WWI Zepplin Is Landing

[kdriver]

That is strange with the downloads. I can email if you like. Any other suggestions?

[CrisGer]

kdriver can you e mail me the file and i can try to check it out and put it into the first post of this thread?
Your posted zip is corrupted in the download .....

thanks for the work on this. I see the file has gotten larger did you add new textures or sound files? thanks again. I will PM you my addy.

for now we have restored the download in the first post with the corrected version ..that R66C did very kindly for us. Hopefuly I can get a Naval skin done for this beast as well as I want to set up some WWI naval campaigns going and I am working to get CFS2 ships to fire at each other and do damage so we can at least do Jutland and Dogger Bank and the Zep raids on the UK. Sorry to have taken so long to get the original file back up.

[R66C]

Talking about fixes - I'd tested this beast as AI-driven one, on stock CFS2 terrain (one of German airbases, taken from original CFS, can't remember which one exactly). Good thing that our friend AI can handle this on takeoff, with some issues, but still, he can. Bad thing is that I still can't figure out how to fix that non-colliding parts.
And talking about Naval campaigns - as far as I know, in at least two of Alexander Belov's addons for FS2k4 you can find many nice WW1 ships (Zenta class cruisers, torpedo boats, even U-boats). As far as I understand, is that possible to convert them from scenery BGL's to MDL's with corresponding .DP's and .CFG's? Maybe I'll try to contact with him about this little idea. Will see.

[CrisGer]

that would be great to have, we need torpedo boats very much, i was going to re texture a WWII ship but having a actual WWI model would be wonderful. Zeta too. I dont have any of those if you can find them and send me examples it would be great. I can re texture as not many people know that most of the torpedo boats of WWI were painted black from all navies for low visitiblity and night action.... thanks a lot.



High Seas Fleet Torpedo Boat flotilla

[R66C]

Check your mail, I sent some nice screenies from that addon for FS2k4 that I was talking about.

[CrisGer]

wow, remarkable. ah, those are for FS2002? i have that but did not know there were naval updates.

[simonu]

for now we have restored the download in the first post

Thanks for sorting that out Chris.
I happen to notice the eyepoint seems too high in the aircraft.cfg

[Views]
;eyepoint=246.6,0.000000,6.3         ;value in download
eyepoint=246.6,0.000000,2.3          ;value to see interior model from helmsmans eyepoint

[Tboomer57]

I suppose this has been discussed..............

I downloaded, but haven't tried it yet


http://www.simviation.com/cfs2aircraft18.htm

[simonu]

That is a great pack Tboomer57, I was thinking of mentioning it myself.
I like the way he did the parasite aircraft recovery.
The mother is actually a ship, a carrier with a tiny invisible landing platform right under the recovery hook. The parasite fighter has "superflaps" that enable you to fly the plane at the same slow speed as the Airship. It is still a tricky landing. The player flyable version of the airship is scaled down a bit. The history of the American Airships is fascinating
Attachment 26435Attachment 26436Attachment 26437 Attachment 26434

[TARPSBird]

The Akron/Macon package is a lot of fun. I almost think it's more challenging to trap aboard the CFS2 versions than it was the real ones. :d

[CrisGer]

Thanks Simonu for that eyepoint fix, i will test it out and add it to the download with thanks....great to have all the help fixing this beast

ys i knew of that pack, it is great, a bit later in period than the Zeps..but I do enjoy all the airship history and details. Sadly the US airship fleet suffered disasterous losses that doomed that arm of the service except for the non rigid blimps which were active all the way up to my own youth, i remember them well flying from Lindberg Field in San Diego, droning across the blue California sky.



German Naval Zepplin over the High Seas Fleet at Sea



Over the Fifth Battle Squadron



A Sister Zepplin in the Surveillance Airship Squadron

A problem i am having is getting far enough away from the player aircraft to get a decent screenshot, the external camera is too close to the airship..is there a fix for this? We need a lot more distance for a ship of this size.

[simonu]

Use chase view. it zooms out further you can also chase other units in the mission and so get a view from the ships. Chase view is CTRL+F4 (CFS2Combat Keymap) or C (FS/CFS1 Keymap) TAB cycles through mission units.

[CrisGer]

ah ha, thank you.... much appreciate that. :salute:

[Captain Kurt]

Thanks for reloading in the first post. I was finally able to get it and open it.

[CrisGer]

Good, glad to hear that Captain. let us know if you find any bugs.. we have tweaked the CFGs...as is permitted by the original author, he gave us the file set to use as long as we keep all the contents..but we are allowed to tweak and improve. So enjoy and do let us know if you find any improvements. I may try to improve the external texture of the gas bag as it is a bit plain, ie a large flat gray area....but that will have to come when there is time.

Also operational units has unit or id numbers and that may be something to add too. Machine gun nests were added to the top frame as well..they must have been pretty cold in those positions.

I still wish they could have managed parachutes for those lads.

[R66C]

Well, I just got an answer from Alexander Belov, and he agree on conversion of his objects into both BGL-libraries and ship MDL's.

[tonybones2112]

Friends, I ain;t had the time to look through this thread, what's the word on the L-44? I have it, someplace, but lost interest in it when I found you can fly right through it and the only way you can destroy it is to hit one of the gondolas. Has there been an update?

Thanks

Bones

[CrisGer]

Well you can check out the download in the first post of this thread...and see, we have made some changes with the permission of the creator...and will be happy to look into further fixes. There are no other Zepplins available for CFS2 other than a payware from an old old add on set, and this one has the most promise. If there are things that need fixing this is the place to post about it..if we need to improve the dp then that is something to go on the list. :salute: that is great news R66C and very nice of him to give his consent.

I am trying to remember what needs to be changed for conversions...texture format maybe and some other things i am sure... maybe Colin can help us with the ship conversions.. that will be great to add those lovely ships that Belov made to the CFS2 Fleet. And the Sheds are sorely needed for accurate Zepplin missions for they were the sortie start and end point for all the Zepplins in the war and a target for bombing missions by the allies.

[tonybones2112]

Cris, thank you. I love this L-44 and my favorite thing I'd want to do flying WW1 would be blimp busting, glad you all are working on it, I'll take some time and look through the threads. The missus here is not well and I keep a pretty close eye on her.

Tony

[simonu]

I just took a look at the L63.
The model converts very nicely with no need to fix any animations.
Because it is painted black and has no shiney parts there are no issues with texture format.
Only the flight model needs work, I'd suggest using the L-44 flight model and combat model. They are ready to go and the two airships are more or less the same size.
Now for some details The L63 has no LOD models but is only 10516 polygons.
The L44 has three levels of detail the highest being 23120 polygons the lowest 4428 polys.
You can figure the balance and effect on frame rates.
I also took a look at the adriatic scenery pack.
You cant use it directly but the scenery is old style FS2k2 coding so those scenery bgls could be scasm hacked into ship models. Once again there is no levels of detail but they are quite lo res.

[Captain Kurt]

ClassicBritishFiles.com also has an airship base scenery for download. It is the John McKeon scenery for Fs9 of the Cardington Airship Station in Bedfordshire where R-100 and R-101 were moored mentioned earlier in this post. It has sheds, a mooring mast and a static R101. There are 2 files, the base and an update. I don't know if someone could convert these to CFS2 but they look really good.

http://www.classicbritishfiles.com/i...derby=2&page=2

http://www.classicbritishfiles.com/i...derby=2&page=3

[CrisGer]

Somewhere there is an observation balloon for WWI of the type that both sides uses...was it AeroCrates? not sure..i dont recall..but hopefully it will turn up too. That is good news about the L 63, yes some of the night raider zeps were painted black...and i see there is one of that ilk in the zep shed that Mr Belov did.... that will be a good addition. I would think the cfgs will work out if they are the same size... I am testing maneuvering them as a fleet, so far there were some funny activities by a few fleet members but overall i think it will work.... have to try the damage model out and see about that next.

Captain those sheds from the UK base are great, they would work if we cant convert the zep sheds that Mr B did, the German sheds were a bit different in design..we have a pic earlier in this thread...straight sides is the largest diff but they would certainly work. Those were certainly engineering marvels for that time and technology.

AIR RAID ON NAMUR PLEASES LONDON; Retaliatory Attack on Zeppelin Sheds Approved Amid Discussion of Home Air Defense. SOME THINK IT IMPROVED Others Think Every Aircraft That Visits England Should Be Brought Down.

Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES. ();

August 27, 1916,

, Section , Page 5, Column , words

LONDON, Aug. 26. -- The bulletin issued today by the Admiralty of the British aeroplane attack on the Zeppelin sheds, near Namur, was generally hailed with satisfaction as in line of the "defensive offensive" policy advocated by the majority of air experts, whose views have received most pub licity in the popular newspapers.

here is an interesting revolving zep shed:



and the more normal type:




the Zep sheds at Nordholz, L48 shared the shed in the distance middle with L 42

In late 1914, the first long-range air attacks were undertaken by the Royal Naval Air Service against the Zeppelin sheds in Cologne and Düsseldorf. The German airships were a menace to British shipping and a threat to British cities. The inspiration behind the attacks was the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. British seaplanes were based in the Channel to protect the waterway and to shorten the distance to Germany. The attacks proved effective and continued into 1915. That year the Admiralty developed plans to attack German industry as well, but they were suspended in the spring of 1917. Churchill was always an enthusiast for bombing and aerial attacks on German industry were approved a few days after he became Prime Minister in May 1940.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/mosl...#ixzz19SQtiIz4

I think this is the destruction of LZ37 over Belgium by an RAF pilot

Since the destruction of these sky monsters was spectacular due to the gas I imagine we could include some of the special effects that ghostpony and others developed to make it accurate.

maybe we can sneak in a few parachutes.

[CrisGer]

I found some sheds: already for CFS2 dont know how good they are...

CFS2 WW1 SCENERY ww1 zeppelin base ..at the trenchs Two WW1 air strips with refuelling zeppelin surrounded by trees. and a large system of trenchs APPEARS IN AIRFIELD MENU.AS WW1/aer zep made with fssc . macros by martin wright (and myself via EOD) and trench textures by norman turner ..........Chris Benson. 263K


http://www.simviation.com/cgi-bin/sy...s&file=zep.zip

and WWI Trenches front line and 14 air bases with refueling for both sides here:
AIR World War One scenery for CFS2. Included are 14 airfields 7 German and 7 allied (13 have refueling areas) also a multiswap mission to put flak over the trenches get cfs2 multiswapper from raf662.com I know there was no adf in ww1 but i put in ndb's anyway (in case you get lost!!) Amiens 200 Auxi-le-Chateau 201 Bertangles 202 Bruay-eu-Artois 203 Cachy 204 Cambrai 205 Cappy 206 Douai 207 Lagincourt & Favreuil 208 Lille 209 Noex-le-Mines 210 St Quentin 211 St Pol-sur-Ternois 212 Hopefully I'll be able to improve it later (railroads,roads etc) but I've had enough for now!!! Steve Richardson. 1.7MB

http://www.simviation.com/1/download...fs2scenery.zip

[R66C]

Okay, just tried to make a "fast" conversion (MDL only) by myself. Still, I'm a newbie in MCFS2 coding, so the visual model didn't showed up properly.
Source file was NorthSea-5.bgl from Zeppelin_Bases_2 (1 object, lightship, to be more exact).
So I changed the start of file, added some of SCASM related stuff:
Set( BUF 4096 )
Set( LABELS 9000 )
Set( PATCHES 9000 )
Set( LINBUF 8192 )
Set( MAXPTLST 3000 )
Set( FSVERS 0x0800 )
and deleted this:
LatRange( N53:25:56.73 N53:31:20.70 )
Then, compiled that with SCA296 and converted into MDL by means of umdl.
After decompilation of the file, I got message about 11 Unknown BGL opcodes.
Talking about the start of decompiled file, it looks like this:
Set( RAW 1 )
Set( BUF 4096 )
Set( LABELS 9000 )
Set( PATCHES 9000 )
Set( LINBUF 8192 )
Set( MAXPTLST 3000 )
Set( FSVERS 0x0610 )

Area( R )

Perspective
RefPoint( nsi :[ -124 ] 0x04 v1= 0 v2= 20 )
;uName: uOffset: 0x90
IfVarAnd( :L0010A6 0x90 0x08 )
VFileMarker( 100 )
;uName: uOffset: 0x68
IfVarAnd( :L0010A8 0x68 0x8002 )
Call( :L0010C0 )
RefPoint( nsi :[ -152 ] 0x04 v1= 0 v2= 20 )
SetScaleX( :[ -164 ] 0 0 7 )
PBHCall( :L001156 0x1C )

So, can anybody tell me about some errors in this?
Thanks in advance.

[CrisGer]

I found the full file set for the L 44 which includes an extra skin with camoflage (not sure of the accuracy but it is nice to have an additonal resource) and some additonal working files..i will get it uploaded and restore the link for it tomorrow/today...as i was up all night working on projects...but soon. Just glad i was able to find it, Cody was kind enough to share it with us as earlier posts will indicate and now we can restore that link.:salute: