One of the greatest breakthroughs in EAW was the splitting of the 30 plane files, such as "planes.dat", "loadout.dat" and "pnames.str", most of which was done by Knegel. It has enabled us to use aircraft packages in EAW 1.28E, and is being further developed for the upcoming 1.3 exe.

The story of TMods is that the data for them was hard coded in a large table in the exe. One of the first things we did in the 1.28 series was to extract it into a file named "TMod.dat" which the exe reads. However, it is even worse than the 30 plane files because it contains data for 256 TMods.

Well, we have been able to split it into "TMod000.dat" to "TMod255.dat" and have compiled a new eaw.exe which reads those 256 single files instead of the old "TMod.dat". I have added the default ones to the "Data.cdf" file. What it allows a modder to do is to make an individual file, and put it in the root folder so that the exe reads it instead of the default one in the Data.cdf.

Here is an example. I edited "TMod043.dat" file (the train engine) making the length 10 times bigger. This does not affect the size of the graphic, but it affects the spacing between the train and the next vehicle which is the tender.



In the screenie you can see the smoke of the train, and judge the gap between it and the tender.

The upshot is that we have solved Col Gibbon's engine size problem, and any new TMod that needs one can have its own editable "TModXYZ.dat" file with the correct values

Jel

Just looking at the new single TModXYZ.dat editor

If you click on a 'distance value' label then it is displayed underneath with the distance converted into feet:


Also if you edit a value you must hit enter for it to be changed:


This is how I made the "TMod043.dat" with a train length of 690 instead of 69, as used in the previous screenie.

Jel

Can we use 3dz points rather than feet?

3dz points are the constant I have to work with and calculating to and from feet to 3dz points gives me brain ache!

It would be easy if I knew what 1 point is in the 3dz system

I just found this in another forum- is it still correct?



Edit:
Checking his 3dz studio code I find:

Const POINT_2_METERS = 0.0448

So we could easily do a conversion from 3dz points to EAW units
1 metre = 1/0.0448 which is 22.32 3dz points
1 metre = 64 EAW units
So 1 3dzpoint is 2.8672 EAW units
Or 1 EAW unit = 0.3488 3dz points

Jel

Jell,

just one problem... 'ubyte 9' defines the magnification to be used to display the model ingame, so the ratio of a 3dz point to the game world is not constant.... planes in a plane slot are a lot smaller than the same model in a tmod slot for instance.... or city block models are much bigger in their own slot than in a 'farm' slot etc...


cheers,


Pobs

Thanks for that Pobs- I was aware of this value and need to check the game source code to see how it is used.

Jel