VonBeerhofen

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

Interesting stuff RiBob, I just can't say if any of it is usable. EAW is very limited in it's capabillities and maintaining framerates is more important then accuracy. You may understand that the tracers are just a line on the screen which can only use the colors EAW has reserved for them. I've used what I possibly could use and made it look nice, I don't think I can do more then that. Within the available colors a rewrite of the code to have more is just not feasable or would take too much of my time. There's another 1000 things I want to tackle, so it's time to move on to the next issue. Thx for your input, it was an eye opener for me since us Dutch have no knowledge on bullets in general, as we're not allowed to carry arms and the info I already acquired was not very extensive. I think you'll like what I've done, :) VonBeerhofen

Hi RiBob, smokey tracers are very feasable in EAW and since they were appearently used more frequently at the beginning of the war I may be tempted to replace the colored tracers for the year 1940 only. I may even be able to add the corckscrew effect to the animation. I can't say when it'll be done but it's been added to my todo list. VonBeerhofen

I've programmed the tracer frequency under control of the EAW.INI entry LimitedAmmo= 1-15 max. The value 0 still is unlimited ammo. SInce it's a bitwise logical operand the sensible values are 1 3 7 or 15, the values in between will work too but makes the behaviour more irregular. Changing to a higher value will slightly improve framerate as well, because there will be more illuminated dots then tracers. The default value of 1 (stock EAW) will probably be the best choice for most people and will allow backward compattabillity, the higher values are mainly meant to improve FPS when necessary since the EAW.INI EffectsDetail setting was replaced with this option which simply is faster then the stock routine. The higher the value the less tracers. VonBeerhofen

Thx Mark, nice one. VBH

I made a few minor changes to EAWPRO's contrails which will benefit framerates, especially when large numbers of planes are battling it out. A Glide issue with the trails was also fixed and will be available with the next release of EAWPRO. A temporary fix has been uploaded to my FTP which restores full functionality but doesn't yet use the new improved version. Just overwrite your EAW.EXE in your EAWPRO gamefolder with this version: https://rabartel.home.xs4all.nl/EAWPRO_FIX.zip Mark if possible you can do the same thing with the download version at Mediafire, it would save me from having to construct a new .ZIP. These are how it will look with the next release: VonBeerhofen

They're fading alright. but can also have smoke trails. It's a bit of a disputed issue for some players though as it may obscure the player's view of the target, and I don't know how it'll play out on FPS. With the optimised and changed code there's room for several options. VonBeerhofen

Tracers are now set to app. 1 in 7 bullets and can be adjusted with a .LDR script. VonBeerhofen

Exactly, however EAWPRO is a NoCD/NoOS version and requires a FULL install of the game. Best way for this install is to just copy the entire CD onto your drive to prevent any registry entries being made. It will also work on working copies already installed. VonBeerhofen

It's adviced to install EAWPRO as suggested in the accompanying notes. The addon has all official upgrades up to v1.2 incorporated and is meant to be installed on top of the US/UK CD version. It may well work on other versions but can't be tested since those versions usually don't work on my legacy machine. You're welcome to try these versions at your own risk but no support is given when you try, as it's impossible to predict what other files will become part of your game. VonBeerhofen

Hi RiBob, EAWPRO should be loaded on top of an OFFICIAL RELEASE version of EAW. V1.28E is NOT an official release but a heavily modded version by the code group, hence it is not the right base for EAWPRO. VonBeerhofen

The Ace skill level setting isn't a Flight Model entry but a Skill Level entry, the FM Multiplier doesn't change AI behaviour, just the FM. VonBeerhofen

A new feature was added to EAWPRO which changes the flightmodel's behaviour to allow for a wider range of aircraft. The feature was added to the EAW.INI entry FlightModel=X which now can use 4 values: 0 = off 1 = pre WWII planes 2 = WWII planes (default) 3 = post WWII planes There's probably a bit more to do but the switches are working. VonBeerhofen

I can get to that page just fine, not going to download it though. It's fine to have it there or anywhere else really. VonBeerhofen