How can I make a backup of the Mission Builder

[jinx]

Hi,

Not too long ago, I messed up my Mission Builder making a mission and I had to reinstall CFS2 from scratch.

Is there a way I can make a safe backup of it to avoid that kind of thing, and if yes, what files need to be backed up?

Thanks for any help you may give,


Nick

 

[kelticheart]

Hi,

Not too long ago, I messed up my Mission Builder making a mission and I had to reinstall CFS2 from scratch.

Is there a way I can make a safe backup of it to avoid that kind of thing, and if yes, what files need to be backed up?

Thanks for any help you may give,


Nick

Hi Jinx,

MB is part of the CFS2.exe, the executable file that is the engine of the simulator. If you check the command line properties in Windows menu, you'll see that it is activated through specific switches added to the CFS2.exe command.

I don't understand how possibly a messed up mission could have corrupted CFS2.exe but with computers anything and everything is possible. Instead of reinstalling CFS2 from scratch, I would copy a clean version of CFS2.exe back into my CFS2 root folder, overwriting the corrupt one.
As long as the Windows Registry entries for the program are still there, everything should return to normality afterwards.

I routinely format my HDD once or twice a year and reinstall my applications, a new Windows install always looks like a miracle compared to the previous one, with the pc purring along like a brand new machine.
Re-installing all CFS2 mods in the correct sequence, carried out over a 10+ year period, is pure folly. What I do is keeping a synchronized copy on an external drive, everytime I change something to CFS2 on my C: drive I do an immediate file synchronisation with the external drive.

When I format the HDD, I simply reinstall CFS2 anew and then delete it, keeping the folder structure over which I copy my backup on the external drive. I am back in business with my over-tweaked CFS2 as if nothing ever happened.

With this, I am telling you there shouldn't be any problem in copying over the faltering executable CFS2.exe with a fresh, uncorrupted version.

Cheers!
KH

 

[jinx]

KelticHeart,


Thanks for the tips. Will save your text in a folder I have named CFS2 BASIC FILES.

By the way, are you of Celtic origin? The user name points to that.


Nick

 

[kelticheart]

Do you really wanna know?

...By the way, are you of Celtic origin? The user name points to that.

To an extent, that the vast majority of Northern Italians have a degree of Celtic ancestry.

Celtic settlements found since the early 1980's in this part of the country were identified by archaeologists as such from their burial rituals, personal belongings and various decorations on gold jewels and pottery found in those burial grounds, which all lead up to a "Pre-Celtic" European continental culture, exhisting in Halstatt, near Salzburg, Austria and La Tène, France. In those two places were discovered the largest bronze-age European burial grounds, the former dating from 1,200 to 1,000 B.C., the latter around 800 B.C.

Italian sites were dated to the La Tène late bronze-age, long before Rome was founded. Some stone etched inscriptions using Etruscan alphabet were found in a valley North East of Milano, at the foot of the Alps. They were definitely identified as written in Celtic language, the very first Celtic writing ever found in the entire Europe, and one the very few, since Celtic traditional way of preserving history was oral and not written.

The Romans showed up in the Po Valley around the 3rd century B.C., which was already settled in various waves by the Celts, called by the Romans "Galli" or "Gauls", while Celts were the only people able to lay siege to Rome itself in 390 B.C., before the fall of the Roman Empire over a thousand years later, in 476 A.D.
Hence the obsession the Romans had to defeat and conquer the Celts for 200 years, until they succeeded it with Giulio Cesare in the 1st century B.C.
They were perceived as the epitome of the brutal barbarian enemy, the nightmare to subdue at all costs.

Further proof, apart from known history, came in the 1960's during an Italian scientific research to identify the possible genetic cause of a disease diffused in the Med area, called "Mediterranean Anaemia". It causes a very low RBCs count in the blood. The research was done because it's virtually unknown in the Po Valley and there was a suspicion it was tied to the blood types. The results confirmed that the concentration of blood types in Northern Italy is akin to Central Europe, while, south of the Appennini chain bordering the Po Valley, it changes radically.

My blood type is A+, and the research results indicate that the same concentration of human beings with A+ blood type can be found in all of France, Ireland and Scotland. But kelticheart derives from another reason.

I discovered all of the above when I caught an insane passion for Celtic music, which I played professionally for several years. I developed the pseudonym when I first subscribed with a Web services provider choosing "braveheart" as my username, Mel Gibson's movie had just come out, inflaming several audiences up here. I discovered over 200 "braveheart" variations were already in use on the net, so I simply replaced "brave" with "keltic" spelled with a K as they do in Northern Ireland and Scotland, Kelts instead of Celts. It was instantly accepted as a unique username and I can claim with no hesitation my heart is truly there!

Thank you for the beautiful Me410 repaint!

Cheers!
KH

 

[Worthless]

Fascinating! Great history K!

 

[jinx]

KC,

Thanks for the explanations. It is fascinating, as Worthless says, and we also learn a few things from you...

Seeing that you live in Italy, may I also ask if you are Italian? And if so, how come you write such excellent English?

We might be in a similar boat, as I am Greek and my English is also very good--but I studied English and Ancient Greek literature in Greece and then continued with a second degree in American poetry in the USA, in Oregon, and worked as a teacher of English all my life.I also wrote a lot of poetry in English. I have had poems published in the US, Canada, South Africa, Greece and France...Added to that I have worked as a translator and writer of all types of texts, even aviation texts, in English, on the side for some extra income, so I have had a lot of experience in the language--which explains my skills in it.

I also speak and write French very well (having lived in Paris for 4 years and having had a good French teacher at highschool for 4 years before that), and can speak basic Russian, as I married a Russian woman, and I can get by in Italian and Spanish.
From my teaching, I do know for a fact that foreign languages are an in-born talent and some people learn fast while others are very slow or nil. My wife belongs to the last category, as she still cannot speak proper Greek and cannot write it at all after so many years in Greece--though I suspect she must be dyslectic without knowing it as she exhibits symptoms of dyslexia. Though dyslectic, she does not say "Stop that plane!" when I fly in the sims, unless it is late at night and she is trying to sleep and my engines or guns or bomb bangs are too loud...I turn the sound down then...
I cannot complain about her, in all honesty.


Is that you in that plane in your avatar image?

Cheers,

Nick

 

[kelticheart]

KC,

Thanks for the explanations. It is fascinating, as Worthless says, and we also learn a few things from you...

Seeing that you live in Italy, may I also ask if you are Italian? And if so, how come you write such excellent English?

Thanks to both of you, it's always a pleasure for me talking about a subject which fascinated me for the last 30+ years of my life and still does. I think I own one of the most comprehensive collection of Celtic history/culture books written in Italian, plus some in English.

Yes I am Italian, even if sometimes I have doubts about it. Up here we are very different from the "wass-the-matta-you" stereotypes known abroad and in the US. When I was first taken to an Italian restaurant in N.Y., I could not explain the reason why they had "spaghetti and meatballs" as the biggest thing on their menu, I had never seen it or heard about it before then. It is not part of our traditional cuisine, anyway.
This is dairy country, big on cheese, butter and pork meat air-cured, salted specialities like "Parmesan Ham". "Parmesan" cheese was, obviously, created here, the province of Parma. Rami and Jagdflieger had a taste of our cuisine when they visited me and they both looked as they enjoyed a lot what I had ordered for them at the restaurant. But they could not identify what they were eating at first, because they had never seen it in American-Italian restaurants!

Oh, B.T.W.: I love traditional Greek cuisine! Tsatsiki, dolmadakia, suvlaki and spanakopita......mmmmmmmm.....

As to my English, thank you again for your comments, I enjoy a lot speaking, writing and reading it. I studied it for 8 years throughout junior high and high school, then I was lucky enough to spend almost ten years of my life in the US.

May I ask you why do you keep addressing me as KC? Shouldn't it be KH or am I missing something?

We might be in a similar boat, as I am Greek and my English is also very good--but I studied English and Ancient Greek literature in Greece and then continued with a second degree in American poetry in the USA, in Oregon, and worked as a teacher of English all my life.I also wrote a lot of poetry in English. I have had poems published in the US, Canada, South Africa, Greece and France...Added to that I have worked as a translator and writer of all types of texts, even aviation texts, in English, on the side for some extra income, so I have had a lot of experience in the language--which explains my skills in it.

I also speak and write French very well (having lived in Paris for 4 years and having had a good French teacher at highschool for 4 years before that), and can speak basic Russian, as I married a Russian woman, and I can get by in Italian and Spanish.
From my teaching, I do know for a fact that foreign languages are an in-born talent and some people learn fast while others are very slow or nil.

Good for you! I am quite impressed by multi-lingual people like you. Since my girlfriend took me to Paris several times already, and she wants to go back every year, I am studying a little bit of French myself and I already understand it much more than I can reply properly.

My language experience is similar to yours. I was involved in teaching Italian in adult education courses, when I moved to the U.S., and I obtained a simultaneous interpreter certification from the New York Supreme Court, where I did interpreting work in a few legal proceedings involving elderly Italians, who could not speak fluent English.

There, I experienced once again the deep difference between Northern and Southern Italians. The Italian people I was interpreting for, spoke to me in their native Sicilian and Calabrian dialects and I could not make out a single word of what they were saying!
I had a tough time explaining to the judge that in Italy dialects are not as they are perceived in the U.S., where they call "dialect" a simple Southern accent, which is just a different way to pronounce an English word. Our dialects are structured languages with their own grammar rules and vocabulary. Up here we all sound like French or even Germans, (actually there is solid proof that Northern Italian dialects are so close to the French language just because they have the same origin, that is Latin grafted onto the Celtic tongue spoken locally before Roman conquer), while in the deep south they sound like ancient Greeks or even Albanians. A very common comment, I kept hearing from people when I lived in the US, is that "I do not sound like an Italian when I speak English".
You can imagine how embarrassed I was, fortunately the judge accepted my example of our dialects compared to official Italian being as different as Cajun or Caribbean Creole languages can be to official English, or even Gaelic in Ireland and Scotland. Quite slowly, but I was able to do my job as the Italian seniors did understand me somewhat when I spoke to them in Italian!

I think the inborn capacity of learning languages has a lot do with ear, meaning musical. Basically, all of the musicians I met were all very good at learning a foreign language, while tone-deaf people have a very tough time discerning different sounds than usual. If you think about it, a language is made up by sounds, voice modulations that become words, just like a piece of music. If one can figure out and play a song just by listening to it, the same listen-analyse-and-reproduce mental process comes into place when imitating another language.

......Is that you in that plane in your avatar image?

Yes. A very good friend of mine, who knows the other insane passion of mine I have for flight, gifted me with a few real flight lessons few years ago. My avatar picture was taken right before my first takeoff with a Cessna 172.
As I already wrote several times on these pages, you wouldn't believe how the countless hours I spent in front of Microsoft flight simulators, combat and civilian alike, came to my aid. Understanding the dynamics of flight, how the controls work, identifying dials, gauges, starting the engine, flight patterns around the airport and more, all fell into place once I sat down in the cockpit.
The flight instructor asked me whether I was joking, when I stated I had never piloted an aircraft before! The only two things I was not too familiar with were the kicks in the rear-end I got, when I flew through windy air turbulences, and carrying on a proper radio protocol with the control tower.

Cheers!
KH

 

[jinx]

Great explanations, new repaint for all

KH,


Excuse the KC-mistakes....

What I suspected is almost true to the point. We have similar backgrounds and experiences--teaching, translating, and living abroad.

Your explanations are very detailed--again, I learn many things--I knew about the Italian cuisine, as I am a passsionate cook as a hobby. I cook mostly Greek and French though, and pasta about once a week.


Glad you had some flights in the Cessna. I also have two pilot friends here, one flying a 3-engine business jet (Falcon) and another flying a CFS152, or rather close to taking his Pilot's license.

In france I had once flown in a Robin 400, a delightful small one-engine job.

I am attaching a screenshot of a new skin I finished 10 minutes ago, and maybe I will upload it tomorrow. It is a Me410A-1?U2 of 6?KG51, in April 1944 with offblack unders and lots of stencils and an iron cross on the sill. The Russian text says it had shot down 3 Liberators in one mission.
The fuse sides are a light green with mottle and the yellow code is a G. Red-dottted no-wal lines are on the uppers of the wings...

Regards and thanks a lot.

Nick

 

[kelticheart]

Excellent!

....I am attaching a screenshot of a new skin I finished 10 minutes ago, .......

!!!!!

Thanks!
KH