There it was- ALL Day Long-
The 'N' key clearly visible on the keyboard pdf.
I apologize for my oversight. It had to be the lack of sleep.
I guess I was punch-drunk when I decided to dig into the manuals and such.
Again-thanks for helpin' this ol' do-do

If you have downloaded patch 2.10 and 2.11, the latest manual is
in the docs folder. It is vastly improved over the original,
and mostly applies to all the patch versions, though we certainly
never tried to make it backward compatible. It is far and away the
best manual for a currently available flight sim - the functionality
of IL-2 Cliffs of Dover, for instance, by comparison, is utterly
concealed, barely hinted at in its half-hearted manual.

PV, I have every patch the BDgroup has assembled.
Just finished reloading 2.04..tweaking the bdg file and altering the colors just a bit on the dawn/dusk hours.
I like things alittle 'darker' and unseen...that's the real fear, its what we don't see that's gonna bring us down.
I really hate to say this, but the landscape changes just doesn't suit my pallet. And you can witness the extra work load being placed on the AA formulas and Aniso calculations too.
To me, it doesn't 'look' period enough...too many suburbs and all of the hayfield repetitions connecting all of the 'propers' and 'greaters'....metros and municipalities.

I stayed up all night last night, reloading and unloading Bob and trying each patch for about a hour each install.
That landscape made me a tad upset. Oh sure, the AI improvement is fine. But I don't call the landscape an improvement, not one bit.
But again, its just my personal taste. I'd like to think of 1940 as a less populated time period. Although the landscape probably wouldn't reflect it. If I need to, I can land at the nearest sheep farm, slide the glass open, smell the exhaust and kick the tires....and nobody's around for miles in the 204 landscape.
So, I have to say, I'm back to 2.04 and perhaps, 205.
One thing though, I never had one CTD with 204/5 since I've used the product (which is a whole damned bunch of use)...stayed up way way way too late just me & Bob.


Attempting to tweak some things in the bdg file under Bobbies's skirt, don't ya know-

Just a reminder, BOBII on version 2.11 and 2.12 are expected to be run on a gamer PC with very strong Multi core Processor speeds and a very strong video card with 1 GB of video memory.

Just one example of the change is that the landscape textures size have grown from 256 to 2048. Running 2.04 or 2.05 is a major step back in time. I do not want to think about 2.04 as we are now in the process of testing all the new stuff for version 2.12.

We have no problem with players running old versions of BOBII but our small volunteer BDG team has very little time to support players running old BOBII versions as we need to focus on the future. Players running old versions can not be supported except as we have time. I hope you understand the position we are in.

Here is a link from the BOBII Technical Forum at A2A"s web site talking about player's PC and BOBII:

http://a2asimulations.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=12174

Thanks Bud, It does my heat good to read your comments.
I'm not keen on logging on to A2A just so people can read my joys on an old version.
But I went ahead and installed 2.11-
Two words....

LOVE IT-
But of course I would. After all, she's Bob!!
The only medium settings are weather,horizon and particles.
Object density turned down while trees-forrest raises are on..
Avg FPS 41
Low FPS 24
Frames improve greatly when I reduce the weather to low...not the worst option one could suffer.
Even the low weather w/the gorgeous water takes a person back to sitting on a bank fishing and snoozing.
These figures were gathered from the Historical IA...every minute entity was spot on gorgeous.

If you have all the patch versions, first, I hope you're clear that to change
versions, you don't have to do all the intermediate steps - you can go from
2.04 to 2.11 in one upgrade. But, if you've had the energy to do all those
reinstalls and swaps, and if you have personal preferences about the
appearance of the terrain textures, they are all available in the landmap2
folder of each patch, and if you want, you can step through them and mix and
match (you'll need a better viewer than the default windows ones to see the
.dds files, but most all freeware viewers like xnview and irfanview will do
just fine). There are a few minor caveats: best to keep the filenames constant,
at least to the degree of keeping the img0022 to 26 each fixed, and distinct,
as each represents a different density of urbanization; and 0015 is woods,
and somewhere around v2.07 we changed from having airfield lawn being img0001
to img0004, so best not to deviate from the patch default on those, or you'll
be having a very hard time finding airfields!
Oh, and when we changed lawn from 1 to 4, I had to run about and change "rough",
ie marsh, moor, wilds etc, from 4 to 16, so the latter should be left alone too.
But that still leaves 0,2,3,5-14,17-21 available to swap out however you like -
you could even choose one that you liked and substitute it for all of them, using
copies with the appropriate file names applied. Just be aware, as Buddye points out,
that the resolution of the earlier textures are going to be pretty crude compared
to the later ones. But as far as I'm concerned with textures, you should get what
you want to see. Several people have made their own texture sets over the years.

As I say, the terrain itself - ie the shape of the shoreline, hills, roads and
rivers, is greatly improved in later patch versions, and will not affect frame
rates, and is completely independent of what you do with the textures. You could
run v2.11 with its terrain, but with 2.04 textures if you want, and it would work
fine, as long as you make some adjustments for #1,4,and 16 as I noted above.

Well,now see there-
That's exacty whats been rolling around upstairs for the last two week now.
Looking thru the folders made me ask why that couldn't be done. So when I never saw the suggestion made, I had a feeling that there were very specific instruction sets to call on 'precise' image files and that altering those files in anyway shape or form might produce holes and such.
A couple of times I had considered saving some sub-folders over to the temp directory, reload Bob, patch & then simply drag/drop the older landscapes. Then I could simply copy some sub directories over to disc in case future reloads came forth.But at the time, my energy was nearing the end and I wasn't in the mood for troubleshooting. I have to give the back a rest.
But anywhoo- yes, I'm tickled that you made that suggestion.