Native A-20 Havoc for FSX / Prepar3D

[MrZippy]

Just in case are the textures deleted from the Riding_high folder or from the base.textures folder. A little confused on this!

 

[wellis]

Thanks...will giver 'er a go! The FS9 failed to load after my first attempt, OH well! Now my dumb question...do I remove the stuff from the Riding_high folder or the base.texture folder?

Just remove all the files from the Ridin_High.texture folder (see below) and be sure to put the texture.cfg file in your now reduced Ridin. All of the files being those other than the above mentioned critical files are in the common textures folder and as Milton mentioned are tailored specifically for the FSX Native. The currently available Ridin High is for FS9 so it comes with everything in the livery specific folder rather than a separate common textures folder as in FSX. If you are going to use SteveB's and Huub's FS9 textures you will need to do this for all of them. Hope this helps.

What you will have at the end is a texture.Ridin_High folder with seven files: engines_t.bmp, fuselage_t.bmp, fuserear_t.bmp, htails_t.bmp, wing-L_t.bmp and wing-R_t.bmp and the all important texture.cfg. Don't mess with anything in the common textures folder which shows up in the main aircraft folder simply as "texture" (no suffix or livery name).

 

[MrZippy]

Just remove all the files from the Ridin_High.texture folder (see below) and be sure to put the texture.cfg file in your now reduced Ridin. All of the files being those other than the above mentioned critical files are in the common textures folder and as Milton mentioned are tailored specifically for the FSX Native. The currently available Ridin High is for FS9 so it comes with everything in the livery specific folder rather than a separate common textures folder as in FSX. If you are going to use SteveB's and Huub's FS9 textures you will need to do this for all of them. Hope this helps.

What you will have at the end is a texture.Ridin_High folder with seven files: engines_t.bmp, fuselage_t.bmp, fuserear_t.bmp, htails_t.bmp, wing-L_t.bmp and wing-R_t.bmp and the all important texture.cfg. Don't mess with anything in the common textures folder which shows up in the main aircraft folder simply as "texture" (no suffix or livery name).

Thanks for the help! I will do the work after I get back from the bank. I borrowed a texture.cfg from one of my other aircraft so that's good to go!

 

[menef]

Thank you mister Milton for this aircraft. I've very appreciated it!!!
Great paints!

 

[Butcherbird17]

My Thanks to Milton and team for this. I found a couple things that may or may not have been brought to your
attention. I have not read through the other 2 threads to see if they were and I apologize in advance if they were.

This is for the FSX/P3D version.
The first is the folder name for Queen Julia textures which in the download I have is like this, "textures_Queen_Julia".
The "s_" needs to be changed to "." so the textures will show in sim.
The second is in the same folder, the texture "wing-R_t" is saved as a bmp but needs to be flipped so the top of wing
is not showing on the bottom and vice versa. I flipped it in dxtbmp and then saved it as a dds file which flipped it again
and now all is well.
The last has to do with all the model's. They are missing the "hump" for a lack of better term across the top of the wing/
engine area. It is a prominent feature that you can see on the real a/c. As of now it is just flat across the top wing surface.
I don't know if you can add this or not (I hope you can) as it would make a great model even better.

Thanks again, Joe

 

[wellis]

Thanks for the help! I will do the work after I get back from the bank. I borrowed a texture.cfg from one of my other aircraft so that's good to go!

Just back from the recycling center. I neglected to mention, in case you are not already aware, in order to get it to show an image in the FSX+Accel aircraft selection menu you will want to add a thumbnail to the Ridin High texture folder. Huub has provided several screen shots with his liveries so I would take one of those and reduce it to a respectable thumbnail size (45-60kb) and like other FSX texture folders rename it to thumbnail.jpg and you will be good to go. You don't need this of course if you are using P3D.

 

[wellis]

My Thanks to Milton and team for this. I found a couple things that may or may not have been brought to your
attention. I have not read through the other 2 threads to see if they were and I apologize in advance if they were.

This is for the FSX/P3D version.
The first is the folder name for Queen Julia textures which in the download I have is like this, "textures_Queen_Julia".
The "s_" needs to be changed to "." so the textures will show in sim.
The second is in the same folder, the texture "wing-R_t" is saved as a bmp but needs to be flipped so the top of wing
is not showing on the bottom and vice versa. I flipped it in dxtbmp and then saved it as a dds file which flipped it again
and now all is well.
The last has to do with all the model's. They are missing the "hump" for a lack of better term across the top of the wing/
engine area. It is a prominent feature that you can see on the real a/c. As of now it is just flat across the top wing surface.
I don't know if you can add this or not (I hope you can) as it would make a great model even better.

Thanks again, Joe

Hi Joe, here are a couple photos of "Little Joe" at the National Museum of The U.S. Air Force. Not all of the A-20's had this feature. There were a number of different marks/versions for the Boston/Havoc. As noted, Little Joe did not have one, but if you look at the machine displayed at the website of the RAAF Amberley Heritage Museum you'll see that it does. If you do a broader web search for images of the A-20 you will find many that do not. Milton could explain this better than I, but I am guessing it is because of the limitations on the number of vertices/polygons allowable for these models in any of the sims. I know these models were already pushing those limits. I have tried to simulate this in a 2d fashion for some of the paints, but that really had a limited appeal to me so in most cases I left it out (though it is a select-able option in the paint kits). Please note these photos are courtesy of the NMUSAF.

 

[MrZippy]

Thanks to Milton and wellis for the help this morning! It was still a no go on the A-20g. This may be a concern for the few out there that don't have FSX-SE, Acceleration or P3D.

I still have lots of your aircraft, both FSX and FS9 that work in my Sim!

 

[Milton Shupe]

Just back from the recycling center. I neglected to mention, in case you are not already aware, in order to get it to show an image in the FSX+Accel aircraft selection menu you will want to add a thumbnail to the Ridin High texture folder. Huub has provided several screen shots with his liveries so I would take one of those and reduce it to a respectable thumbnail size (45-60kb) and like other FSX texture folders rename it to thumbnail.jpg and you will be good to go. You don't need this of course if you are using P3D.

The FSX beta contained proper Ridin' High DDS/DXT5 textures and thumbnails so I'm not sure why this problem even exists. The Ridin' High texture folder had a texture.cfg in it. So now I question if Mr.Zippy is even running the beta for FSX.

 

[Milton Shupe]

My Thanks to Milton and team for this. I found a couple things that may or may not have been brought to your
attention. I have not read through the other 2 threads to see if they were and I apologize in advance if they were.

This is for the FSX/P3D version.
The first is the folder name for Queen Julia textures which in the download I have is like this, "textures_Queen_Julia".
The "s_" needs to be changed to "." so the textures will show in sim.
The second is in the same folder, the texture "wing-R_t" is saved as a bmp but needs to be flipped so the top of wing
is not showing on the bottom and vice versa. I flipped it in dxtbmp and then saved it as a dds file which flipped it again
and now all is well.
The last has to do with all the model's. They are missing the "hump" for a lack of better term across the top of the wing/
engine area. It is a prominent feature that you can see on the real a/c. As of now it is just flat across the top wing surface.
I don't know if you can add this or not (I hope you can) as it would make a great model even better.

Thanks again, Joe

Hi Joe,

Thanks for the feedback.

All corrected.

With respect to the air intake, that was added for the African bound aircraft so that larger air filters could be used to deal with the sand and dust. All aircraft did not carry this feature. Other deliveries may have included the larger intakes.

When looking at all the various models and their differences, I had to limit how many variants I would do based on model differences of wings, rear gunner areas, fuselage and noses, and engine nacelles and cowl flaps. That is why I chose to stick to the common short intake.

 

[MrZippy]

The FSX beta contained proper Ridin' High DDS/DXT5 textures and thumbnails so I'm not sure why this problem even exists. The Ridin' High texture folder had a texture.cfg in it. So now I question if Mr.Zippy is even running the beta for FSX.

Yep, it's the beta for FSX that I started with, A20fsxbeta.zip That had no cockpit glass, no plexiglass dome for the gunner, nor gun muzzles for the nose or gunner's turret for the A-20g. The FS9 beta version gave me the cockpit glass, gunner's dome and gun muzzles. The cockpit gauges worked but once the engines were started, no throttles movement from my joystick or mouse on the throttle levers.

I even went as far as a fresh download and installed all 4 of the packages to my Sim. I was using the link from the very first post in this thread.

 

[Butcherbird17]

Thanks Milton and Wellis for your explanation. I don't know why I couldn't think of the right term at the time I posted
about the HUMP, was drawing a blank in my head. The "Ole Rolodex" isn't what it use to be.
I understand about the model and I just hope down the road if you get the itch to add that feature that you will.
The funny thing to this is I was looking at a model of the A-20 that I built back in the early 90's of Little Joe that it has
the air intakes on it and is why I posted about it.

Joe

 

[MrZippy]

I just tried for a 4th time...fresh download and vanilla install just sticking the cranky start effect file into my Effects folder and the 4 aircraft types, _A20CHavoc,
_A20gHAVOC, _P-70A1 and _P70A2 into SimObjects/Airplanes folder. No glass, plexi or otherwise, nor guns, turret or nose show anywhere.

Sorry Milton, just wanted you to be aware of the problem. Maybe another FSX SP2 user will try it and report back!

 

[Milton Shupe]

I just tried for a 4th time...fresh download and vanilla install just sticking the cranky start effect file into my Effects folder and the 4 aircraft types, _A20CHavoc,
_A20gHAVOC, _P-70A1 and _P70A2 into SimObjects/Airplanes folder. No glass, plexi or otherwise, nor guns, turret or nose show anywhere.

Sorry Milton, just wanted you to be aware of the problem. Maybe another FSX SP2 user will try it and report back!

Thank you for the extra efforts Sir.

That is perplexing. The glass may be related to use of material features not available in pre-accel versions.

But the guns, all I can suggest is maybe changing the format from 32-bit to DXT1 as it does not use the alpha channel.
I have attached it for you to try. Just unzip and copy the guns.bmp to your common texture folder replacing the existing.

 

[MrZippy]

I tried the new guns.bmp, still no joy! Might have to play with the FS9 texture folder in the FSX version to see if has any affect.

 

[huub vink]

Mr Zippy,

I'm convinced your problems have nothing to do with textures. The textures are in a format which can be used in any version from FSX. Although I'm not yet familiar with the FSX version of the A-20, I am not 100% sure. But I think the barrels from the nose mounted guns can be made visible and invisible and are controlled by an xml script. In FS9 the turret movement is controlled by an xml script as well. Personally I think these xml scripts are causing the problems as I made textures from all versions of FSX and never encountered any problems with them.

The fact the glass texture doesn't show could be caused by a difference in the way FSX sp2 and FSX Acceleration handles transparency.

Cheers,
Huub

 

[MrZippy]

Mr Zippy,

I'm convinced your problems have nothing to do with textures. The textures are in a format which can be used in any version from FSX. Although I'm not yet familiar with the FSX version, I am not 1005 sure. But I think the barrels from the nose mounted guns can be made visible and invisible and and controlled by an xml script. In FS9 the turret movement is controlled by an xml script as well. Personally I think these xml scripts are causing the problems as I made textures from all versions of FSX and never encountered any problems with them.

The fact the glass texture doesn't show could be caused by a difference in the way FSX sp2 and FSX Acceleration handles transparency.

Cheers,
Huub

Thanks for additional help! Now Milton is gonna kill me! I am now using the FS9 model.a20g in my FSX (oh, man, Milton's cringing!) I substituted glass.bmp files from the FS9 download and put them into the texture folder. Still no nose guns but the rear turret looks good and cockpit glass looks good as well as 2D and VC.
So far, everything works and throttles make me move!!! No pilot or gunner people showing from outside view yet....Give me time

 

[Milton Shupe]

LOL Well, good luck For the crew figures to show, you will need to plug in the FS9 A-20 "C" panel folder. However, there are gauges in that folder that may have to be removed as they may crash on load.

There are functions that will not work without the FS9 panel, and functions that will not work with the FS9 panel.

 

[Seahawk72s]

Taxi light

Not sure what I am missing...
I don't see the taxi light in an on condition...

 

[Milton Shupe]

Not sure what I am missing...
I don't see the taxi light in an on condition...

SH72,

Seems I left out the effect in the beta release although it was in the pre-beta.

Attached