What's new ? By chance, did you find time to study the bytes I mentioned in another post ?

Well, I found myself time (and courage) to study those bytes last night and it looks very promising IMHO. I will make some further investigations on Sunday and I will send you my own report.

From what I know now : the bytes are organized into 15 series of 3 x 16 bytes. I precisely know what are the aircraft whose formations are affected by those bytes. From memory (I am at work now), I can say that some series (I remember series 2, 3, 4, 10 and 15) are unused. All the others affect the formations of one to 10 aircraft. For example, the series #1 code for both B17 and B24. As I presumed in my first post, byte #3 of every chunk directly affects the size of every section of a formation and the size of the formation and its whole.

The way the program use those bytes #3 :
- the number of planes in a section (box) is byte #3 of the first chunk multiplied by the byte #3 of the second chunk.
- the max number of planes in a formation is the factor of the bytes #3 of the three chunks.

For example (and from memory), the V1 bytes #3 (series #8) are respectively 1, 1 and 3. That means a section size of 1 (1*1) and a total number of V1 per formation of 3 (1*1*3). That's also true for the other a/c.

The other bytes affect the position of every aircraft in a section and the position of every section in a formation but I still don't know how they work exactly. In the particular case of V1, almost all bytes are set to zero that leads to a random formation.

This is very promising and, in the future, I could make some kind of "formation randomizer" which will change those bytes in the exe. This could be included in a new version of my skin randomizer.

Cheers.

Dominique

I didn't work on them cause I first wanted to finish the skin I released yesterday.

When I read your last post on the topic I had similar things in mind. That means, that every chunk is used for one slot... So this seems to be true. Please inform us about all knowledge you ware able to get from these bytes.
I'm especially proud of you because of the random formation finding. This is exactly what we need for a nightfighter campaign. I can't tell it often enough: Great work.

Now the question is: should I still take care of them or do you now know all we need to know?

excellent, now we can have night bomber missions with small open formations!!!

well done indeed!!

S!

cheers,

I didn't try your skin randomiser yet, because I'm so busy with all these campaigns (right now Malta). But a combined "Skin-Formation Randomiser" would be terrific and I'd certainly use it if I'm ever going to PLAY a campaign in the future!

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'Alles zu retten muss alles gewagt werden' - Schiller

Andy,

Don't worry. As I said, last week-end I didn't see the opportunity to do some EAW job untill a week or more and I thus begged some valuable help. Many thanks to you and Moggy for your proposal. I got unexpected spare time during the week : that's why !
The reason why I posted the present message is that I don't want anyone having read my previous post and doing work which is already done . Well, I plan to do some extra job on this stuff on Sunday and I hope to yield enough infos in order to build the tool (following Sunday ?).

About the slots : probably, I made my explanations unclear. Among the 15 bytes series, only 10 are used. Don't ask me why, I don't know. That means that a single series may affect one, two or up to (10?) slots. I remember (I have not my notes here)that the single series #11 (12?) affect many german a/c slots like 109E, 109G, 109K, 190A, 190D, JU88A, Me410, 262 (german fighters or so). Series #5 only affects slot B26. Hence, the changes made for slot 109E will also affect 109G, 109K, 190A ... Since the settings could be changed everytime the patch program will be launched, this will not a big prob IMO.

I will communicate my findings as soon as possible and your advices will be welcome to build the randomizing tool.

Dominique

I've been engaged in shadows and cockpits, and was going to have a look at those bytes this weekend. At least we've gotsome good pointers now as to how formations are controlled. Excellent work!

Moggy

and Alatriste, I like your thinking with reference to the SCW formations

Interesting:in bombers formation all "nose art" are used (17 for B17 & 15 for B24).
Usualy only 12 for a formation of 36 planes are used.With extra squads when we got
72 bombers (2 flights of 36 planes)or more (about one hundred) the second and evantually third flights use the same "nose art" than the first flight.Nose art on plane 1,4,7,10,13,16,19,22,25,28,31,34 and now 37,40,43,46,49 (17 nose art used),52 (same as plane 1),55 (same as plane2),58,61,64,67,70.

Well done!

Gramps
VMF214