homepage Forums Air Combat & Civil Aviation Battle of Britain + Battle of Britain II Hi all, I’ve put together a companion app for BOB2 2.13 aimed at making the game easier to run on modern PCs. It tackles: T

Those are properly impressive achievements postman! Properly.

I might actually have to give this a spin on the next rainy day.

Great work Postman, appreciate your dedication to this old but good sim. Carry on Sir !

Stuck in a loop trying to to fix a DPI manifest issue. First try to fix, I get what you see below, telling me it still needs attention. Clicking either of the fix buttons has no observable effect. Trying the close and start over option gets me back to the same loop/dead end.



EDIT - screenie with the 'details' visible:

PS took me a while to find the reshade option - got this message getting there...



...but enabling it has restored antialiasing. Have just tried in the taking off training mission so far.



Not sure what you mean by '...try the antialiasing on its own first and leave ReShade until you know what the rest is costing you' - as you said there is a Reshade button which turms them all on together - don't see the option to try AA only.

I have a question for you Postman if you can clarify for me. As I mentioned before I am just running Battle of Britain II w/o any modifications, version 2.13, Windows 10, Nvidia 1060, i5, pretty meager components. It runs perfectly, max settings, 1920 X 1080 144 mhz. It does not use Voodoo applications for graphics, uses my stock 1060, everything is stock. I don’t want to mess up my perfectly running install so my question is would your mod have any possibility to effect the original install. Please don’t misconstrue, I so much appreciate your contribution to this sim and sincerely appreciate your passion for it.

Hi Lima

That loop is my fault. The manifest step needs a permission Windows never asked you for, so pressing Fix could not work. Right click BOB2 Setup, Run as administrator, do the Windows 11 tweaks step once, and it is done. The next build asks properly.

You were right about the antialiasing as well. There was no way to try it alone. It gets its own buttons in Settings, Graphics, with 4x marked as the one to use.

One thing worth knowing: turning ReShade on does not turn the antialiasing off. Four of the five presets do their own, so with both on you are antialiasing twice and your 770 is paying for it. Either use 4x on its own, or use ReShade on the Subtle preset, which is the only one without it. Not both.

Here is the latest version: Click Here

Hi Teri

Yes, it changes your actual install. It is not a separate copy. It backs up every file before it touches it and there is an uninstall that puts them back, but I would not want you relying on that when what you have already works.

If your install runs perfectly at max settings then most of what the mod fixes are problems you do not have. It exists for people whose game will not start, or crashes, or draws black bars, or has broken menu text on a high resolution screen. On Windows 10 at 1920x1080 with a stock 1060 you are the case it was never needed for.

The one part that is an addition rather than a fix is the Squadron Room. It sits alongside the game and gives your career a dispersal hut: your pilot and his rank, the squadron roster with the real men who flew in it, a log book that fills in as you fly, promotions and medals earned the way the RAF actually gave them, and a map to pick your squadron from. It reads your campaign save to do that. It does not write to it.

So my honest answer is leave it alone unless the Squadron Room is what you want. If you do try it, copy the whole Battle of Britain II folder somewhere first. That is a couple of gigabytes and it is a real safety net, unlike my uninstall.

Al that worked thanks, but then something weird happened. I started experimenting with the reshade options, having started Enabled -subtle but AA off iirc



Tried tweaking those settings to see effect on FPS bur first tweak I made - can't recall what exactly I changed but was one of those settings - and I get a grey grid superimposed on the landscape, which is a new one for me.



Same in other missions in other localities and heights. The lines undulate with the lie of the land. Get the impression it affects tiles at medium range, not closest or furthest.



The Reshade control panel is a really neat way of controlling its settings and checking impact but I heed to get rid of that grey grid.

Hi Lima

That grid is the terrain tiles showing their joins, and it is the antialiasing rather than ReShade. BOB2 draws the landscape in tiles, and when multisampling is forced too high each tile edge gets resolved separately and the seams light up. We hit exactly this here at 8x.

Go to Settings, Graphics, and set the antialiasing to 4x, or Off if you want to be sure. Then start the game again, because that setting only takes effect on a fresh launch. The grid should go.

If you had it on 8x, that is the whole story. If you are certain it was already at Off or 4x and the grid still appears, tell me which single setting you changed and I will chase it properly, because then it is something new rather than something we know about.

One thing worth saying while you are in there: with a ReShade preset running you do not need the translator's antialiasing at all. Everything except Subtle does its own, so the two together are paying twice, and on your 770 that is the expensive way round.

That did the trick, thanks! Back in action!

Thanks your honest answer Postman. I appreciate your candor and the work you have done for this legacy sim. I already have a working copy of BOBII on my external SSD usb drive and it suns great from that SSD.

I am busy building the Germain ready room. Finished adding all the ME109 squadrons and their specific camo patterns based on BOB2. All awards and ranks are also completed. Should be ready for testing by next week,

Puts a modern and well-equipped front end on a classic - looking forward to trying the RAF version for a new SPC and when ready, this additional feature for a Luftwaffe one. Great stuff!

EDIT - the 109 profile is an F, expect an E will be substituted. I dunno how you will pull in the right unit markings from Multiskin, given it applies things like quick recognition yellow and white markings only in later phases (not sure it always gets this right) - or maybe you will use a 'stock' Summer 1940 profile with just unit badge and/or gruppe marking, rather than pull from Multiskin,

Questions - am I right in thinking these are intended for and will work best with the Single Player Campaign, which is essentially the usual campaign but geared so that you fly with the same squadron rather than jumping into any scrambled squadron as you choose? And will I be able to create multiple concurrent pilots in different units, and choose which to fly with?

Unless I'm mis-remembering after coming back to sims after a long gap, you don't have a trouble-free install, because Alt+X when flying takes you to the Windows desktop instead of as it should, back to the campaign map (in campaign flights) or the Instant Action submenu. The former behaviour I believe means you probably lose the results in the campaign of the mission you exited and in all cases it's a nuisance having to re-start the sim if you want to fly again. While you are doing really well only to have that issue and it's unimportant of you don't fly campaigns, this fix looks to remedy that and if we do run into issues deeper into gameplay (i) postman I expect will be able to fix them and (ii) I had no problem reverting my Windows 7 BoB2 install (on a different SSD) to pre-fix 2.13 by simply deleting a few files as per the 'manual uninstall' procedure in the fix's readme. Especially if we can get a few more testers here or over on BoB2A2A then think this fix will be the way to go here, especially as it is now heading to be much more than a fix.

Quick follow up. You were right about the F, and it is sorted.

I have s redrawn every 109 side view from the game's own textures, 162 of them, each named for the .DDS it came from. That last part is what mattered. It means the Room can read Me109MainSkin.ms straight through and show you the skin the game is actually going to give you, chosen by unit, by which airplane of the Gruppe you have, and by the date.

So your either/or turns out to have a third answer: nothing substituted and nothing stock. Where the game changes a skin on a date, it changes here too, and where it does not, neither do we. The yellow is part of that. There is no rule anywhere that puts it on by date, it is painted into each texture, so you see it exactly when the game gives it to you.

The German airfields had nothing on them at all. Forty of the forty six in the Luftwaffe order of battle are bare grass in both of the mechanisms the game has, so a German career took off from an empty field.

All forty are now dressed, about twenty three static objects each. Tents and revetments, a barn or two, a flak piece, ground crew, a few vehicles, and no trees. Nothing is invented: every object is lifted from one of the six French fields the BDG dressed by hand.

Great news there!

OK, sitrep!

In the Launcher's Ready Room, I created a new pilot with a commission in 501 Sqn in 10 Group, then hit 'Play' as per on-screen instructions.



Opening the sim I went to the Campaign screens to start a new one with the Channel phase, went thru the drill per the 2.13 manual to create a new single player campaign and in the campaign preferences, selected to fly with my new pilot's squadron, 501, only. I had picked the same surname for my pilot when creating the campaign.

I get to fly when the squadron is sent on a patrol S. of the Isle of Wight, leading the squadron despite being a lowly Pilot Officer. My kite's ID letter in game is 'T', the Ready Room/Dispersal squadron roster says I should be in 'R'.



I think I've gone awry somewhere.

Also the Launcher is now reporting a problem, and repeats this after I apply the selected fix. I don't see a particular problem here, in game.

Hello Postman, hope your doing well. Even though I already have a good running BOB II install I thought I would give your mod a try. First made a backup of my good running BOB II. Downloaded v 1.84 and unzipped it and put it my BOB II folder, ran the bat ( BOB2.bat ) then clicked ( _CLICK HERE TO START.bat ) then your menu came up, looks great. Started going through setup as requested to the Setup Wizard completed all questions but it still says " Not Done Yet " so the Play button is greyed out. I keep trying to go through Setup Wizard again but same result. " Not Done Yet ". Setup Wizard says everything is patched and done, hit the done button and it goes back to the menu saying that the Setup Wizard is not yet done. I am stuck at that point, any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks your hard work everyday. I went through other setup menus and now the Play button is ready so it’s all good now. Started it up by pressing the Play button went to field but resolution was not right went to options and changed resolution 1920 X 1080 @ 144mhz, all good now, sorry for false alarm, like your mod so far Postman, great work, thank you.

Thanks for the sitrep, it was really useful, and version 1.9.2 is now out with fixes for both things you hit:
Click here

Instructions: Click here

The letter: 1.8.4 made up a code letter for the Ready Room, which is why it said R when the game gave you T. The Room now follows the game. A new pilot is shown the letter the game gives the leader's aircraft, which for 501 is T, and after each sortie it shows the letter you actually flew.

Leading the squadron as a Pilot Officer is the game, not the mod. On your first sortie it puts you in the lead aircraft whatever your rank.

The launcher warning was a false alarm, and it's gone. The game adds the name of your last save to the end of the settings file, so the file's size changes as soon as you save a campaign, and the old check took that for damage. Nothing was wrong with your install. If the file ever really does break, the launcher now puts a good copy back quietly when you press Play.

You also won't need the campaign drill any more. Create your pilot in the Ready Room, press Play Campaign, and the game opens straight onto the campaign map with your squadron, phase and name already set.

There's a lot more in this one: a Luftwaffe side with a Bf 110 crew, a personal record behind each pilot's photo, and the real 1940 day in the morning papers. It's all in "Modern Fix Handbook.html" in the download. To update, delete your old BOB2-Win11-Fix folder, put the new one beside Bob.exe, start the launcher and click the upgrade line at the bottom. Your pilots are kept separately and won't be touched.

Heads up that the download is bigger than usual, 65 MB, because of all the new aircraft pictures.

Hi, glad it's all running, and thanks for the kind words! Making a backup first was exactly the right thing to do.

No need to apologise, your report was useful. The "Not Done Yet" was a small bug: when the game is installed somewhere Windows protects, the wizard couldn't record that it had finished, so Play stayed grey. You found the way round it, and I've fixed it so nobody else gets stuck there.

1920 x 1080 at 144 Hz is fine if it's holding steady for you. If you ever see the menus shrink into a small box, try the same resolution at 60 Hz.

Version 1.9.2 is out now too, with a lot more in it and a picture guide to everything in the download:

Click here

Enjoy!

Latest sitrep.

With my 501 Sqn pilot, last night I flew another campaign mission in 1.8.4. Selecting play from the Squadron Room took me to the BoB2 main menu, not straight into the campaign. I selected Load Game and loaded autosave, which seemed to being me back to the correct campaign day. When 501 was ready to take off, I accepted the 'fly' prompt and led the squadron off for a patrol S. of the Isle of Wight. Before we got to the patrol area, while in the 3d external view, the game audio and video stopped briefly, resumed briefly and next second, I was back at the desktop, looking at the App.

At lunchtime I had another go, this time after deleting the modern fix subfolder (but not deleting anything in Appdata) and unzipping 1.9.3. Selecting the same pilot from the Squadron Room, then selecting Play Campaign, once more I was taken to the BoB2 main menu, not as I thought skipping the menu and opening the campaign map.

Once again during the patrol, the sim just dumped me to the desktop from the 3d, after a little longer this time. Only unusual thing is I did a couple of 'next waypoint' time accels, but I don't recall that ever being a problem in BoB2.



I haven't been simming much of late apart from this. There were no artifacts or anything but I'll try flying in Win 7 with a different BoB2 install (2.13 but no modern fix) just to rule out my old graphics card being on its way out.

I just had a go at deleting my pilot and creating a fresh one, after re-running the setup wizard, to see if doing that would skip the main menu as I was expecting, but no dice, Play Campaign still takes me to the BoB2 main menu.

I'll report back when I see if I'm getting the same CTD in my Win 7 install.