Random Dynamic 'Battle' Smoke and Ground Units

[sonicviz]

3 hours ago, Stonehouse said:

WorldObjects is a folder not a file so all ok. Could be wrong as I don't use the weapon mod anymore since the dev's revisited the 50 cals a couple of patches ago but I don't recall a conflict at the file level either.

 

Ok, thanks. 

[MajorMagee]

On 10/22/2021 at 7:12 PM, Stonehouse said:

The dev team updated some of the ships files in a recent patch. I didn't notice as I rarely use the Kuban map where most of the ship action happens but yesterday I ran into some errors as a result. I've done an update to my personal version of the mod but have not really had time to test it much. Since I published my personal version a few posts up and I know a few people are using it I'm now publishing the updated version as a courtesy. I'm not sure how much support I will be able to give as real life is pretty flat out right now. That said I like using the mod so likely I will eventually fix any problems if I can.

 

 

low Effects plus Units.7zip 13.13 kB · 24 downloads

I was having trouble with this version having the smoke effects fade in and out every 12 seconds or so. Editing Staticexplosions.txt to reference the city_firesmall_loop.txt and villagesmoke_loop.txt files (found in the latest scripts.gtp) instead of the city_firesmall.txt and villagesmoke.txt files provided in this zip got them running continuously.

[Stonehouse]

Good find! Interesting because city_firessmall and villagesmoke have loop = true. So wonder if the X_loop.txt files are just treated differently by the game or there is a special parameter or setting making the loop ones work better.

 

Maybe the StoppedPhase parameter? will have to play around with it a bit and see what happens

Edited November 28, 2021 by Stonehouse

[MajorMagee]

I played around with the various parameters making them match the values in the _loop versions for most of yesterday without success. It's as if the game code needs to see that specific file naming convention for the continuous looping without the fade in the middle to work.

[Stonehouse]

With the info from MajorMagee (thanks again) and some playing around I've created this version which so far seems to work better than previously in regard to smoke fade out/in. I think for me personally though I may reduce the probability of each effect still further as I left it running for about 30-40 mins in a free flight quick mission and there was a lot of large black smoke columns by the time I came back and as these don't fade and are visible from a long distance I thought it was a bit much. Anyway adjust as you see fit. Note that I also tweaked some of the other map emitter files to also carry the always visible tag. Set up for JSGME. As before I have turned off the spawning of enemy units (like AAA) by commenting out the lines in staticexplosions.txt because I use this mod to give atmosphere in missions rather than provide extra action. You can easily remove the comment markers though to suit your taste.

 

See how it goes for you.......

 

Dynamic Effects plus Units.zip

[MajorMagee]

One thing I noticed in your update is that templar_big_fire_loop.txt references CityFire.epl instead of CityFire01.epl. This leads to the fade in/out effect still happening for that part of the script.

[Stonehouse]

Ok I hadn't seen that. To me it seems to not do the fade cycle. Will check it out though thanks. CityFire.epl and CityFire01.epl are different effects. Do you see a big difference visually other than the fade loop?

[MajorMagee]

They look pretty similar. It took me a bit of trial and error to figure out that this was the cause.

[Stonehouse]

Thanks. One other thing out of interest. I usually test this mod in single player using the F2 external camera and rotate the view back and forth taking a smoke plume in and out of the field of view to check for the fade in/out issue. Previously it was quite obvious and you would see the base of fire with no smoke and then smoke as well but as I said I didn't see it anymore. Is that how you test ?

 

 

<edit> ok retesting and being more vigorous in rotation that usual I notice now that it does fade in and out in only certain segments of the 360 deg view. Seems to be rear right quarter and left front quarter. Elsewhere the effect stays solid for me. No idea why but will update to the CityFire01.epl and upload a new version as soon as I get a spare moment to do the edit and retest since you advise it fixes the issue. Thank you

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited December 5, 2021 by Stonehouse

[Stonehouse]

New version. Removed one of the effects as it is now a duplicate as they both end up at cityfire01.epl - I think when I get more time I can probably remove parts of the TemplarGFX folder now.

 

Also some example pics of some the effects generated for people new to this - I've marked the effects caused by this mod. These randomly spawned smoke columns and fires add a great deal of atmosphere to your missions. If you investigate this thread a bit you will find instructions to also enable random explosions, flak, ships etc. 

 

 

Dynamic Effects plus Units.zip

[Spinnetti]

Great stuff, thanks!

 

I know you are busy, but this seems to conflict with a couple scripts with visible pilot mod.. any way to make them compatible? Are these scripts directly editable in notepad for instance to merge the changes?

 

Thanks.

[Stonehouse]

I don't use the visible pilot mod so not sure. Can you provide the messages or whatever symptoms of error you are experiencing? If it is JSGME type warnings then just post up pics showing the JSGME warning box. You could also just try loading the visible pilot mod after this one too. Generally speaking the last mod loaded wins when it comes to conflicts usually.

 

Actually don't worry. Just found and downloaded the visible pilot mod and looked at the contents. There is no conflict at the file level that I can see so I believe that any warnings you are getting are at the folder level ie something like warning folder xyz already created by mod 123 do you want to continue

 

So I believe it is fine. You only need to worry about file level conflicts when loading mods.

 

if you were getting a warning like "\data\LuaScripts\WorldObjects\mapemitters\city_firesmall_loop.txt already loaded by mod xyz do you want to continue?" for example then that would represent a true conflict that could only be resolved by looking at each mod's version of the conflicting file and if possible merging the two versions of the offending file or merging the mods. If they are both altering the same sections of the file then obviously you cannot merge the mods and have to choose which to load.

 

Edited December 7, 2021 by Stonehouse

[Spinnetti]

Thanks.. it just said it conflicted at the folder level. If I put the pilot mod before your mod, the game fails (messed up graphics, action doesn't start etc.). If I put the pilot mod after yours, it runs and shows your mod greyed out in JSGME - I don't know if it just disabled your mod entirely, or impacted it in some way?

 

it gave the following errors when I added the pilot mod after yours - the pilot mod said v4 - I thought I had seen a newer mod somewhere, but maybe not.

Folder "data\luascripts\worldobjects" has already been added by the "Dynamic Effects plus Units" mod.
Folder "data\luascripts\worldobjects\bots" has already been added by the "Dynamic Effects plus Units" mod.

 

Thanks!
 

[Stonehouse]

No idea why putting the pilot mod before this one (not mine by the way, I'm just caretaker for now as the original author is MIA) causes messed up graphics. Possibly it is another mod that you are using or some other issue. v4 was the one I checked visually.

 

If a mod is greyed out in JSGME it just means that it is "pinned" by a mod that is loaded later than it and you will not be able to unload the greyed out mod until the one pinning it is unloaded. 

 

The folder level warning you describe will not cause any problems. All it is telling you is that a previous mod has already created a folder that the mod being loaded also references. The warnings that are important are ones telling you that file has already been created. This is important because each mod's files are a snapshot of game files which have been altered to create the mod.

 

JSGME was originally created for one of the Silent Hunter submarine games and possibly folder level conflicts were important in that situation. I do not believe folder level warnings are important for IL2 GB.

 

An example of this is I load a couple of skin packs via JSGME. Loading the second says (amongst other similar warnings) "IL-2 Sturmovik Great Battles\data\graphics\skins\Bf109F4 folder" has already been created by mod "Historically Accurate Skins - All - Extra" - but it doesn't matter as the two skin packs don't have the same name dds files.

 

So if you load a mod that references the same files as another mod you will overwrite the previous mods snapshot. This means that mod loaded previously will stop working. Often this doesn't cause errors just the loss of the effects of the overwritten mod. It tends to only cause an error if the overwritten mod has a dependence on the overwritten file being a certain way.

 

An example of this is meplanes effects mod and Rowdy's cloud mod. As downloaded they both have certain common sun and sky related dds and ini files in them. So if you load meplanes effects after Rowdy's clouds you see meplanes version of certain things when you fly not Rowdy's. If you load it the other way around you lose meplanes version and get Rowdy's. So if you wanted Rowdy's you must load his mod after meplanes.

 

Last one loaded wins.

Edited December 7, 2021 by Stonehouse

[h777ax24]

Ооо!! Спасибо! Очень все хорошо и подробно расписано!!! !! 

Ooo!! Thanks! Everything is very well and detailed !!! :))

[MajorMagee]

The only issue with these is that, as far as I can tell, the smoke always drifts from South to North, no matter the ambient wind direction.

[Stonehouse]

Ok hadn't noticed but wasn't thinking about that aspect. Not sure what to do about it off the top of my head, is it all types of smoke? Just the big one?

[MajorMagee]

It's all three. I was hoping that the last hotfix might do the trick. Perhaps there a hidden parameter that can turn on wind directionality with these loop effects.

[Beebop]

2 hours ago, MajorMagee said:

The only issue with these is that, as far as I can tell, the smoke always drifts from South to North, no matter the ambient wind direction.

Unlike the aerostats, smoke drift is hard coded into the object.  Try rotating the object in the ME to the orientation of the wind.

[MajorMagee]

I tried both HaveDirection=0, and HaveDirection=1 to no effect in the loop script.

 

These are not being added in the ME. They are being randomly placed through staticexplosions.txt

[Stonehouse]

8 minutes ago, MajorMagee said:

I tried both HaveDirection=0, and HaveDirection=1 to no effect in the loop script.

 

These are not being added in the ME. They are being randomly placed through staticexplosions.txt

 

The havedirection parameter was my only thought as well. Was planning to give that a try after work today but no point if you've already tried it. Will still have a fiddle around and see if I can find something. Might be the weekend before I have time though even then so if anyone has an idea feel free to try it. As I've said before I'm just self elected acting caretaker for this not the original author. 

Passing thought - does smoke from things like exploded vehicles or whatever undergo drift due to prevailing winds? Just thinking these spawned smoke clouds might be handled similarly in the back end of IL2.

[MajorMagee]

Yes, vehicle fires / smoke drift based on the actual wind direction and strength.

[Stonehouse]

I tried looking at a mission with a city_fire_loop effect in it where the orientation of the smoke plume had been specified. Code in the mission looks like:

 

Effect
  {
    Name = "smokeEffect";
    Index = 25987;
    LinkTrId = 25986;
    XPos = 190065.000;
    YPos = 0.000;
    ZPos = 142698.000;
    XOri = 0.00;
    YOri = 16.00;
    ZOri = 0.00;
    Script = "luascripts\worldobjects\mapemitters\city_fire_loop.txt";
    Model = "";
    Desc = "";
  }

 

16 deg is the wind direction from the wind layers in the weather config:

 

  WindLayers
  {
    0 :     16 :     6;
    500 :     16 :     8;
    1000 :     16 :     10;
    3000 :     16 :     10;
    5000 :     16 :     10;
  }

 

The effect has been manually set by the mission author to match the wind layer setup, it doesn't default the orientation by itself.

 

So somehow you would have to specify the x,y,z orientation for the spawned smoke. I think you'd need to be able to have an lua function or or some way to retrieve the mission windlayers config  to get the wind orientation and then be able to pass it to the spawned effect. Global table perhaps. You would have to do this somehow within city_fire_loop.txt or more likely staticexplosions.txt as a parameter to be passed to the emitter.

 

No sure it's doable without some help from the dev team. Perhaps they could make it default to the ground level wind layer if not otherwise specified.

 

Any thoughts? 

 

edit - I think the spawned smoke is always blowing from south to north because the orientation defaults to (0,0,0)

Edited December 16, 2021 by Stonehouse

[MajorMagee]

Agree that it's defaulting to a 0 value without any overt input, so it's always drifting to the North.

 

It would be nice if the developers automated the orientation to match the ground level wind for us. I suspect it would only take a few lines of code.

[Stonehouse]

I'll add it to the request thread. It would help mission builders a lot I imagine as it avoids them having to hand spec every smoke effect to make it match the wind. Much better to set the wind layer and then every effect uses it to determine orientation without mission builders needing to do anything.

[Stonehouse]

Default Smoke effects orientation and mission wind direction. - Suggestions - IL-2 Sturmovik Forum (il2sturmovik.com)

 

If anyone can add any points that you feel would make the devs favour this idea please do so.

 

Keep it respectful and on topic obviously.

 

Thanks

Edited December 17, 2021 by Stonehouse

[RISE]

Is it possible to increase the general amount of flak but leave everything else off with this mod?

[Stonehouse]

5 hours ago, RISE said:

Is it possible to increase the general amount of flak but leave everything else off with this mod?

Using the MG34 section as an example. The line in bold is the one you want to change, it's the probability of spawning a unit. The closer to a value of 1 you get the more often the unit will spawn. Be aware though these are real AI units and if you end up with too many you will find your FPS will eventually get very bad.  Also be aware that the range 2500,15000 is saying that these units will spawn between 2500m to 15000m from your position at that point in time. You can change these values obviously but if you get silly about it you can find enemy units shooting you down before you take off. This is one of the reasons I personally only use the smoke effects and set them to generate off in the distance.

 

//Ground based MG34 enemy gun emplacement
[Emitter]
    P=0.015
    Object="LuaScripts\WorldObjects\Vehicles\mg34-aa.txt"
    WaterObject="LuaScripts\WorldObjects\TemplarGFX\templar_no_water.txt"
    Alt=0
    Range=2500,15000
[end]

 

[RISE]

7 minutes ago, Stonehouse said:

Also be aware that the range 2500,15000 is saying that these units will spawn between 2500m to 15000m from your position at that point in time.

 

 

This is in general radius of player? Or can this be set to only enemy lines? and thanks for the info.

[Stonehouse]

The player or the host. It has been mentioned previously but to remind new people you really only want the host of a MP mission to run this mod when flying online as it is network enabled so that the effects generated are in sync for all players. If everyone in a MP session runs it then it quickly swamps things as everyone is generating effects.

In summary use this mod in offline or as the host in online with clients not running it. Particularly I'd suggest for MP that less is more. ie don't spawn 100s of units and expect things to run smoothly in an online session. Effects like smoke are cheaper in general than AI units.

Edited December 21, 2021 by Stonehouse

[artao]

Hello. I'm new to the game. I picked up BoS and FC1 during the sale.

This mod won't work for me. The game keeps complaining about missing .epl files. Shells and such.

I do have Draw Distance Increase installed as well, as recommended. And with zero performance hit I might add. Yay!

Am I missing something on my end? Has there been a game update that broke this mod?

The videos with it running look darn tootin nice.

[Stonehouse]

As far as I am aware the version I posted a few months ago up this thread works fine. I believe errors you are seeing come from another mod. Checking here at my end this mod does not include epl files. Perhaps give a screen shot or some other info to help pinpoint where your problem lies? A list of the mods you are using would probably also help

Edited March 14, 2022 by Stonehouse

[Beebop]

With Stonehouse on this. 

Try this, disable all other mods.  Do you still get error messages?  If not then it's a mod conflict.  Re-add mods until the error returns and that is the culprit.

[artao]

Okay, so .... I think it's working now. Or at least, I'm not getting any errors when I have it installed (using JSGME)

 

I have almost zero mods installed:

Better Fronts -- Just a graphical enhancement for no man's land on the Arras map

Draw Distance Increase -- As recommended by this (dynamic battle) mod

This mod

 

Here's the thing. I DLed and installed the file linked in the first post. (DynamicWarzoneIL2GB.zip) That is the one that was spitting out errors. All by itself or with the other two installed. It kept complaining about missing effects files.

After verifying game files (two had to be restored from Steam) and trying again, then coming back to this thread, I noticed up above a ways another post with a different file (Dynamic Effects plus Units.zip)

 

So I installed Dynamic Effects plus Units by itself, and that worked fine. Then I removed that and added increased draw distance and dynamic warzone, and everything is working fine.

Do I even need Dynamic Warzone installed? Looking quickly thru all the rest of this thread I see that there have been several versions posted. So for now I will use only Dynamic Effects plus Units. I am guessing that the file in the first post is NOT the one to use. Is that correct? ONLY use the Dynamic Effects plus Units from the Dec 5, 2021 post of Stonehouse, yes?

So now my mods are, in order: Better Fronts, Draw Distance Increase, Dynamic Effects plus Units

And that should do it, yes?

[Stonehouse]

The original Dynamic Effects plus Units is way out of date. Last ok version was mine from Dec 2021. It's been a while but I believe from distant memory that my version of Dynamic effects plus units effectively includes draw distance increase - at least for smoke columns anyway. I don't know what is in Better Fronts.......I seem to recall that's one of those compilation mods but could be easily wrong. Anyway I can say I definitely no longer use Draw Distance Increase. Just remember for MP only the host/server should be running Dynamic Effects plus Units.  If you look back through the thread you'll see me make that point numerous times. 

[artao]

Gotcha. So I can remove Draw Distance Increase too. Cool.

 

Better Fronts is just a re-texture of No Man's Land on the Arras map from Flying Circus.

[Youtch]

@Stonehouse: just to confirm that the last version of this mod you are referring to is the one posted in the thread above from 5th of December?

 

Does it include or replace the original mod?

 

Shall we consider the version with units you provided as an effective replacement of the original mod which would be more up-to- date with last IL2 versions?

 

What is the overall impact on fps (in VR everything is more taxing)?

 

I was very interested by this mod, but i was restraining on installing it as it looks that the original author stopped updating it in 2019.

 

Thank you very much in advance for your clarifications.

Edited March 15, 2022 by Youtch
Reworded

[Stonehouse]

1 hour ago, Youtch said:

@Stonehouse: just to confirm that the last version of this mod you are referring to is the one posted in the thread above from 5th of December?

 

Does it include or replace the original mod?

 

Shall we consider the version with units you provided as an effective replacement of the original mod which would be more up-to- date with last IL2 versions?

 

What is the overall impact on fps (in VR everything is more taxing)?

 

I was very interested by this mod, but i was restraining on installing it as it looks that the original author stopped updating it in 2019.

 

Thank you very much in advance for your clarifications.

 

The one posted Dec 5 2021 is a replacement for the original (which no longer works due to game changes over a year or so of patches).

 

I don't use VR so can't comment in that regard. 

 

On a normal screen - assuming you are flying SP or MP with only the mission host using the mod and that you don't increase the probability of spawning too much - I don't see much impact at all - although you should note that I only use the smoke effects and searchlights to create atmosphere and do not spawn AAA etc units. AI units would typically require more resources so I would expect that if you have too many you will have issues. If clients and host all use this mod you will get problems as the mod is network enabled so that each smoke column etc is the same size and position for everyone. If everyone is spawning smoke etc then things will get bogged down eventually.

 

I keep probability numbers very low and still see plenty of smoke off in the distance making the battlefield much less sterile. I host the missions for the group I fly with and have this mod enabled for smoke effects and they don't have issues due to this mod. All I can suggest is try it and see. It's not a big download anyway. Personally running an i9-9900K on 32Gb RAM and a 2070 8Gb card with about 40 mods switched on at 2k resolution plus reshade and very high game settings including ones not accessible outside startup.cfg and gpresets.cfg and typically as far as I've noticed I'm getting somewhere between 60-80 fps all the time.  

[Youtch]

1 hour ago, Stonehouse said:

40 mods switched on

40 mods!!! This is a LOT of mods!

 

I would be very curious to know what are all your mods.

 

Thank you very much for your clear answer, i will give it a try.

[artao]

Thanks for keeping this updated @Stonehouse .. It definitely increased the "life" on the map. Less sterile. Especially on the Arras map.

 

Since the OP doesn't appear to be active and this mod is maintained by someone else, perhaps a new thread is in order so the first post can be updated with the most up-to-date working version. To avoid confusion.