The some of you who have been working with me and/or chatting with me on the IRC #falcon4 (stop by there btw) know already that I'm going to take a summer vacation this year. Last summer (year 2000) in my part was dedicated totally to f4 theater building, now you might think I just did lot of theater work, wrong... I did nothing except theater work. It was pretty insane staying up all night tiling and doing other stuff like that day after day when my friends were having fun in the sun. I did NOT have much time for summer fun activities (only few weekends) so this will be now corrected in the coming summer.
I'm gonna be out of the "hard" theater work for at least most of May and until September / October, depending really how the summer turns out. So it might be around six months of vacation time for me.
What do I do in the summertime?
Well I dont want to bother with the hard work getting my hands dirty with f4 theater stuff. I will be however coordinating tiling on upcoming Opeartion Desert Storm theater (same as T-Bone's F4ME). I will be limitedly answering my falcon4 emails, but please do not get offended if you do not receive prompt answer. Most likely I'll answer all emails I get, but depending on the complexity of the answer it might take a looong time to get reply. I can put together Installers for new theaters, but again please dont get mad if this is extremely slow process I'll do it when I feel up to it (if these new theaters needing installers come up in the summer). Time to time I will be idling around on IRC #falcon4 and also slowly reading PMC TFW (this) forum but please dont expect prompt posts for questions. Basically I want to take my mind off from the falcon stuff.
Status of the PMC TFW theaters?
Vietnam is basically on hold until the summer is over. At this moment (before vacation starts etc) I'm putting together new beta release for it but its not certain it gets released, v0.4 works pretty decent with the campaign update. I have some plans on upgrading Vietnam to Spherical map and 128 segment size, but thats WAY into the next winter, most likely early 2002 - if it happens.
Operation Desert Storm (ODS: the 128 theater) continues to be tiled as there is so much to do, we only now almost cover the 64 segments of the map, still too much to go... The campaign is under work and there might be some issues with the 128 fixed engine of eFalcon v1.09 - remains to be seen. ODS beta 1 is a question mark, will it be public or internal beta will be decided in next few weeks. If you definitely want to get this theater, I suggest you post it to the ODS forum to let us know, currently there is not such post happening...
Hmm thats about it for the background, now for the business at hand. Currently our PMC TFW tutorials are in bad shape, I have already been updating the tutorials and they will be reflecting the Spherical Conversion for terrain creation and (I think) decent campaign building. Tiling guide hopefully will be a bit updated too. The F4Patch theater installation is the ONLY way to do it these days, but here is the problem: the f4p + installshield system is extremely complex and I'm having hard time understanding it myself so how could I produce nice tutorial for it? sigh. We could try of course, might give some idea to the f4 theater builders.
The summer is a long time and dumbass like me will surely empty my head on the heat of the sun
- right now it would be good idea to pump out whatever information I have, to the forum/tutorials here so you guys can enjoy it. C'mon I dont know much but at least that amount I do know, I want to share it with you so if/when there will be new theater builders in the summertime, they can benefit from it.So lets now start by you guys asking me bunch of questions regarding Spherical Converter making the terrain files from DEM data... Creating campaign, how to avoid CTD's and such... How does things work in TacEdit and such... Also tiling, texture.bin and textures itself... Anything you can think off... all you can get out of me, I'm here to try answering what I know or to tell I dont know - which ever is the case
PMC TFW
Snake Man
