Hi

I've already posted a similar message on the TSH forum, but was wondering if anyone here could provide any more info.

Basically I discovered that sometimes (through no fault of the player) it can be impossible to complete the First Night mission. In this mission you are required to destroy the two TELs at the SCUD site. Unfortunately (perhaps 70% of the time) at least one TEL will fail to 'spawn' or be loaded by the simulation and on rare occasions neither will spawn, resulting in an automatic mission failure.

By adding mobile TELs to the site and making them the mission goals the problem can be worked around. This go me thinking about editing other missions in the campaign and I'am wondering if its possible to add more missions to the campaigns?

If this cannot be done directly, would it be possible to edit the campaign in Jane's F-18 using the TSH campaign import and then transfer it back to JF-15?

Thanks

I have done alot of mission writing for F15 and alot of campaign writing for F18, and from what I know, there is no user campaign editor available in F15 like there is in F18. And I have never been able to open the F15 campaign files in the F18 editor.

I have also never run into the problems you described with the targets in any of the missions, including the First Night mission.

Good luck

Thanks for your reply Dragon.

Regarding the First Night mission, although I'am not the only one to have experienced this problem, perhaps it is related to the type of grapics card used?

Cheers
Wolfhound

hi, its been quite some time since i played JF15,but if you are talking about the same mission i am thinking, i had a similar problem, i was sent with a limited time to find 2 scuds, the first one was easy and was in the target designated area from the briefing,the other was a pain to find.
i was initialy browsing the ground with the ground moving target radar mode,but when i found the first one and realised it wasnt moving, i changed to the static mode ( i remember in the briefing they said the scuds would be moving in the area).
then when i almost had no more time left, i found a cluster in my radar, i sweep down, to visually ID it,and it was a bunch of bedoin tents and some camels, i sent my wingman to orbit there and look for oportunity targets, to see if he would find something, with only 1 minute left, i found the scud somewhere around the bedoin tents,as i turned in towards it, a few seconds later my wingman also reported it, the thing is, i HAD gone trough that route when i was sweeping low,and the scud wasnt there earlier. this led me to believe the scud only spawned near the end of the mission time.

so my tip is set radar for static targets, look for clusters on screen, set your wingman to orbit,and give him order to find target of oportunity,use nightvision on heat mode,and fly low, around the bedoin tents. see if it helps.

Hi Blade_RJ

No that wasn't the mission I was describing. I do remember the SCUD hunting mission you mentioned however. Its be a longtime since I last flew that mission, but I do recall it being quite long and difficult. Thanks for the info.

The mission I'm talking about is this one: Gulf War Mission Report 4: The First Night
As you can see the SCUD site was completely destroyed (Grover mention this at the end of the report) yet as shown in the briefing screenshot only partial success was awarded for destroy the primary target DMPI 1.

A also posted about this a few years ago here: First Mission Iraq & Iranian Campaign Woes
As you can see D-scythe also experienced the same issues.

Perhaps its a hardware problem, or a software problem e.g direct x version?

Wolfhound

Its been a long time since I last played the Iraqi Campaign, but I don't remember having that problem in the very first mission. I did had a CTD somewhere along the road, but the problem was later solved. Still, I'll look into it since I am back on JF-15 and report back when I get through that mission.

I can confirm Obi's position. I tried that First Night mission on two different computers and I can never succeed because the TEL's fail to spawn. Sorta detracted from the Desert Storm experience a bit.

I gotta third it. The weird thing about it is that both launchers were right were they should be, the first time around. But I had to screw up the exfil and get 2 wingies killed ( ), which forced me to re-fly the mission (I backed up the 'Resource' folder prior to that mission). After restoring the folder and reloading JF15, one of the launchers (2nd DMPI) was gone. There seems to be a truck where the SCUD is supposed to be, but even flatening it out won't result in mission success.

(Supposedly) DMPI#2:



DMPI #1:



Destroyed targets. #3 confirmed hit on the truck (as seen below), but I was too slow to take the SS:



I'll toy around a little more with it, maybe try a fresh install.

Thanks WhiteStar.

The problem isn't consigned to the fixed SCUD TELs. There are two 'First Missions' in the Iraqi campaign against two SCUD sites. The one in your screenshot looks like the mission against the medium SCUD site. In the other mission you are tasked to attack a large SCUD site next to the 'H2?' airfield. This site has four TEL launchers of which the mission demands three to be destroyed. This large SCUD site has rocket fuel tanks (a row of four large cylinders packed together) in the top left corner, with a square building right next to it and an 18 wheeler fuel truck parked outside the building. The site is also defended by four 23mm guns and a single 37mm gun. The guns, square building and 18 wheeler tend to spawn randomly. You can load a mission (campaign or single mission with the site installed into the mission) and find anyone of those or even all absent from the site, as well as the launchers, this occurs with other objects as well.

Wolfhound

Yeah, I know about those two missions. I started another campaign and am now required to hit 3 SCUDs. Haven't played it yet, but hopefully all of the targets will be there.

Will keep you posted ...

My guess as to what is going on is that when the core mission stuff was set up it was doing, if I remember correctly, placing every known fixed AAA and SAM that was in theater. The person doing this didn't know that the game wouldn't be able to handle it and when it finally made it in the framerate dropped like a rock. There wasn't enough time to go back and try to haphazardly remove them from all the missions affected so the game goes through and programatically and randomly removes items that from the world. I believe it checks the goals and/or there may be an objection setting which will make sure an object isn't removed. I think there might be a write up somewhere on this in the comp.sys.ibm.pc.flight-sim newsgroup if you search.

You might want to try and compare that mission with a similar mission and see if the goals or objects are set up any differently.

I'm sorry you're running into this.

Elf

Thanks for the description Elf.

The only missions I recall where this problem could manifest are the two first night missions in the Iraqi campaign and the missile site mission towards the end of the Iranian campaign. The missile site mission in the Iranian campaign, uses the fixed SCUD TEL objects as the missiles and launchers, which it why it is also effected by the problem I believe.

Wolfhound

Having feedback from the guys who actually created it: priceless.

Thanks for the info, Elf. Guess I can stop re-installing the game searching for that ghost now, lol. I'm still banging my head for screwing up the exfil the first time around, when all of the targets were there, though.

DON'T BLOW THE OP
DON'T BLOW THE OP
DON'T BLOW THE OP ...

I think I'm confusing things. What type of object was put down shouldn't influence things. If this were true then we could never have used a SAM site or the like as a goal since these were the things we really needed to cut back on. I think when you place objects down in the builder there are options you can set and one of them might be to make sure it doesn't get culled. I say "might" since I remember being a goal was a bigger factor but there might have been an override to make sure that things that weren't goals but still needed stuck around. Still, since I gather these are actually set up as goals I would have thought that they should have stuck around because of that so there could be a bug or something. If this was the case though I would have though this would have shown up more so I'm still leaning towards something in the mission setting. When I get home I'll try to remember to search through the old forums and see if I can find anything else useful.

Elf

I'm sorry I didn't get back to you sooner so you didn't have to go through all of that but December was a busy month with the holidays and all so I didn't get here much.

Elf

So this "framerate saver" is active even if the frame-rate is good?

Hey, don't worry about it. I had to exaust all of the options to find a workaround. Besides, its another chance to get back on JF-15 and help out other players.

Just another proof that this is a great community. How many 10+ years games are there that you can count on the developers to clear things out?

/edit- This is a reply to this happening even if the frame rate isn't a problem /

Yes. This isn't something that is done during the mission but when it is loaded and trying to add stuff in and remove it on the fly would have eaten even more frame rate and probably loads of other problems (bomb is on the way to the target and it vanishes) that we never even thought about it. Also, as mentioned, doing this in the first place wasn't even something we had intended to.

That being said, this reminded me that there might actually be a registry setting which might disable this. Unfortunately I had nothing to do with this code and was one of those things I remembered hearing in passing so I'm not sure if it's actually in there (or might have been removed at some point) nor what the exact entry is but we can give it a shot. Open up the .exe in a text editor like WordPad. You may want to copy the file first, just in case but it shouldn't cause a problem (unless you make changes and save). Search for "john" (case insensitive) and see if you find anything. If you do, let me know and I'll tell you if I think it's it. Since we'd be comparing a text string that should still show up as normal in the exe. This is how guys found some of the debug keys for the game. I'd do it but I'm not sure where my copy of the game is.

Elf

I could not find it both in lower and upper caps in the patched (1.17) and no patched (1.02?) version of the f15.exe