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Author Topic: Modding Tornado  (Read 227963 times)

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Offline Wexodius

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Re: Modding Tornado
« Reply #180 on: September 18, 2018, 05:42:25 PM »
Thanks for this mod Frankie. Appreciate the hard work done.
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Offline Frankie

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Re: Modding Tornado
« Reply #181 on: September 18, 2018, 07:19:29 PM »
Hi Wexodius. You are most welcome.
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Offline Frankie

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Some loose ends
« Reply #182 on: September 30, 2018, 02:15:50 AM »
I've had a whale of a time modifying the Tornado source code for the past one year. Unless I get a sudden rush and burst of inspiration, or an upgraded new brain cortex, I will be closing this eventful and memorable (at least for me!) chapter of my flight sim life. It's 2018 now and it's time for me to put my 1993 hat off and to look for another hat to put on. Modding Steel Beasts 1.0 looks good, but first I'll have to get the source code. Good luck with that! Alternatively, if you happen to own the source code of a DOS-based flight sim of the 1990s, and you are willing to share it with me, please do contact me.

In the meantime, I leave you, the viewer, with FOUR mini-projects to advance the Tornado project.

1. Add Shadow for Tornado plane

See: http://dogsofwarvu.com/forum/index.php/topic,5046.msg31950.html#msg31950
For better depth cuing - Date of delivery unknown.

2. Modifying Tornado to run on multiple monitors

See: http://www.tinmith.net/wayne/blog/2017/06/immersive-flight-sim-4.htm
For a more immersive experience - Date of delivery unknown.

3. Smoke trails for SAMs

So we can see the SAMs better - date of delivery unknown.

4. Multicrew Navigator+Pilot multiplayer Tornado

The ultimate mod - date of delivery unknown.


These are all projects that I no longer have time to plough through. If anyone would like to try their hand at modding the source code, you are most welcome to try!

So THANK YOU, Asid and the DOWVU community, for all the support and encouragement given to me as I sought to make one of the best DOS flight simulators the best. It's been a real blast. Lastly, thank you to Kevin J. Bezant for writing the awesome 16-bit Tornado 3D engine code. His well-written and well-documented x86 ASM source code made it easy for me in many instances. He's the real genius behind Tornado. Cheers mate! I raise my pint of lager to you!


Frankie out.

« Last Edit: October 06, 2018, 10:41:30 AM by Frankie »
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Offline Asid

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Re: Modding Tornado
« Reply #183 on: September 30, 2018, 02:34:33 AM »
It has been an awesome trip Frankie. Your passion for this project has been obvious throughout.

I look forward to your next project and will support you as much as I can  :cheers
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Offline Frankie

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Re: Modding Tornado
« Reply #184 on: October 15, 2018, 07:11:33 PM »
103. Enhanced flyby for tornado with just F3
Mod: Flyby re-engineered with F3 key
By Frankie
Description:  Modded Flyby view (F3 key). Previous mod required you to hit F1 before hitting F3 for a nice flyby view. Now you just need to hit F3 without F1 to get a nice(r) flyby view. When you hit F3, if the flyby is activated (in some cases it won't especially when nearing Target X or Target Y), the view will swivel so that the Tornado is oncoming. Then the view follows the Tornado as it leaves your field of vision.


Some scenes are F1 followed by F3. Most visuals, however, were the result of
just hitting F3 by itself. A Tornado-flyby innovation.

The F3 key works most of the time except for parts of a mission where it becomes a fixed view from some viewpoint way out. I haven't figured out why this is so. Still, there are enough moments in any mission where hitting F3 gives you a nice panaromic view of your Tornado sweeping by.

Regards
Frankie Kam
« Last Edit: October 23, 2018, 04:20:20 PM by Frankie »
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Offline Asid

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Re: Modding Tornado
« Reply #185 on: October 16, 2018, 02:00:44 AM »
 :thumbsup
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Offline Frankie

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Re: Modding Tornado
« Reply #186 on: October 26, 2018, 12:16:36 AM »
Bug Fix. There was a lingering bug since Mod#97 that went unnoticed until now. If you hit the "M" (Map) key, followed by either PgDn or End, you would end up a screen crash.


This has now been fixed. Perfecto.

Regards
Frankie Kam
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Offline Frankie

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Re: Modding Tornado
« Reply #187 on: November 17, 2018, 09:29:32 AM »
104.  A10 Wannabe
Mod: Trading plane models - Swapping the Tornado 3D model for the A-10 3D model (all other aspects unchanged)
By Frankie
Description: I thought this one out of the blue. What if it were to possible to fly the A-10 in external views instead of the usual Tornado IDS? In otherwords, fly the Tornado as usual, except that the Tornado would assume the 3D model and shape of the A10. And like-wise - to make the A10 assume the 3D model and shape of the IDS Tornado. So I decided to try it out for a lark (just for fun). Guess what? It works. Haha. See image below.


See the bottom status bar "VIEW="? It shows "TRK" which means tracking view.
So this isn't your usual DRONE view, mate!

What I did was simple. I merely swapped the IDS Tornado and A10 3D object model code. Here's what I did exactly which is (Fair)child's play.

Step 1. Open the file \TORNADO\VISUAL\OBJECTS\MOBILE\TORNADO1.INC using a text editor like Notepad++
Step 2. Edit the first word of the first line by changing the word Tornado1 into A10
Step 3. Open the file \TORNADO\VISUAL\OBJECTS\MOBILE\A10.INC
Step 4. Edit the first word of the first line by changing the word A10 into Tornado1
Step 5. Compile the ASM source file \TORNADO\VISUAL\MOBOBJ1.ASM
Step 6. Link all OBJ files by executing the command "link @main.lnk" (without apostrophes) - usually put inside a batch file like L.BAT (on my system)
Step 7. Execute FLIGHT.EXE and vola!

So what does this mean (other than having some mindless fun flying an A-10 which for all practical intents and purposes is still an IDS Tornado)? This means that which some creativity and time on one's hands (not mine!), one can redesign the simulation to be an A10 flight simulator. For that to happen (which won't, but it is still interesting to consider the possibilities), the cockpits have to be redesigned, not to mention the avionics, and everything else. But the development guys over at Falcon BMS 4.XX have already done this kinda thing, so this thought will just remain ... a thought.

Still nothing beats moving mud as a Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt.


Letting loose a 1,000 pounder at 200 feet is not my idea of fun!


Checking on the A10 drones with F5 (Drone View) and I can see that where it usually shows an A-10 flying lazily slow at low level, I now see an IDS Tornado. So I rest my case.


Split personality planes to confuse the situation. But it's all for science, so it's okay I guess.

Haha.
« Last Edit: November 17, 2018, 09:46:42 AM by Frankie »
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Offline Asid

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Re: Modding Tornado
« Reply #188 on: November 17, 2018, 11:35:21 AM »
Thats awesome Frankie

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Offline Tom N

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Re: Modding Tornado
« Reply #189 on: November 17, 2018, 01:56:15 PM »
Overwhelming! I'd wish for the Chinook "skin" :-D
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Offline Frankie

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Re: Modding Tornado
« Reply #190 on: November 20, 2018, 04:07:45 AM »
Hi All

My long term goal is to mod the actual 3D model files in Tornado. For example, it would be nice to add more 3D points, vertices and surfaces to the Tornado 3D model which at the moment looks like this (see below).


The 3D model is very 1993-ish. For an era when most people were running Intel 286 and 386 PCs!

The purpose of this post is to request for help with GeoGebra. If you know how to use GeoGebra, I appreciate it if you could reply to this post. I am trying to visualise the 3D Model of objects in Tornado. If I can crack the code of the 3D model files, then I stand a better chance of modding the 3D objects themselves in Tornado.

The object data files are found in inside D:\TORNADO\VISUAL\OBJECTS. For the time being, I trying to understand the code inside the file D:\TORNADO\VISUAL\OBJECTS\MOBILE\LGB.INC. I am using a 3D Plotter software named GeoGebra. With GeoGebra, I can translate the lines 004-0031 of the code below (they refer to 28 (x,y,z) points) into plot data. This is the easy part.

;--- Start of D:\TORNADO\VISUAL\OBJECTS\MOBILE\LGB.INC code

Line 001: COL_DK_GREY   EQU   8
Line 002:
Line 003: lgb      OBJECTHEADER <OBJ_SCALE16,1024,-1,1,COL_GREY4,3,5,3>
Line 004:       DB   064,072,064   ;   0
Line 005:       DB   062,070,064   ;   1
Line 006:       DB   066,070,064   ;   2
Line 007:       DB   064,074,064   ;   3
Line 008:       DB   062,066,064   ;   4
Line 009:       DB   066,066,064   ;   5
Line 010:       DB   066,056,064   ;   6
Line 011:       DB   062,056,064   ;   7
Line 012:       DB   070,060,064   ;   8
Line 013:       DB   058,060,064   ;   9
Line 014:       DB   064,070,066   ;  10
Line 015:       DB   064,070,062   ;  11
Line 016:       DB   064,066,062   ;  12
Line 017:       DB   064,066,066   ;  13
Line 018:       DB   064,056,066   ;  14
Line 019:       DB   064,056,062   ;  15
Line 020:       DB   064,060,058   ;  16
Line 021:       DB   064,060,070   ;  17
Line 022:       DB   064,058,064   ;  18
Line 023:       DB   066,060,064   ;  19
Line 024:       DB   064,060,066   ;  20
Line 025:       DB   062,060,064   ;  21
Line 026:       DB   064,060,062   ;  22
Line 027:       DB   064,062,066   ;  23
Line 028:       DB   066,062,064   ;  24
Line 029:       DB   064,062,062   ;  25
Line 030:       DB   062,062,064   ;  26
Line 031:       DB   064,056,064   ;  27   
Line 032:       DB   -1
Line 033:
Line 034:       DW   OFFSET   lgb_1
Line 035:
Line 036:       EVEN
Line 037:
Line 038: lgb_1      DW   74
Line 039:
Line 040:       
Line 040: LGB_0      LABEL   BYTE
Line 041:       DB   00Ch,COL_GREY4,COL_GREY4,00,04,02,-1   ; face 1
Line 042:       DB   00Ch,COL_GREY4,COL_GREY4,20,00,22,-1   ; face 8
Line 043:       DB   00Ch,COL_GREY4,COL_GREY4,26,08,24,10,-1   ; face 14
Line 044:       DB   00Ch,COL_GREY4,COL_GREY4,36,34,32,-1   ; face 11
Line 045:       DB   00Ch,COL_GREY4,COL_GREY4,36,18,16,-1   ; face 11
Line 046:       DB   00Ch,COL_GREY4,COL_GREY4,28,40,44,30,-1   ; face 8
Line 047:       DB   00Ch,COL_GREY4,COL_GREY4,50,54,46,26,06,24,-1   ; face 8
Line 048:       DB   00Ch,COL_GREY4,COL_GREY4,48,54,52,08,06,10,-1   ; face 8
Line 049:       DB   00Ch,COL_GREY4,COL_GREY4,14,42,38,12,-1   ; face 9
Line 050:       DB   -1
Line 051:
Line 052:       EVEN

;--- End of D:\TORNADO\VISUAL\OBJECTS\MOBILE\LGB.INC code

Here's what the LBG1000 looks like in the game:


As you can see, after plotting the 3D points in GeoGebra, the object clearly resembles the LGB1000 laser guided bomb.
In this video, I also MANUALLY create some polygon surfaces.

It is the section of lines 041-049 of the LGB.INC code above, referring to faces (polygons?), that I do not know how to convert the code into GeoGebra code. Reproduced below again:


Line 040: LGB_0      LABEL   BYTE
Line 041:       DB   00Ch,COL_GREY4,COL_GREY4,00,04,02,-1   ; face 1
Line 042:       DB   00Ch,COL_GREY4,COL_GREY4,20,00,22,-1   ; face 8
Line 043:       DB   00Ch,COL_GREY4,COL_GREY4,26,08,24,10,-1   ; face 14
Line 044:       DB   00Ch,COL_GREY4,COL_GREY4,36,34,32,-1   ; face 11
Line 045:       DB   00Ch,COL_GREY4,COL_GREY4,36,18,16,-1   ; face 11
Line 046:       DB   00Ch,COL_GREY4,COL_GREY4,28,40,44,30,-1   ; face 8
Line 047:       DB   00Ch,COL_GREY4,COL_GREY4,50,54,46,26,06,24,-1   ; face 8
Line 048:       DB   00Ch,COL_GREY4,COL_GREY4,48,54,52,08,06,10,-1   ; face 8
Line 049:       DB   00Ch,COL_GREY4,COL_GREY4,14,42,38,12,-1   ; face 9
Line 050:       DB   -1
Line 051:
Line 052:       EVEN


If you can shed any light on how to translate lines 41 to 49 of LGB.INC into GeoGebra code, I would be most grateful. I am also attaching the Geogebra export file used in the Youtube video, as well as the original LGB.INC file from Tornado 1.0. I am not sure where this road will lead to, but it's worth a shot.

Cheers and regards
Frankie Kam

UPDATE 4th December 2018
I've got it now. Here's how it works.
DB   00Ch,COL_GREY4,COL_GREY4,00,04,02,-1   ; face 1
means Face1 is made up of these three Vertices: Vertice0, Vertice2 and Vertice1. Notice that the values between the COL_GREY4 and -1 are made up of even values. Those even values are always the VerticeNum multiplied by 2. So the "00,04,02,-1   ; face 1[/size][/font] refers to Vertice2.

      DB   064,072,064   ;   Vertice0
      DB   062,070,064   ;   Vertice1
      DB   066,070,064   ;   Vertice2


and DB   00Ch,COL_GREY4,COL_GREY4,14,42,38,12,-1   ; face 9
means that Face9 is made up of Vertice7, Vertice21, Vertice19 and Vertice6. The values are the vertex number * 2. Effectively the index value for the look-up table. Saves doing the * 2 in code.

The polygons are always clockwise in their vertex order. If you were looking straight-on at a polygon, the vertices would be clockwise.
Many thanks to Kevin J Bezant for this information. Now this makes sense to me.

« Last Edit: December 03, 2018, 10:02:32 PM by Frankie »
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Offline Frankie

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Re: Modding Tornado
« Reply #191 on: November 25, 2018, 05:38:23 PM »
105.  Tracer Colour
Mod: Tracer colour variety to distinguish Tornado Mauser cannon rounds from enemy AAA rounds
By Frankie
Description: By default, the game's Mauser cannon shots and enemy AAA are the same colour - yellow. This is especially confusing when performing a head-on cannon attack against enemy AAA. Every cannon shot fired from the Tornado or from the enemy AAA is yellow. So when the action gets furious, all rounds are a yellow mass of pixels.

So this time I decided to mix up the colours for variety and gameplay sake. I edited the source code D:\TORNADO\VISUAL\OBJECTS\MOBILE\TRACER.INC.


Enemy AAA is at my One O'Clock, firing at my aircraft. I have just fired my Tornado's Mauser cannons.
Hence for the criss-cross of light blue (cyan) streak of tracer rounds against the yellow-red AAA rounds whizzing in front of me.

Now the rounds fired from the Tornado are a mixture of white and cyan. The rounds fired off by enemy AAA is a mixture of yellow and red. Both to simulate tracer rounds. This effect is a matter of taste. You may perhaps wish for a more realistic colour mix, but now, visually, I can more easily distinguish between friendly and enemy tracer rounds. These colours work well for dusk and night missions. Less so for daytime missions.

Regards
Frankie Kam
« Last Edit: November 26, 2018, 05:06:03 AM by Frankie »
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Offline Frankie

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Re: Modding Tornado
« Reply #192 on: December 04, 2018, 03:08:40 AM »
Update on my modelling Tornado sub-project. 4th December 2018.

I downloaded and installed a trial version of Matlab software. I also downloaded this exercise:

Using the attached MATLAB file script, I managed to auto-generate a wire-frame and 3D shaded model of a cube.


All I need to do now is to modify the script to input and generate the wire-frame and 3D shaded models of Tornado's INC files. E.g., LGB1000, TornadoIDS INC files. The next step after that is to add more vertices and faces to the models.

The world's my oyster. Stay tuned.
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Offline Danjuro

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Re: Modding Tornado
« Reply #193 on: December 16, 2018, 01:04:09 AM »
Greetings,

I am new to Tornado. I wasn't blessed with a PC back in those days and I am busy catching up all the wonderful flight sims of yore. Your site made Tornado one of the three I have been dedicating my energy too and led me here. I have yet to learn a lot of the ropes (identifying targets properly is so hard!), but I am astounded by all the work you put in this modification project.

Cheers and best wishes!
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Offline Asid

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Re: Modding Tornado
« Reply #194 on: December 16, 2018, 01:20:43 AM »
 :Welcome to the forum Danjuro

Frankie has done an incredible amount of work with Tornado. He is very passionate about it  :thumbsup
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