Online games are in real time, there is no possibility of time acceleration, therefore groundstarted missions over long distances are no fun.
Since the dawn of OAW we have endeavoured to find ways of overcoming this, with target set-ups close to frontlines.
It became easier when the new map system was invented, which freed us from the 640x320 tilemap.
The problem with this is making target/base selection screens. Many have been done based in the "eaw32.tm" file, but with small theatres the BMP files are too small, and scaling them up often makes a poor picture.
Currently I am working on 116x63 tilemaps, which are very small compared to the 640x320. However, they represent 475 x 258 kilometres, enough space for an online game.
To make the map I use a utility that reads the actual tiles. The limitation is high memory use, and the 1116x63 size is the maximum I can do on a 1920x1080 monitor.
However, this has allowed me to make a re-worked version of Roy's lake theatre, which has been released, plus a mini-SPAW theatre, which I am fine tuning.
These are screenshots of the utility, one with the control panel showing, and the other without. The latter is the one I convert to PCX then Targmap.pic and TargMap1.pic files for the pilot and base selection.
This test run is the sort of thing I would do for a mini BoB. I chose the light winter terrain

So I went ahead

Interesting..
Now all you need is sort of a master tm2 file. Then one release can have as many scenarios as can fit in the EAW world. You Grok?

I don't understand what's being improved upon in EAW with these images, they are not self explainable? You started off okay at explaining, but then just screen shots.
What did the Lake mission provide as far as an idea or ability to do something?

But I do understand that close opposing air bases are much more fun for online play since you can fly and fight, return to base refuel/rearm and go up again easily, then long boring cruising fights.

Mark
This is a screenie of the target editor when I made this new theatre. The area selection map for the editor is made by the editor itself. It reads the "eaw32.tm" file and draws a pale blue circle if the tile is not a water tile. In this case the map is 113x62 and there are gaps between the circles, but it serves its purpose for an area selection screen in the editor. In a 640x320 case there would be no gaps.
As an in game map it would be useless, because there is a minimum height needed in the order of 1200 pixels. Otherwise the game does a CTD with the flight map display. Scaling up this map to 2400x1200 would make things even more distorted and look terrible in the game. That is the problem that this new method solves for these small theatres.

It takes a real graphic artist, which I am not, a lot of time and patience to convert a map like this into something reasonable.
Julio did a marvellous job with Moggy's IRAQ map, and John made the new map we use for the full 640x420 ETO.
John did not use the tilemap as a base, he used a real map, and it worked because the ETO tilemap is accurate. He then tried to do a similar thing for Spanish Air War but found that the SAW tilemap is very inaccurate, and the map he made did not display the targets in the right places

There is a big story behind this one- I learned a lot from making the "Little BoB" theatre

I can't answer for MrJelly, but for my work the basics are that by creating a smaller theatre one tends to learn a lot of the way EAW files, code, etc. works.
Both the limitations and possibilities can be discovered for future works.

The usefulness of creating local theatres for the overall online or offline single or instant (aka quick) close missions is undoubted, IMHO.
It was the focus of much of what I worked towards as well as OAW, MrJelly, Knegel, and others. Also Moggy and many others have some similar.

Its especially useful to have scenario 'test-beds' when you get others to use it / fly it.
Then a lot of bugs, etc. get revealed. Changes needed become apparent, new ideas, etc.
And a lot of bugs, glitches (and often mixups) get revealed.

I did this with OAW mission 1, 2 and Lake Mission. Then last with Pacific Isles / BeachHell scenarios.

btw; MarkEAW, as a history note;
As far most of these creations think of it as using an EAW scenario creator / editor the game never implemented (although there is an unfinished one that is hidden in the game code. ; )
It partially worked but not very useful for us since we have better tools and changes to the code and files, as well as the shakiness of the program routines itself would make finishing it (arguebly) harder than just making a new one.

There are some tools that actually buildt that code where it came from the MP programmer made available to use and later were fixed. They are of of some use.
(The ttd editor, tile and map editor(s) especially in the later fixed version form particularly.)
Other than that the buildt-in game scenario editor artifact code is more of a footnote in EAW development history though really.

EAW would have been a really markee game had all the pieces come together at the right time.
But then it did in a way. I consider it a real gem. Comparable to Falcon 3 and Sun-Dog, CIVII, Silent Hunter, etc. Its one all-time favorite classic IMO.

The one thing missing from EAW is a true dynamic campaign.

It is interesting that PAW, the Microprose predecessor to EAW had a dynamic campaign as well as user accessible tail gunners.

What's the chances that the code for those functions is buried in the exec?

Alright, so basically you can make smaller maps more easily for smaller scenarios at lower res....I guess I think I understand, unless I'm reading when I'm too tired, lol.

Thanks Jel and FsFOOT, all pretty neat.

I think the PAW is available but EAW is way more complex than PAW. Most likely someone would have just use the idea as sort of a template as opposed to directly being useful C code that you can just pop in a function and get the same results.
Programs like EAW are huge containing thousands of sub program functions. EAW has also besides the .exe code itself a whole combined SDK. That has to do with the the whole way it 'plugs in' so to speak with the Windows and Directx SDK etc.
I do not quite 'get' it ll as I'm not a C programmer really more of a bodger..

Some of the code just functions that were artifacts really from PAW/EAW crew before but there entire programming team was replaced
(there is an artifact picture of them (AFAIK) in one of the original .CDF's )
and a lot of that code artifacts that remain are not good code or were mere ideas really. I was even appalled by the crudeness of some of it.. lol

TK, Wil Gee, Rob and the team rewrote all that stuff really. They were all experts even then. Even so TK and later had to patch together some stuff with kludges, or leave as is since the development of this game was not complete at all. Its more or less like 2 games were cancelled really - the post PAW , early EAW idea, and the EAW development (or that of an advanced sim for the more modern Windows PC, drivers, DX etc capabilities) proper, which never really happened (well other than the graphics team started on it - thus the outdated but long serving its purpose terrain and skin bases we have etc,)

EAW that we have post 1.0 and especially post 1.2 patch s basically like a puppy spared from the pound. With further care by the Code Group and frankly Tony did by far the most with Ralf to some extent and Wil, Bob and Aldo n Sydbod, and the whole team. Wudpecker and Crashin Jack and so many. Col.'s Gibbon and Landers were instrumental in dealing with the MPs and parliment even helped out.. lol (I heard rumors of a Churchill connection)..

No offense to anyone I didn't mention.

Back to the topic

My revision of the lake scenario went well because all of the targets are set around the lake more or less in the middle.
With my mini BoB the targets were spread all over the theatre, and as I expected the "EAW wall" came into play.
The wall is a 16 tile border around the 640x320 tilemap and you cannot fly through it.

In the mini theatres 16 tiles is a significant amount, so I extracted an area from the eaw32.tm and eaw16.hm files with the top corner set 16 tiles higher and 16 tiles to the left of the original version.
I increased the height and width by 32 tiles.
So I have the previous mini theatre with a 16 tile border, and I moved any targets in the border into the middle, so that there were no longer any targets on the wrong side of the wall.

With the map screen I made a new one, for the same area as the old and the same top left corner, using the spring tiles. Then I calculated what 32 tiles would be as a percentage of the width, and as a percentage of the height, and increased the canvas size by these percentages. This gave me the 16 tile border on the map, which I applied a fill to. Then I pic-packed the file to create the "Targmap.pic" and "Targmap1.pic" screens.

What I posted in my last screenie is the inflight map in the new theatre. The theatre is working well, and there is no problem with the wall

In terms of an online game I checked the map and found the longest distance. I set an online interdiction from Hornchurch to Laon:
The screenies show the estimated time and the in-flight map.
I think that this is a reasonable theatre for multiplayer, so I will now add some railways and convoys

I have added simple railways for mixed interdictions and several traditional convoys for ship interdictions, and a mainscreen
They seem to be working as intended so they can be refined later

Tony
I love that main screen ,,,Which aircraft is the dogs???

The dog is Little BoB
I gave up on ship convoys, and replaced them with ones on invisible railtracks. These work much better.
I also went back and re-extracted the "eaw16.hm" file, but this time from the "smooth hilly" parent. The result is much nicer.
In the last file of the attachments you can see the destroyer marked after a "Ctrl-E"