VonBeerhofen

For those who have kept track of EAWPRO devellopment there is a new EXE for download. Just overwrite your current EAW.EXE with the new one. All others need to download the full EAWPRO addon at Mark EAW's website and when installed and working you can add the new EXE by overwriting the old one. Main changes: rewritten fire routine to get rid of the sky fires and incorporated more fires into various effects new elevation calculation with additional offset for raised hitbubbles (no objects programmed sofar) damage model fix on twin engined various other minor fixes improved FPS by optimising the code and removing some 500+ extra bytes from the gameloop Some other improvements The file is available here: https://rabartel.home.xs4all.nl/ProUpdate.zip Hope you guys like, :) VonBeerhofen

The challenge was to give RiBob control over AAA and Flack in his alternative scenario, if you can teach him how to use the target editor then that's fine with me. If my posts discourages him from doing so then I'm sorry about that but I think a warning that it's not as easy as portrayed is not out of place. It's up to Mr. Jelly to take on the challenge because I won't. VonBeerhofen

You only mentioned that the problem was in the hitbubble table, there was no follow up explanation on how it got really fixed. Raising a carrier is merely an adaptation of the Z value in a 3DZ or the hitbubble table, and with that any object can be raised to what ever level. At some point I created an early 3D cloud TMOD and raised it 10.000 feet into the sky. Besides that you're making assumptions about what I can do or not without knowing anything about what's possible in EAWPRO. Sure enough the PTIII carrier used for landing planes is an optical illusion but it can be raised and have objects on it too. Trucks and tanks and other vehicles are readily available but will only work properly as targets, not as a mere ground TMOD, as that will invoke negative scoring points, unless switched off ofcourse, in wich case there would be no penalty for collateral damage. Obviously having targets on deck will prevent the use of the carrier as a base but I think it makes for a nice target if not used as a base. Anyway, stacking objects isn't more difficult in EAWPRO and just as feasable, just as it is in v1.2. EAW has no problem with having various objects in the exact same location, proof of that were the doubled AAA locations under Ray's objects, recently called a bodge. They work fine in all versions of EAW but EAWPRO no longer needs them as each object can have AAA capabillaty without the bodge. But all that and your above post are besides the point of the discussion which is about wether editing targets to control AAA is easy to do for newbies or not. VonBeerhofen

Mr. Jelly is not a newbie we're trying to teach how things work, he made these tools and should know better then anyone how it works. Editing the hitbubble table to fix the ships is about the easiest thing I can think of in EAW, I already said that about asigning AAA and Flack to objects in EAWPRO. Your last remark is a two way street and you're proofing nothing to me. I could say the same thing about your view but I won't, I respect your opinion and don't think it's worth quibling over. I'm just responding because I think my opinion has at least as much value as yours. People are free to take it to heart or leave it. VonBeerhofen

Sorry but I don't agree with your views and there's nothing daunting about hexediting, especially not with hexeditors which allow people to format columns and select a numeric system to display for each column, but perhaps it's my background which makes it look so easy. I agree that the editors make life a little easier but there's still a lot of knowledge required to learn how to use them, not only about the editors but also about how EAW functions. I'm sure you're well used to it all but ships in the sky aren't particularly proof of how easy it is, more like how easy it is to overlook things. I'm not criticising the tools you use but I am trying to convey a fair representation of the knowledge required and can't see the benefits of painting a more beautifull picture then it is. Ofcourse you're entitled to your own opinion, which I respect, but it just doesn't agree with my opinion. It's also useless to start a debate about how easy hexediting really is for me, but it bypasses how hard it might be for someone else who has no further experience with it. Simmilarly my explanation on how to make good 3DZ models will differ from yours but I'd still tell em how hard it is and timeconsuming to do it right, as I see no use for lying about it and to be honoust I'd rather find out sooner that people don't have the stamina for it then later, after spending weeks trying to explain things. It's tough, believe me, and If my views deter people then that's too bad but I'm always willing to help. Thanks to such help Modred learned how to reslot planes, with a hexeditor, and it didn't take him very long. VonBeerhofen

The reason is to warn newbies that learning to mod EAW isn't easy and requires a lot of knowledge, time and an experienced tutor who's willing to spend his own time on teaching. VonBeerhofen

Let me be a little more precise RiBob, a TMOD is the groupname of 3D ground objects, each groundobject consists of a number of TMOD**.3DZ files which usually have a texture pointer in it which points to the *******.TPC it will use. Both files are needed in EAW, if one's missing weird things may happen and can even crash your game. Each object has 4 states which are switched by the game and each state is an actual 3D object. These different states have their own letter added in the 3DZ filename and are TMOD**D for destroyed detail TMOD**H for high detail (for nearby view) TMOD**L for low detail (for far away view and using a simpler model and 128x128 pixel drawing in v1.2 to speed up FPS) TMOD**S for shadow detail The *******.TPC is usually a compressed *******.PCX drawing in 256x256 pixels and in stock EAW always 8 bit. If you modify the drawing (also known as a skin) you essentially change the obect's looks. Editing these files isn't straightforward but can be learned if you have the proper tools installed. Easiest is probably reskinning objects but requires some experoence and some skill with paint programs. Editing 3DZ files is a lot harder to do if you want to do it right, but we have a nice tool for that too. VonBeerhofen

It wasn't that much of an effort really, I just ran into the right routine and saw it's possibillities and I can only say it looks pretty impressive but yes it's mainly eyecandy in that nearly everything new in EAW is just eyecandy to me. Those who're not interested in eyecandy can stick to v1.2 which totally lacks this feature. As for using the target editor, I've been involved in it's devellopment and used every program released since, including the splitter program, which saves individual targets so they can be imported or converted into other targets. Can't say if that's the newest version, it just doesn't alter the fact that I wouldn't advice others to get involved in using them, irrespective of how easy you say it is. VonBeerhofen

RiBob, The answer is that in terms of programming nothing is impossible and as such hitting a bomb with a bullet, be it on board or in the air can be programmed. Wether it's a usefull feature and if I want to spend my time on it with still so many other things waiting to be taken care of is another. You suggest an idea and I take it as such, just an idea. VBH

Observations are based on 20 years of modding experience and merely my opinion. However when it's as easy as you describe then I wish you good luck with teaching RiBob the ropes of installing and using those programs. For editing the hitbubble table I personally only need a few minutes with a hexeditor, teaching inexperienced people how to use a hexeditor and explain the hitbubble table will need significantly more time. FWIW I find it just as annoying to point out everytime that things aren't as easy as some people think they are. I would like nothing better then seeing RiBob edit the EAW world and create an addon of his own making. He can then give his own opinion on how easy it was, :). VBH

I wouldn't advice anyone to use Jel's target editor, it has a steep learning curve not only to learn how to edit the targets and place objects but also because of the relation between various files like tardata.dat, targets.dat and airfield.dat etc. We both know it would require at least several months to even start grasping how things work. Ofcourse anyone is welcome to give it a try but I've seen many give up. The hitbubble table is a much easier thing to edit and easily explained too. With a few notes it would probably take a week or so to understand how to edit it in a hexeditor or with one of Jel's tools. The question is wether it would result in interesting improvements as much time was already invested into getting the most out of it in EAWPRO. Personally I believe that various theatres will have enough diversity to keep people interested without saddling them up with learning what you and I learned. To RiBob I can only say that there's nothing easy in EAW except perhaps loading a complete addon/theatre and you don't want to spend years of your life to figure it all out if you're not totally committed to doing so. VBH

In EAWPRO it's easiest to control Flack and AAA capabillity by editing the hitbubble table and asign this capabillity to any object. Besides that it can be asigned to a target as Rotton describes too, however it requires specialised knowledge on how to control it properly and isn't for the faint hearted. Editing the hitbubble table is reasonably simple and can be done directly in the eaw.exe by means of a hex editor or by loading a .LDR scriptfile which can also be edited the same way. No extra tools are necessary for editing either but .LDR's make things more versatile as various scripts can be created and activated at will. The kill ratio of AAA is directly linked to the number of AAA positions, for light additionally the distance to these positions also have a big influence, the closer you are the better their aim. VBH

Hi RiBob, It shouldn't be too hard to implement such features into the game as there is no reason to make things harder then it can be. At present EAWPRO already has many simmilar happenings. I'll have a look if I can add this idea somewhere. It may take some time though before I can get to it. VBH

Since I started flying EAW in Januari 2000 flackrate or accuracy has never been an issue for me or anyone who've flown EAW online in the Launchpad. Accuracy and rate are controlled by random values resulting in a lot of variance depending on the selection made in the Mission Parameter screen. Sometimes it's dense and sometimes not, fact is that as in real missions you will not know what you will encounter untill you're right in the middle of it. When dense it's ill adviced to fly straight and level, or as low as flack can aim, their accuracy improves with lesser distance. Like true flack you can also fly just below the flack treshold and it won't cause any damage. It's very rare to loose planes in misions, even when flying closed formations but it can occasionally happen. My personal estimate of v1.2 is a survival chance of app. 90%, in EAWPRO the chances are lower as there are on average about 4 to 8 times more flackpositions depending on the target location's of flack capable positions, which will move around to other locations when destroyed. When these target locations are very close together the grouping of flack automattically becomes more dense and more dispersed when further apart, as in real battles. I'd rate the average chance of survival in EAWPRO at app. 60-75% depending on the target. Both averages are with the heaviest AAA setting in the Mission parameter screen and there are two lower settings under user control which will Improve the player's survival chance. It's ofcourse always possible to sustain a direct hit, which is unfortunate but to all intend and purposes very realistic and never resulted in any complaints from the people I've flown with, not even after the offline routines were made to work online too. I don't see it as wrong to gain more control over the flack parameters but I do not agree with your assessment of survival chances. VonBeerhofen

Hi RiBob, Exceptions like the one you describe can be created freely in the EAW.EXE, however those exceptions stick when the 262 is reslotted with another plane. The exception may relate to the behaviour of Jet engines or more specifically to the 262 slot in EAW and could pose a problem when the same EXE is used in another scenario with another plane in the slot. The Jet engine isn't so much of a problem but slotspecific calls can be. EAWPRO has got an additional flame effect when the 262 engines start, they don't really set the asphalt burning though but mimics the effect. The flightmodels can be changed in that it's more cumbersome and will take more time for planes to take off, however in EAWPRO flightmodels use accurate data for plane weight, engine power and all the rest which result in the flightmodel behaviour. Our group discusses any tweaks to be made but the weight is more on balanced fights then take off or landing behaviour. There is no seperate flightmodel for those and creating exceptions just for the 262 slot or Jet engines may not work out very well in various addons when the same EAW.EXE is used for them. As such it's a kind of balancing act in what's more important and what is feasable. AAA action can be controlled when setting up the mission parameters, it can be low, medium or heavy. Experiment with the various settings in the Mission Parameter window, there's a lot there which can have a profound influence on the game, like skill level, enemy activity, etc. VonBeerhofen

I'm just trying to stay away from cumbersome workarounds by using ancient computers. Picked em up from the street, :) There's a boatload of unused possibillities in DirectX 6 but the problem is to figure out how to activate them in the 3D world. Possibly some of these could be simply incorporated into some of EAW's routines, but which ones is hard to figure out and very time consuming, the more so because we can only go by trial and error when the full workings of the program isn't fully understood. I'm experimenting with limited success but it's fun and educational and sometimes there is a small success which opens a world of possibillities. Skyhigh, as for the ambience effect I can only think of weather effects like thunder and lightning and I've already started on that. Ofcourse rain is an entirely different thing which could be a screen overlay or a sprites or particles effect. That can only be done using hardware accelleration as I doubt a software solution for millions of droplets will bring the game to a halt. Furthermore there is a possibility to give a user control over the light color and intensity but I simply don't like that idea, more variation is feasable but I don't really see it'll add to what's already there. The latest EAWPRO already contains one ambience effect in the cockpit but I don't want to spoil the surprise when people encounter it. Call it an easter egg but for me as most things it's just playing with possibillities and try to understand how it works. Mark, which ever programmer would be allowed to mess with the source, he'd still have to figure out how the Source Code works and how and where to embed extra possibillities. I consider myself a decent programmer with 35 years of experience but after 10+ years of messing with stuff I'm only marginally wiser as to how things work and I'm still just trying to have some fun. Figuring out the entire game is a massive undertaking and only for lunatics who have nothing else on their hands anyway. I won't rule out some extra cool upgrades but it is very slow going and we're not getting any younger. VBH

I don't see any differences here Skyhigh, not even with my own computers. It looks standard to me, nothing extra besides the mods ofcourse. Ambient lighting is preset in the game, just did some fun experiments with it, anything else you mention I haven't seen in the game code and when it's not in the code it'll do zilch. Ofcourse one can program new graphics features but to incorporate them into the 3D world is very unlikely, I don't think anyone has much knowledge on DirectX and it's functions, or Glide and D3D graphics routines. The manuals for these libraries are well over a few 1000 pages and as hard to learn as a new programming language. Just my thoughts VonBeerhofen

The EAW Launchpad wishes all it's members and friends a healthy and fun 2019 and expressess it's special gratitude to the Combat Ace forum and moderators for kindly allowing me to do what I've always liked doing, which has been improving EAW to the best of my abillity. VonBeerhofen

Thx guys, it may take a while before anything new comes up, with X-Mas and all, but in any case the work continues! VonBeerhofen

Since the work on EAWPRO is a continuous effort I've decided an interim upgrade would be nice. Those who've kept their game updated can simply extract the upgrade into their EAWPRO gamefolder, allow overwrites and it should be good to go. Older installs will require the latest release version on top of an official Microprose version 1.x after which the new upgrade can be added the same way as above. The upgrade is available here: https://rabartel.home.xs4all.nl/Members/FXEXE.zip Some appetizing pics: Enjoy and have a nice X-Mas VonBeerhofen

It's come to my attention that the parachutist's 3D model was inadvertently removed from it's 3D.FXE archive, hence I've uploaded the model to my FTP site so it can be easily extracted into your EAWPRO folder (where the EAW.EXE resides) to fix the problem. The file is available here: https://rabartel.home.xs4all.nl/Parachutist.zip Sorry for any inconveniences, VonBeerhofen

That's great Mark, thx a lot. Haven't got much new to add yet and a single archive is much easier then several. It's all designed to go on top of eachother and with the cleaned op folder there's plenty of room. Can't go wrong with this small change. VonBeerhofen

A small example of the differences between the stock effects and the ones used in EAWPRO. This drawing shows the stock effects in the left picture and one of EAWPRO's effects in the right one. As you can see there are 9 different animations in the stock drawing, the bright colored squares are used for the tracers, one square for each calibre, and only 4 frames are available for fires. All other animations use 8 frames. EAWPRO uses an entire texture for it's 16 frames per effect and besides the longer and hires animations another advantage is that the drawing's color palette is individual to each effect drawing and is therefore much more realistic, whereas the 8 stock effects have to share those colors in a single texture. EAWPRO also uses 8 calibre colors with the option to use 16, as apposed to just 4, I just can't think of any weapons to use the remaining 8 colors. Furthermore EAWPRO uses 16+ of such Hires effects drawings but each effect can also borrow frames from the other effects drawings, which with certain animations allows a selection out of 16 x 16 = 256 frames. I hope you understand that this approach allows all effects to be swapped freely with another by simply renaming the texture file or .SPT filename. The same goes for their TRA (transparency) counterparts. I hope this explains why swapping Sprite Tables or changing them isn't as usefull as one thinks, after all each animation is linked to some action in the game and the routines for these had to be completely rewritten in order to make this work and it's not just a swap in the Sprite Table, that won't work at all since the used animations are defined in their own specific routines which control their actions. VonBeerhofen

from pilots who can give an honoust opinion about things which aren't working properly or problems which occur during their games. I don't mean personal issues about not liking skies or shadows, or even plane or ground models, terrainsets or effects. These are no real issues and can be changed anytime by anyone who feels he can do better, with programs as mspaint, photoshop, gimp, etc. After all these are just drawings created by people like me who initially didn't have many skills in creating such drawings. The real problems are when the game stops working or when selections with particular programs don't give the required results or are to cumbersome to use. What I'm saying is that without your help we can not improve things and we're unable to test on our own machines because there are too many factors and problems which relate to hardware, OS and the way EAW was initially programmed in 1998 when XP, VISTA, Win7 and current hardware devellopments were not known. It's your feedback that helps progress EAW's devellopment and not knowing about the issues you encounter nothing will happen in solving them. Due to such feedback many problems were identified but many still remain unsolved, which is to be expected with a game from 1998. There isn't always an immediate solution, but a lot of problems which may only need a minor adjustment are understood today, but if you don't ask for help you won't get any. Sure enough there will always be issues to which I and others may not have answer (yet), but when these problems aren't discussed or mentioned things will not change. I hope you also understand that when there is currently no cure for your problem, the issues are being noted and may already have been identified as a recent problem for which there's no cure at present. That doesn't mean that people aren't trying to solve the issue, but solving problems can be pretty timeconsuming. EAW is still progressing, so don't give up hope for a cure, some people are still trying to work it out and come up with a fix! With zero feedback I can only program new things which will work on my own (obsolete) machine and although that's good enough for me and the people I fly with, I'd like to fix real issues for anyone with an interest in EAWPRO or 1.x derivatives. VonBeerhofen

With the added 5 gun calibres came the need to display their tracers differently and this is how they look now: VonBeerhofen