About This Club
Support, Discussions, and Development of EAWPRO and EAW in general.
- What's new in this club
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Modified configuration menu with the 3 options: VonBeerhofen
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I think I cracked the computed gunsight from another EAW version. As a result of this I had to come up with a new plan to be able to switch between the 3 available modes and asign a new key in the keylist. The INI entry DisplayHUD was freed and no longer necessary and was turned into a bit switch which can control 8 different operations in the same way DisplayInfoSettings works. My intention is to allow real time control of the reticle's mode and perhaps even it's size and position. Sofar the selected mode rotates with each pressure of the new mode key but as usual things may change in the near future. You heard it first in the Combat Ace forums! VonBeerhofen
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This one is pretty funny I think. As I attacked an enemy base, a truck delivering a load of replacement pilot seats for enemy planes was shot to pieces and the pilot seats flew all over the place causing secondary impacts and creating havoc under the airfield personnel who tried to run away in all directions. 🤣 https://rabartel.home.xs4all.nl/test/Gallery/image/PilotSeats.jpg VBH
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In the background is a photographic horizon picture. Everything in the explosions are mixed animations of EAWPRO's enhanced FX set and due to it's endless possibilities still very experimental. It's so easy to swap drawings or change them, so I'm just having fun with the hundreds of animations I created. For instance, throw in a persons animation and they'll fly in every direction in an explosion. More realistic are animations of grass, bricks, soil or plane parts. In the bomb explosions it's predominantly smoke, fire and soil and an occasional generic piece of debris. Often multiple animations are triggered from an event which makes it all look different. The goal is to have extreme variation as opposed to the stock animations which are every time exactly the same and not distractive. VonBeerhofen
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What else am I looking at in that last image? Various types of particles and fires and smoke, and the 3D Clouds you made? :)
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A big improvement!
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In this screenie of a B17 bombing raid on an airfield you can see the new transparent version of the jagged edge explosion on the right. VonBeerhofen
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Here's a shot with the old jagged edges explosion overlayed on top of a screen shot of last night's online mission in the EAW Launchpad. Notice the red hot colored shrapnel and the old rusty version. These were both rusty before the changes to the sprites list, so there are now 8 different planehit animations of 8 frames instead of the stock planehit of just 2 large debris parts. So lots of stuff flying around when you explode💥 VonBeerhofen
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The EXE was tested on various operating systems and computers in online battles with Launchpad members and worked great. In the process of it's creation the no longer needed transparency link of the reticule, which is now under hardware management, was given to the only explosion animation which didn't have the feature and was showing jagged edges. Those are now gone and with the transparency in it looks pretty Impressive and realistic. VBH
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Well things went horribly wrong when I noticed another sprite file got damaged so spend this weekend searching for answers. The sprite table was reorganized, something I already planned a long time ago but never got to it. The gunsight switch kept working great but plane damage kept showing an alien terrain tile being animated and a giant soldier in between the explosions and in desperation I decided to try the routine without an extra call I added to free up memory prior to loading the new reticule, i.e. I rolled back to what I believed was causing the first problem which made me add that call, as I was about to throw in the towel. Again it showed I should have done more testing but haste got the better of me as the sprite table still needed a complete overhaul. The reorganisation meant I had te relearn all the mess I made from mixing animations and improving what was there already. I crashed about 1000 planes on the runway and kept switching and taking pics to see if all was there. When the free up call was removed things finally went my way, and here's one shot which I liked and gives a small impression of the new animation order and one resized reticule. It's a bit small but it was just a test and in comparison an easy fix. Hope you like it. VonBeerhofen
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Nice going with the new feature, VBH!. Love your screen shot too , lol omg. :)
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Scary moment adjusting to my new gunsight. VonBeerhofen
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It's now fully working in EAWPRO too. The problem was caused by the added transparency and (sadly) had to be removed and the original filename restored. I think I can give it PRO transparency in a similar manner as was done with these reticules, without the need of reserving memory. All which is needed is to add the word TRA to the filename and create a single link in the TRA list which will work for all reticules. Anyway that's how I see it, but that's for later. I also have a nice little instrument sprite for some of the bombers which don't have human controlled guns and have no need for a gunsight. It's now time to party 🥳 and move on to the next challenge! VonBeerhofen
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The routine was added to v1.2 for further testing and it worked fine after removal of an old UHR tileset. Most aircraft were tested extensively this time and I even tested a few of EAWPRO's hires reticules which occupy app.10 times more memory then stock v1.2. I'm not yet celebrating but sofar I've learned a few new things about how to modify filenames from within the game and how and where to attempt to load them, so there is still hope. More ideas for this method is to add. year/slot specific file names to certain files which may benefit from it. Probably not many players may be interested in this as other versions already have this change but for me it's a challenge and a hobby, so the work continues! VonBeerhofen
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Ugh, Sounds rough. I have these devastating EAW moments all the time. :) Any luck on getting the files to work correctly?
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Yeah, pretty devastated after all the work that went into it, but I'm not giving up. Weird thing was that my original sight remained visible but it's transparency was gone inspite of the filename having changed. Instead the reticule was shown against a non transparent yellowish back ground. The routine itself worked fine and gameplay was normal besides not seeing the enemy ahead of me. Will test some more at a later date, got all the relevant stuff backed up for now.
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aw, man. I'd imagine a lot of things don't pan out. Your use to it though right? Sorry, it sounded promising.
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Sorry guys, I spoke too soon. The game did ask for the new files when switching planes but didn't accept the new drawings when I gave it one. I should have known I can't make it work this way after all, memory use is seamless and you can't squeeze something in without reloading all. Wasted a lot of time on this, sorry. VBH
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Nice work and discovery VBH. Do you or will you have a list of the filenames for each slot? (I'd like to add it to the fxexe-patch page...)
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I've managed to give each plane type in EAWPRO it's own reticule by copying the same parameter used in the P***VIEW routine into the GUNSIGHT.SPT loader without having to reserve any extra memory for it. This allows the use of any available reticule drawing per plane slot. For example, the SpitIX will use GUNSP111.SPT for now but may change if needed. The change can also be added to the STEAM or GOG versions of V1.2.
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Merry X-mas and a Happy New Year to all! VonBeerhofen (EAW Launchpad Janitor)
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Inspite of war and darkness looming over many parts of the world I hope that the coming festive days will still shine a bright light over people's lives in which they find comfort and solace! The EAW Launchpad and remaining members
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View from different angle Incase you decide to cross: VBH
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Proof of concept on a multipart model, the design will probably still get some more improvements later and the center part will follow after. VonBeerhofen (Launchpad Janitor)
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An error I made working on the city districts drew my attention to the COSTCT tile which only shows a staggering 6 times in the entire EAW world. I'm pretty sure there are hundreds of coastal towns and seaside resorts in Europe, one of which is the one I live in. So I feel I have a choice to make, add more to the EAW coasts or free the tile to be turned into a new city tile to add more diversity to the limited set in use. Personally I think that a village or city tile one coastal tile away from shore will work just as well, after all the entire coast and beach are merely app. 1 or 2 KM deep. The question though is what is a better use in a 64 small tileset? Furthermore with a universal tile border there is also a much better use for the river city tiles as they can now also function outside the cities and add more diversity, as was done with other nature's in EAWPRO. Besides that industries predominantly happen on river banks, so it adds to realism too. Vice versa there's also no reason not to use other bridges inside cities like London when borders are uniform, which had 5 at the time of the blitz. EAWPRO already uses dozens of instances of the unused stock rail bridge and a much higher number of any other bridge. They're even used as piers on coastal tiles too, making fun targets to destroy! Here's Londen Thames with added bridges, of course the fake crossing can be removed now too. VonBeerhofen
