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Author Topic:   Aircraft formations tweaking : a preliminar report
DOM
Member

From: Lille, France
Registered: Jan 2001

posted 02-24-2002 03:54 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for DOM     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Hi,

Here are some preliminar notes on the bytes which control, at least in part, the size and overall structure of the formations in EAW.EXE :

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/dominique.legrand/EAW/frm_notes.ZIP

As said, it is preliminar but I could not do more today and this can be a solid basis for anyone willing/on the way to give a try on those bytes. I thought to able to do more but I spent most of my time determining the a/c slots which correspond
to the bytes series. As a matter of fact, I was partly wrong in my previous post :

http://www.simhq.com/simhq3/sims/boards/bbs/Forum41/HTML/011852.html

Contrarily to what I first found and said, ALL the series are used and a single a/c may use several series depending, at least in the single missions mode, on the year. You can see all that in the document. There are some schemes that roughly illustrate the structure of 'standard' formation structures. However, these are only 2D schemes. Have in mind that the formation have a third dimension . Furthermore, I sometimes only represented a single section of the formation.

One easy way to display and analyse the formation of a flyable aircraft, before and after changes, is :
- run the eaw.exe, choose a plane in the single mission mode, set to 12 planes and heavy, select the year and disable 'immediate action'. Launch the mission. Once on the tarmack, set autopilot (Q on my keyboard) and increase the time to x8. After some tens of seconds, the formation should be OK. You can pause the game, select the external view and zoom to
visualize the formation in its whole.
The same procedure can be used for the non-flyable aircraft but you will often have to hit Alt-N and pause to screen the other formations. One difficulty is that if you pause the game just after Alt-N, most of the formations will not be formed. On the contrary, if you pause too late, the formations may not exist as the action starts.
In campaigns, the ideal way is to change the byte which code for the a/c in the career.sve.

OK, if anyone of you want to tweak these bytes in order to understand their accurate function, please do it : it would be nice. It is a time-consuming try&test work.

After some more investigations on the next weekend, if I can, and thanks to casual investigations you could make yourselves,
I plan to make a tool which will easily change those formations both in specific and random ways. All suggestions for the making of such a tool are welcome. Just be aware that I am just a little basic-DOS programmer.

Cheers.

Dominique

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DOM
Member

From: Lille, France
Registered: Jan 2001

posted 02-24-2002 04:02 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for DOM     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
The server does not seem block letters for the zip file name.

You can try this link :

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/dominique.legrand/EAW/frm_notes.zip

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Bingo47
Member

From: Toulouse,France
Registered: Dec 2000

posted 02-24-2002 04:31 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Bingo47     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Thanks DOM

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DOM
Member

From: Lille, France
Registered: Jan 2001

posted 02-24-2002 05:05 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for DOM     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Salut Bingo

I would like to propose the following :

A good procedure would be to make a kind of « formations library ». As a matter of fact, depending of the settings, a newly created formation structure can work or not. If you increase the number of a/c to 4 in a section which normally contains 3 planes, the distances settings will have to be reconsidered. Same thing is true for the number of sections in a formation. Usually, there is no trouble when you decrease the number of a/c/section in a given formation (by just decreasing bytes #3) but it cannot be the case in increasing way. I observed crashes (planes exploding) using Alt-N

Hence, it would be nice to build such a library with « tested and working formation s» of various sizes (1 to …). The program could load those formations structures for the differents slots, in a controlled (fixed or random) way.

Your comments ?

Dominique


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