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Question about bombers and bomb runs

S

smg13

Members +
Hello everybody. I am making a few 12 o' clock high-style missions from both the B-17 and P-51's perspective and I have two questions about bomb-runs.

First: is there any way to make the black cloud burst of flak stay for a longer time in the air? It would be nice to fly thru a thick black cloud over the target or see that cloud over the target as one approaches. Right now I fake it by lowering visibility when am over the target with CFO weather....

Second: is there any way to make wingmen bombers drop bombs at the same time as you, like they do in CFS3? If you press A, they fly out of formation and dive to target, even when set to be heavy bombers. The only way arround this is to fly as wingman by editing the mission file, and drop bombs yourself when the AI does... it is more realistic this way, but I would like once in a while to be the flight leader, not just a wingman or tail-end charlie!

And a third question I will sneak in.... and I sadly know the answer... will anyone ever figure out how to make the gunners in the player's aircraft shoot for themselves and track targets? Is there any way to fake it?

I know there is a dummy bomber made... it is nice, but it is not perfect. Maybe someone can figure out a way to make a AAA gun "flyable", and "glue" it over the player's plane, or on the DP or something like that...
 
On your first question, you'll have to modify the emitter and particle lifetime values in your fx_flak_1, _2 and _3 files to make the puffs hang longer. RAF_Mutlly did a mod a long time ago for increased hang time and intensity, but with Netwing's demise, its no longer available online since this was the only place i know of that it was posted. And we seem to restricted at the moment in attaching files in posts (probably something to do with the recent sever problem). Send me your email in a PM and i'll see what i can do.

As for questions 2 and 3, better stick to CFS3 for these tricks, buddy...

CFS2 wasn't designed for high-level, close formation strategic bombing from a player lead position. As you've discovered already, from a player perspective, its well designed for tactical bombing where you order wingies to bomb selected targets, but no carpet bombing can be ordered as lead. On the gunner question, you don't have any to speak of -- you're all alone in your multi-station bomber. There's no autonomous AI crew to "order" and no way to fake it. There IS the extremely complex option of creating panel bmp representations for each gunner's station on a bomber and incorporating this into a panel.cfg file as multiple fixed windows with gunsighting, like we've done with bombsighting so far. But the problem in this is that the "guns" can only be static images in the window bmps and you have to move the airplane around to aim the windows instead of aiming the guns inside the windows.

In '99, CFS2 was hastily constructed as a counter to the increasing market shares of CFS1's biggest WW2 fighter pilot competitors - EAW, IL2 and Jane's WW2 Fighters. CFS1 was losing ground and since all four were Eurocentric theater sims with no open world capability, it must have seemed like an attractive idea to get ahead by merging the successful open world of FS98/FS2000 with the combat programming of CFS1 and venture out into the wide open Pacific theater where no competition existed at the time. Plus, many third-party CFS1 designers were already building Zeros, Corsairs, Wilcats and Hellcats with no place to fly them except Europe.

After CFS2 proved itself a good bet as a WWII fighter pilot sim, the next logical level was integrating some player bombing capability for a new venue, like in the well respected "B-17, the Mighty Eigth" sim. That's probably how CFS3 got this fully immersive player option with player-lead formation bombing and the capability of manning gunner stations as well as the pilot's seat. But that's it right there...without new programming and essentially creating a new sim, you can't retrofit CFS2 to do the same bombing stuff as CFS3 with any real satisfaction.
 
In real life the crews never saw the bombs that they dropped hit.The aircraft behind were able to observe the hits or misses made by the group infront .
 
The best option for the player in level bombing missions is to move the player out of the first position into the last position in the formation. Then the formation will act just like any other AI lead formation. Your job becomes to stay in formation and put your bombs on target. The AI's will drop their bombs on the Attack WP as usual.

This requires some hand editing but it's not hard. Just Cut & Paste the line
"is_player_aircraft=1"
from the first to the last unit in that formation.
 
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