flying circus No More Parachutes for YOU, German AI Pilots!

[Hurridale]

Salute!

This makes my first published JSGME-ready mod.  I play Single Player exclusively, nearly always Quick Start, living out a fantasy of pre-June 1918.  'Love the game in general, but seeing German pilots escape via parachute -- not so much.  So I made this mod to put in an early-war pilot without a chute into the aircraft, using unGTP-Il2 and lots of poking around.  It´s not perfect, but does add to my experience.  Your experience may vary.  It hasn't crashed my system and seems to get along other mods.

From the Read Me file:
INSTALLATION: Unzip to MODS folder and use JSGME to install. As always, it's wise to backup files first, and, of course, use at your own risk.  I'm a Dummy.

ISSUES:

• Sometimes Roland gunners hang out partially from aircraft after being killed, but I seem to remember seeing that before I changed the files. 
• Another problem with the pilot fall is that they sometimes survive and sit up as if they just used their parachute.  But I set the DeathDelay to 45 seconds from 15, if you are an ungentlemanly type...
• Some good news is if you are flying one of these and eject without parachute, you survive just fine.
• Halberstadt CL2 gunners eject with parachute flapping behind them, but it will not open.  Well, not for the first 200 seconds of free-fall, at least.  (No early-war option for the CL2)
• Pity the poor souls in Fokker E3s and Halberstadt D2s, because they always seem to go down in flames, despite my best efforts.
• How these mods will work in dated missions and multiplayer is not known.  That was not my intent.  

BACKGROUND: I fly Quick Start Missions nearly exclusively and the in-game use of German parachutes shows up way too often and too early for my fantasy battles.  This is my attempt to get rid of the parachutes in those Quick Start battles.  With this mod, aircrew which would have parachuted out of a flaming or out-of-control aircraft now free fall.  Some pilots survive the fall and will sit up in the field -- I don't know why, and getting rid of that is beyond my meager talent. Besides, I'm not cruel.

To mod them, I ungtp’ed the data file and went to C:\Program Files\IL-2 Sturmovik Great Battles\data\LuaScripts\worldobjects\bots and modded the pilots and gunners to early version "C1early" (without parachutes) instead of "C1" (with chutes). Changing the figure for pilots was relatively easy: change VisualImage from "C1" to "C1early".  
Note that is alphanumeric, NOT "CL" (the lowercase "L" and the number "1" appear the same in Notepad++, learned the hard way...)

Using Notepad++, I had to open the botgunner mods for individual aircraft, for example
botgunner_hcl2_ger17.txt and botgunner_hcl2_m_ger17.txt  (I don't know the difference.  I´m guessing Multiplayer)

I added comment lines to describe the changes to the files: ParachuteDelay, DestroyDelay, and EjectDelay in addition to the C1/C1early pilot images. The EjectDelay was reduced quite a bit to get them out of flamers as soon as possible, though they still stay in longer than I would have.  I don't think my reduced time made any difference.  Maybe I'll poke around the files some more later to see if I can find that (ideas, anyone?)

I hope it works for you.  I have benefitted a lot for many years from the mods and help from this community,  and greatly appreciate all the work the devs and modders have done over that time! This is my attempt to give back a bit.

Good hunting!
Hurridale

No Parachutes.zip

Edited April 29 by Hurridale