Janes F15 is capturing hearts all over North American, and will soon be doing so on other continents also. We want to provide a technical update to this fine piece of work, along with a few disclaimers. The disclaimers are necessary because many of us are being booted back to the WIN95 desktop during flight.

First, the customization possibilities. Some sound adjustments are possible, some additional command keys may be programmed by the user including a frame rate counter that will display in your HUD, install size can be pared down from the 600 meg full install to a 470 meg full install, the keys file can be printed out, you may be able to remedy the lack of black out and white out under 3dfx, and you can download CH, Saitek, and Thrustmaster files from this site. First, the installation size.

Originally I was running F15 on my PII 300 system with 3dfx, and I was amazed by the lengthy pauses on a medium install (170 megs). I discoverd that my 24x CD Rom goes into neutral and then has to spin up on demand. Pauses could be as long as four or five seconds! I switched to my AMD 233 system to do some checking on my 12x SCSI, same size install. Pauses were almost unnoticeable on that system. So.. for those with a 24x CD, you will want to find a way to do the complete install. Don't have 600 meg free? Here is one way to get around this.

Mike McCoy sent us this note on paring down the full install: "Run the REGIT Utility on the F-15 CD. (As opposed to Regedit, which could cause serious harm if screwed with wrong) Change the Value of "Movies" to CDROMPATH:\Movies (ie E:\MOVIES) Then delete the the movies directory of your F-15 directory off your hard drve. Presto! 135 megs of space! And you can still play the thing without the CD... even without the CD, it just skips the movies. (Reponsible coding... I love it)."

Next, customizing the sound. Some are complaining about the engine sounds. Personally I think they're fine, though it would be nice to have an AB "pop" as in F16 so that one has an auditory cue that afterburners are engaged. This note is gleaned from Usenet:

You know that huge soundz.rwv file that's a hair under 90 megs big? I opened it up in Cool Edit Pro and it's basically a pcm sound file. You just select 11025 (sample rate), mono, 16 bit. You'll then see a little window popup with a few choices you can select (since it opens up as headerless data). I selected the second line that has Motorola in it, and besides being a mostly unplayable file, there IS a small section of playable sounds! Lots of jets and tons of explosion sounds.

I zoomed in on a certain section very closely, marked the insert and end points to a T (0:00.000 that time frame), so it'd be very precise, then found a great F-15 jet sound I love, made sure it matched the exact length in the big file (about 4 seconds), and converted it to have the same characteristics as the game file.

For some reason I had to totally exit the game and restart it for it to work. At first I thought it didn't work, and was bummed. But when I started it up a little later there it was! Nice surprise. It's very tedious to do but if you want a different sound, it can be done. Just backup that big mother of a file first in case you mess it up beyond repair. Pete.

Obviously, this isn't the ONLY way to customize sound in F15. I wanted the engines louder and Betty and voices quieter, so I chose SOUND from the CONFIG menu and moved the sliders until I had what I wanted. Simple enough!

You can customize the command sets in Janes F15 by clicking on CONFIG in the screen center and then clicking on CONTROLS. However, the options are more limited that they appear to be. Mapping some keys doesn't work, and on one occasion I was booted to my desktop when I attempted to save a new command set.

While the manuals are great and the expert manual is especially good, we could have used a more detailed command card, or even an additional card documenting the views, both those supported in the default modes as well as those we could program ourselves. The views work differently depending on where one starts (fixed view or virtual) and this can be confusing. Flexibility is great, but such a high degree of it then requires more explanation than we were given to remain user friendly.

If you access the CONFIG file and go to CUSTOM and use the filters to check out view options, you will discover that many views you could access are not programmed to keys. You can choose some that look interesting and assign them to keys and save them to a new default set. View flexibility is quite impressive, as are camera options.

If you still don't have a 3dfx board, the release of the second generation should make PLENTY of used boards available out there; this is the time to upgrade. Be aware, however, that black out and white out effects don't always work properly under 3dfx. If you have lines like this "SET SST_RGAMMA=1.70" in your autoexec file you will have to REM them out. Also, ensure that the screen refresh rate is below 72hz. However, this may not work at all on Voodoo2 boards.

Meantime if you would like to have access to the complete EXPERT default list, you can find it in your F15 directory, labeled "F15keys.ini." Open the file with notepad and print it, or import into your word processor.

Unfortunately, stability is an issue for many of us. This is by far the most trouble I have ever had with a Janes release. I have been unable to complete most campaign missions, having been booted back to my desktop, sometimes randomly. One of the known bugs has to do with having the FLIR screen up while clicking on a target. But I have also been booted to my desktop while cruising in AP and not touching any key, and while using the JUMP feature. I expect we will see a quick patch that will take care of these issues.

If you need configuration files you can sample a number of options. We have posted two different PTC files for CH HOTAS and two configurations for Thrustmaster, along with one for Saitek. Click HERE to access the download Index. If you would like my Masterpilot configuration email me directly.

If you would like to add a frame rate counter to your HUD, follow these steps. Open the f15keys.ini file that is in your F15 directory. Add these lines in the appropriate place by scrolling down the list: (be sure to remove the html tags)
KEY_SHIFT_G=FORMATION_LIGHTS
KEY_SHIFT_H=COCKPIT_LIGHTS
KEY_SHIFT_I=DISPLAY_FPS
This will give you the ability to display frame rate by hitting SHIFT I at any time, or you can leave it on all the time. You will also gain the keys for lights.

F15, with all settings to the MAX, is quite demanding of hardware, especially when low over cities. Running on my PII 300 under Voodoo TWO, I dropped as low as 8 fps. Average was 16 with A2G radar running and WPN Maverick camera ON in the A/A Graduation mission taking pot shots at likely targets. Turning off the WPN view gains 2.5 fps. Average framerate at 15,000 feet over land is about 45 fps on this system, varying from 30 when diving toward ground to 50 as a high. Check it out yourself.

An interesting comparison is F22: ADF at 800x600 with cockpit ON flying low over a city and releasing JDAMs. My frame rate on the same system is about 15 fps with all detail and graphics options ON. Turning off the cockpit boosts the frame rate to 20-25. The moral of the story is that if you have Voodoo1 and you want a good frame rate in F15, or have less than a PII 266, let the install choose default graphics settings for you and don't move all the settings to the max!

Finally, "Piglet" posted this to the forum today:" While poking around in F15.EXE with a text editor I found the following command which does not show up in the Keyboard Config menu: MEET_SMUT. If you map this to a key, and press it, it turns your F-15's into flying pigs with machine guns. Pretty funny stuff. Anyway, to do this, open up the F15keys.ini file in your F15 directory with a text editor. Then just pick a key and assign it to MEET_SMUT.(e.g. KEY_P=MEET_SMUT)"