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