sniperton

Strange. I was pretty sure that killing yourself was a safe (and the only) way to make losses undone.

This is what I was talking about. These are missions in a static campaign, where each mission recreates a historic situation and therefore can be commented on in a historic way. Dynamic campaigns are made on a 'what if' base, starting from a historic OOB, but leaving to you and to fortune what should happen in the future.

Well, what you should and could know of the actual mission in advance is there: Mission type / Objective Date / time Weather / clouds / wind Home base and aircraft Active pilots Anything else would be either unrealistic to know of, or too generic. What you have in mind is better fitted to scripted or static campaigns, where each mission is 'hand-made'. DCG is too 'dynamic' to predict what should be in the briefing for mission #16. Of course, as Nephris said, the campaign designer is at liberties to provide background (aka intelligence) info for major events (reinforcements arriving, etc), but this rarely happens, probably because building and testing a campaign is a time-consuming process.

If everything goes south and you want to refly the mission, kill yourself, then exit, then Refly. If you don't kill yourself, squadron losses during the abandoned mission will be added when you refly the very same mission. DCG will only generate the next mission when you hit the green Apply button. If you're unsatisfied with the mission generated by DCG, exit from the briefing screen and the campaign mode, alt-tab from the game, start DCG, and manually generate another mission. Honestly, I don't remember whether it will generate a new mission with the same date or will transfer you to the next mission day. Paul, if you watch this thread, could you please jump in and enlighten us?

There are advanced tricks, e.g. defining individual squads via timetable commands. Say you have all Axis squads to have 4 planes per flight and all Allied squads to have 3. Now you define all bomber squads to have 3 flights instead of 2 and all flights flying with 3 planes each. The result is 8 Axis fighters attacking 9 Allied bombers escorted by 6 Allied fighters. Now you can send flight #2 to look for the Allied fighters while you go for the Allied bombers (or vice versa). DCG is simply great in recreating the past. Happy flying!

I try to avoid massed formations and furballs, they are too hectic, as you said, with frequent accidents, and they are even unrealistic for most theatres to have 16 fighters attacking 16 bombers escorted by 16 fighters. I prefer early war and small scale action, but with several simultaneous battles fought all over the map by AI chaps. Therefore I mostly use Heavy or Dense with only 2 flights per squadron.

A bit of stuttering on mission start is normal, it should be over after half a minute when all the planes are loaded. If the lag remains, you should consider reducing "squadron density" on the General Campaign Settings panel. Another approach is to reduce the Maximum Flights/Squadron setting. "Moderate" with "Four" means that half of the squads will be active with all of their planes, while "Full" with "Two" means all of the squads with half of their planes.

When you use stock DCG, added maps/planes/etc won't show up. Retextured/remade ones will do. If you run DCG on e.g. VPMOD/HSFX, stock maps/planes will be nicer. Added ones will not show up. Say, the stock game has the Norway map. Great. Norway map in VPMOD looks better. The stock game has the Bf-109-E4. Great. In VPMOD it looks much better. The stock game doesn't have early Messerschmidts or Spitfires, but modded games do have them. You won't have them via stock DCG, you need a 3rd party campaign (with modified data files) to have them for your game. Running DCG with modded games is never a milk run. Expect problems. Hence my advice to learn how it works, and once learnt, you're ready to expand towards new frontiers.

DCG is a versatile (1) application with some (2) content provided with it (campaigns shipped with DCG). (1) as an application DCG is fully compatible with both the stock game (currently 4.13.4) and the major mod packs (e.g. HSFX, VPMOD, CUP/BAT). You can safely use DCG with any of them, BUT (2) you'll only have access to stock game content (stock planes, ships, maps, vehicles) using the data files coming with DCG. If you want to have modded content as well, look for 3rd party campaigns specifically made for the respective mod packs. There exist several ones for HSFX and some for VPMOD and BAT too. Mission4today and SAS1946 are good sites to have a look around. But just to get the hang of DCG (and to learn how it works and how it can be customized, which is sometimes tricky for the first), I suggest you should start a stock DCG campaign in either the stock game or in VPMOD (or good old HSFX). BAT is quite resource-heavy, it doesn't make much sense to use it without the goodies you can only have with BAT-specific campaigns.

Yes, you can. It even works with taxi-to-takeoff. Just make sure that the last taxi section is in line with the takeoff path.

Yes, it was what I meant. Any squad can deploy on a carrier (if assigned so in the template file), but only FAA and USN squads will remain there, the rest will transfer to land bases upon the first mission. But probably it has nothing to do with the problem of Nephris.

Maybe I remember incorrectly, but some time ago I had to choose Fleet Air Arm (FAA) squads for the planes to correctly deploy on a Britsh carrier. The same might be true for USN vs USAAF.

Yes, but only if you're sure the plane is really playable in the game version you use.

SOS, Paul, http://members.shaw.ca/lowengrin/ doesn't work any more.

So far as I can judge, take off in pairs would not affect flight path calculations or any other part of the code. Planes get airborne a little bit faster, that's all. There would be two more benefits as well. If it can be implemented, take off in line (side by side) could also be implemented, which would come in handy on WWI type airfields where the runway is not a strip, but a wide (and short) field instead. (The Slovakia map has plenty of them, but scattered you find them on a couple of other maps, including modded BoF and BoB maps.) The second benefit would be, as demonstrated in my test file, that any runway section could be used, not just those with the take-off sign. The East-West runway on Herdla airfield is a case in point: those fighters could not take off from it the 'normal' way. Anyway, take your time, and thanks for considering.

Yep, the stock game has its limitations, hence the unorthodoxy.

Sure, but you have to be clear about that the stock game lacks many of the historic maps and planes, e.g. there's no proper Channel map and there are no early Spitfires: You'll fly Hurris (or against Hurris) on the Finsgulf map instead. The whole modding thingy was started some 10 years ago to remedy this situation. Uncheck 3rd Party Campaign in DCG, go to Career menu in the game, and select any of these, depending on your side preferemce:

DCG works fine with 4.13.3 -- provided you use the stock DCG campaigns coming together with DCG. The Chanel Front campaign is a third-party development, it has been made for a modpack and uses modified data files which are incompatible with 4.13.3.

This is not a proper feature request, just some musings about taxi to take-off and take-off in pairs. I attached a test file for reference. Take-off in pairs Here we have something like this: This can be used (with minimal adjustments) in the airfields file. Nevertheless, in contrast to ‘normal’ take-offs, x0;y0 can’t be used for all flights, as they would collide when spawning at the same location. That is, xn;yn as spawn points should be calculated for each flight (n) separately. the take-off path vector alpha = arctan(y1-y0 / x1-x0), so that xn = x0 + (cos alpha * D); yn = y0 + (sin alpha * D), where D = [safe spawn distance between flights ~ 40 m] * n [zero-based number of actual flight] The 20 m offset between pairs and the 40 m between individual flights is safe enough even for twin-engine bombers, but it would be a no-go for heavies. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem possible to use ‘normal’ take off (in a single row) and paired take-off together in a mixed way. I think restricting take-off in pairs to airstrips could be a fair workaround. Taxi to take-off I placed four spawn areas which can accommodate one full squad or four full flights. Bigger airfields could have two or three times more. Placing them correctly is a little bit tricky, as the first taxi waypoint has to be to the left of the area to prevent planes from making tight turns and colliding with objects. Anyway, the 16 bombers get airborne within 6 mins (with ‘normal’ take-off it would take 4:30 for the given plane type, so that it's just a 33% increase). Consequently, 6 minutes seems to be an absolute safe delay time to spawn another 4 flights. What is needed is to have multiple sections in the airfield file, e.g. [Herdla_Airstrip_0], [Herdla_Airstrip_1], etc, etc. There is one serious backdrop: flights and planes get mixed as they take off, their sequence is not ABCD EFGH as with normal take-off; when airborne, flights have to regroup first. I think taxi to take-off could only be used in conjunction with ‘all planes circle’ or ‘attack rendezvous’. The reference file: [MAIN] MAP Norway/load.ini TIME 12.0 CloudType 0 CloudHeight 1000.0 player RAF_No004SQN00 army 1 playerNum 3 [SEASON] Year 1940 Month 6 Day 15 [WEATHER] WindDirection 0.0 WindSpeed 0.0 Gust 0 Turbulence 0 [Wing] RAF_No004SQN00 RAF_No001SQN01 RAF_No003SQN00 RAF_No003SQN01 RAF_No003SQN02 RAF_No003SQN03 [RAF_No004SQN00] Planes 4 Skill 1 Class air.LAGG_3SERIES29 Fuel 100 weapons default [RAF_No004SQN00_Way] TAKEOFF_002 93610.55 18274.09 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 NORMFLY 91965.38 18294.09 100.00 250.00 &0 [RAF_No001SQN01] Planes 4 Skill 1 Class air.LAGG_3SERIES29 Fuel 100 weapons default [RAF_No001SQN01_Way] TAKEOFF_002 93573.50 18274.13 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 NORMFLY 91936.66 18294.70 100.00 250.00 &0 [RAF_No003SQN00] Planes 4 Skill 1 Class air.PE_2SERIES84 Fuel 100 weapons default [RAF_No003SQN00_Way] TAKEOFF_004 92493.44 17817.04 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92454.30 17796.23 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92458.33 17788.83 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92463.65 17777.53 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92480.28 17750.59 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92483.61 17739.62 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92494.91 17734.63 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92507.55 17729.31 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92523.18 17726.32 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92536.81 17722.33 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92553.11 17721.33 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92561.42 17732.97 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92564.75 17746.27 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 NORMFLY 92984.01 19288.46 250.00 250.00 &0 [RAF_No003SQN01] Planes 4 Skill 1 Class air.PE_2SERIES84 Fuel 100 weapons default [RAF_No003SQN01_Way] TAKEOFF_004 92507.24 17955.28 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92471.67 17961.43 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92456.61 17929.08 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92433.09 17832.99 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92480.28 17750.59 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92483.61 17739.62 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92494.91 17734.63 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92507.55 17729.31 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92523.18 17726.32 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92536.81 17722.33 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92553.11 17721.33 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92561.42 17732.97 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92564.75 17746.27 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 NORMFLY 92984.01 19288.46 250.00 250.00 &0 [RAF_No003SQN02] Planes 4 Skill 1 Class air.PE_2SERIES84 Fuel 100 weapons default [RAF_No003SQN02_Way] TAKEOFF_004 92337.02 18105.27 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92321.03 18128.51 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92291.69 18111.82 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92285.12 18089.57 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92305.35 18047.09 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92412.56 17866.54 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92434.31 17853.90 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92433.80 17829.62 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92471.23 17764.39 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92496.01 17731.51 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92524.84 17719.88 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92555.68 17728.98 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92566.30 17745.67 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 NORMFLY 92995.83 19325.41 250.00 0.00 &0 [RAF_No003SQN03] Planes 4 Skill 1 Class air.PE_2SERIES84 Fuel 100 weapons default [RAF_No003SQN03_Way] TAKEOFF_004 92492.28 17662.76 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92541.26 17663.03 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92552.39 17683.26 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 TAKEOFF_004 92565.54 17742.94 0 0 &0 TRIGGERS 0 0 20 0 NORMFLY 93005.84 19392.61 250.00 0.00 &0 [NStationary] [Buildings] [StaticCamera] 92542 17447 100 0 [Bridge] [House]

I guess you're using JG_X_Man's Channel Front campaign designed for CUP/WAW, right? (https://www.sas1946.com/main/index.php/topic,51983.msg566054/topicseen.html#msg566054) Do you have these settings? As to the Fortresses, do they crash or blow up upon takeoff? If they blow up, it means that their assigned payload is not available in the game version you use. BTW, which game version do you have? The campaign was made for CUP/WAW (but you also need this: https://www.sas1946.com/main/index.php/topic,51330.0.html),and may also work in BAT, but don't expect it to work with other modpacks.

The stock game has about 450 planes, but the WWII module of the biggest modpack has above 1000. IMO the effort would be disproportionate to the gain. I think the solution is to simply forget about extremely short airstrips when creating DCG campaigns. But if you give it a thought, you might consider redefining the 'side' digit which is redundant in a way. (There are no flights without a squadron assignment, and squadrons are linked to a country and, hereby, to a side.) If you have fresh energies I would rather propose taxi to takeoff and takeoff in pairs as challenge candidates . I still have my old test files and plenty of ideas how to implement that feature Anyway, thank you again

I had a similar issue with a modded BoF map where not even MB.152s could take off safely from some historically short runways. While standard Il-2 runways are 1500 to 2000 m long, those early-war grass airstrips are less than 900 m. Perhaps it would be easier to introduce a new FieldAirstrip location type to prevent anything but ultra-light planes to take off from. Much depends on how DCG 'decides' which airplane is fitted to which airfield type. Is it hard-coded for each model, or is it derived from the plane role type as defined in class.dcg? I guess the latter is the case, and anything but level bombers can operate from airstrips as well, no matter how long a runway they actually require. Changing the role type would mess up mission assignments, but a tripartite airfield classification with a corresponding one-digit entry in the class.dcg file would do the trick (0 = all airfield types for light planes; 1 = only airstrips and airfields for most of the rest; 2 = only airfields for the heavies). The only question is if it's worth the effort to re-code DCG and to provide the data manually for each plane type.

All this is probably because since Win7 user-created files (configs, savegames, etc) are removed from the program folder by the OS and placed under Users/Documents/... and are only available to the application software via hardlinks/symbolic links referenced in the OS registry. In contrast to recent software, neither Il-2, nor DCG was designed with this working of the OS in mind, and, on the other side, Windows can't fully keep track of your changes due to the 'old-style' working of these applications. This is why the conventional wisdom says you should never ever place anything related to Il-2 under Program Files. Simply create a C:/Games/Il-2 folder and copy everything there and you'll regain full control of your files.

Unlike _Station or _Harbor, Anything_Airfield doesn't require any Anything nearby. You can just call it whatever you want. The important things is that _Airfields can have bigger planes, while _Airstrips only single-engine ones.

No and yes. ZG1 has Bf-110-C4Bs, designated as ground-attack. I changed the squadname, but with no avail. Then I changed designation from ground-attack to fighter, and voila, problem resolved. I guess my issue was due to the action radius set to 75 km, and as there were no ground/naval targets within that range, DCG made ZG1 fly armed recon missions with only one plane. For some reason I believed that action radius affected player squad only... BTW, taxi-to-takeoff works fine (via airfields.dcg) for seaplanes, where no more than 4 planes are spawned at a time. Otherwise it's a no-go just as takeoff in pairs. On the other hand, seaplane bases are not handled as ordinary airbases. Stationary airplanes placed nearby don't get replaced by DCG as in ordinary airfields, etc, etc. Anyway, thanks again!