European Air War - The Gen

It was my understanding EAW's 70 clock cycles/second made it possible to adjust for different CPU speeds on different machines..... You are basically correct here. From memory, the computer has hardware circuitry that updates a counter 70 times a second. The game loop looks at how many of these 1/7...

Hi Wuddy, The 3 camera setup is there to solve 2 separate problems. The screen image is displayed firstly from Camera 0. That image is overlaid with the the view of Camera 1. Finally the image is overlaid with the view of Camera 2. Camera 0 and 1 are the 2 cameras that are moved around in the 3D wor...

Hi All, Just a small update. A kind model creator has donated 4 aircraft models for this project. The only major limitation he placed was that I have to find some way to protect the native files for the models so that other unscrupulous people do not pinch them, as he makes a living from creating an...

Well folks.... here it is. I have been in a holding pattern for some weeks waiting for a new release of the game library that I am using. Hopefully it will be released some time this year. This release is just a slightly more polished version of the other release .....but a little prettier. Currentl...

Time for another progress report. Even when using Z buffers based models things are not as simple as people sometimes expect. Have a look at this picture ( look at the propeller disk of the aircraft flying towards us) http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b49/sydbod/100108232149.jpg As you can see, the ...

Hi Wuddy, Getting some one else's code and modifying it is not very productive. One only gets a view from within the modules and one never gets a global perspective of how a game should function. Starting from the overview and then developing the bits and pieces has given me more insight in the last...

Hi Dumo, A most interesting article. I have been spending many sleepless nights thinking about what that article talked about. The ground shadows cast by aircraft in FSX are calculated straight off the polys themselves and the more of them you have the more performance you lose. In case you don't be...

Hi All, Just a quick update of what is being done. I have decided to settle for something like a HD2400 (dirt cheap bottom end card) as the minimum video card for this project. Likewise catering for 128 online players at the one time looks like it will be more than enough. After spending the last 2 ...

UMMM!!!!!! Ehhhh!!!!! gulp. It looks like the transparent water was causing all the problems when a machine is using an early generation video card. Oh well ..... I learned a lot in the exercise. I know my graphics creations suck (so dont judge it on my graphics skills), but I liked the sun effect t...

Just a quick update. While doing some FPS testing on various machines, I came upon a situation where with the inclusion of just one more "Matrix" into the game, it would cause the game to drop from around 100+ FPS down to only 12FPS. EEEEK!!!! This happened on a 754Pin Sempron 2800+ machin...

Greetings fellow travelers, Some interesting developments have been under foot. It is a good thing the Z Buffer approach was never implemented within EAW to replace the BSP system. Here is the continuation of the Rodnoc story so you hopefully will see the relevance to the above statement. After play...

Hi Shreck, Just some background info for you. I am still trying to finalize a procedure for creating terrains for this new project. There are so many options and at the moment only one poor brain to try to think of all the options and how to implament them. Things become even more complex because th...

Was having a little fun integrating terrain into the model I included a few sandy atols but decided to determine what a good texture would look like. Zoomed up the small crappy 128x128 texture for the island to 4096x4096 and then replaced a section of it with an 800x600 picture to determine what sor...

I know people like pretty pictures, as it means much more than just text. While I was playing around to develop a suitable water mode for the game, it became necessary to test water transparency. I still have not added ocean bed detail ..... only because I suck so much in creating graphics. The ocea...

Just a small update about the terrain. While I was creating parts of the new terrain code, it looks like we came across a nasty fault within the game library when using its inbuilt terrain functions. It appears that when one creates a terrain using the inbuilt functions, then these functions actuall...