
where we exist, either. "We" operate out of two or
three continents and a tropical island, depending
on our membership at any given time; a few of the
europeans have gotten together once or twice, but
the rest of us remain in our scattered refugia.

Another item, I've just discovered that you sent me a
couple of PMs, which generated email notifications
which for some reason were shunted off to the spam
folder, which hasn't happened before, so I will have
to solve that, tomorrow. I also see that the flag for
the PMs here at SimHQ is nowhere near as obvious as
it used to be, so I didn't even register it - a little
winking flag on the top bar, which I usually scroll out
of view immediately to get past the Day-by-Day image
to the post index. Anyway, I wasn't ignoring you.

PV, I'm trying to locate a certain file and I'm just not having any luck.
I'm getting back to the sighting topic of earlier.
Could you point me to the file that displays the sighting aperture for the B109-
I can be a symmetry nut sometimes, and as such, I disable behind the site at all times.
If I choose to fly the 109, I'll just wing shoot using best guess from what I see before me.
So I'd like to just remove the sight from view altogether.
Next patch, ask if they can implement a keystroke to remove sight reticle like I discovered in WoP...
Being a rifle and shotgunner, I can tell ya that there have been times where the sight actually became a hindrance and gut instinct proved the better.

Thanks Again, Hoss-
Blue Skies, we'll chat later.
Ed

Hot Damn- Thanks for the tutorial zip.
This will be a cool read I can put on the nightstand, my man.
If you knew how frustrated I could get just googling around (and wasting hours bytheway)
Time wasting that I can't afford to be wasting these days...
You hit a wall after while and just poke and prod through trial & error and that soon gets exhausting for me anymore.
I don't have that college try like I used to.

Cockpm16\sight2.dds looks like a pretty likely suspect

Yes, I caught that.....was going to just swap it out w/a blank....but it was a no-go.
The blank swap worked fine for the spitfire...

I relocated the following to a backup folder-
sightgls & 4 of the sishadw files...as well as sight2 which I checked before posting.
Edited the BDG file to dump cache...
Funny thing is XnView displayed the correct thumbnail of sight2..but the blowup view just shows a circle w/crosshairs.
But anyway, moving the files didn't help, went to IA, takeoff using the 109 and there was the sight.
What's your guess-
Ed

Ahh, the sight files are in DXT5, which is multi-layer. It will have a
graphic layer, and then an alpha layer. The alpha layer determines what
is transparent, and how much. If I open it in gimp, it shows a yellow
crosshair on a checkerboard background, which is gimp's indicator that
the crosshair is a visible object over a transparent background. The
gimp layers dialogue only shows one layer, but it is labelled "main
surface". If I open it in DXTBmp, it shows a main image of a bright
yellow ball, like an incandescent lightbulb. On the side panel, it
shows the alpha layer, white on black, of the crosshair. This tells me
that the crosshair shape will be displayed in the colour mapped by the
main image layer.

Oh, yes, another thing. The original image files for BoB and BoB2 are
in Rowan's proprietary ".x8" format. Subsequent patch versions are
set to seek files based on filename, and use any with extension .dds
first, failing which .pcx, failing which .x8. This allows us and user
modders to add new versions of files in preferred formats, for any image
used by the program, at any time. So removing a file will cause the
program to go to the previous version. If it can't find any version,
it will generally be unhappy. Best to give it a sheet of full alpha,
rather than trying to remove a file.

(I don't work much with image files, so I don't remember these things.)

Yes, Yes...that is how Adobe tells the user the very same thing. The checked background means there are layers that haven't been flattened or combined, etc. Yeh, I got ya.
And yes, moving file that its calling during launch (execute sim) just freezes the screen (loading bimap display)
I would see in the BDG file something about using dummy and I've witnessed a small red square in place of some imgage that I would move around. I really like the concepts you explained above.
Oh, and don't worry about remembering things. Your post show you to have a sharp memory as it is.
Hopefully as time goes by, you'll still have that talent of recall.
I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer these days.
And I'm told it'll get worse.
Ain't we got fun?
Good Mornin'

I think you know where and what I'm going with this. I mentioned symmetry before and that's one reason.
Two is if the user is defaulting to always be behind the gunsight, then his panning angles to the left are reduced.
Thusly, I'm aiming (hah) to get myself centered w/the prop, and either drawup a new sight that is shifted left, or use a blank and mentioned before and employ true wing shooting.
Since I've found my best score comes from setting the convergence to 177 yards, and I'm familiar with the picture that displays different aircraft and I can loosly guess their distances, firing a quick burst shows me the flight path of the projos (bullet)..
Yep, for me...177 yards is my sweet spot. So at 250, the spread is not that great and at 350-400 the spread is more effective against larger craft.
2nd cup of coffee-ahh