FoolTrottel

Today's mission, low level on our way to France ... Do note the altimeter, I did set it to zero on T/O ...

Today's mission, low level on our way to France ...

Thanks, installed it, appears to be working okay...

Speak for your self darling you git !

Never knew/realized it was you that lured him into our group Todd! Thanks for doing that ... not just for us, but mainly for him! And thanks for sharing these messages ...

Thank You! ChkSkins users: delete the file from your skins folder, then run ChkSkins to download the later version ... (yeah, there's no version / date-time check in ChkSkins, so .. too bad ...)

From today's mission, it started early morning On our way back ...

Done!

Fixed now!

Downloaded it, and used ChkSkin to make it available to others ...

Oh my... Today, we took part in another one of the missions in this campaign. And... this really is something different, and something very special. Is it hard? No, not really, but you need to be focused. And stay focused. And get the job done. This one mission, this was a sweep/recce over France, North of Paris. And we did sweep and recce. Over France. As we did not come across any enemy aircraft during our designated route, we attacked ground targets, where at some point, White leader (the one leading our section: Fenrir, Wingflyr, Painless and FT) decided to fly over the target and draw flak, so Red section could attack it. And yes, rather unhappy being number four, like WTF! But, as it's your job, you go and do so. Somehow, we all four got out of that kinda okay. And next, even made some attack runs ourselves. Now as I forgot to switch to the slipper tank on the way in, and only did that after the French coast had been in sight for a while, I was the first one to call out an RTB due to fuel state. Way too late mind you, cause I had the English coast in sight with like 2 Gallons remaining. I did not make it back, as I also had a different kind of liquid related emergency, and I had to be away from the controls for a bit, and my Spitfire wasn't trimmed as well as I had hoped it would be, so I ended up in the drink... all dead and shift. One out of seven Spitfire pilots one had to bale out due to fuel, one crash landed in a field on the Isle of Wight ... the others made it back, and all were low on fuel. Mind you, some ground targets were destroyed ... but in this stuff, it's not about the kills ... it's all bout the experience. The immersion. A huge difference from our GBS sessions - where we think 45 minutes is a long mission? Well... this one took two hours. But due to the environment, the setup, the immersion, you do not notice that, you do not feel it. After I was done for, I looked at the clock, and was like... eeerrmmm .... What? Really? For sure one could argue GBS has better graphics, and looks better all around, and Cliffs has the Hurricane and the 110 (well, at some time at 20K over the channel today, somehow I wished I was in a docile and stable Hurricane in close formation - lol) and a flight model "feeling" a bit better, this DCS thing combined with the SRS radio module, and the discipline of radio silence just beats them. It really does. Mind you, I enjoyed Cliffs in several SOW missions, flying with our lot of Dogz, Fenrir talking to proper human operated ground control in really Big Missions defending Britain - and that was really awesome - immersion wise - somehow this is a step up from there... So, if you got DCS, and the Spitfire ... please think about joining in. Rumors state it won't be long now - the invasion is imminent - we get to fly Spits with beautiful black and white stripes on 'm. W00T!

In the end, there are three options here: 1. ChkSkins full - all skins downloaded/uploaded, some 3700 at the moment, 40 GB 2. ChkSkins 4K - Limited to 1550 skins at the moment, 30GB 3. No ChkSkins The idea was to easily share skins ... and that has been achieved. In mission, I see a lot more custom skins than before. So, now remind me, where the problem is? If you think your free disk space gets too low, by all means, delete some, and do not run ChkSkins any more.

Great idea Delta. I am working on setting up a secondary server, that can and will run the missions currently in rotation on our primary Dserver for GBS. On the other hand, we simply should get more people involved in hosting !! (As in do-it-all-them-selves, our get them into operating our dedicated server!)

In general, it does indeed what it says on-the-tin, and yes, if we do not look too closely, it's perfect. Yet... there's stuff like this: For sure, this is a 2K skin, so... but it does show a problem. This is probably 100% the very same skin, but it's there three times, just because somebody decided to download it more than once (hence the (1) addition) plus the name has an extra trailing space before the dot. Yep. And I found this 'skin', it the I16t24 folder: So, somebody saved it there, but it should not be there at all, me thinks. Yet, there's a chance everybody has it now, apart from the Only4K Crowd. What I now need are suggestions in the absolute technical part: What could I add to ChkSkins that would make it help us get rid of rubbish? Mind you, I am not talking fuzzy logics, or some level of AI or self learning, and please nothing like : "ChkSkins has gladly offered you this nice skin. How do you rate it on a scale of 1-10.000 where the higher one would be "Over the top me in my Rift just had an out of 3D experience just by looking at it" ... !) No, something simple and sensible. ... Yeah, if it were that simple, I'd have thought about it already! \\:)// As for the more complex solution: I could try and have ChkSkins create a blueprint of each and every skin found locally, compare it with the blueprint in the vault... and use that to compare equal skins... then delete all the equal ones locally, and download the one in the Vault, using one unique name... but... that'd probably slow stuff down like mad! Or maybe not? Still, that'd leave us with deciding what is a good skin, what's a bad one. What Kevin states: Yes, I am all for that: We do not want to go look through 30Gb of skin files looking for the bad ones! So, putting this all together, my suggestion would be: 1. ChkSkins will use 4K skins as a default: this will weed out a lot of "bad" skins. The Skault will not have any only 4K skins in it, and ChkSkins will no longer delete any local non-4K skins. That way, you can use your personal photo's at will. ChkSkins will still have an option 'Delete local non-4K Skins' 2. ChSkins will have a cleanup option for the Skault: It will make a blueprint of all files in the Skault, and clean it up for any duplicates. It will also record the names of these duplicates, and will prevent any new skins with that blueprint yet with a different name to be uploaded. (No, is my initial reaction, way too much work, yet on the other hand, this could be a brilliant idea!) 3. ChkSkins will suggest you that when the disk where your skins are downloaded runs out of disk space, to buy a new one. A bigger one. To fund this, it will randomly select one of the following tips: Sell your car Sell your second car Sell all of the kids Sell your second wife Sell your facebook account. So, in the end, please post any bwilliant hot ideas on this. You can't go wrong. Anything is welcome. Thank you very much. It's cool. I'm not crazy, my mother never had me tested, but there's no need to, she believes me on my blue eyes. (Mind you, in her defense, they are bright, just as bright I am!)