VonBeerhofen

Thx RiBob, I think that searches in Google automattically include searching it's own library, as I've seen many quotes from such books. I'll read anything that's free and WWII related though, you never know if any new ideas will spawn from that. Don't really have much interest in ''What If' scenarios but I'm sure other people do. VBH

It's taken quite some time as Covid-19 stagnated manufacturing of 3D models and anything EAWPRO, but I'm not about to give up and finally found some extra energy to start work on the 4th citymodel for the Italy addon. Shown here still using lores textures and not entirely a 100% model yet. There's still about 35% unused space in the model which allows for dreaming up some extra nice details. Devellopment is carrying on, although somewhat more in the background, sorry. VonBeerhofen

Hi Mark, I've started work on a few new 3D models but other then that not much else to communicate, all I have to show is a few tiles of the Harvest riverset. The virus situation isn't particularly giving me much energy to continue. I'm trying to keep my online group motivated and do whatever I feel needs doing. Hope all you guys are still OK, hang in there and stay safe! VBH

Hi RiBob, I'm sorry to hear that, my condoleances. Got a bit trapped in the Covid-19 situation myself but I'm still alive. Just not very active right now. Hopefully there'll be more to show in the future, stay safe. VBH

Always willing to test new stuff or give info on the old, :) VBH

Nice one Mark, thx a lot for the effort! VBH

Thx to Erik and Stratos a special EAWPRO club was erected where further devellopment of my work can take place without unnecessary interruptions. Anyone is welcome to read it's contents which remains uncensored, but discussions are limited to members only and admittance to the club is exclusively under my control. Ofcourse crticism about EAWPRO can still be posted in the General EAW forum and when possible will be taken to heart. I'm sorry that there is no other way to present my work but it will not hamper further devellopment in any way. You can find the club through the forum's main page or by selecting CLUBS in the top from any page in the CA forum or by clicking the picture below:

The road tiles are used as well but in a more generic way, in a way nearly every tile is a road tile and can be used as such. The road tiles don't appear very often in stock EAW and are essentially a waste of precious resources. I use them as standalone tiles besides road tiles, so they appear much more often. The only properties in EAW are water or land, roads don't have a special property but they're normally used to have interdiction convoys driving on them. The convoys can be placed on any land tile though but I haven't stepped away from the game's normal use of convoys other then that they can be larger and have a more interesting mix of vehicles. The extra placement of standalone roadtiles can also spawn way more convoys then the stock game, so the chances of running into one is way higher in all mission types. It's the same with trains if you create more rails in the game. VBH

A few pictures of this mixed set which was randomly contructed from some 400 terraintiles. UHR stands for Ultra High Resolution and consists of 512 x 512 tiles as opposed to hires which are 256 x 256 and lores which are 128 x 128. In this set 4 hires tiles are combined into a single UHR tile giving the game the equivalent of 256 tiles instead of 64 and puts the terrain in a more appropiate pespective and scale. This new set made many hardly used tiles in EAW redundant by using them instead as field, grass, forrest, city, river, coast or mountain tiles. For instance, the BNROAD tiles only appear some 700 times in a 204.800 tiles terrain. This is hardly economic use and besides that the field tiles in this new set already have roads drawn on them resulting in a much more elaborate road system then the stock game. The result is a much more diverse terrain which are essentially all field tiles, except for the river and coastal tiles (when in use). Even City tiles have field transitions and each city tile therefore lends itself to construct an entire city which can also use village tiles or can be used as individual village tiles too. It's number of used tiles is variable depending on the need, allowing for 10, 20 or any number of tiles to be used to construct cities. This again has a great influence on the diversity of cities, but with a limited number of 64 tiles available in total also limits the field set somewhat. The same was done with forrest and mountain tiles, which can be constructed into large areas or just sit individually in between the fields, again greatly enhancing their use. One could call this set the neverending terrain. New tiles are being created constantly and can be grouped in coloration, nature type or shape and as a group can replace other tiles to create inserts in the terrain which have a specific purpose, Industrial, Rural, Agricultural or Urban areas can be constructed at will. The approach even allows incorporating other tilesets with very little work, and conversions are fun to do. Tile borders will fit ANY terrain, swamps, lakes, islands have already been created and await importing and like every terrain tile's creation can be further enhanced or changed depending on one's imagination. Stick bits and pieces on from other tiles or use cutouts from satelite photos, once you get going it's hard to stop, when bored or don't like it, just replace a few tiles and change the view! VonBeerhofen

These tiles started out as a new approach to EAW map tiling and the first experiments in devellopment in 2010 culminated in a hires set I named BENELUX. It's primarily goal was to get rid of the annoying tileseams visible in most other sets and a lot of work went into develloping a method to get matching borders on all sides of the tiles. In the following 10 years I worked on improving the basic design of each tile and finding a better way in creating tilemaps which made better use of the low number of tiles stock EAW and EAWPRO can use. As I wrote previously, these tiles don't really need the BNROAD set, each tile has it's own design of main roads and secundary paths. The same is true for the BNALCTY set, as each city/village tile was made into a standalone tile which can function as a village or city component. This allows much more freedom in building cities and villages as there are no border tiles anymore, each tile can function as a border or perhaps better each city is just a collection of village tiles. Borders have been hampering map design and by doing away with them it's become much easier to create new theatres from scratch. Besides that, each tile has at least a few farms or small farming communities on them, simmilar to the stock EAW village tiles. Many of these farms now sit on various corners or sides of the tile and small villages appear where the sides or corners meet. City and village tiles can be used to further diversify the tilemap, simmilar as was done with the bridges, roads, mountain and forrest tiles. They can appear 100'ds of times more often in any combination with the other tiles which results in a much more natural looking terrain. When groups of mountain tiles are placed in a specific area you still get a predominantly mountainous terrain but you can also use each of those tiles in other areas which are not meant to look predominantly mountainous. Ofcourse the same goes for forrest tiles too. To show this improvement better here's a few pictures of my latest creations in the BENELUX set, i.e. these tiles are stock EAW format, 8 bit and just 256 x 256 pixels and all have a mix of roads, village, forrest, field and mountain in them. Ofcourse mountain tiles have more mountain drawings and forrest tiles have more forrest drawings on them, but there's total freedom in choosing how much of each nature is used. EAW is just not a unified collection of a single approach to theatre building, if you stick to old fashioned methods you just can not get the best out of each theatre which is so very different from stock EAW. What's the use of river tiles in a desert terrain or why have fields in a predominantly jungle terrain and uninhabited islands? VBH

Here's a few more screenshots of the set, which I think gives a better view of the diversity of the 400+ tiles which are available to it. VBH

Naaah, unless you're talking about an earlier version then the one I have. I've thought about using those screens but they're too detailed for EAW. I'd say their graphics level is about 10 times higher then EAW's. Nice compliment though, and in a way it was those screens which got me into creating these. VBH

Having found a good way to get this new planetype working it is now fully activated. The plane is programmed with one nose engine and one engine on each wing. I'm aware that there may be pusher variants which have one engine in the tail and if so I'll try to add this variant too. It's AI behaviour is a hybrid of multiple plane AI and all possible AI choices can be used, i.e. Fighter, Bomber, Fighterbomber, Strikefighter, Divebomber, Waterplane etc. This is NOT just a modified Quad or Twin plane, which used to have just one less/extra engine nacelle in the 3D model but would behave like a Twin or Quad with perhaps an optional flightmodel for 3 engines (not sure if that's been done really). It's an entirely new planetype with it's own (damage) charactaristics and flightmodel. It is available for all sides and all available PLANES.DAT switches can be activated on it, like multi crewed, slats, armour, defensive guns and gear type. This isn't really new in comparison with the older versions, new is their specific AI behaviour and apropiate damage routines, which are different in comparison with other versions of this plane. A plane with NOT 4 or 2 engine controls and engine damage locations, but 3! Hope to show some proper Tri engined pics soon, sofar the testing was only done on a modified Quad and pics from that wouldn't be very representative as it only shows a B17 with one engine off. A new 3D model has to be build or an existing one needs to be properly modified in order to fully test functionallity but I can't see any problems surfacing with the choosen method. VonBeerhofen

Yeah that's what I gathered. In fact the smoke isn't disipating at all, a calculation diminishes transparency the longer the trail gets, currently the highest transparency sits at the start. Perhaps it helps when tranparency increases towards the tail end of the trail. There's a lot of options really and prior to this version dozens of drawings were tested and like cloudlayers each one had it's own charme, sadly I can't put them all in at the same time, lol. Experiments will continue but I realise that some may like the older versions better. Therefore EAWPRO allows each effect to be changed individually and all previous created versions can be used at will. It won't look the same in my other addons as I feel a different effect will only add to the atmosphere of the addon and the use of other smokesets gives people a large option to experiment themselves. Even the transparency files are interchangeable, so the same drawing can be used with various transparency depths, however when used in combination hundreds of possibillities become available and it can become quite timeconsuming to find the best combination of files. VonBeerhofen

Wasn't very happy with the dual purpose dual smoketrail I created long ago so I created a more substantial one with 3D effect which works better in all situations when active. OK, that's perhaps a little biassed observation but I hope you guys agree with me after seeing these pictures. Hope you guys can see which one and that the effects detail setting is working again in high mode, :) BTW , have you noticed the EAWPRO club recently expanded by 25%! Not bad in such a short time for EAW standards eh? VonBeerhofen And here's the Super Smoke Trail

The Suez theatre, dragged from a dusty corner of my harddrive, where it sat unfinished since 2004 due to Moggy's work on a simmilar theatre. I don't think he ever finished it so I pulled it out again to see what else I could do with it. The map isn't the same scale anyway and lends itself more for the battle of El Alamein which is just on the map. It covers a pretty large area and I created a new desert terrain set for it already. New though is a true elevationmap, which it never had because I had no idea how to convert such maps into EAW, but I've learned since then. With it the Suez region becomes a fully flyable theatre and is a step closer to turning it into an interesting new addon. Work continues! VonBeerhofen

Mark, the thinned out bit at the end is actually what remains of the contrail. There are a few options to truely thin out the end but I haven't decided yet on which one is best. One option is to remove smoke from the last frames in the drawing animation and another is to extend the inner smoke trail so it trails the main smoke. That animation is already more open due to it's dual purpose to function as a trail or a smoke. Perhaps there's another possibillity to draw less smoke frames at the end which should also help and change transparency depth, a combination of all is probably best and I'll see what I can do to thin it out when I've got some spare time. Getting it right is very timeconsuming though, I mean you can only see the effects of what you've done in battle but I'll keep trying! VBH

My bad Russ, I shouldn't put two different topics into one thread. Yep, I have some cool ideas for the comms, hope I can make them work more then what I have at the mo. VBH

Since this formation was created app. a year ago. This misssion was set in 1943 which was giiven a very small chance of this formation appearing as opposed to 1940. One encounter a year sounds about right eh? And I fly the game multiple times dayly, just because I need to check my latest creations. BTW, talking about latest creations, a new routine was implemented so AI can communicate amongst eachother like human players can. 24 such commands have been implemented but communications are still rudimentary. However there's plenty room for expansion and eventually this could evolve to a whole subset of specific AI commands, so more cooperative attack and defense become possible. VonBeerhofen

Hey Russ, It's fully working as intended. The line abreast formation regularly appears in 1940 but not so often in 1943. Pretty chuffed to have seen it in action, :) VBH

And here's the 12 sided version as it is for now. The model's shape was further refined and a new texture was created. I'll try to inflate the stabiliser wings too but those can be pita, so I don't know when that'll be ready. We'll see, :) VonBeerhofen

for Flyright's V1 conversion. As you can see in this picture the model was constructed the oldfashioned way from the V1 , which shape is still visible because back then it was the only way to create something new. All the old polygons and nodes had to be left as is to keep the rendering sequence intact. Essentially it's still a V1 with all it's parts still present but set to invisible except for the parts which were needed for the blimp. The result is that in the editor and in the game the model uses space for 145 polygons and 147 nodes and it's filesize is not much smaller then the actual V1, 4.73 Kilobytes. Due to the changes to the V1 model and not being able to recalculate a new Rendering Sequence this model never worked very well in the game, as sides and tailsurfaces disappeared depending on the viewing angle, a valliant effort for those days nonetheless This next picture shows the fixed model with a newly calculated rendering sequence, all unwanted nodes and polygons were removed, an anchor line attached, the stabiliser wings were straightened, the messy tail was remodeled to give it a more accurate shape and the model was prepared for further improvements, i.e. a 12 sided version with appropiate 3D stabiliser wings instead of just flat polygons. As shown it consists of just 73 polygons and 71 nodes resulting in a filesize of only 2.96 kilobytes. This new model is stable as a rock, takes up less memory and renders almost twice as fast, where ofcourse framerate is always an important asset in any flightsimulator as AI intelligence and reaction times are directly linked with it. The next two pictures show the model in action. Notice that the difference with the old version isn't very big, the difference mainly lies in the stability of rendering the model and viewing it from all angles and ofcourse 2 kilobytes removed from one model will hardly impact framerates. It does however become more significant when dozens are visible in the same frame and taking into account that in a single screenshot a few hundred 3D models will be visible, some very complex, the overal cleanup will have a dramatic influence on framerates, loading times, CPU and GPU use and frees up memory for more complicated models, like the upcoming 12 sided version currently being develloped, a shape which can NEVER be derived from ANY model created for EAW in the past! VonBeerhofen

Yesterday I started on a new theatre to be incorporated into PTIV as an addon. Rather then posting a lot of pictures I've set up a folder on my FTP with the test flight screenshots I made to check the new tilemap and pilotmap of the Philippines theatre. Still have to figure out how to use this new club so my excuses for not following normal procedure. Hope I'm not breaking any rules. It won't be the usual way I'll post screenshots. This map picture shows the app. route I flew and the tile and pilotmap I cobbled together to not get lost. Obviously this addon is about ships and carriers but also about driving the Japs out of the Philippines. The white targetdots are from PTIV, no targets have thusfar been assigned to the new map, I just had a look to see if there were any tile errors and wether the pilotmap was accurate. You can have a look here: https://rabartel.home.xs4all.nl/Philippines/ VonBeerhofen

Added 10 more screenshots to aforementioned folder at my FTP. The higher numbers starting from 20 show the fully activated tileset and the beaches are now at sea level to prevent what I'd call the waterfall effect on missaligned coastal tiles, its where water could be seen going up a slope. Fine if we'd have waves hitting land but we don't. VBH