DD_Arthur

This is what happens when you have family stay for the week!

It's Spring! This morning my lawn is indeed lime green!! Lets see, Stonehenge is about seventy miles up the road from me, the Caucasus must be around three and a half thousand miles from me - and possibly in another continent - about the same distance as St. Johns, Newfoundland - so yes; it could be something in the water lol!! I had to drive past Stonehenge twice last week. It stands on a chalky meadow on the southern part of Salisbury Plain overlooking the A303, the main road to the west. Grass was...well, greeny as usual Thirty-two years ago I was at University in London. I did a spot of part time motorcycle courier work to keep the cash coming in too. In my second year I had a couple of lectures on a Thursday morning and then zilch until a tutorial on Monday afternoon. My mum lived in Devon - about one hundred and fifty miles away - and had recently been widowed. She was struggling with this; we all were and I was the nearest and most available of her sons. I discovered the courier firm I worked for had a job no one wanted to do - which made it a very lucrative job; pick up a wages tape from the offices of Barclays bank in west London before five o'clock on a Thursday afternoon and deliver it to a block house type building on an industrial estate just outside Exeter - in Devon - by midnight. By the most direct route this was one hundred and fifty-seven miles and you'd end up on the other side of the country late on a Thursday night with the prospect of a long and unpaid trip back to London. Thats why no one wanted to do it. However, for me it was perfect; a nice little earner and a long weekend at home with mum and seeing friends. I had a Suzuki GS850 with shaft drive, fixed panniers, a howling Yoshimura four into one and a nice big five gallon gas tank. The worst part of the business was the trip down to west London for the pick up and out onto the M3 motorway during afternoon rush hour traffic. After a couple of weeks I discovered the bank office was manned twenty four seven by their security staff. I could ignore the afternoon deadline for pick up and scoop it up around seven p.m. and avoid the evening traffic. As you leave the M3 motorway and join the A303 you pass a large green traffic sign that says 'The South West'. I love this sign. To me it says beaches, sunshine, rolling green hills, friends and family. It was also the point where I really opened the taps on my big GS and settled in for my own personal TT race across southern England. These days the A303 is largely a straight piece of anonymous dual carriageway but back then it was mostly a hundred and twenty miles of sinuous two-lane black top snaking westwards across the counties of Hampshire, Wiltshire, Somerset and Devon. Through the Spring I'd do the trip non-stop. As long as I dawdled down and out of London I had enough gas in the tank for the whole trip. If you wound the big GS up through the gears and then held it at around one hundred mph you'd get 'er down to around twenty - twenty five to the gallon!. After the summer break I took this job up again and as autumn set in I fitted a bikini fairing from a GS1000S which surprisingly helped with fuel consumption, the small screen helped to deflect wind blast too. I also fitted an (illegal) 85w halogen bulb into the big headlight for the onset of winter. I took to taking a thermos flask of coffee and some sandwiches with me and breaking the journey. A GS850 is not the lightest nor most nimble of motorcycles at around 550lbs but that sheer mass gives a certain planted feel to front and rear tyres. If you know the road you can get into the groove of things...if you know what I mean. No speed cameras and no radar back then either. Stonehenge marked the midway point on my journey. At night, and at speed you would come off that short section of dual carraigeway called the Amesbury bypass and follow that white line into a fast right-hand bend before the road briefly straightened out over the crest of a hill. Then at the moment you started to lean it into the following down hill left-hander you'd get a brief glimpse of the stones on the rising meadow a couple of hundred yards away. A minor road branching off to the right went up a gentle hill to make the northern field boundary. I ignored Stonehenge. I'd usually stop for coffee and a cigarette in a protected layby a couple of miles further up the road. One bollock-freezing, crystal clear night in late October I came hammering westwards past Amesbury at around a hundred and twenty. There on the left was a reflection of tail lights which rapidly grew into a blue and white Rover SDI of the Wiltshire Constabulary parked up at the side of the road. Oh shit. Sure enough, as I howled passed his lights came on and I knew he'd want to pull me. There is simply no point in trying to outrun the rozzers on a motorcycle. It can only end in pain of one sort or another. Much better to hide! As I crested the hill I knew they'd only just got their Rover going so I went straight on up the minor road to the stones on the right, switched my lights and engine off and coasted into the Stonehenge visitor centre car park. There was no other traffic around but I got to see the headlights of a fast moving car heading west along the A303 away from me. Phew. I broke out the coffee, sarnies and had two cigarettes. From then on I always stopped at the stones for a break. The visitor centre was surprisingly grotty and closed. If the car park was empty I'd climb over the chest high fence and have my little picnic in the dark, sitting amongst the stones and watching the occasional passing traffic below and listen to the slumbering sheep that also occupied the field. Christmas came and with it a three week break at home. The second Thursday evening in January saw me pull up as usual in the car park. I noticed the fence now had a length of barbed wire running along the top but since it was still chest high it hardly presented an obstacle. The sheep were gone. I'd just sat down amongst the stones when I saw a pair of headlights come on directly to the south by a stand of trees. Around a half a mile away. It was just after nine at night and I watched these lights trundle leisurely towards me along a track in the fields. They crossed the A303 and headed up the minor road and did a sweep of the car park. I thought about the new barbed wire on the fence, the absence of sheep and realised I was about to get nicked. Sure enough, the headlights belonged to a little white van marked 'Department of the Enviroment Security' from which emerged what turned out to be a nice man in uniform who escorted me off the premises. Luckily thats all he could do as he had no powers of arrest! He also explained that when I jumped the fence I'd set off an alarm and by walking over to the stones I'd triggered two pressure pads. Ah well, all good things must come to an end. Infact, not long afterwards the job itself came to an end when they started sending the contents of the tape down a telephone line. Apologies for this rambling nonsense having bugger all to do with DCS.

And a hotfix too. Now have version 3.002b

I came, I saw, I registered - just and it produced a coop for me which I put in the coop missions file in BoS and Hey Presto! It freakin' works https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/36002-cooperative-mission-generator/?tab=comments#comment-606355 Still no slots available for breathers to fly for the opposition but pretty simple to generate a coop with plenty of options.

Did the meta-shaders and f-something folder delete and the game does indeed run better than before This is running on deferred shaders off; On my system it's ok but not a huge improvement visually on 1.5. Overall performance not as good imo as 1.5 either. Combat up high not too bad but down low looks er............. Now with deferred shaders on and an approach to landing; Game looks fantastic at these settings but is noticeably poorer in performance. Conclusion; although I think there is considerable room for optimisation of 2.5 - which I've no doubt the DCS team will eventually manage - I DO need a new system to get the most out of DCS.

Perhaps the best way forward would be to establish who is available on which evenings - or days - first? Forget about which sim to fly at the moment. Would it not be better to establish availability first? For instance; we can see that a Thursday night is not on for Sid and Crash. Perhaps they - and everyone else - could post which days they are available. Once we have that sort of information to hand we can work out when we do what to most peoples satisfaction? I would also suggest that Sunday evening remains OUT of the discussion. Sunday evening still remains well supported and is obviously a good time for all those Dogz who enjoy IL2 1946 and should not be touched. Personally, when it comes to flying this is fine for me as Sunday evening is one of the few nights I cannot go near my PC. Can I just stress that it would be very useful if everyone could post this information - regardless of what they fly at the moment. So for myself; any evening - bar Sunday - is convenient.

I tried to do it myself but was unable (see below) and I thought you'd enjoy doing it I did say I was a f#&*wit. We need to look in more depth around how to generate missions. I know it can be done. I can do it with PWCG but you get one-sided missions. There seems to be no ability to have human opposition as the enemy a.i. are spawned during the missions; therefore there are simply no enemy planes to be filled with breathers at the start of the mission. Does that make sense? I'd like to hear other peoples experience with mission generation.

Technically, yes we could run a dedicated server at the moment but it would be a dogfight server only and there seem to be plenty of those up anyway. At the moment the Dserver will not run coop missions. By 'rotating coops' do you mean a server permanently up that hosts continuous coop missions? If so this is not technically possible at the moment. Like IL2 1946, IL2 BoX needs a host to run coops. Could we put up a server that has a.i. aircraft running and aircraft available at airfields that can be flown by humans i.e; like our CLoD server? Yes to this too BUT the amount of a.i. flying around would be drastically smaller than the amount that can be programmed into CLoD. We'd need a dedicated box for this. Here's link to JimTM's excellent manual on the ME and setting up the Dserver; https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/26303-il-2-sturmovik-mission-editor-and-multiplayer-server-manual/ Also, a link to the server commander software Coconut has developed for his server; https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/21264-release-sturmovik-server-control/ When it comes to coops BoX and IL2 1946's system of doing things seems pretty familiar and I think it's surprisingly easy to host coops on our own machines. It must be - I've been doing it and I'm a f#%*wit when it comes to this stuff. Any of us who have the game can do this. The important thing seems to be a decent internet connection. Do we have a need for this? I think certainly yes - for us as a squad. As we get more experienced with it we could host for the general community in a UbiZoo coops style too. What we lack at the moment is content. People are making dedicated coop missions now the game has this mode. What they are tending to do though is make them for Battle of Kuban at the moment as it's the latest and greatest. This isn't too much of a problem as all maps can be accessed in multiplayer. We just simply need the ability to edit the planes to give us a set that everyone can fly - i.e, from the Battle of Stalingrad planeset.

OK; Vander uploaded new missions which should work correctly now. Links and uploads amended accordingly. Jabo; can the files for this in the vault be deleted and replaced by these? SYN_Cooperative_Kuban_v4.zip

Still no go with Vander's coops tonight. Both WingFlyr and Perf were getting File Transfer error messages. I'll edit my post but I think they should be pulled from the vault too. I've let Vander know. Edit; Remember, you can launch and play them as a single player in coop mode but other people will not be able to join you.

Must be pretty desicated after three decades?

I thought I'd start this thread in an effort to see what we've all got between us in the way of BoX coops so far. I've been hosting these made by Tx_Tips TipsCoOPs Pack One.zip TipsCoOPs Pack Two.zip These are fairly straightforward missions with er...brief briefings but some planes have an airstart option. They contain Stalingrad and Moscow maps and plane sets. I've also got these made by SYN_Vander which are in effect a mini campaign for the Kuban map. https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/30922-the-syndicate-corner/?page=3 With the exception of mission #4 they all contain at least one type of aircraft from the BoS planeset. They also come with a full brief and mission map. The BoX coop system seems to work very well - once you've got your ports sorted.. I've made a video and posted it in the rough and ready guide about hosting coops but briefly; download these into C:\Program Files (x86)\1C Game Studios\IL-2 Sturmovik Battle of Stalingrad\data\Multiplayer\Cooperative start the game in online mode, click on multiplayer, select coops and then click on create server. You should then see and be able to select these missions in your coop folder. When you launch the mission you are actually putting a coop up but you will be able to fly these missions on your own. I wonder if this is a way for those Dogz who only have Battle of Stalingrad to have a play on the Kuban and Moscow maps at their leisure? In theory this should work as the game is being launched in multiplayer mode where all maps are available? What we really need to be able to do is edit these coops in the mission editor and replace the Kuban planes with Stalingrad planes so we can have as many Dogz participating as possible. I know this is doable using the editor, I'm just a bit stumped as to how at present Also; linky to section of the BoS forum where these - and others - are being posted https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/forum/113-multiplayer-missions-co-op-and-dogfight/ Any other coops people have - especially those succesfully generated using the campaign system or PWCG - please don't hesitate to post them here SYN_Cooperative_Kuban_v4.zip

Detcord - not the most prolific but certainly the most talented skinner in BoX at the moment - imho https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/30152-dets-hangar/