~S~

you can fly any mission you like online, but some missions are more effective than others.

You need MPSU - a program that allows you swap your default online mission to any other mission stored in your Missions folder. If everyone on the multiplayer session swaps to the same mission you will all experience to same shared environment, see the same ships, ground targets, etc.

You can find a download for MPSU from our web site: http://www.caw15.com/downloads.html

There are some limitations to using swapped missions. Although all players will seem the same ships and other targets, these are not 'shared' in the truest sense. Instead, each player is flying in their own individual version of the mission as loaded by their own games when they joined the online session. This means that if your squad mate destroys a target, you will not see it explode and that object will remain visible in your version of the mission until you have destroyed it yourself and vice versa.

For this reason, we tend to use swapped missions to provide carriers for online carrier landing practice, shared weather and to provide flak cover for airbases, and not much else.

To have a properly shared target you really need to designate one of the players in the session as the target and have them put their aircraft down on a field somewhere for others to shoot at/defend.

As an extension of this, I am currently working on player controlled versions of the CFS2 ships to act as targets.

These are effectively aircraft and are treated in the same way as any other aircraft by the game. They can be 'landed' on the water or CFO-ed into position and even driven around on the surface. All players can see them and all players will see when they are damaged or destroyed. They do have some limitations, but they do provide properly shared targets. See an example here: http://www.caw15.com/downloads/guncamera/pix/ship04.jpg

For online bombing, you will need so-called 'Alpha' bombers. These don't have bombs as such, but rather modified cannon-shells that behave like bombs. That is they cause bomb-like damage when they hit something, but do not explode or cause blast damage like bombs.

I set up a whole range of these for my squad - take a look and check some of them out:

http://www.caw15.com/aircraft/multiplayer.html

I'm most pleased and have most fun with the dive bombers as these use cannon-bombs that fall very much like real bombs. The level bombers use a different technique that is less authentic (but still effective and also pretty good fun! )

~S~

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