Forum > Tornado
Modding Tornado
Frankie:
22. Working HUD in full-screen FLIR display view!
Mod: Working HUD with full-screen view of FLIR
By Frankie
Description: After two and a half-months I have achieved success at last! The HUD information is now accurately shown when in the full-screen FLIR view. The Mauser cannon and Countdown clock with Target of Opportunity Waypoint (T) is now working too. CCIP Bomb-lines in HUD are good. Loft bombing is ... magical. Here are the screenshots.
So what does this mean? Well, you can now hunt down those elusive SCUD launchers and that wily train in the Tornado missions. Shooting up soft targets, tanks and APCS with your Mauser cannons never felt so good. Better immersion, better gameplay. With the 20 cumulative enhancements and modifications, the original Tornado just got enhanced by a factor of 5x.
Instrument Landing System (ILS) in action. The HUD information is perfect.
Frankie:
23. NVG (Night Vision Goggles) toggle
Mod: View FLIR and TIALD in bright green colors (Night Vision)
By Frankie
Description: Pilot's MFD must first be accessed and the FLIR is turned on. Then hit Shift+Tab to turn ON the NVG effect. Hit Shift+Ctrl to turn OFF the NVG effect.
Prior to this hack, when flying at night, all previous versions of FLIGHT.EXE automatically showed the FLIR and TIALD views in Night Vision Goggle (NVG) green phlorescent colors. The user cannot turn off and on the NVG colors at will. It is out of his control.
Now however, by default, the full-screen FLIR and full-screen TIALD views are NOT in NVG colors. Instead, at night the user will initially see them as per the night level colour. This time the NVG colors are turned on MANUALLY by the user using these steps:
(1) User must be in Pilot View (Home key)
(2) User then hits the 'D' key 3x so that Pilot's MFD will cycle until it switches to the FLIR view ...
(3) ... which of course will open in full-screen mode. The user then hits Shift+Tab to turn ON the Night Vision color
(4) If the user hits the Home key, he will see that the outside of the cockpit is in NVG color. The user can imagine that the pilot is using a NVG gear on his pilot's helmet. The tracking (external view) will also be in green phlorescent colors!
(5) To turn OFF the NVG color, the user hits Shift+Ctrl. The colors will revert to the non-NVG colors.
There are several benefits of not defaulting to the NVG colors:
(a) The user can practice takeoffs and landings at night minus the aid of the NVG technology;
(b) The user can appreciate the night hues an colours of the environment (e.g., runaway and towns)!
(c) The user now has a choice to toggle a TIALD or FLIR view between NVG and non-NVG colors
(d) The user can navigate by the lay of the landscape and by the stars!
(e) The TIALD and FLIR views are now not so boring - seeing the MFD and TV-Tab show green NVG colors in every mission gets a bit tiring
The choice of turning on and off the NVG colors leads to more variaty based on the use-case of the user. It extends the playability of Tornado. For example, the user may want to practice full-screen FLIR view and loft bombing in almost total darkness. Being able to toggle the NVG on and off affords the user with a choice to apply the NVG or non-NVG colors to his situation or taste. Artistically, you can watch a runaway or enemy station being hit by flashes of light and explosives at night. That is a sight to behold in Tornado.
Unfortunately, at the moment I am unable to switch off the NVG colors when I am in the TV-TAB TIALD or FLIR views. So if you are in the Navigator's panel and have switched to the full screen FLIR or TIALD with NVG colors, the only way to turn off the green colors is to switch to the Pilot's Panel view and then hit D three times, followed by the awkwardly positioned Shift+Ctrl key combination.
Above: a runaway in its full lighted glory, as seen through the TIALD view. Someone forgot to do a blackout. Did they forget that there is a conflict?
The latest FLIGHT.EXE is attached. This executable comes with the manual NVG colors that the user is able to switch on/off.
Frankie:
24. Mini-views of FLIR and TIALD displays are back in fashion!
Mod: Mini-views of FLIR and TIALD displays
By Frankie
Description: Gamer can now choose between the original FLIR/TIALD TV-Tab displays or the full-screen FLIR/TIALD displays. I felt that converting the FLIR and TIALD views into full-screen were great, but something was missing in the process. The MFD's FLIR mini-display and the TV-TAB's FLIR and TIALD mini-display are classic. They have their charm of their own. So for the sake of the Tornado purists, have I decided to put them back into the simulation. Now the gamer can select both mini-views and the full-screen views of FLIR and TIALD! This has never been done before!
I enabled the FLIR in the pilot's MFD.
The TIAD display in the TV-TAB and the FLIR view inside the MFD are back wth a vengence.
The graphics below are 25-27 years old, yet they still look good!
A novelty. The TIALD TV-Tab display superimposed over the full-screen TIALD view.
This has never been done before in Tornado.
This time the reverse. The FLIR TV-Tab view superimposed over the full-screen TIALD view.
Here's the night view. See the MFD in the centre? It's NVG is not yet activated!
All it takes is a Shift-Tab to activate the NVG. Not only is the MFD's FLIR view
in infra-red, the outside world is too!
The outside world in NVG!
Both the MFD's FLIR display and the right TV-Tab's TIALD views are in non-infra red.
You get to appreciate the night time colors. Isn't the enemy supposed to impose a total blackout
in a time of war?
The MFD and TV-Tabs in infra-red. The ability to toggle on and off the
infra-red palette greatly extends the gameplay of the simulation.
That's it for the pre-Christmas release mod. If nothing else happens between now and Christmas Day, then this is the Christmas 2017 release of the modded Tornado! If you are a former Tornado-holic, I hope that you are enjoying this classic flight simulator more and more each day! If you are new to Tornado or never touched it all these years, you may be wondering what all the fuss is about. Well, the BEST DOS flight/combat simulator just got even better.
Regards
Frankie Kam
P.S. I am attaching the latest FLIGHT.EXE file. Enjoy.
Update on 27/12/2017.
I had to remove the mini-MFD inside the Pilot Panel because it caused a side-effect where the target marker went missing. Imagine selecting the ALARM and seeing the weapon countdown clock appear BUT no target marker! So no more Pilot's mini-MFD. Instead of a mini-MFD, the FLIR MFD appears as full screen when the D key is hit. The Navigator's mini-MFD FLIR view works fine is unaffected.
Frankie:
THANK YOU
Thank you Asid for our friendship since 2014, and for allowing me to host my Tornado news on the Dogs Of War Virtual Unit forums. You are the reason why the Tornado threads exist. You are a rock star!
Thank you DOWVU forum readers, for reading this and my many posts on Tornado on this wonderful website!
Thank you tertius_oculus, for making Twitch videos of Tornado, even in 2017.
Thank you AirFox, for creating a proof-of-concept GOG Tornado zip in 2017.
Thank you Tom N. for being the a supreme example of a Tornado maestro. And for showing me the finer points of flying Tornado with one engine and in extreme weather conditions. Tornado's hard-core flying was created for gamers like you.
Thank you Aki, for creating the Tornado Discord Server back in August 2017, and for compiling what is probably the first new FLIGHT.EXE in 20 years - you started the whole modding process for me in 2017!
Thank you Christopher R., for sharing with me love for Tornado, evident in your many boxed copies of Tornado, in its many variants.
Thank you tbest90662, Terry, for pioneering the quest for Tornado II back in 1998 through one of the earliest and most active forums on Tornado
Thank you to horsmaan, Simo, for a shout-out to my humble Tornado Tribute site on Home Of The Underdogs' Tornado page.
Thank you Jens S. for recommending the OpenGL graphics engine for a Tornado remake, and for offering your aviation expertise with the Tornado remake project.
Thank you Agathosdaimon for making me understand more about raising and lowering the Tornado under-carriage especially at high speed!
Thank you aturi83, Paul, for calling me a "steely eyed missile man".
Thank you ajalberd8, Andrew, for loving Tornado back in its day, and for your joystick questions.
Thank you Olof Pettersson for our wonderful and timeless Olof's Tornado site. It existed long before my Tribute site and there is no other website done in Tornado colors as yours.
Thank you Winged Hussar, Rob, for sharing your love for Tornado and for drones and UAVs.
Thank you foo squiggly, for calling my site cool and for showing me that there are people who will download and play Tornado in 2016.
Thank you Peter "MiGMan" Inglis for the one and only Migman's Musuem, the most comprehensive flight simulation website on earth and this side of the Universe, and for igniting my love for flight sims back in the 1990s.
Thank you Renders, M., for your friendship on Dogs Of War Virtual Unit, and for liking the concept of Tornado2.com.
Thank you Davide I., for expressing interest in flying for Germany, Saudi Arabia, UK and Italy in the remake of the game
Thank you, The Maverick, Joe, for your BBS flight sim files, and firing up Tornado in DosBox once every so often, as well as other classic DOS flight simulations like F15 Strike Eagle II.
Thank you Andrew R., for advising me to replace the old 16-bit assembler with something more up-to-date, like 32-bit or 64 bit or DirectX, Direct3D and OpenGL.
Thank you Speedwagon, for making this sim a part of your life since 1994, and for running it (still!) on both an IBM PS1 486DX 20MHz (your first PC) and an IBM Aptiva Pentium 166MHz. Indeed your enthusiasm in aviation and for the game propels me to greater heights. Your Debriefing tutorial on one of my Youtube videos will always be a classic to me!
Thank you Blackfire, B., for the chat we had on Google Hangouts, and for your professional programming skills which are a source of inspiration to me.
Thank you Gillespie P., for showing me that old timers and good DOS games, like Tornado, are never inseparable.
Thank you for Herve Caen of Interplay, for offering me an opportunity to form a team of developers in order to revive the game.
Thank you Richard P. for the many magazine scans of Tornado reviews of the 1990s. Yoou brought back many memories of the 1990s.
Thank you Graeme Mason, for writing on Digital Integration (DI) and for bringing the world of DI to our world with the many fascinating photographs and historical DI artifacts. You are the King of Retro Gaming reporting.
Thank you Carl Hamlin for being an assembly language guru and for being my inspiration in low-level programming.
Thank you Zurger6, Phil, for sharing so many things in common with me - Malaysia, durian, Petaling Jaya, aviation and of course, Tornado.
Thank you Bruce M., for volunteering to play test the Tornado remake.
Thank you Andrew MacP., for your enthusiam of Tornado back in the 1990s right through to the early 2000s. Your Google Group posts on Tornado are a joy to read. My favourite is your 2003 post entitled "And then one day you find, Ten years have got behind you...".
Thank you David Punshon, for putting a soundtrack on Tornado and for your music skills and talent. Your music maketh the game.
Thank you Simone Serponi for writing an Italian post on Tornado back in 2016. It was full of nostalgia.
Thank you gpoppitz, Gotz, for sharing with me the challenges of WZ1, Mission 9 "EWR Dawn Attack" and WZ2, Mission 3 "Early warning radar blackout".
Thank you Squakenet for your Youtube videos on Tornado.
Thank you Kenneth Larsen for your ingenious Tornado Time Compression mod.
Thank you Eric Joiner, Basil Copeland and Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein for forming the TCSC Associates group and for creating the BEST Tornado tactics and strategy tutorial of all time, the Tornado Command and Staff College Tutorial.
Thank you Heinz-Bernd Eggenstein for the many, many original ingenious Tornado mods of yesteryear. Yours were the ORIGINAL Tornado mods.
Thank you Mike of Leavenworth KS, for contacting me on eBay in 2002 and for sending me the boxed set of Spectrum Holobyte's Tornado, for free! You started it all for me.
Thank you to the entire ex-Digital Integration development team for creating a classic!
Thank you Matt Smith for designing the colour palletes used in Tornado. The colours of the simulation make it stand the test of time and are a monument to your amazing skill.
Thank you Kevin Bezant for being MORE than a consultant on the Tornado source code. You practically and single-handedly wrote the bulk of the Tornado 3D simulation engine. Tornado is you, and you are Tornado. You are, and always will be in my book, the greatest assembly language developer who ever lived. Whenever I look at the 16-bit ASM code that you wrote 25 years ago, it never fails to amaze me.
Thank you David Keith Marshall, for Tornado. You were the reason for its birth and production. You will be missed.
Thank you to my wife, J.L., and my girls, Leanne and Laura for living with a gamer/flight simmer dad.
Thank you to my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (Happy Birthday to You!) for salvation by grace, not by works. And for the creative skills you have blessed me with to create the Tornado Tribute site and the many assembly language hacks and mods of the Tornado source code. HALLELUJAH!
Frankie:
25. Added a Credits screen - The Christmas 2017 Version of Tornado.
Mod: Credits screen
By Frankie
Description: The Digital Integration development team were a modest bunch. For the amount and quality of work that they put into the simulation, there was never a credits screen inside the game. In the paper manual, yes. Game, no. Until now that is. For the first time in 25 years, a credits page appears when you hit the F11 key.
Hitting F11 at the Pilot Panel screen
The text is easily read in a night mission.
I resisted the urge to add my name to the list.
Hitting F11 in the Drone view
Sorry if the red color that I used is garish, but it does provide sufficient contrast to be read. I chose to use only UPPERCASE letters because they can be read clearer compared to a mix of upper and lowercase letters. How did I do this? Firstly, I had to modify the CONTROL.INC file. Just a tiny tweak. I changed the OPT_DEBUG constant from 0 to 1.
This small change makes a world of difference
I also had to modify the \VISUAL\VISDEBUG.ASM file.
Modifying the text and making sure that the text is properly centred
So after 25 years, the development team finally gets its own credits page with the F11 key! Better late than never. Giving credit where credit is due. With this 25th mod of the series, I can now say that this is the CHRISTMAS 2017 VERSION OF TORNADO.
Happy Holidays and a very merry and
blessed Christmas to all
***Update***
I have improved the color of the names. This time, the color of the names are the same as the current HUD color level. So while in the Home mode (Pilot Panel) or in the full-screen FLIR mode, hit the "H" key to cycle the HUD colour.
I can see clearly now the rain is gone
I can see all obstacles in my way
Then when you are at any of the external views (F1, F2 forward view, F2 reverse view, F3, F4 or F5), hit the F11 key for a surprise. The latest FLIGHT.EXE is attached below. The original garish-red version is also attached below. Season and use to taste. Cheers!
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Update: 29th May 2018
Due to the memory limitations of Tornado, I am unable to add a full credits page. Instead this is what I have designed for the Credits Page. It contains only the names of the Development Team.
New Credits Page
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