For Capt Sopwith
The evolution of EAW 1.40- a quick overview:
From the development of the first version of 1.28 many new features have been added to the eaw.exe, so many in fact that I cannot remember them all.
We tried to add things that people wanted, such as:
Gun convergence
Multiskins
Increased multiplayer choices
Smoky engine starts
The display of flyable planes for selection in single missions
Use of bmp textures
Elevated aircraft carriers
We added things that we really wanted too:
Split 30 plane files such as the old "planes.dat", "loadout.dat" and "pnames.str" so that a plane could have its individual files rather than just the skin files and "*.flt" file.
We developed the "Dir.set" system so that the exe would look in nominated folders for files, rather than have file managers like OAW put copies of files in the root directory. Out of this emerged 'plane' folders, and scenario folders containing 'planeset' folders which contain "PDir.set" and "FMDir.set" files which the exe reads to locate the skin and flight data files for each aircraft.
A lot of data was hard coded in the original exe, and often the comment "This should be moved into a file" appears quite frequently in the source code. So we did that, in particular for the TMod table, the bump tile mapping table and the special texture links table. Each TMod can now have its individual data file.
The tile system was very limiting because a single byte contained both the tile ID and its orientation. That allowed a maximum of 64 tile types. Will Gee came up with a sytem which has four bytes for each tile, so in theory it is possible to have 1000s of different tiles, and some people have already made tile sets with more than 64 tiles in them. The previous single byte "eaw.tm" file was replaced by the new four byte "eaw32.tm" file, and the old "EAW_TTD.DAT" was replaced by the "Geawttd.dat" file.
The maximum number of TMod types was increased to 1000, and the maximum TMods per tile to 256.
Lots of nice little things were done, one of my favourites is the ability to set the mission time, in line with sunrise and sunset. Ralf had made many changes to flight modelling, including getting AI aircraft to park on carriers.
New things were done in 1.29. I made it possible for the exe to read a file to get the tilemap size. This meant that we were no lomger locked into 640x320, but it requred a new way of drawing the base/target selection and inflight map. The new map files are very basic, and could be more elaborate, but they are built from the tilemap file and the bases and targets are placed exactly where they should be.
I also used some data in the railway files to make it possible to have multitrack rail lines, and tracks which are not rendered which allow barge and ship convoys to travel on invisible rail tracks on rivers and lakes and the sea.
Ralf started 1.30 using a slot free system. The "p38h" ..."v1v1" names have gone, and you can put a plane in any slot. After he stopped EAW work I continued and switched it to 1.40, which has an extra mission type- a torpedo strike.
Because it is slot free the 'planeset' system is essential. Many files in CDFs, and even whole CDFs became redundant, and capitalising on the way the "Savedata" folder in the root folder is used in 1.40 I was able to produce a version of 1,40 which does not use CDFs at all,
File management is done almost exclusively by the "DirSetExeManager" program. In a couple of mouseclicks we can switch between ETO basic, ETO full, ETO with barges (on the Thames, Seine and Elbe), SAW, DAW, SPAW, SPAW45 and Moggy's Middle East.
This is my complete EAW 1.40 CDF free folder:
You would like a bomber intercept?
