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Hans_Petter

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About Hans_Petter

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  1. Great article Chris! FU III (with SanFran added) is still on my hard drive. As you know, the X-Plane world is where I spend most of my sim time these days. The water reflections are prettier but the ground handling (lateral friction) still suffers. Hans Petter
  2. Hello friends! I just passed by and noticed some familiar names. As some of you know I'm primarily into X-Plane now. FU III is still on my hard drive but my main problem is the aspect ratio. That is, while I've got two monitors these days they're both widescreen. That's the new standard. FU III, on the other hand, has a native resolution of 800 x 600. For a while I tried various ways to get a windowed mode but it didn't work well. After all these years there's still one aspect that FU III does better than the rest, namely the ground handling. I can get prettier water in X-Plane and 64 bit support. However, I can not get aircraft with proper sideways friction on the runway. all the best, Hans-Petter
  3. A belated reply--I have the Saitek / yoke combo, CH rudder pedals and a Logitech stick. For X-Plane or FS they can all be plugged in: FU III, however, goes haywire whenever the Saitek composite unit is plugged in. All assignments are mixed up. Evidently, a simple yoke would've been OK but the throttle quadrant linked to a yoke creates conflicts. FU III works fine with a basic stick / yoke and rudder pedals. The latter needs to be entered as a few text strings into a CFG to work. best regards, Hans
  4. Several of us worked on the FU III textures. The texture resolution of FU III allows way better textures than the ones Looking Glass provided. If you extract a sample of the stock textures you'll see clusters of pixels and quite messy transitions. What saves the day is the anti-aliasing that makes it look a lot smoother than it really is. Looking Glass used quite low res black & white ortho-photos and hand painted them. They used a few colors, far less than what the somewhat limited palette allowed. Evidently, these maps were freely available (probably USGS maps) and that's why Looking Glass chose to use them.. Google and Virtual Earth provide far better maps for most regions, especially if you take time to edit them. However, if you implement those and share the result you're in trouble due to quite draconian copyrights. What can be done legally is to look for better USGS maps (public domain) and hand paint them yourself if they're black & white. A better resolution, less sloppy painting and the implementation of a wider selection of color nuances should ensure a much better result. Bottom line, FU III provides a pixel resolution that will support a far more detailed ground texture. regards, Hans.
  5. I've been working on a Super Puma helicopter for years now. It will be uploaded eventually but I want to get the virtual cockpit finished first. Then I've made some custom buildings for a Chinese scenery (Hongqiao by Shane Montoya) and I'm about to finish some animated ships. They run a straight course at a speed of 20 knots and look good along any coastline. I've been experimenting with different approaches to making the wake look right--a large moving vessel leaves a conspicuous wake that's several times the length of the vessel itself. Semi-transparent textures help make it fade out. FU III has transparency but does not support semi-transparency. The latter is useful for fading and can be employed to eliminate jaggies along the edges of a transparent region. regards, Hans
  6. Hi Chris, I just dropped by again. FU III is still on my hard drive but there's a problem--since I bought a new monitor several years ago (and then an even bigger one last year) the aspect ratio of FU III (800 x 600) doesn't work too well. Today all we get is wide-screen. I'd love to run yesteryear's favorite sim in windowed mode but the tweaks and apps that I tried were not good enough. Today I'm an avid X-Plane flight simmer, and to some extent a developer. Still, if I could get FU III in windowed mode on a modern wide-screen monitor I would certainly spend some sim time along the northwestern coast of the US again. I still miss the ground handling of FU III aircraft as well as the general hard-to-define atmosphere of the sim. all the best, Hans Petter
  7. I checked. It's a DME (look it up). Basically, it can be used to assess the approximate distance to a VOR.
  8. I just dropped by and noticed this real world versus sim world comparison. You have certainly made Switzerland look like the real thing :rolleyes:
  9. We'll look into the northern region again. I'm quite busy for the summer but I haven't given up on FU3. It's a great flight simulator, especially for fixed wing GA aircraft. ("Fixed wing" excludes helicopters). I still find FU3 to be superior in terms of ground handling--it's got the real world lateral friction that makes wheels roll forward and skid sideways. So, "ground handling" goes far beyond being a taxiing issue since it's directly relevant to take-offs and landings, especially so for crosswind landings. With rudder pedals or a twist stick for rudder FU3 is a great sim for practicing challenging landings. I have, however, found FU3 to be lacking outside of the normal flight envelope--planes don't enter an unrecoverable stall no matter how far you push it. Thus, we've got a sim from the late 90's that's quite forgiving when you abuse an aircraft, yet it's simulating proper flight better than recent sims, at least the moment the wheels touch or leave the tarmac.
  10. Well, if we could set it up to process flight3.exe (add it to the list) we could try the values that are provided for the various Thief versions. These are contemporary EA games and are likely to share similar rendering engines. I hooked up a secondary monitor yesterday, an older 19 inch monitor that is closer to the 4:3 aspect ratio. When I choose this one as my primary monitor I can use it for running FU3. For other computer actives I use the widescreen monitor as my primary one and use the secondary one to achieve a larger work space whenever several applications are running at the same time. I'd still be very interested in making FU3 look good on a widescreen monitor though, since that's what we'll all end up with eventually.
  11. This looks like something that might work. However, it's designed to patch the main exe of the following games only,SHOCK2.EXETHIEF.EXE THIEF.EXE (Gold) THIEF2.EXE DROMED.EXE (SS2) DROMED.EXE (T1) DROMED.EXE (T2) The program is looking for these and aborts when none are found. I tried to rename Flight3.exe into thief.exe and thief2.exe but there's more to it than changing the name. Thus, we'd need to tailor this program to look for and modify Flight3.exe. It could be as simple as entering Flight3.exe (with a hex editor) and instruct the program to treat it as it would treat Thief or Thief2. Does anyone know if there's a perfect match in terms of rendering engine?
  12. I've spent my sim time today looking into ways to make this work. There are a few applications (loaders, hacks) that are reported to work for most vintage games. The only one that seems to (sort of) work for FU3 is D3DWindower. I managed to make the sim run in an 800 x 600 window but the colors were awful. I might have been able to tweak the configuration if it weren't for the fact that the interface is written in Japanese. All the "English" downloads that I found were actually the same Japanese version as far as I can tell. Since I haven't installed Japanese fonts all of the menus look like hex code. Provided somebody comes across a version in some kind of Western language version this application may seem to be a promising approach.
  13. I tried it and it works to some extent. 1920 x 1080 does not work while 1024 x 768 does work. However, the monitor size ratio is still 1.33 with this one while my monitor is 1.78. Result, I lose a lot in panel sharpness as well as losing terrain texture quality. It would be better if ddfix could force a windowed mode that retains the original aspect ratio of 1.33. I know that other older games can be run in windowed mode but it may require native support of windowed mode. If everything fails I can hook up my old monitor before running FU3.
  14. I bought a 24 inch monitor yesterday. Its native resolution is 1920 x 1080. While more recent sims can be set up with a graphics resolution that will fit my screen FU III gets badly distorted. Evidently, the reason is that there are no resolution alternatives that provide widescreen proportions. So, I figured a windowed mode might do. I realize this has been discussed before (FU3 on wide screen monitor---s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d) but it doesn't hurt to look into it again. The thing is, if you buy a monitor these days you're likely to get widescreen proportions while FU III was created in the days 800 x 600. How do we go about setting up a windowed mode that will retain the correct proportions?Hans Petter
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