First of all, I want to say thank you for this amazing utility for FSX/P3D.  I have been wanting something like this for years and even tried building missions a few times.  But features, ease of use, and re-playability of this program make it a no brainer and completely surpass anything I could have worked on.

I do have a couple of suggestions/requests for a future version:

1.  Is it possible to have the markings from retardant drops show up on the ground as a light red/pink strip instead of round bloches?  I think this would help add to the realism and also make it a little easier to see where previous drops landed.  After a few passes, it's difficult to tell where I've dropped as it starts to look like a big mess of round splotches.

2.  This is more of FSX/P3D effects issue, but perhaps it can be corrected through this program.  There is an effect that comes with FSX/P3D (I can't remember the specific effect name right now) that simulates a large, wide, flat smoke cloud that would develop over (or downwind) of a wild fire and it's smoke column.  Would it be possible for Firefighter X to trigger one or two instances of this effect over a fire's spawn location?  It would help to give the fire a bit more of an ominous look, and also add to the immersion.  Sometimes the single smoke column that rises from the main fire and dissipates into nothing looks a little strange.

Here is an example of a fire I manually placed and added the large smoke cloud:

 

Thanks!!!

 

Hi,

many thanks for your kind words!

About your questions:

1. If I understand correctly, you could get visuals almost like that if you set the FFX ground splash size to its smallest setting (22ft) on the drop control dialog. In the current retail version it may happen that they are too far apart to form a line (depends on your hit zone size setting), but this has already been corrected in 1.79, the current devel version. Also, the ground splashes are timer based, initially set to 30 minutes for retardant and 15 for water (this is randomized, not an exact value). You could shorten that timeout in the Settings to make them go away sooner - but then they would lose their effectiveness as a barrier (holding back the fire) too.

2. This would have to be optional, because for example around the Mediterranean wildfires are usually accompanied by very strong winds (30-50kn), so there wouldn't be a smoke cloud like that. I will look into it for the 1.79, I need some real world data under what conditions a cloud like that would develop.

Best regards

Thanks for the response!  I played with the splash size and see what you're saying.  I look forward to seeing what 1.79 includes.

Regarding the smoke - makes sense that you won't always get a hanging cloud like that.  I may also try to edit the forest fire effect files to so that smoke for the medium and large forest fires lasts longer and continues to grow in size but become more transparent, resulting in a larger more "ominous" looking smoke column as often seen in large fires in the western US.