Hi,

today i did stumble over part of EAW code that i didnt understand when i was looking to it last time.

Looks like 3d clouds was always possible in EAW, just the needed 3dz is missing and the procedure to enable the clouds is strange.
looks like a forgotten part of code.

It work like this:
For a test take the Ord19.3dz file and call it "clouds.3dz".

1. Start EAW with weather set to "particular clouded".

2. Hit "ctrl c".

Now you should see big 300l droptanks somewhere in the cloudlayers.

I dont know if just one clouds.3dz will bring the wanted result, but it should be worth a try.

Edit: just made the test, this even work in EAW1.2!

Greetings,

Knegel

Hi Ralf.

We have the 3dz cloud, but it's an old PAW model, It's nothing special, and to be honest, looks crap by todays standard.

I thought you were working on something a bit more sophisticated?

This info is quite old allready Ralph,

It was found about 5 years ago and I've shown some pictures with em back then. I agree with Col. Gibbon on this one, I don't think anyone wants em.

VonBeerhofen

Good to know, but this is a starting point to implement better clouds.

and them being really extra large tanks too...can you give it a DM/hitpoint, if they weren't so shakey could simulate something more simular? let me think...nah! forget it!

There were 3d clouds in "Aces Over Europe", at the time it was possible to duck inside a cloud bank to escape the bad guys. By todays standards they would most likely look pretty crappy. But, they did function pretty much like the real thing.

Ralf, working 3d clouds would be amazing. Might even give me a change againt you in a dogfight. Just think, me being able to dodge your slingshot fire, out climb your hangglider and disapear safely into a cloud. The odds keep looking better.

Would be nice if we could see what the 3D cloud looks like? (Screenie?)

Is it the way a 3dz file is made that makes a new 3D cloud complicated?
Sorta like how it's so hard to make a wheel round?
Is a sprite a 3dz?
What is the possibility of taking a bmp or jpg cloud picture and turning it into
a sprite? (Or 3dz. lol!)
It's amazing this sim still has stuff you can do to it...!!!
AO

Knegel,
You might want to search the game programming sights such as gamedev.net and gamasutra.com. 3D clouds is now old tech. The elder archives should have info that will help you.

Just a thought, but it would be hard to do in Glide wrapper as there transparency is 8 bit and not Alpha mask math.

A cloud is a box.
The cloud is more dense in the center.
To simulate fire, old school was to place textures on polys that gridded the box.

A box may change it's size based on variables and randoms.
Opacity may be changed by changing the A value of the color.

A cloud is also a point in 3D space. Particles can be spawned from a point. Particles can be manipulated by many variables.

There are a number of ways to simulate clouds. What fits best to EAW will take trial and error.

I honestly say thank you to the people who mod EAW by giving of there time.

wow, the tholians from star trek have returned. ;p

Hi VBH,
As you have already played with it:
Have you tried to see if those clouds actually behave as volumetric clouds?
Can an aircraft actually be seen to be flying infrontof / behind / inside the cloud or is it more like the terrain where buildings and aircraft show through mountain terrain.

I have trouble visualizing how volumetric clouds can be made to behave realistic without using Z Buffer for the rendering, as we don't have that capability within EAW.

The other obvious question when looking at them is ..... is there a transparency link available so we can make them less 'solid'.. ?...


cheers,



Pobs

Hello Allen,

thanks, i will have a look, for now i was fiddeling around with what EAW have to offer.















As you might see, this realy seems to eat fps, so i will have a look for other 3d clouds.

Greetings,

Knegel

Raised Smoke textures?

Maybe try adding more layers, using bigger textures to get more defined clouds, rather than our blodges of White and Grey

Hi Ralf,

I can not make it out clearly from your pictures.
When an aircraft flies into one of those clouds does it transition from full visible, and then slowly becomes invisible the further it progresses into the cloud?

Hi Peter,

yes, it do!

Like always the screenshots dont show how it looks in game.

In game it looks very nice, at least as good as the aces high clouds, though, they realy need to much PC performence for now.
Iam sure its possible to reduce this, somehow.

Greetings,

Knegel

Thanks Ralf,

So it must be made up of a huge cluster of individual sprites rather than an individual 3DZ.(or am I missing something?)
That probably explains why the huge loss in FPS.

A most interesting effect.

Most of the modern game make up their clouds using horizontal and vertical sprite plains. This way one uses much fewer sprites, but to get the volumetric effect with them, one requires the Z buffer.

Regards sydbod

EDIT: UGGGGGG!!!! after rereading your post ... it is a cluster of 3DZs rather than a cluster of sprites ..... that is even worse.

Nope, its sprites, the 3dz dont get loaded, i only use the already existing cloud position routines.

I can increase the size of the sprites, then it look much better, but strangewise the fps gets down even more, although i reduce the number of sprites much.
Looks like a big drawn sprite cause more trouble then many sprites.

This isn't strange Ralph, it's very easily explained.

Pixels are just a single spot in 3D space and a zoom calculation is used to calculate the size of each pixel to be displayed on your monitor depending on the viewdistance. Best display is when one pixel corresponds to one pixel on the monitor, which doesn't need a calculation. Add to this the alpha texture and things get a bit more complicated and more timeconsuming too.
I think that all these calculations in EAW are done by the software and not by hardware accelleration as this feature only came later and therefore isn't implemented in the game.
It shows why smokestacks are just as problematic, the longer and bigger the smoketrails/stacks the heavier the calculation. The same drop in FPS has been observed with hires in cockpit propellor views when they're drawn full screen, switching the cockpit off improves FPS by about 25% and that's just a single texture.

VonBeerhofen

Clouds like this?



http://www.markmark.net/clouds/RTCRImages.html

Col Gibbon, send me a PM and clear your PMs(says your over the limit). I saw your post in another forum and have some info that might help you.

Hi,

this is what i can get in EAW, without to much fps lost.

When i made this screenshots, the game was paused, so all planes have the same position.











Greetings,

Knegel

Yes, I remember VBH's clouds. Not possible to do anything more at the time.

The original programmers probably dropped the idea of 3D clouds because of FPS hits and computer limitations 10 or 12 years ago.
More's the pity, since clouds are both beautifully immersive and useful to fighter pilots (and very irritating to bombardiers).
New possibilities have opened up, thanks to creative thinking, and it's already fascinating. I'm impressed.

Looks like you, Ralf, and maybe Gibbs are onto something good.

FXEXE trial version:



VonBeerhofen

Knegel,
The pure sprites of EAW can only be used for learning. You can do little more then it's limitations. You and Woody should be well versed on the limitations of EAW particles. ') even if you don't realize it.

VBH,
The boundries for the differance in detail are clearly visable. It's a beautiful pic. please stop being so hard nosed and share with them what you learn through assembly. None of us will ever be rich from modding. It's all about partnership (comrads).

Do what any of you wish. It's a hobby.

There's nothing to teach Brit,

observant modders probably long noticed it's not a sprite but a simple 5 year old 3DZ model which was shelved because of lack of transparency (which problem was recently cured) and I'm very curious what creations people will think of to get the most out of this, after all with a 3D model there are hundreds of possible shapes, not just one, as in a sprite. It's just harder to come up with an appropriate shape or shapes.



VonBeerhofen

Hi,

my clouds are never exact the same and they work like real clouds, as more you get into them, as less you can see and then the sight clears up slowly again.

The there can be many different basic shapes, due to some random influece they still wont look the same.







This is made with some default sprites, unfortunatelly there is no smooth white default smoke sprite, still the result in game is not to bad.

Of course such clouds bring a big impact to the fps, nothing else can be expected.

Allen,

iam not sure anymore that this wont work.

Look to the fps and this is made while all, not just the closest cloud, are generated out of many hundret drawn sprites.

By using a much simplyfied cloud routine for clouds with bigger distance, the fps should stay high.

Actually the sprite system can work very much like the other cloud generating codes i saw, where only the closest cloud get generated with many layers, while the other clouds have just one 2d graphic which get always rotated to stand in a good position to the current view point.

I will see if i can find out how to edit the sprites. As more smooth the sprite is drawn, as bigger i can blow it up, as less sprites i need, as less the performence will suffer.

Greetings,

Knegel

Hi Ralf,

Just remember the golden rule.

The same cloud in the same position on every multi-players machine.

The last thing you want is one player hiding in a cloud on his machine, while he is totally in the clear on an attacking players machine.

Thats actually the smalest problem.

Hi Ralf.

Could you try getting the simple 2D vertical clouds working? Even with moving 2D clouds in the distance, say 1000m from view point, the effect would be great.

Can't we mimic the effect of flying through a cloud by extending the Grey out time? I've always thought the time going through our levels of cloud are too short.

What vertical 2d clouds??

Iam not aware of vertical clouds.

Otherwise i only can repeat myself:

"Actually the sprite system can work very much like the other cloud generating codes i saw, where only the closest cloud get generated with many layers, while the other clouds have just one 2d graphic which get always rotated to stand in a good position to the current view point."

Our current clouds are no 3d clouds, they are layers and no matter if there is realy a drawn cloud or not, if you fly through the layer zone, all will get dizzy.

One problem is that the planes get drawn after the layer, as long as the plane is in the layer, so there is no real cloud effect.
By changing the rendering sequence, we get strange light effect on the plane dots, when the plane is in or behind a layer.

3DZ clouds can do exactly the same thing Ralph, that's how they're generated. A random seed value places 50 or more in one single location and the single 3DZ cloud becomes a cloud of 50 3DZ's with the difference that a 3DZ isn't a single square but can have 255 polys in any random configuration, shape or size, with different mappings on each.
By creating more or less complex shapes the 3DZ can be addapted to fit any CPU/GPU, slow machines get a simple model, fast machines can have a more complex one, and they're truely 3D unlike sprites which can only face in one direction, towards the camera. The 3DZ is also subject to lightsourcing, the sprite is not.
I nearly forgot, the 3DZ is something which can occupy modders for years to come as they're a challenge and great fun to play with:






VonBeerhofen

Please remember VB, we don't hack exe's, we can reprogram the exe as we like. So, adding vertical painted clouds, as distance models is perfectly possible.

http://www.markmark.net/clouds/RTCRImages.html

In hacking or programming everything is possible Col. as long as you keep an eye on your FPS and your enemies,
I see Ralph's is down to 34 and my old crappy computer didn't even flinch.

VonBeerhofen

I only see one cloud there, while there are a lot on my end. 12 clouds was at same time when i got 24 fps.
And i cant see any fps measurement on your, side, how you know your PC didnt even flinch??
Between 25 and 35 fps there isnt a big different.

I would like to see how good the fps is with 12 clouds, or maybe 60 realy 3d clouds.

Trust me Ralf,

I can have as many clouds as you can have sprites as I made no changes to the algorythm yet, You should know.
Framerates are determined by movement in the game and my HUD flash speed due to triple buffering (it's like a light going on and off with FPS), I didn't see any difference but obviously the more and the more complex it'll cost. That's what I've been saying all along. It goes for planes or 24 bit textures too, more objects, higher resolution terrain tiles, etc.
It's what your team has allways denied. There's a limmit to all this beauty and it's determined by one's computer and EAW's graphics engine.
I won't lie to you Ralf but EAW's engine doesn't allow for a modern approach, hence all we can do is use what's there but it will never look the way it does in modern games and I can live with that. Ofcourse there are drawbacks and problems to solve, that's just part of the fun. It works for me and it's nice to try something else again. Perhaps even Col. Gibbon is giving this a try and he may find as much pleasure in it as I do.
Hell, every 3DZ modder should try, it's great fun and very impressive when done right. This is just one model, a trial, but there are hundreds if not thousands possible not even mentioning the used drawings. Now that is weather for anyone anywhere. Need sandstorms? Here's your chance.
You can have both options, why don't you use the CTRL C switch to swap from one method to the other, or use one for overcast and the other for light cloudsetting for instance?

VonBeerhofen

2D like this. Sorry, only 256 texture.



Broke up the lower straight line.

Very good! Gibbon!

Yes, I was following this.



Moggy DCM

Interesting,

You may find also there was some reference to rain (that was obviously not implemented) in some of the old code either commented out, or maybe it was in the unused files.
Of course I doubt rain very useable, as anyone can roughly guess the massive complexities that may be involved, but maybe enough code there to start on for example simulated sandstorm or at least a couple extra effects?

Also one thing I forgot to mention at TheGen, that some of the commented out and unusued files may be very useful to look at and at least get some code snippets to reuse for whatever purposes.

Hi John, such or similar clouds i would like to see in the background, while always the closest cloud shal be a cloud with many layers.

How did you display this clouds?? Did you use the default 3dz and loaded a 2d picture with it??


Greetings,

Knegel

Hi Ralf.

These clouds are just simple 2D flat elements, dropped into an aircraft slot, in this case Spit 2.

Now, the trick would be, to get this type of cloud into the sky box, independently of the aircraft.

We would need several types of these clouds, so they do not look too repetitive.

Time to put on the thinking head.

Hi Guys,

Just getting back from a 'forced sabatic' and I'm very late in responding to this post.
So, I'm apologizing, ahead of time, before this post ruffles anyone's feathers....

This is a terrific find and an exciting enhancement to the EAW environment....

Althought, I have noticed, over the years, that 'columns of smoke' were 3D
I hadn't thought that this could mean that EAW clouds could be too.
Trust Knegel, to show us the way to the promise land, once again....Great work Ralf.

Those screenshots are very exciting to see....

A few inquries....
1) As with all addons for EAW, could these 3D Cloud Mods be made available
to the community as a separate addon? The reason I ask is, they could be added
to existing/past Campaign Games (ie: ETO, DAW, SPAW, FAW, etc.)

2) Could these new clouds be associated/connected with the Campaign Game's engine that presently changes the Cloudscape
(ie; 'Clear', 'Partly Cloudy', 'Heavy Clouds' and 'Overcast') during ramdom mission setups.....
Will these 3D Cloud's appearance reflect those of the in game categories,
as the present 2D Clouds do now?

3) Would these new 3D Clouds replace the 2D Clouds in the EAW enviroment
or can both 3D and 2D Clouds be displayed in the same mission, at the same time?

4) Could it be possible that these new 3D Clouds could appear
randomly throughtout the EAW environment as the mission flight path unfolds?
Sort of like random 'pockets' of 3D clouds.

5) Would it be possible for this addon to be modified by community members
and these alternate clouds mods be made available (ie; posted on Sandbagger)
for others to download into their Campaign Game, without it beginning
connected to a specific EAWexe?

If these thoughts have already been addressed.....apologies!
Please direct me to that specific post for their answers....thanks

Cheers mates
David

Hi David,

at 1st we need a cloud type that is realy worth it.

What means that it looks good, from a distance and when you fly through it and which can appear many times without to kill the fps.


To place this clouds is then not that difficult.

But for now all this is just a test, which for now will be awailabe only as test version with the next exe.

Greetings,

Knegel

More tests, in the clouds.3dz slot.

WOOW! John, That's a truly inspiring image....

Hi Knegel,

If I'm not mistaken....this 3D Clouds development
will create yet another High Watermark for EAW.
It will be the next monumental acheivements to be added to a long list of achievements
created by the likes of;
Charles 'Charles' Gunst release of 'Enemy Coast Ahead' Control Panel...
Dirk 'Emil' Schoorens' who released his DAW and Malta Campaigns...
Jeff 'Salty' Salter and John 'Chompy' Masters' release of the first HiRes Modded Skins...
Nathan 'Col.Landers' Howland's negotiations with the owners of EAW...
Tony 'MrJelly' West's OAWSelector and other EAW Editing Programs...
The Code Groups' release of 1.28exe...
and all the other Modders, Coders and Skinners that have kept this 'Old Gal' alive...

Not only does she live but she continues to grow far beyond, I'm sure, her original creator's expectation
because of the efforts of so many enthusiasts, both past and present.

Thank you Ralf
David

PS: This was my short list, as best as these old gray cells can remember.
If I left someone out, my apologies, it was not intentional.....

That...is freakin AWESOME!!!

Hey guys, this is nothing more than a early test, so get up from your knees(dont know about John, but i dont need a blowjob right now ).

The real usable 3d clouds most probably will look more like what Roel did or what i did.

The 2d pictures, like in Col.Gibbons picture at best we can use as more variable horizon clouds. Currently i cant see a possibility to get similar good close distance 3d clouds going.

To fly throuh a 2d clould would be a little immersion killer.

As an enhancement for the distance fog, I think they look good, but up close we need to think again.

Amazing!

The distance view is terrific
The 3d clouds effect will afford some work but as long AI is able to X-ray these clouds the disadvantage will be on my side (clouds hiding the enemy )

Time to play online then!

I posted this at the Gen, but really thought it might be better
if more heads were involved.%^)
Maybe we have a modder here that is familiar with 3D Studio and could
possibly make some cloud sprites for us. I do not know if we would
be able to use the ones in FS2004,(copyrights?) or the possibility
of acquiring the plug-in add-on that Niniane Wang made for 3D Studio.
In any event, there is a very interesting PDF link I included at the
bottom of this post on how Ms. Wang made 3d clouds for FS2004 and
made them as FPS friendly as possible.
AO
=================================================================
This is from the young lady that did the cloud system for FS2004.
Very interesting stuff......if I could just find the tools.....for free..

CloudsInGames_NinianeWang.mpg


In Niniange Wangs' video, I saw the same 2D Octoganal ring that
we use in EAW for the horizon clouds. But I notice that she was able
to get a few different 2D pictures on the individual octogon faces,
where WE seem to have the same repetitive picture on each face.

If we could make the octogon faces with, for instance, the 2D cloud that
Col. has been showing, with a few massive 3D, it might look right, IF we
can make the massive 3d without a big FPS hit. Maybe the individual
sprites that have to be massed to make a 3d cloud, could be made larger
or smaller than the average 512 x 512 size. (Whichever would have a
smaller FPS hit.) FS2004 uses 512 x 512 3d clouds on average, they also
use 128 x 128 and 64 x 64.





I also would look into the possibility of asking Wang about possibly letting
us have or use a 'light' version of a bmp or something that we could
incorporate into EAW. You can find her with a google search. There has
got to be SOMETHING we can do to make this a possibility, and be FPS
friendly.
AO


edit: From a google search, a PDF from Ms. Wang. A very informative
read!:
Making 3D clouds PDF

A few thoughts on clouds in flightsims.
There are mainly two people that published about them, one is mark harris ( http://www.markmark.net/clouds/ ), who has already been mentioned in this thread.The other is Niniane Wang, Google for
niniane wang clouds

A (nearby) cloud is normally made up of many "sprites" that always face the camera.

Framerate in games is normally determined by three aspects:
- Number of polygons in the scene
- Number of objects to draw (technically "drawcalls", is most importtant in DirectX9 and may not really apply to EAW).
- Number of pixels to render
Many large transparent polys means the number of pixels increases as even completely transparent areas count. An easy way to get an idea on the bottleneck is to increase screen res by say 50% and see whether the FPS also change by 50%, or by 0%, or something in between.

Not having a ZBuffer might be an issue.
OTOH most modern games I know down make a perfect job either and when in a cloud, each sprites basically either is in front of a plane inside the cloud or behind (see Harrisons work for improvements on that). This seems to be ok 99.9% of the time. Of course what should be achieved is that some sprites of the cloud can be in front and some behind the plane.

Guys,
I sent an e-mail to Niniane Wang:


She already gave me a reply:


Can anyone (Ralf?) respond to this? I'm going to e-mail her back and refer her to
this thread. (link.) I'll let her post under my logon if she wishes.
Maybe she will read it and think us all mad.....
Or maybe she might respond.
She already responded to my e-mail, which is already more than I expected.
AO

Sprites don't need any tools to create. They're just simple flat rectangular pictures and can never be 3D. Sprites date back to the Commodore 64 and ZX spectrum, which used them too. They can be rotated and resized but that's about all they can do. In an array they can sit behind eachother and their position in the array will tell the sprite when it's in front or behind another one, however in 3D space they all occupy the same space since they're superimposed onto whatever the programmer wants in front or behind it, unless they use additional coordinate parameters which tells a program when to switch em on. Sprites allways face the camera when visible and can also be in front or behind eachother depending on their drawing order. Closing in on the sprite only zooms in on the picture, that is if a program is told how to use these coordinate parameters.
Flying through sprites is an illusion, only when the sprite occupies a large part of the screen it gives you the idea that you're in it but actually you're in front of it. In the array a program can be told to switch off the first sprite so the 2nd one now seems to be in front of you, the first one can now be told to become visible when the camera pans 180 degrees, giving the ilusion it's behind you. Obviously this will need some programming which keeps track of the camera position so the switch can be made when for instance a camera's X, Y or Z coordinates corresponds with additional coordinate parameters linked to the array and each sprite's location in 3D space, or it's coordinates can be updated so it will seem to be passing the camera, while at the same time it's resized.

Niniane's proposal is exactly what Ralf has done and the only possible improvement is to improve on the picture, use larger sized sprites or create an animation. Another option is to write code which uses current hardware (vertex) features of videocards or newer directX implementations or use the Microprose idea of 3D models.

VonBeerhofen

Hi AO,

Clouds within games is very old technology.
How they are created and the optimizations are very well documented all over the internet.
Here is one of the simpler sources explaining volumetric cloud creation:
http://www.markmark.net/PDFs/RTCloudsForGames_HarrisGDC2002.pdf

The real problem is that EAW uses such an ancient rendering system that practical cloud creation is virtually impossible to implement in that sort of system and still have playable FPS.

One can not effectively backport volumetric cloud creation techniques into a DX6 rendering engine where the Z buffer and Shaders are not able to be used.

Regards sydbod.

Hi Sydbod,
yes....I gathered that from VB's and others post.......
After seeing Col.'s and Ralfs efforts, it was very wishful
thinking on my part......

The past several days I have been trying to utilize some of the tools
that have been made by the community through the years,......and after
reading several readme's and docs, I have been amazed with the amount of
knowledge and experimentation by this community, and of course, embarrassed
by my own lack of knowledge of same......
I can only hope that some of my uninformed questions might have at least
stimulated a thought to a possible solution.

I really enjoyed Niniane Wangs PDF about cloud rendering, as it gave me alot of
information I never knew......but also made me realize that you guys already knew this
stuff.
So,....who has been making horizon clouds and skies? Can any be made that have the
large cumulous clouds that Col. was showing in his screens?

If I learn how to use these tools, I'll eventually make them myself.
(Although it may take me a few......years!
AO

Hi AO.

As Sydbod, and Allen have pointed out several times, our Achilles Heal is our out of date 3D engine, and it's use of DX6.

I think we should start looking at updating our code to DX9, but, and here is the but, how do we do it? We are not up to re writing the entire 3D engine, but is this necessary to implement DX9.

I know Sydbod has been working on a more modern 3D engine, so maybe he could give us some insight into what needs to be done.

Perhaps if we knew what was needed, we could start making some plans.

Hi C.G.,

I suspect that the EAW community is too small to undertake a rewrite of the games rendering code.

You would require at least 4 people interested in "Code creation itself", as well as in EAW. That way, when one or two of the members drop out over time, there are still enough members around that know what is going on, and can help get other replacements up to speed.

Also, jumping directly into EAW code itself would be a very dangerous move. One would normally get the team to start on a smaller lead in project, like a new "3DZ Studio". This way they can develop all the tools and required knowledge (using current rendering procedures) that is required and that can then later be transposed into the new EAW rendering code. Learning to crawl before learning to walk.

Crawling is fine, but some of us are still trying to sit up, without falling over.

All joking aside, I don't really think we can keep on adding stuff to the current exe code without sorting out the code bottle necks. EAW is not a hardware hungry Sim. like a lot of modern ones are. if only it used a modern computer efficiently, FPS of 100+ should easily be possible. So somewhere, sometime, we are going to have to bite the bullet, and now there is new interest in EAW, what better time to start looking for some new recruits.

Hello,

Okay Col. G, when can we D/L them clouds?

S!

BVM

After all i did read, its more easy to transmit all the gameplay related EAW code into a new(more modern) game engine and to recreate all graphics from zero(if they cant get converted into the new format), than to convert EAW to DX8 or 9.

It need a dx specialist to do such things, additionally a EAW specialist.

I dont think its possible.

We better join Syd´s project.

Hi Ralf,

As Allen has correctly identified, the problem of the crappy FPS is purely based on how EAW does its rendering.

There is a nice little sample browser within the DirectX SDK.
One of the samples under Direct3D9 is called "OptimizedMesh".
Without doing any optimization at all I am lucky to see about 0.25 FPS when rendering 1,000,000 polygons.(using a HD 4550 a low power video card)
When I fully optimize the rendering for the "VCache" and "triangle list primatives", I get around 100FPS.

This is the problem with EAW. It has to be switched to a much later optimized rendering procedure.
The problem with EAW are the massive number of unoptimized draw calls with no possibility of using geometry instancing.

It is a comparison like walking for EAW and jet aircraft for the later rendering procedures.

With a new rendering engine, and things fully optimized, the average EAW screen should be running at many hundreds of FPS, and not the paultry 20 or 30 FPS that some are seeing.

The other interesting thing is that the current models can easily be rendered using a more modern rendering system. This is already being done within 3DZ studio. There would be no requirement to recreate new models, although it would be advantages to re-save the current textures into a 32 bit format. A lot of resources from within EAW could be used with virtually no work required.

The real problem is just getting enough people interested in first gaining the expertise for the later DX9/10/11 rendering procedures, and then applying it to the game, or a new game.

Obviously a new game tends to be easier because one does not have to do all the research to see how to couple the new knowledge backwards into an old game, but that does not mean that it can not be done.

All can be done, if we can get 400 years old and if someone else pay what we need to live.

Hi Sydbod.

As you have pointed out, this community is a tad too small to do all the work ourselves. I know I've suggested this before, but we should look outside for a few extra hands to help. People like me, don't possess either the skills, or the time to commit to such a project, and there are a lot more of us modders in the same boat.

This is not a question of slaves, working for the greater "us", but updating the game for the future enjoyment of everyone.

Try your luck, but i have no idea where you want find willing and skillfull people.

One problem is, this people not only need to know all bout dx6 AND dx8/9, they also need to know EAW and its structure.

To use an existing modern game engine and implement the EAW gameplay is more easy.

Hi Ralf.

Maybe the thing to do would be to "ask the experts", if you know what I mean. We have a number of EAW experts, who could give a judgment on a course of action.

I haven't read every single post, but thought I would chime in in case this is helpful:

Gunship has well-implemented clouds, and while I don't have the sprites, the cloud textures are available.

http://www.simwarrior.com/gunship/images/kosovo1.gif

You'll need to extract them from the using the xtrcat2.zip tools here:
http://www.simwarrior.com/gunship/gsdev.html#files

The file names are:
Gunship!/Data/Textures/Cloud1.pca

Gunship!/Data/Textures/Cloud2.pca

These are PCX files with transparent elements. You can edit them by renaming them to *.pcx

The names of the rest of the files in the archive are here:
http://www.simwarrior.com/gunship/filelist.html#textures

They aren't normally at ground level, unless one is in the mountains of Kosovo



Good luck!

Thanks for that FNG, and great to hear from you too ...



cheers,



Pobs

Hi fng2k!

Great idea mate, and an email has gone to NM.

Ralf, this is true if you already know DX8++. If you only know DX6 and EAW it is just as easy to learn as you go and improve the EAW engine.

The transistion from DX6 to DX8 was poorly documented by MicroSoft. You have to dig VERY deep to find how to convert the programming calls. From there, learning the new abilities of DX becomes easier.

But, already DX9 is not supported. The newest games do not support Windows XP and DX9.

Windows and MicroSoft give you only two choices. Build for Windows7 or build for elder computer hardware.

There is a third thing you must keep in mind. Your CPU ony knows assembly language. No matter what happens, your computer only understands 0x0 and 0x1. Even Billy Gates can not change that truth.

EAW is a hobby that exists in a professional field that never stops growing. As a hobbiest, you have to decide on the erra of computers you wish to spend your hobby time. VBH chooses 80486 and assembly language, I choose single core processors and C, others are willing to continue to learn compleatly unknown future languages.

I choose Win98, WinXP and OpenSorce. I had to understand that I could not learn as fast as technology progresses before I welcomed the thought of OpenSorce. Motorcycle mechanic is what will pay my bills. Programming is only be a hobby.

I have great respect for Peter and his desire to continue to find the latest and greatest.

While I have chosen my spot, I am not unwilling to help.

This was a long winded post that can be summized by saying there are advantages to either path of growing the EAW experiance. Only the person can decide which is best for them.