FINELLY, putting the Alpha/Virt RF-4 (Pack 3) to bed.

[Sbob]

For folks like Frank who have known me for a long, long, time- my FS Nemisis aircraft has always been Alphasim's Phantom pack for FS9.
It was bad enough getting the first two Packs to run in FS2002 (which I did if anyone wants to convert them) but Pack 3 had some special pains in FS9.
To be fair, the Phantom was Alphasim's most complex aircraft in terms of MDL construction for quite some time. Another way to think of this was that they managed to cram 45 pounds in a five pound bag.
The last hassle I had to deal with was kind of bizarre, both the stock RF-4 and all of my RF-4 repaints had a bad habit of causing my ground textures to blur after a couple of minutes in the external views. It was really strange because the only way to get the ground textures back in focus was to switch to another plane.

I finally figured it out today. If your ground textures turn into mashed potatoes and go blurry, load the texture folder into DXTBmp and verify that ALL of the textures are in DXT3 format.
There are some really small texture files at the top of the folder that I always figured weren't a problem but were really saved as DXT1 textures. Just load then save them as DXT3's and your ground textures will thank you. For repaint textures saved as 32-bit, its your call but DXT3 works best on my system.

A couple of other small changes, the wheel brakes are set way too high. Find your [brakes] section in the aircraft.cfg file and change it as follows:

[brakes]
toe_brakes_scale=0.7752
parking_brake=1

This will give you a normal brake feel at taxi speeds but you'll get some fade as the speed increases. This brake setting is common for all three Packs.

The last item that needed work was engine smoke. As far as I know, the RF-4's didn't produce a lot of smoke but the auto-smoke "switch" in the panel's CAB file doesn't work at all.
If you have a ton of Alphasim or Vertavia aircraft installed, you should have a gauge called Alpha_exh_smoke2 in a folder inside your main Gauges folder named "Alphasim".

Make the following change in your panel folder(s) in the [Vcockpit01] section of your panel.cfg file:

gauge02=alphasim!Alpha_exh_smoke2, 1,1,1,1

and this will turn on the auto smoke effect when you bend the throttles.

[Sbob]

Meanwhile, work is going quickly (now) fixing some small texture (alpha) issues for things like gear oleos that are metallic and not black (this is mostly for the rear gear legs) and adding some newer engine and 'burner effects.

This has been an off-and-on (mostly off) project since the "Three Pack" went freeware and it feels good knowing I'm down to the last ten yards.