I hope you don't mind a quick technical question. I've wrangled a number of interesting mods from i-war2.com, but I notice that some of them have .ini files that do not have multimod entries in them. Does this mean that they will not work at all? Or does Multimod try to make them work anyway? Are there any signs that EOC gives that a mod is throwing an error?

For example, custom_jafs does not have a multimod section in its .ini, but location_finder_multimod does.

The list of mods I've picked are:
- multimod
- custom_jafs
- dense_fields
- elitemod
- free_form_mode
- location_finder
- manual_countermeasures
- selectable_powerups

downloaded from http://www.i-war2.com/downloads.htm. The forums there are unfortunately quite dead, populated by one very persistent spambot.

This game is gorgeous so far, btw. Kudos to your part in it, and to your former team, I really appreciate a lot of the little details. It's a very elegant design.

Thanks for the kind words!

Some scripted mods need to override the scripts.ini file to get themselves to run. It's only mods which create entirely new scripted functionality that do this, which is generally all the user created script mods, as the script source code for the game's scripts was never released.

If more than one mod tries to override the scripts.ini file, then only one will activate, the rest simply won't work. There's no error - they just won't launch.

Multimod was written as an enabler mod to fix this, so that new mods would not need to override the scripts.ini file and they would work nicely together.

A couple of the early Particle Systems mods such as Location Finder and Manual Countermeasures were written before multimod, so won't work together. You need to get the multimod enabled versions to ensure compatibility.

If a mod just modifies art assets or ship ini files, etc, then they don't need to be multimod enabled, it's just scripted mods which need to launch at various points in the game.

Thanks for answering my first question. I'd also like to know if you have any access to any kind of flux.ini documentation or reference material.

I'd like to be able to extend the line-of-sight for the game to reduce scenery and object popup, as well as adjust how the engine models objects at a distance. It's been ten years, my PC can handle the polys :)

There are some other hacks that seem to be possible as well, looking at the flux.ini. It looks like it is possible to increase damage done by collisions, overheating, and other things.

I suppose I could experiment, but it would be great to have some in-house docs to cut down on the time!

I'm not actually that much of an expert on the flux.ini file. It's been about 8 years since I did any fiddling with it! The best thing to do is just to experiment. Make a backup first of course.

Is it possible to alter the joystick dead-zone in I-War 2? I'd like to play it with a Saitek X-52, but it doesn't quite feel right with the default dead zone.

You might find a solution in this thread that kinda got buried: http://www.gog.com/en/forum/independence_war_series/i_war_2_joystick_deadzones_hardcoded

Awesome, thanks a lot for that!

No problem. Enjoy this fun game!

Thanks for the kind words!

I don't remember anyone at Particle Systems saying they wanted to write a novel. However an I-War fan who went by the name Hot4Darmat wrote an I-War novel called 'The Meeting'.

Apparently it is still available online. I've found it here:
http://www.i-war2.com/TheMeeting_1.htm

A quick question about the internals of I-war. Does I-War 1 use dinput or winmm to achieve joystick control in game?

I believe it uses dinput, but a very early version. Support for microsoft's force feedback sticks was programmed into the game, which I believe requires dinput.

Thanks! A guy just fixed a Wine-OS X dinput bug and now joysticks work in Il-2 Sturmovik playing it under Wine for the Mac, but joystick control for Independence War 1 and Red Baron 3D is still broken in Wine-OS X. Since I-war and RB3D were contemporary with each other I'm thinking they may use the same control input. Joysticks do work under Wine-Linux for these programs and it was suggested that maybe these programs used winmm which is implemented for joysticks in Linux but not OS X. Your response indicates however that there may still be a bug in Wine-OS X's dinput or somehow it isn't properly interoperating with this old version of dinput.

Blame on you, Ravenger, blame on Particle System!! Since my first roundtrip with the Dreadnaught to Jupiter and Europa, I-War ruined pretty much every other space flight sim for me!! ;-) I used to love the X-Wing series, but after experiencing what you can do with a Newtonian flight model, it became too restrictive for me.

Well, to be honest, Freespace 1 & 2 wasn't bad either. And with Orbiter I learned that true Newtonian physics are not always fun (if you don't have an autopilot). ;-)

So here is my question: I always had the feeling that there is a certain imbalance of the in-game cutscenes, in regard of number and length, towards the early missions. Did you run out of time creating new scenes? Or was the storage on the CD too limited?

I know, my question sound a “little” bit nerdy, but after the intro and the first missions, I had always the feeling, you wanted to create a Final Fantasy rival set in space ;-)

Oh, btw, big thanks from me, as I-War I in combination with Tie-Fighter CD, helped me a lot to improve my English listening skills.

Thanks for the kind words!

If there was a bias towards cutscenes in the early part of the game then that may have been because you needed a lot of scene-setting in the early missions. I'm not sure there was any lack of time or anything that contributed to that.

The intro movie and the cut-scenes took a lot of work - remember they were rendering on Pentium 90 class machines with 16mb of memory.

You may be interested to know that the reason the in-game ships looked so good (for their time) was that we had a special custom system that took the hi-res cutscene ships and generated textures from them, baking in a lot of surface detail and shadows. When applied to the in-game models it made them look much more realistic and detailed.