Guess what I found

A Project to model the 1944 Carrier air battles of the Pacific
FlyRight
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Guess what I found

Post by FlyRight »

This maynot be news to some people who may have installed RAW but while I was fiddling around testing some of Knugs files this nearly blew me off my chair (ignor the winterized sea-to-forest terrain, we're really on sea tiles painted with snow)...
Image

Image

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If these pics showup here, what you're probably wondering is why do I see smoke coming out of the ships and at a slanted degree unless, maybe??? their.........moving???

And if you don't believe that than somebody tell me how did that transport pass along side that lead destroyer that I just took out when....

In the last pic we have what normally always appears in the ocean when doing an interdiction mission...static shipping and diffenently nobody stoking the engine rooms...or i'm just a little more burnt out than care to know :wink:
Moggy
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Post by Moggy »

This is a funny thing with ships and smoke and movement. I swear that when I first used to play EAW I saw moving ships, but I have not seen moving ships for a long long while. I don't think I've ever seen smoke from the stacks, and yet the tmod properties table does provide for smoke issuing from the ship objects. So what gives?
FlyRight
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Post by FlyRight »

Hi Peter, I never had moving ships in this game until now which is why I posted this here since it may be more useful to the caw people. Right now I switched the ship tmods to have moving tanks instead which looks more like their spread out doing a sweep and I still get the smoke which would look better as direct exhaust or durt being kicking up in the air 8) if that feature was edited lower to the ground.

This only happens with a specific file that allows the ocean tile to be replaced by a specific blackforest tile. I traced it to vonObens sea-to-forest patch found at max's site and it's identical to the this file Knug borrowed for removing the ocean in raw...the eaw.tm file.

Somehow this file also mimics whatever terrain you install but you always get that respective terrains blackforest tile and all of its properties out over the ocean area as well as solid ground effects. If I install my all-pine-fix to replace the 3D forest I get exactly the same thing spread out over the empty ocean as well as their hitbubbles. I'm also assuming it's reading some other hitbubble tied to this blackforest tile since I seem to be always ramming into something invisable either on a regular land tile or the ocean...posted something not very clear like that at SimHq. I believe theres a residual oversized hitbubble that this 3D compatiable tile is harboring even after using the blackforst-kill set.

Anyway back to this original post. Can somebody tell me what this eaw.tm file is and how do you edit its properties or should I contact vonOben. I like to use it only for an ocean fix but it's also somehow accommodates the fixed bases/targets/etc associated to the russina-in-game map which I don't what to use...just realized now that moscow is in london :roll: .
FlyRight
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Post by FlyRight »

quick update, this eaw.tm file isn't stable, it looks like it will corrupt the directory and best test it in a standalone copy of eaw because I couldn't default back to eaw paremeters even after it's removal...in other words i was stuck with the russian-in-game map properties that this file harbors unless i copied over the directory with a clean version for a quick fix.
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Post by Moggy »

Very odd!

There is a eaw_ttd.dat editor now by Ryan, which I have and send over, because I forget where to download it. That enables to edit objects on the various tiles and positions.
Pobs
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Post by Pobs »

hi guys,

I suspect this relates to the difference between 'target' convoys and random convoys... Fly, was this convoy your 'target ' for the mission ?

Moggy, regarding smoke... we can toggle smoke on and off in the exe table, and it works for all the tmod slots for moving vehicles I think it includes the ship slots, I can check...

certainly , any shipping that is placed via the targets.dat etc.... files will be stationary but 'convoys' set in the eaw_ttd may well move, I haven't seen it though myself... I will do a test eaw_ttd with 'lots' of convoy markers in the coastal, estuarine and sea tiles and see what happens...


cheers,



Pobs
FlyRight
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Post by FlyRight »

So you can make ships move afterall??? with special editng to the ttd.dat file except i'm not using that file. Its a tm.dat file and in a clean directory thats causing this (excuse my ignorance to the purpose of either file). And I get this automatically when selecting an interdiction mission for any one of the typical offshore convoys if that helps.
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Post by Moggy »

we can toggle smoke on and off in the exe table


It's a while since I ploughed the mystery of the ground object properties table in the exe trying to get permamently blazing and smoking oil tanks for the Dunkirk set, so I knew that we couldn't yet attach smoke to the static tmods. I thought that the smoke was turned on by default for the ships. I guess not. That's something we will have to include in the exe for CAW.

but 'convoys' set in the eaw_ttd may well move


Now this is of great interest for CAW since we will have a number of Japanese supply convoys in and around the Phillippines for target. To have them moving with smoke would be something else!
Pobs
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Post by Pobs »

Fly,

the tm file places the terrain tiles on the map, so the 640x320 tiles are each placed by one byte with their orientation set by having 4 values available for each tile to correspond to facing N, S, E, or W.... that file is what places the tiles you fly over.. the height of each tile is then set in the eaw16.hm file.....

The eaw_ttd places the 'non-target' objects onto the tiles, like the trees, the farms, the city buildings, convoys.. etc.... in the eaw_ttd there is space for 64 objects for each terrain tile type... there are 57 terrain tile types.... so we can place up to 64 items onto each tile but they apeear wherever that tile appears, so it fills the world up nice and quickly ....

then the targets are placed individually using the tardata.dat file in conjunction with the targets.dat and the gridata.dat files...

hope that helps :)


cheers,


Pobs
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Post by Pobs »

OK,

report test 1 : 10 freighter and destroyer slots placed into the 'sea tile' and 4 into each of the coastal tiles water areas... using the default eaw.exe in my SAW test set-up... nothing !.... flew half way down the catalan coast, past harbours, river estuaries, the works.... not one convoy anywhere... went out and swapped the 1940 campaign slot for the 1943 campaign slot.... same mission... nothing, still no convoys and no ships either... so like the ground convoys, the ship slots dont actually appear so why no convoys ?... could this be like the tanks... activated by a date switch... so only appearing in certain campaigns...???...need to investigate further....


cheers,


Pobs
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Post by Moggy »

Thanks pobs - watching with interest.
DeanH

Post by DeanH »

Pobs, What Nationality were you flying as?
I wonder if you would notice any difference flying LW on the English coast, as opposed to RAF on the Euro coast?
Alternately, USAAF?

Alternatively, a Fighter/Bomber type (Mossie?) as opposed to a Spit or FW190?

Just some thoughts, knowing how convoluted it can be, the way one aspect of the game affects another.

Dean
Captain Kurt

Post by Captain Kurt »

Anything further?

CK
Pobs
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Post by Pobs »

So far the news is not good... I checked the default eaw_ttd.dat file and there are no tmods placed to activate the sea convoys, so these clearly dont use the same system as the ground convoys do, if you place ship models on the sea tiles and do an offshore interdiction then the convoy that appears is stationary and unrelated to the placement in the eawttd... the ship tmods don't appear ingame if you place them in the eaw_ttd so to get shipping in harbours etc via this method we would have to allocate some of the 'non-shipping 3dz's to ships... I believe they appear fine if used in the targets.dat, but are stationary...

regarding the moving convoys... I will try installing this eaw.tm that fly has and see if I get any moving convoys... I have not seen them before... Fly, which exe are you using ? this may be related to the 1.2a or even the original exe rather than the map files.... Chris Coon's definitely was of the opinion that the sea convoys in eaw moved....I remember him saying so...

cheers,


Pobs
FlyRight
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Post by FlyRight »

Sorry Pobs I forgot all about this post...swamped with getting acquainted with editing tools since a project i started snowballed :roll: but it was the 1.2 patch, its the only one I ever use for startup setups. Which btw I like to send you the sea-to-forest tm.data file to remove the smoke coming from the vehicles I changed with those vessels moving above.

Any chance of copying your GInterdict1 onto Tonsters ttd.data file. Right now his mod offers 9 substantial target locations that work pretty good for me representing Army Gruppe North facing some Red Army HQ's now :D but like to keep your mod representing pockets of trapped russian troop convoys...great fun for after missions as targets of opportuntiy.

BTW getting back to moving vessels, I'm a big fan of Moggys torpedo mod and for a long while I practically made every torpedo bomber I could testing each thoroughly against any possible water tiled convoys and never encountered any ships moving at any time until using that modified sea-to-forest file.
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