OK, So here is current release 1_10 of my effects mod for WOFF UE. JSGME install recommended.
Contains New Padlock Icon, New Flak effects, New Smoke effects, New Craters, New Impact effects, New Fire effects, New textured cockpit blood, "Hot" bullet casing, New Dirt Spray textures, New Translucent Oil Textures for Windscreen damage and fuselage, New Dust effects, New trees for All seasons, New snow on buildings in season, New HD skyboxes. Retextured stack of objects and buildings. New roofs for all generic buildings. Retextured All Hangars. New season textures etc etc.
Making the mod for me is relatively easy, but the amount of time it takes to test everything and attempt to get screenshots to show it off is an unbelievable pain !
Hand painted colour replacement tool for the Ground texture tiles for Autumn, Autumn with Snow, Winter, Winter Light & Winter Medium. New grass, forests, Urban for all seasons. Made these Seasons less green and added a lot of brown grass/mud depth to the landscape. Left Summer/Spring and Winter Full Textures as stock for more variety. - Suggestion from Panama Red.
Re: JSGME oddities since 4.12 update - 01/07/1707:53 PM
No mate. Thanks for the help. I will look into it tomorrow. 1 hour to make the mod, 3 hours trying to test it in game and get screenshots, 4 hours tearing out my hair trying to get it to work, lol.
Re: JSGME oddities since 4.12 update - 01/09/1701:59 PM
Hi mate, Thanks for the feedback. Are you sure that it was my textures causing your framerate problem?
The reason I ask is I can't really see how, as the texture sizes in my mod are exactly the same as the originals. There is only 1 texture in my mod that's larger than an original texture and that one is only larger by less than 3kb.
Just for the record, I have noticed 0 frame rate difference on a single 970 gtx and i5 4690k using fraps and MSI Afterburner to monitor frames.
Thank you for the feedback guys, I really appreciate it. Obviously this is only the first version so I aim to improve it and add to it over time. If any one does have any problems, then I will try to fix anything to the best of my ability.
Thanks for taking the effort to try it. I'm quite sad in regards to making mods as I enjoy it and find messing with textures/graphics, sound engines and game engines cathartic for some weird reason!?!, call it a hobby if you will, so If I ever make something I think someone else may get enjoyment from, I always try and release it for everyone to try. I appreciate that some of my stuff won't be everyone's cup of tea, but there's no harm in trying though.
Thank you for the feedback guys, I really appreciate it. Obviously this is only the first version so I aim to improve it and add to it over time. If any one does have any problems, then I will try to fix anything to the best of my ability.
Thanks for taking the effort to try it. I'm quite sad in regards to making mods as I enjoy it and find messing with textures/graphics, sound engines and game engines cathartic for some weird reason!?!, call it a hobby if you will, so If I ever make something I think someone else may get enjoyment from, I always try and release it for everyone to try. I appreciate that some of my stuff won't be everyone's cup of tea, but there's no harm in trying though.
Cheers !
I think we all appreciate modding efforts. Your contribution is a good one for sure. There are a good many modders here but one talent we are short on is GMAX model rendering. Hopefully someone will come along to contribute.
I agree it is like a hobby and a break from flying. It also gives us a chance to give back to the community and to improve the options available in WOFF.
4L0M, something weird just happened while I was using your mod. One of my flight members crashed and burned and the weird thing was there were two smoke pillars each going in the opposite direction. I didn't even think to take a screenshot at the time, so I'm sorry about that. Maybe this is something you can look into?
4L0M, something weird just happened while I was using your mod. One of my flight members crashed and burned and the weird thing was there were two smoke pillars each going in the opposite direction. I didn't even think to take a screenshot at the time, so I'm sorry about that. Maybe this is something you can look into?
Banjoman, I've seen the 2-smoke crash in vanilla WOFF, even pre-UE. I don't think it has anything to do with 4L0M's mod.
Reworked ALL Blood spatter effects for better quality, New night lighting effects, New Oil Slick, New debris textures, Significantly better alpha channels on all textures, New fireballs, Tweaked flak and improved Alpha channel, New spark effect.
All feedback welcome as it's a nightmare trying to see them all in game to test!
I'm not sure I like the little balls of dark yellow/grey emitting from the fireballs in the screen shots you posted. They just don't seem realistic to my eyes, but hey, that is just my opinion.
Hi Robert. Here is a (very poor) video of it in action.
I wouldn't normally record using fraps and panning with the hatswitch, but I just saw it was going to blow, so I quickly hit record, so apologies for the poor quality.
Basically, the little fireballs that you reference, are also annoyingly the flame texture when a plane catches fire, just used in a different context.
Even more annoying, is that these plane flames are also emitted as even smaller versions in some situations. As the base game is so old, and has no particle effect system like modern game engines do, the majority of effects appear to be just textures continually repeated to create movement. There are also a relatively small amount of textures to work with too.
Changing the texture for the small fireballs in the above Video has the knock on effect of altering effects in other areas, so it's a bit of nightmare to try and figure out how best to balance this out.
Quite a few of the textures even appear to be hand drawn, such as the roads on the map. I have just gone through the concrete roads, dirt roads, and paved roads and given them actual photo textures.
Same with a lot of the effects, and the actual .dds files are tiny (256x256px for a fireball in some cases etc) and I'm attempting to use High Definition photos of actual fireballs etc to replace all the hand drawn stuff.
It's still early days though, so I appreciate the feedback. Like I keep stating, trying to check everything I have altered in different daylight conditions, different planes/missions etc, is nigh on impossible, so any feedback is really helpful.
4L0M, do you think you could possibly remove the white foamy outline on all of the water surfaces? I was going to work on that myself, but you sound like you are much better suited for this kind of work than I am. Boy, if you could that would be awesome, those foamy outlines have always bothered me. Of course, this is just my personal preference.
I haven't had a chance to play WOFF or try your MOD due to RL issues. If you haven't already done so, are you able to separate your MOD, so I can choose which ones to install?
@Banjoman, I will have a look for you mate. No promises, but I will see what I can do. Got another minimod to sort out first, but I will look at the weekend.
@Oldhat, I could try and split the mod into different categories, but it would be further down the line as it would take me ages to keep updating individual packs as opposed to just the one at the minute.
NEW : All New Fire and Flame effect Replacers - 2x The Original reolution and Handmade from scratch.
With the new double resolution Flame and fire effects and my 4x Road Texture mod that I have been working on ( Not yet Included ), continually testing a run of quick combat of 20 v 20 planes in various weather conditions and maps VRAM usage has increased by about a measly 50mb. That's it.
Game with mod installed currently uses about 1.3GB of VRAM @1080p -60fps with 8xSQ and 2xSS enabled in Nvidia Inspector testing on an ASUS STRIX 970GTX.
With the new double resolution Flame, fire and smoke effects and my 4x Road Texture mod that I have been working on ( Not yet Included ), continually testing a run of quick combat of 20 v 20 planes in various weather conditions and maps VRAM usage has increased by about a measly 50mb. That's it.
Game with mod installed currently uses about 1.3GB of VRAM @1080p -60fps with 8xSQ and 2xSS enabled in Nvidia Inspector testing on an ASUS STRIX 970GTX.
This mod will not decrease FPS in any way on any modern-ish GPU with 1.5GB or more onboard VRAM.
4L0M the oil spatter is stunning and alone worth the price of admission. The pictures don't do it justice especially when the light hits it just right. For those still sitting on the fence see below for the light and shadow play on the windscreen:
The resolution is bumped up and very detailed. Great job 4L0M. On thing I noticed is that when 2 splatters overlap they start to flicker as in fighting which one should stay in front of the other. And it seems very colourful. I don't know what burnt oil looks like on glass in real life, but I wouldn't imagine it this "nice".
I haven't noticed any difference in flak when compared to stock and I still need to see the smoke and fire. Will report once I get to see these effects. Once again, great job and don't stop!
Hi Fullofit, first off, thanks for trying the mod. I noticed the double texture overlap once too, but only in about 10 hours of flying, I have thought of 3 different ways to possibly remedy this, one super easy, one easy, but time consuming and one that may be a nightmare,lol.
Hopefully I will sort this minor issue out in time. To be honest, I'm amazed with all our new hardware we can actually run a 14 year old game engine anyway, So I suppose anything else to try and enhance the experience is a bonus !
In regard to the flak, I have only tweaked it slightly by brightening the Initial implosion, Giving it a ( In my opinion ), a high quality real smoke texture image and rendering it at 512x512px instead of 256x256, and cleaning up the slight pixellation in the Alpha channel for a higher defined look when one explodes up close.
From the pics, the smoke effects look very nice. The fire effects look a bit brighter than default WOFF.
Would it be possible to make the fire look more like flames (instead of fireballs) and mix in a bit of trailing smoke in the fire textures so that they can gradually transition into the smoke textures?
I didn't know that splitting the MOD would make too much work for updating. Maybe you can consider it later.
4L0M the oil spatter is stunning and alone worth the price of admission. The pictures don't do it justice especially when the light hits it just right.
Agreed, Fullofit!
Hi 4L0M,
I know this is still a work in progress, so just some feedback. Take a bomber squad and heavily bomb a railyard from about 3000 feet. There's lots of stuff burning down there, vehicles (oil, gas, tires), warehouse goods, wood. etc. And the stock smoke colors reflect that with a mixture of white and black smoke, and multiple colors in between.
I'm running your v0.25 effects mod, and my squad bombed a railyard last night. The smoke was a homogeneous "tan" color like dust, even though we had just about everything on fire in the railyard.
Everything's looking great other than that from what I can tell!
Just thought I'd give some feedback while I'm thinking about it. I even circled the railyard thinking "I don't remember it looking like that."
Maybe I'm crazy, but I'm guessing some of these smoke effects are also being used for the destruction of ground objects?
I haven't seen the flak textures, yet, but remember that flak is very finetuned in the effectfile, to randomly spread and turn into mushrooms and other random shapes. Using different textures, different sizes etc. might prevent this effect to be displayed properly since the finetuning was made for stock textures (which are also new in UE btw.)
The oil looks great btw. Not sure if it shoudn't be more in brownish colours, like oil for motors usually look like (maybe merged with this colourful version) but it looks great.
Ok, I'm confused. I just downloaded yesterday version .30 and now I see that version .25 is the latest, so which is it?
My fault - I didn't spot the version 0.3 in the thread. I'll correct the upload just as soon as MediaFire allows me to download (only certain times I can do this for some reason)!!
All Windscreen Oil Effects darkened considerably as per suggestions - still retain translucent effect.
Stock Shockwhite Texture - removed pixellation.
Plane fire textures darkened as per suggestion.
All Smoke effects replacers finished?!? - 2x original resolution & Handmade from scratch.
NEW :
All new moon replacers - 16x higher quality moon replacers made from scratch (up from 64x64 pixels) - moon will appear to be half the size in the sky as it is currently in stock, no longer resembles Omnipresent Death Star. ( Considered experimental, as I'm having a hard time working out time and dates to view the full moon in game, etc, the two moon states that I have seen are working ). Please Please Please take a screenshot for me when the moon is out ! ! ! THANKS ! )
This mod will not decrease FPS in any way on any modern-ish GPU with 1.5GB or more onboard VRAM.
Glad to see an update. I really am liking this MOD and don't want to overwhelm you with suggestions, but am throwing ideas your way. This is more nitpicking, but if you can get rid of those nice round balls of fire/smoke, that would be great. I believe that in WW1 flak explosions were not nice round balls, but looked more like the picture below:
Hi there OldHat. I think I could change the textures to approximate the above. All suggestions are welcome, whether I can can achieve them is another matter, but I will try to give it a go. Any help you can give me with reference material like images of the flak etc is really appreciated. More the better really.
I have increased the brightness of the moon textures I have made for 4L0MFX 0_35 MOD as an additional download. Maybe you prefer the originals, but these are here for anyone who wants to try them.
Here is a woefully poor screenshot of the moon in game using the brighter moon textures posted below.
If we're nitpicking 4L0M, please don't use the terms "Axis" and "Allied" when referring to the Great War combatants. The terms you should use are "Central Powers" and "Entente" respectively. It's a little thing but as you are currently involved in amending little things ...
Very slick mod you have going here by the way - well done!
Nice variation 40LM thanks for all you do. To me working on WOFF so long they stand out as very saturated, they may look better with some desaturation to make it blend in better with the realistic landscape.
40.....so interesting to see the possibilities.....so great to see all of you carrying the the mods forward. And the JGSME dodge let's us see one or the original other.....thanks Devs for keeping an open mind!!
@Fullofit, I could make them all luminous green if you'd prefer?
RELEASE : 4L0MFX 0_45
Modified :
Tried Desaturation of Trees on Spring/Summer & Autumn sets as per suggestions.
See how you all like these ( Or not, lol ). Thanks for all the kind words by the way, I appreciate it.
I really love this sim, especially the terrain textures, they are outstanding. ( That's high praise coming from someone who has spent £500+ on Terrain textures like Orbx, GEX, Ultimate Environment etc for FSX/Prepar3d. This is probably the only sim ever that I have loved them "Out of the Box" as it were. )
It seems the snow cover on the roofs of buildings doesn't work on buildings defined in the facility files for aerodromes. It does however show up fine in towns and villages part of the overall WOFF world.
What do you think my batsman is doing when I am out fighting for God and Country--sweeping snow off the roof of buildings at the airfield, of course! We run a neat and tidy military operation here, mate!
Cheers everyone. The snow on roofs are only shown on "generic" buildings. If I added it to the other buildings they would show up in all weather conditions, so this is the best compromise. Better than nothing I suppose.
99% of Trees retextured on Spring/Summer & Autumn Textures.
Small Trees Retextured.
Bushes Retextured
GrayHorizon skybox - 2 x Higher Resolution skybox (2048x2048px) created in 16 BIT so no banding and zero light bleed - you will either like it or completely hate it, . - for testing.
Hi Robert, you may as well wait mate, that's fine. I have added another download link straight from my website, so hopefully an instant download through the forum, or a mediafire link as backup if the direct link doesn't work.
Updates come when I'm testing something or happy with something to upload. I can't put timescales on this I'm afraid.
Wowzers! Outstanding mod 4L0M, love being able to see the fall colours now. On the clouds, one thing I noticed when I was running your mod while working on my Bostraincourt update, the high wispy clouds look rather flat compared to the originals and compared to others you have reworked.
So......I have made a cloud mod as a seperate mod from my FX mod. The reason it's seperate is due to the fact that everything in my FX mod I have personally made from scratch, but the textures in the cloud mod have been ported and converted by me from something else. All 512x512px original clouds are now 1024x1024px, and currently contains 57 different clouds.
I have no idea what the rules on this forum are for such a mod, so if anybody wants to try it, I will upload it to my website and if you want to try it, PM me, and I will send you a link. Cheers.
I am definitely interested in what you have done with the cloud files. In fact, I am currently in the last stages of working on a weather mod, which will be in two parts. The first part will be a simple replacement of the OFFHistoricalWeather files for 1915 - 1918. The second part involves tweaking the types of clouds found in the WOFF weather folders (Good, Light, Medium, etc.). However, these are just text file changes, as I am a horrible artist. So, I would be very interested to see how your new cloud textures might look in my mod. Thanks.
BuckeyeBob, there is an existing weather mod already out there. I think ArisFuser did it, if I can find it I will send it to you and you can use it in your mod. I loved the mod, but the lightening strikes really screwed with the FPS, as a matter of fact, on my system the game would hitch every time lightening struck.
Edit: Just sent you a PM with the old weather mod.
I'll be honest... I wasn't going to try this mod as I didn't like the oil textures, but I broke down and got the latest. Just when you think there's nothing else one can do for the Sim, I was blown away. The tree colors and rain were great.
And now a sky mod in the future.... I don't suppose you could make foto relalistic trench tiles..I've been trying for years to no avail. Think thats the last thing that needs a big change.
Looks good 4LOM Is it just me or does the sky look a bit too caribbeanlike bright. Maybe it's just me, but for me it looks a bit too bright for northern france.
Did you take a look into the effects to make your new flak spread and turn into mushrooms etc.?
Looks good 4LOM Is it just me or does the sky look a bit too caribbeanlike bright. Maybe it's just me, but for me it looks a bit too bright for northern france.
Love the screenshots but I will second Creaghorns observation. I have no idea what northern France skies look like, but those skies colorations do look familiar to me and I live in Florida.
That said, your work is simply stunning so thank you!
There is mention of sky colors being too rich from other users, and I think the sky was a bit too dark for this F.2b noon flight, but it was a dark day. And I haven't seen v0.70 yet...so never mind!
Bucksnort, those are winter trees in your last shot. If you look closely you won't see any leaves on the trees except for the evergreens. The sky looks great to me.
Thanks to Panama Red graciously talking me through the various sky states, (it took me a while to grasp it, lol), it appears there are 5 different types of skyboxes we can currently use in game. I wondered if anyone knows whether this is hardcoded into the game engine, or could we make more for even more variety?
As for the sky colours, I can always change some of these, so feedback always welcome, cheers!
first off, thanks again for injecting some fresh and exciting elements into our beloved sim
...one issue that's been around forever is that occasionally, when you fly through a cloud, you see the flickering edges of it as sharp, defined lines. We're all totally used to it happening and they soon pass, but I wondered if by doubling the texture size we're going to see these edges half as often as before...? That's my twisted brain for you Anyhow I'd love to try out your new clouds!
Again thanks 4LOM for your continued work. A quick one if I may? Has your mod changed the rain effects? I'm seeing like vertical lines as rain compared to OBD,S original individual rain if you know what I mean..thanks pal
Yes, I changed the rain, I can't stand the flying through hyperspace effect of the normal rain in Cockpit view which is where I spend 99.9% of my time, bar taking screenshots.
I Tried to make it slightly more subtle. FSX is the worst for this. Just looks like you are continually flying through a fixed cone. I can't fly FSX/P3D without precipfx.
Yes, I changed the rain, I can't stand the flying through hyperspace effect of the normal rain in Cockpit view which is where I spend 99.9% of my time, bar taking screenshots.
I Tried to make it slightly more subtle. FSX is the worst for this. Just looks like you are continually flying through a fixed cone. I can't fly FSX/P3D without precipfx.
Thanks il spend more time later with your rain effects..I agree totally with you regarding FSX/P3D,thanks again mate
As I posted previously, this is just a fantastic mod all around!! I agree with other comments that on the screen shots posted, the sky blue does appear turquoise "Caribbean" blue.
The colour on the screen shots looks too turquoise, but it seems more realistic on my pc. I appreciate that computer setups have multiple variables and others may have a completely different experience.
I did a set of skybox mods for myself a while back, and spent a lot of time looking out the window to get the colors right. The color shift from darker blue at the zenith toward white as you get down near the horizon can be difficult to replicate convincingly.
I have removed the skyboxes from the effects mod, and made a seperate skybox mod.
I have basically made 50 new skyboxes, placed in 10 different folders, ie; Skybox1, Skybox2 etc, so you can choose one of the skybox folder sets in JSGME before you fly so you have more variety in game with easy implementation. Still tweaking it so no ETA yet.
Reduced "Foam" effect on water body shorelines by about 2/3rds.
First attempt at "Mushroom" Flak.
50 New Skyboxes split into 10 individual folders - IMPORTANT! Only have 1 folder activated at a time!
So, for example, activate 4L0MFX 0_75 mod. Then choose 1 Sky folder and install that. 4L0MFX 0_75 mod can stay activated all the time, but if you want to try a new skybox folder, use JSGME to de-activate the current Skyfolder before activating a new one.
Modified : Less saturation of Spring/Summer & Autumn Trees around airfields
I obviously haven't been able to test all skyboxes under all time and weather conditions, so if any really stand out as sucking badly, let me know which folder you had activated at the time and I will have a look.
Thx 40....these are really nice! Anybody have a short descriptor of what look is in what skybox/ Trying #1.....looks normal to paler blue....nice! here's #1 #2....a darker, deeper blue...pretty but more what I'd expect of an alpine sky instead of a Flanders one. I'll post pix too if that's OK w/ 40?....here's #2 here's #3....very dark, very deep royal blue #4...darker than 1, not as dark as 3....my fav so far.....close Palatinate blue #5....sky blue....pretty natural looking....I don't know....hell of a lot of blues out there #6.....looks like 5ish w/ a bit of green??? #7.....I'll be hornswoggled if I can tell what's different here, looks sort of like a midpoint between 1 and 5? #8....zowie, quite dramatic....a deep Yale blue w/ pale banding down low....cool #9.....a sombre almost menacing steel blue and finally....#10....looks pretty clean.....maybe the default....I'll up load a pic w/ no skybox just for interest no skybox....well, we're certainly spoiled for choice......thx 40....fun
That's a great idea, but until we can test them all and we are all happy they all work for everyone, then I will try and sort them in some kind of order. I just wanted some variety and this seemed like the quickest way to achieve it. Invariably there will need to be some sort of tweaking to be done, but this is just a first attempt.
The more pictures the better by the way mate, it really helps me to see what the mod looks like on other peoples machines. Cheers!
cool...do the skyboxes affect clouds, rain, etc......or just sky color? The colors I've put up are first shot on a cloudless day....and seem to change a bit w/ altitude and sun angle. I'm completely ignorant of what a "skybox" encompasses so if these are helpful...great. Meantime....what a choice!!! Many Thx
Your Skybox Mod in addition to the other aspects of this Mod..is just awesome!! The choices allowed now, to WOFF simmers because of this addition, is really "above and beyond" IMHO.
It seems that all those involved in the "Modding momentum" that is going on in WOFF UE at the moment, it at an all time high.
If you don't like them delete the 4 raina - raind.dds files in effects/weather folder before you activate the mod.
Thanks for all your work on this. I've not had a chance to fly much recently, got a bit in last night and I was enjoying the different sky's. I had one flight with rain and I too prefer the stock WOFF UE rain.
I think I am on v.70 of your mod. I understand how to revert the rain back should I choose.
Bucksnort, those are winter trees in your last shot. If you look closely you won't see any leaves on the trees except for the evergreens.
Ok, Banjoman, thanks! I couldn't quite tell from the pic I posted. I've been moving things all back and forth with all these airfield and landscapes mods, and then I fiddle with some of them, and then sometimes I wonder what I've done to myself and I have to start over!
Would you be willing to make an alternate set of your Spring/Summer trees like you have multiple versions of your Skybox?
When I bought my monitor, I remember the reviews said that it had a green color bias (I guess many low end and mid-range monitors have some form of color bias). But I never noticed it until I ran into these Spring/Summer trees
Your Autumn and Winter tree sets are gorgeous. I just can't get over your Autumn tree set. And I love how the extra color variation adds to the 3 dimensional feel of the ground view.
But on my monitor your Spring/Summer tree set is way too green. Or way, way, way too bright. The light trees are lime green, and the darker trees are emerald green. On my monitor it looks like I'm flying in Smurfland...lol
When you have the time, would you please consider offering a way radically less bright green Spring/Summer tree set. I can delete the Spring/Summer folders to enjoy the rest of this wonderful mod, but would sure like to see a less bright green version of your Spring/Summer set.
And then there's also that one bright green tree in your Autumn set. If you could include it in this request, that would be great. Its killing me...lol
@gaw1, no mate. You can keep the Skybox folders as they are. This is just an update to the effects mod. The numbered effects mod updates have no bearing on the skyboxes at all. They are completely separate entities.
Waters edge textures, added sand/dirt texture, cleaned up 7 of 8 Alpha channel lanes - 99% seamless.
ALL warehouses - New Higher definition roof textures
ALL generic buildings in the game (50+) - new higher definition and a lot more variation to textures for all roof textures including full sets for all seasons with snow added as appropriate
New high quality Crate texture at Factory
New 1910's Gauloise poster added to covered Factory Crate
You're a busy fellow 4L0M, thanks for all your work on this! One small thing, the sand along the river looks far more "tropical" than what you see in England, Belgium, or France. It should be a sort of medium grey with just a hint of reddish undertone, generally speaking.
One size fits all I'm afraid, there are no separate beach and river textures unfortunately, and the easiest place to test in the game was Dover, so this is a compromise.
One size fits all I'm afraid, there are no separate beach and river textures unfortunately, and the easiest place to test in the game was Dover, so this is a compromise.
Yep, that is the main downside - these coast/bank/shore textures are common for all water areas - sea beaches, river banks, lakes, ponds, etc. . So, that is quite difficult to make these textures that fit well for all above mentioned parts .
Despite being called the Ultimate Edition, WOFF UE just seems to keep getting better and better thanks to the incredible community we have. Awesome work 4L0M! Thank you!
Despite being called the Ultimate Edition, WOFF UE just seems to keep getting better and better thanks to the incredible community we have. Awesome work 4L0M! Thank you!
+1
I'd been away for a few months until recently, and UE + 4L0M's work continues to amaze and impress.
NEW : 3 Barracks buildings retextured roofs, retextured barracks 1 completely - all destruction states
Great stuff, 4L0M! I'm a big jabo guy, and I've been watching the building destruction getting better and better with each version/mission I fly
When you get a chance, could you take a look at the brick factory with the smokestack in the center of the "factory" target site. When you would completely destroy it it used to disappear. Now it just stands there undamaged even when your TAC tells you its destroyed. Maybe you could make it work better!
I checked out the "Brick Works" and you are correct that the model doesn't change when damaged. I looked at the textures for the 3 states of destruction for the model in stock Woff and the textures are exactly the same, they are all the same pristine building texture.
So, I have just retextured the Brick works, including two extra textures with damage affects and a "Completely wrecked" alpha channel for the destruction states like all the majority of the other buildings have, took a free flight at Dover in England with some bombs armed. Dover is the easiest place to test, as when you start a free flight here, if you instantly take a 90 degree turn left, you are only 1 minute away from 2 Brick works close together.
I dropped my bombs on the 2 Brick works, and all the other surrounding buildings show the damage textures, but the Brick factories are unfortunately still pristine, even with my new textures, so they must be missing the trigger telling the game to switch textures on this building.
If anyone knows where the damage state triggers are called from, I have already made the textures, so it could be a super simple fix possibly?
Brick Works retextures - All damage states now included - needs someone to work out where the trigger is to enable damage states on buildings before we can see the damage, but the textures are now done for this as they are missing in the stock textures.
All different tracer smoke now has actual smoke textures
Bullet tracer smoke - darker smoke texture, New alpha channel made with a smoke brush
New tracer rounds - Slightly Brighter, but a lot smaller - no more Star Wars Trench Run
Modified :
Darkened all fuselage oil spills ( meant to do this ages ago, but forgot about it ! )
IMPORTANT !!!!!! As I have modified the tracers, This WILL conflict with JJJ65's tracer mod. I would like to point out that I like his mod, and I have been using it myself, I will send JJJ65 a PM, to see if we can create a hybrid version.
This is an awesome mod that keeps getting better! I am also really liking the new hi res clouds. It's subtle but they seem to compliment the landscape better than the stock clouds. Amazing work, sir!
Brick Works retextures - All damage states now included - needs someone to work out where the trigger is to enable damage states on buildings before we can see the damage, but the textures are now done for this as they are missing in the stock textures.
All different tracer smoke now has actual smoke textures
Bullet tracer smoke - darker smoke texture, New alpha channel made with a smoke brush
New tracer rounds - Slightly Brighter, but a lot smaller - no more Star Wars Trench Run
Modified :
Darkened all fuselage oil spills ( meant to do this ages ago, but forgot about it ! )
IMPORTANT !!!!!! As I have modified the tracers, This WILL conflict with JJJ65's tracer mod. I would like to point out that I like his mod, and I have been using it myself, I will send JJJ65 a PM, to see if we can create a hybrid version.
Brick Works retextures - All damage states now included - needs someone to work out where the trigger is to enable damage states on buildings before we can see the damage, but the textures are now done for this as they are missing in the stock textures.
Hi 4L0M,
I missed this post...thanks so much for this!
Has anybody added this to the bug list or wish list (not sure which it is). If not, I'll post something asking to get the trigger turned back on. It had been turned on for most editions of WOFF, and since there were no grahpics for it, the Brick Works building disappeared when destroyed. So I'm guessing the trigger could be turned back on pretty easily if we let OBD know about it.
Hi guys. I would like to add a nice round version 1_0 to my effects mod and then I will likely knock Woff modding on the head and move on to something else, so if there is anything you want added, or anything needs fixing, please let me know, so I can get it sorted for a final version. Cheers!
4L0M, thanks for all the hard work. Any chance of "freezing" the lakes in the winter, or at least get some snow on the shores for winter textures? I don't think it's in right now. Is it in your power to make the planes that crash into the ground to burn? Currently I think they just leave a crater with no fire (just smoke). If not, maybe make a crater texture with the red embers? Probably won't see it from the air. Cheers!
Dornil, I can do that for you with textures, you won't need to edit any xml files. Any more requests, let me know and I will look to sort it out at the weekend. Thanks.
I don't want to appear critical of this fantastic mod. I've been extremely impressed with the improvements you have made, 4LOM. You've especially improved the coastline and riverbank textures. (These looks so, so much better now!)
However, I'm not the biggest fan of the rain textures. When I finally saw the rain in your mod, it seemed like thick molasses was slowly dripping from the sky. It just didn't look very realistic or immersive to me. Is there any way the rain could be more in line with PrecipitFX in FSX?
But, again, 4LOM, I don't want to appear critical. I'm extremely impressed by your mod overall.
I don't want to appear critical of this fantastic mod. I've been extremely impressed with the improvements you have made, 4LOM. You've especially improved the coastline and riverbank textures. (These looks so, so much better now!)
However, I'm not the biggest fan of the rain textures. When I finally saw the rain in your mod, it seemed like thick molasses was slowly dripping from the sky. It just didn't look very realistic or immersive to me. Is there any way the rain could be more in line with PrecipitFX in FSX?
But, again, 4LOM, I don't want to appear critical. I'm extremely impressed by your mod overall.
I echo this words from T3G,it's the only part of the mod where I keep OBD,S original textures
But I would like to extend my thanks for the incredible mod that you have given this fantastic sim,and this brilliant community.
Please keep us updated as to your new adventure and I hope to still see you popping in to see us lads from time to time Always my best regards Adger
Um... Now that we are talking preferences, I would dare to mention two things: 1) Trees. I know those have been tweaked for 100 times already, but it's more about personal preferences I guess. The current version a too bright and vivid to my taste (especially summer ones), I liked the ones from 0_70 version best. 2) Coastlines. Same thing - my favourite are from 0_75.
Probably you could just kindly provide directions on which files to swap with earlier versions? So that everyone could cater to their own preferences?
Hellshade - There isn't much that can be done with the flames unfortunately. As there aren't any particle effect physics in the game engine, Smoke & flames etc are just continually repeated flat 2d textures. The lack of particle physics is also the main reason why we can't have volumetric clouds either. In what way do you think they may be improved?
To be fair, it is a 14 year old game engine, and OBD and Ankor have worked miracles to get it looking as good as it does today compared to stock CFS3.
The_3rd_Guru - as above, the rain in game is just a continually scrolling 512x512px texture, so nothing like Precipfx (which I also personally use for FSX/P3D) is likely to be acheivable. I will look to see if I can do something better though ( I'm currently not happy with it either if it's any consolation ).
Dornil - Why did you have to mention the bloody trees again?!?! lol!
I have all 4 of my pc's hooked up to different HDTV's not monitors, so I wonder if that is why they look ok for me but oversaturated for other people?
I have been making the mod on my personally built "Steam Machine", which I like to call the "Tardis", due to the amount of crap I have managed to cram into such a small space. The Tardis is hooked up to a 55" 2015 LG Smart TV, and the saturation looks fine to me, but what I will do, is take one final pass at desaturating them, and then you can choose which one's to download, How's that?
I wanted to make a final pass on the shorelines anyway, as I have remade all of the alpha channels by hand and cleaned them up.
The reason I said I would give up modding WOFF is due to thinking of ideas of what to change, how to change it etc, so anymore suggestions, just let me know, Thanks !
If anyone is interested, The Tardis : ( Anybody who is OCD about Cable management should probably look away now............)
Tardis Spec :
Thermaltake Core V1 mini ITX Cube Case Z97E-ITX/ac Motherboard 16Gb Hyper-x 2100Mhz Ram 550watt Corsair PSU i5 4690k @ 4.2Ghz - H60 Watercooler Asus Strix 970 GTX 1 x Sandisk Plus 256Gb SSD 1 x Samsung Evo 850 256Gb SSD 1 x Sandisk Plus 480Gb SSD 1 x Samsung 1TB Storage drive 1 x Toshiba 4TB Enterprise drive
Sorry about bringing up the trees again:) It's really not about the monitor settings, but more like a general look. I try to elaborate: Don't know about France or Britain (especially 100 years ago), but where I fly now, the trees don't look brighter than the grass they are standing on. I am ok with bright trees in spring - they add a sort of "fresh" vibe. In autumn too - they are of different colors anyway. But in summer the trees shouldn't be much brighter than the terrain itself; shouldn't be darker either. Just my subjective opinion. Sorry again.
4L0MFX - 1_0 (JSGME INSTALL ) - uninstall previous version with JSGME first and then delete old mod folder before installing new versions
Changed : Final Tree tweaking (No really) - Desaturated Summer/Spring Trees, Desaturated Autumn Hi-Def Trees - suggestion from Dornil & Robert Wiggins.
NEW :
Rain effects completely reworked - similar to stock, but a lot more subtle, the closest in my opinion to any semblance of a precipfx style effect we can hope for by editing textures alone. It will be way too subtle for some, but I prefer this kind of effect than full on rain dashes everywhere. Hopefully doesn't look like it's clipping through your wing anymore. - suggestion from The_3rd_Guru
Snow build up on Winter full shorelines - suggestion by Fullofit
Hand painted colour replacement tool for the Ground texture tiles for Autumn, Autumn with Snow, Winter, Winter Light & Winter Medium. Made these Seasons less green and added a lot of brown grass/mud depth to the landscape. Left Summer/Spring and Winter Full Textures as stock for more variety. - Suggestion from Panama Red.
The trees now are just hitting the right spot, in my humble opinion. Especially the in autumn with those new muddy fields! Excellent! But the shoreline still looks a bit too wide and bright to my taste. I.e. it is more or less OK at the sea, but somewhat out of picture af far as it comes to the lakes. And the tracers - is it just my imagination, or they became smaller, less bright and generally less visible?
Hi Dornil. You are correct, the shorelines are too wide. I have made new alpha channels to rectify this already, I did it last week.................but can't remember where I saved them, lol. If I can't find them, I will remake them.
The new tracers I made are actually brighter than stock, but about half the length, they personally annoyed me coming out of some guns in cockpit view, they just looked too big, I have added a slightly larger, darker smoke effect to the tracers too.
I appreciate that you wanted darker longer smoke, I can upload a different texture for you if you want it all. Cheers!
Is it possible to make the rivers have the same water effects and the lakes and ocean?
Not sure what you mean mate? Do you mean animated?
Originally Posted by The_3rd_Guru
Originally Posted by 4L0M
Choo Choo !
4L0M,
This looks absolutely magnificent. For someone who seemingly announced his retirement, you sure are unusually busy!
Thanks. I basically make mods, software and stuff all the time as a hobby and said I was going to knock it on the head because I was running out of ideas of what to do next to be honest. Call it "Writers block" or something along those lines.
This is more good stuff 4L0M - I am really enjoying your clouds and effects mods.
On a recent Airfield attack... I actually saw tents collapse when hit enough.. not sure if that was your mod or not. First time I saw it and I said.. ah that's cool.
I was running out of ideas of what to do next to be honest. Call it "Writers block" or something along those lines.
Hi 4L0M,
All this looks fantastic! Here's a question/idea: I haven't been able to play lately, but at one time, many of the "added" buildings (I believe they are Geezer's) in Panama's detailed airfield mod didn't have damage models. They would smoke and burn, and then stand there looking perfect after they are destroyed. These buildings have become pretty much a static set, so I don't think they would be a moving target for you. Have you already, or is there a chance you could add damage models for these buildings. Your new damage models look great for the stock buildings, how about some for the Geezer models (if not already done)?
Thanks for all this! Maybe we'll keep coming up with enough ideas to keep you around on a permanent basis!
@Hellshade, Animated rivers could technically be possible, (Like the Thames in game for example), but someone would have to map where all the rivers were in game ( are they actually in real world positions on the map? I have no idea ). The current small rivers are Single textures only I'm afraid.
@Bucksnort, I would never mess with anyone else's mod without permission from the original mod author.
I would never mess with anyone else's mod without permission from the original mod autthor
I edited and imported those models from First Eagles into WOFF with Geezer's permission. He didn't mind as long as I gave him credit for the originator of the models.
Nice effect, but why do the roads look washed out?
I actually prefer the roads less noticeable as I have always found the cities or towns looking empty and break the immersion a bit ... and have been meaning to ask 4l and you others ... is there anything we can do 1 to make the cities 'fuller' with buildings etc, 2 with more varied buildings or at least building colors and 3 a bit more organic (which I think the washed out roads does a bit, at least for my taste) - just curious and as always thanks to all of you for the continued wonderful efforts!!! very very much appreciated cheers, Ron
Nice effect, but why do the roads look washed out?
They look like that to appear more natural compared to the surroundings, I made a rough and ready mask of the roads and slightly retextured them. The mask that I have made is the best that I'm prepared to do for the insane amount of time it would take to make pixel perfect masks of the urban tiles.
In reply to manitouguy,
1 :
I don't know what calls the buildings, but my guess is that they are allocated a space onto the urban/village tiles. While I'm sure you could add lots more for little to zero performance hit on our modern hardware, you may see them start to appear in odd places.
2 :
I could indeed make the building colours more varied, but as each building texture is only 256px x 256px including the roofs, chimneys etc, there isn't too much to work with, but I will look into it for you, no promises though.
3 :
Things looking more "Organic", is what I always strive for, there are obviously trade-offs here and there, and at the end of the day, everyone has different takes and tastes on the subject.
4L0MFX - 1_10 (JSGME INSTALL) - uninstall previous version with JSGME first and then delete old mod folder before installing new versions
NEW :
New lens flare textures
New textures for :
All 3 different train boxcars retextured - 3 different colours 1 each for British, German and Generic train cars.
New Retextures :
Train Flatcar A7V Tank 18 Pounder Gun British AA Gun Search Light ( Not the actual beam of light itself, Just the Model ) 77mm Gun German AA Gun MKA Whippet Mk IV Tank Renault Ambulance
( If you see any of these out in the wilds, Please take a screenshot ! Thanks! )
Optimised :
All tree lods are now finally the same size. Drastically, if not completely removes LOD pop-in on trees. This also reduces V-Ram usage, though this won't be be noticeable unless you are running seriously old hardware.
Wow, this is fantastic! Now with the the three clearly distinct train colors based upon country / neutrality, Train Strafing might very likely become a new hobby for me! Thanks 4L0M! This is truly awesome stuff.
Nice effect, but why do the roads look washed out?
They look like that to appear more natural compared to the surroundings, I made a rough and ready mask of the roads and slightly retextured them. The mask that I have made is the best that I'm prepared to do for the insane amount of time it would take to make pixel perfect masks of the urban tiles.
They look terrific in game. Those screenshots don't do it justice.
New subtle retexture for grass tiles, dirt, forests and urban areas for all seasons. You may like it or completely hate it, who knows? We will call V2 a beta version, as it frazzled my brain trying to remember which part of which season I had or hadn't retextured Let me know if you encounter any problems.
Can anyone else report faster, smoother texture loading, even on mission start, when using the V2 of 40LMs Ground Season Textures? Just wondering if it's placebo effect or things actually seem to run smoother. I didn't notice any tree popping either, but I didn't spend that long looking.
thanks 4l for the reply and info ... and more changes !! I didn't mean that your work, or OBD's was not 'organic' I simply meant I have often wondered how to make the cities feel a bit less static and geometric and sparse ... when I fly many of the buildings are not over the 'tiles' where roads end, by cities sometimes look empty ... is there a setting for that or are some villages simply not programmed to be fully populated over the 'ground map' .. I have all settings I can find maxed so have always wondered
4L0MFX - 1_10 (JSGME INSTALL) - uninstall previous version with JSGME first and then delete old mod folder before installing new versions
NEW :
New lens flare textures
New textures for :
All 3 different train boxcars retextured - 3 different colours 1 each for British, German and Generic train cars.
New Retextures :
Train Flatcar A7V Tank 18 Pounder Gun British AA Gun Search Light ( Not the actual beam of light itself, Just the Model ) 77mm Gun German AA Gun MKA Whippet Mk IV Tank Renault Ambulance
( If you see any of these out in the wilds, Please take a screenshot ! Thanks! )
Optimised :
All tree lods are now finally the same size. Drastically, if not completely removes LOD pop-in on trees. This also reduces V-Ram usage, though this won't be be noticeable unless you are running seriously old hardware.
Can anyone else report faster, smoother texture loading, even on mission start, when using the V2 of 40LMs Ground Season Textures? Just wondering if it's placebo effect or things actually seem to run smoother. I didn't notice any tree popping either, but I didn't spend that long looking.
I wish I could take credit for that, but I'm sure it's just a Placebo unfortunately mate.
RELEASE 4L0M CloudMod_2k_Set 2
All new cloud set 2k Vol 2 - Only have 1 cloud set activated in JSGME at a time if you also have my version 1 cloud mod ! ! ! ! ! ! !
The first set and the second set both use completely different cloud textures, so you can have more variety in game. Use one set, next time you play, deactivate that set and activate the other one for different clouds in game.
4L0M - You are probably right, of course, that the seemingly much faster and smoother loading of textures are a placebo effect but I do have to say that I flew multiple missions last night for both Germans and the Allies and every time, I had virtually no stutter on the initial loading of the mission. Normally I pause the sim, switch to an outside view and rotate around to load all the textures and then pop back into the cockpit and things run smooth from there. I didn't need to do that at all. Maybe a split second of texture loading and it was done and that was immediately after using your V2 of the Ground Scenery textures. Also, blue triangles when flying near the ground were almost non-existent. Has anyone else noticed that or did I just get a lucky 6 or 8 missions in a row?
This was one of the campaign dogfights, too. Great fun!
You make excellent videos Hellshade. Your energy management is really good too.
My favourite part of the video is right at the end, when you have been all over that guys tail, at one point almost close enough to reach out of the Cockpit and punch the opposing pilot, then your wingman just bangs a couple of rounds into him like, " Bloody hell, hurry up, I want to go home", lol.
No you mention the above, I seem to be getting very very minimal blue triangles now when fast panning, but I'm still convinced it's a placebo or something, who knows?
I noticed that due to simhq forums having weird layout based on date, their is no page 2 for mods section (at least on PC), which is pretty stupid, so any newcomer to the site can't see my mods. Apologies if this is frowned upon, but a lot of posts on the mods page aren't actually mods anyway, so I think it should be ok, Cheers!
I certainly don't have a problem with this since I love your mods. I've missed seeing you here on the forums, I'm hoping everything is going well with you.
Thanks for the kind words guys, I really appreciate it!
I am modding a bit at the moment....but not currently for Woff sadly. I can't stop flying in Prepar3D V4, it's absolutely awesome.
I ported the stock FSX Airbus A321 into P3D (literally just copying the folder in simobjects over) and it works flawlessly, but the Virtual cockpit is a massive eyesore, so I have been making some 4k Virtual cockpits for it :
Re: JSGME oddities since 4.12 update - 01/24/2110:13 PM
Originally Posted by tony2006
Safe to say this mod doesnt improve anything over PE?
I recommend running with the PE ed. of WOFF only mods. that are labelled as PE-compatible, by the mod-developer/tweaker. A fairly thorough list of the latest mods. is available under this post, by Becker (https://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/4509912/release-of-mods-where). Also, my GPU Tuner mod and all FM mods are compatible both with the UE and PE eds. of WOFF. As far as I know, the "effects mod" by 4L0M is only for the UE ed. of WOFF.