Editing Europe v0.6 in Tacedit without CTD?

Europe theater

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Snake Man
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Editing Europe v0.6 in Tacedit without CTD?

Post by Snake Man » 2008-07-24 07:03:29

Okay this is the topic for Editing Europe v0.6 in Tacedit without CTD. Post all your ideas, experiments and feedback into this topic.

I can start by saying that I dont know why it crashes, I THINK it crashes because the campaign is very large, there is 12,636 objectives and why it works if we add all the units in with TCL scripts, but not by manually... I just dont know.

I'd suggest that if there is someone with spare time, they could start to delete objectives until they reach a level when the campaign wont CTD anymore, IF that might be the cause.

Here is some statistics of PMC campaigns objective numbers:
Afghanistan - 11,393
ODS - 8,515
Iran - 7,564
Korea 128 - 5,471
Vietnam - 8,013

One good idea would be to take the crashlog from RV and try to ask from RV devs about it, I honestly cant remember if I did this already (I think I did, but nothing came out of it or the answer was that they dont know, too bad I didn't document it). So if someone has any friends in the devs, please show them the crashlog and ask what it says. That should give us much more idea of what we are facing.

Keep the test results, ideas and feedback coming. Lets try to solve the problem or at least find out what is it.
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Post by ccc » 2008-07-24 10:00:43

I'd suggest that if there is someone with spare time, they could start to delete objectives until they reach a level when the campaign wont CTD anymore, IF that might be the cause.
yes.

i think too many obj may slow down the campaign calculation cycle and probably cause data missing or hardware memory overflow.. thus result in CTD.

for Europe, if each nation has one or two falconeers could learn the basic of TacEdit and do the obj deleting/ re-linking, it should help to reduce the number of obj.

for me no-european, i truely don't know the strategic significance of some towns or villages in this theater..

just my .002c

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Post by derStef » 2008-07-24 10:34:29

Yes, too many objectives could be a problem.
i also understand the issue that you are not the "locals" in the european theater, so i'll look that i can help with Germany, Austria, Swizerland, maybe Italy and Denmark. but as you said, WE NEED SOME MORE PEOPLE!

i'll try what i can, but my abilities are not that big as you know.
i'll start to remove objects in for example France, because it's pretty far away from the FLOT, so only few dudes will fly there, same for the eastern end of the map!


i also deleted all gound units and ACs. CTD while clicking start campaign in RV... :?

cheers
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Post by Snake Man » 2008-07-24 12:24:21

Hehe lets not get ahead of ourselves, we dont need any people to test this theory out. Who knows maybe its not because of the objective amount, maybe its too many UNITs. We just dont know yet.

Relax, test and report the results before going to recruit people.
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Post by derStef » 2008-07-24 14:39:14

Snake Man wrote: Who knows maybe its not because of the objective amount, maybe its too many UNITs. We just dont know yet.
i deleted ALL units and added some (20 battalions each, and 10SQs each).....

hmmm....
but yes, we have to find the damned prob first! :)


cheers
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Post by derStef » 2008-07-26 12:18:54

europe1/save0.cam:

removed ALL units (ground, naval, Air)
removed ALL factories in SW france


added german AF & USAFE RL OOB1989 ACs AND IT WORKS!!!! NO CTD while starting the campaign!!!!!! YEEEEEEHAAAAAA!

i think the problem was that there where too many groundobjects in the theater. that was the reason why i removed some factories in areas, where you are rarely flying!


i hope that was the only problem for now. i'll create a 1989 scenario!
whish me good luck!

cheers guys

Stef

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Post by Snake Man » 2008-07-26 12:54:06

Great news that you got it working. Thanks for doing the testing.

If you have more time, could you pinpoint how many factories/objects do you have to remove until it start to work, we would like to find out the highest amount of objectives we can use.
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Post by molnibalage » 2008-07-26 13:50:27

Stef, maybe we should work together. The lack of a GOOD '87-'89 scenario is one of the biggest failings of Falcon. Airbases in Hungary are highly inaccurate. I can add the Hungarian OOB for squadrons (both HUN and CCCP) and maybe the EXACT positon of SAM units and types.
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Post by Luk » 2008-07-26 13:53:16

Do you can test your "litened" theater with F4AF too? There is another frustrating CTD - buffer overrun error. It can be caused by high amount of objectives too.
I wanted to make 1985 and 1989 scenario too. So I can help you with some W-Pact countries, specialy former Czechoslovakia. I dont have much time now, but CZ 1985 airforce OOB is completed. The 1989-OOB is slightly different, but I can do it.
The biggest problem in current Eu theater is a vely low amount of active airbases in the central Europe. In age of the "Iron Curtain" you have to fly air-defence/intercept missions with point defence fighters (Mig21,29) from Balcan :lol:. This is very unrealistic, some airbases were placed near West/East border just few seconds of flytime..

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Post by molnibalage » 2008-07-26 14:07:00

Ok, before we start ANY editing we should make a plan and collect the references and pack into one document.

So we have the CZ and HUN OOB, we need also the East Germany and Poland and USSR units too. The correct positioning is not too important but we have to know the sum qty. for modelling. It is evident that we can't modell the theater with 100% quantity of the real bacuse the engine can't handle that, needs too many resource, causes low FPS.

If the OOB of '85 is not too different from '89 we can use that. We don't have to follow 100%-ly the real a little fiction is not bad.

+ Forget AF, use the original F 4.0. My opinion that is a heretic idea install FF4 over AF. Yes, you can do but this is not the appropriate way, I think.
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Post by Snake Man » 2008-07-26 15:40:14

Purpose of this topic is to figure out the exact cause of the v0.6 campaign's tacedit editing resulting a CTD... not any '87 scenario OOBs.
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Post by molnibalage » 2008-07-26 16:06:50

Ok. I wait more feedback form derstef about CTD fix and if we 100%-ly sure that works we should open a new topic for the campaign creating.
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Post by derStef » 2008-07-26 16:23:19

Snake Man wrote:Great news that you got it working. Thanks for doing the testing.
If you have more time, could you pinpoint how many factories/objects do you have to remove until it start to work, we would like to find out the highest amount of objectives we can use.
in tacedit: i just only made Factories visible and removed all which were southwestern from Paris.... but i'll look to find out the highest amount... cheers
Stef, maybe we should work together. The lack of a GOOD '87-'89 scenario is one of the biggest failings of Falcon. Airbases in Hungary are highly inaccurate. I can add the Hungarian OOB for squadrons (both HUN and CCCP) and maybe the EXACT positon of SAM units and types.
hey molni, YES we'll work together for sure! cheers man! i bet that you are interested! :) would be cool if you can do the eastern stuff!

As molni said, we have to collect refs first! BTW i have a VERY GOOD NATO OBB from 1989 Airforces and Armies!!! i'll send it to you tomorrow!
but i have no infos about the estern countries. please any info!

VERY nice from you that you also want to tweak that baby now! i we can do a good job here!

cheers
Stef

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Post by molnibalage » 2008-07-26 17:18:29

Stef, check your PM is FF4 beta pls.

I will try something against CTD, I will report later.
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Post by derStef » 2008-07-27 10:15:18

molnibalage wrote:Stef, check your PM is FF4 beta pls.

I will try something against CTD, I will report later.

Molly, PM inbound!

cheers

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Re: Editing Europe v0.6 in Tacedit without CTD?

Post by Tobias Adam » 2010-04-11 15:39:07

Ok, did some more testing. Fixed ALL parent links.

In F4FF5.3, it crashes.

In F4AF, I am able to save a TE. It seems there's something in the database... At the current state, I fear that there will be no further development with the objectives in FF since I have no chance to figure out what objectives is wrong- TacEdit can't read the FF database. However, it works and I can create a TE in F4AF. The CTD in FF5.3 seems to be database related, since the same file works in AF.

So, I think I will stay with AF until the FF database gets unlocked or somebody finds out what is wrong... At the current state, I have one te_new.tac/ save0.cam with no more "nowhere" objectives left. Every objective (of course, except the PAK major cities) has a parent now. I didn't get Luks new terrain working yet because I don't have the hitiles installed, but as soon as I get it working, I think there could be some release with a first state-of-work for testing.

Edit: We even need more objectives. With a dozen of army bases on each side and not a single harbor, it remains rather unpopulated with those 12000+ entries... I think that we need more objectives to simulate a real full-scale-action going on.

Best regards, Tobias

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Re: Editing Europe v0.6 in Tacedit without CTD?

Post by Tobias Adam » 2010-07-11 18:30:58

I now started a thread over at the FF5 forum to see if anybody can provide me some details on the OCD ID's of the ground objectives. I think I might have figured out why the game crashes in FF5.5, I think they changed some objectives so that some objectives got invalid.

If not, I tracked it down to maybe a (few?) dozen of objectives that are not implemented in the original v0.6 file that seems to not CTD. Will try to delete these and the reimport them until the game crashes.
Anyway, I hope to get it working in FF5 as well.

Best regards, Tobias

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Re: Editing Europe v0.6 in Tacedit without CTD?

Post by Luk » 2010-07-12 08:42:10

Hi Tobi.
I dont have FF installed at the moment.
Try this at the beginning:

Sort out objectives by type (1click and you will get - towns, villages, ABs,....)
Then select all hilltop objectives (about 8-10?) and delete them.
Try if it works.

If not - select Prag area by window and delete all objectives there. I used to populate this city by more town/cities obj in the past.

BTW:
Here is contemporary status (very very low quality image - SM rule :):
Image
here a little bit better:
http://i844.photobucket.com/albums/ab4/ ... u_July.jpg

I can not explain it at the moment, but you can see my area of interest - between two red lines.
(you can see placed squadrons, fine tuned ABs, main objectives for capture...etc)
Northern part will be also fine tuned, but I will personaly aim for the southern one.

I had good time for modding last week - I let the campaign run for 6 virtual days (3 days in real) on my background.
I got interresting and dense airwar. Then I needed at least two more days for finishing the current "semi stage"(if I finish "semi stage" I "compile" it for F4 and make tests usually). But my wife is also "creative architect", so she turns me into the handicraftsman when weekend starts usually :roll: :mrgreen: ....

So try the hints please. Then I can send you last stage and you can continue tests with it.
More in another thread...
Luk

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Re: Editing Europe v0.6 in Tacedit without CTD?

Post by Tobias Adam » 2010-07-12 17:31:14

Hi Luk,

well, there are quite a few objectives that you added and I don't want to delete all of them... I just can't imagine that FF5 had so massive database edits that many ID's got incorrect.

You can also send me your TAC file, and I will go on trying with that one. We still can correct that file for FF5 when we know the errors.
I think there could be some hilltops (like you mentioned) because these are not used in any of the early files. I don't think they deleted cities or bridges...

Thanks for your work and your help. I am also married (but I still like it ;) ), so I know how you feel ;) But real life goes first, so take your time.

Best regards, Tobias

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Re: Editing Europe v0.6 in Tacedit without CTD?

Post by Tobias Adam » 2010-07-12 18:49:58

YEHAA! Your tip with the hilltops was the big winner on this one. I just deleted all hilltops, and all of a sudden everything worked! :mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen:

You have to copy quite some files in order to make it work (object directory from F4FF/terrdata/objects, strings, valid a/c file... ). Basically everything except the new files (te_new.tac, save0-2.cam, europe.wch...).

I did not check all objectives yet, but I will do so the next days/weeks.

But it is possible to get it working in FF5.5 :mrgreen:

So, how should we continue? Get one working state in F4AF and port it to F4FF?

I will try to re-import the hill tops again in order to find a working object ID. Will see what I can do.

Best regards, Tobi

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Re: Editing Europe v0.6 in Tacedit without CTD?

Post by Luk » 2010-07-14 08:13:38

Feetch!

I think the question you have posted over the FF forum is quite generic, so I usually suppose no answers in that case. We should make some kind of XLS document, or some table and probably "pre-fill" the objective cells we already know.

I am currently working on airwar stage + I am still tuning a lot of areas and make terrain more beautifull.
I usually add small town/city, village beside AB for better appearance and for units to stack (I hate them on runways).
But in CAM, I am working with AB objectives only at the moment.
BTW I guess the airbase problem in AF db is not so big - I think "river" type of AB objective works fine.

After this flyable and funny(I need some fun heavily, because I flew F4 one time with joystick since February - I just make fast keybord kontroled test flights) airwar stage, I will make another pass - other ground objective terrain placement(SAM sites, customs, armybases, nukeplants etc.) Then we will do bridge placement (by script). After that we will make links among the objectives. Then we will have full valued ground war theater.
We should also find and verify some safe way, how to update elevations from external file. There are at least 2 capable utils, we just need to discover, how to use them(or 1 of them at least). I want to level all bridges as well.

Luk

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