Let me assure you Mr. Jelly that the community WILL notice a huge difference when flying EAWPRO. Changing some 40.000 bytes and freeing up some 10.000 alone will have a significant impact on the game's behaviour, and that's not even mentioning the graphical and AI improvements I've done, as well as the implementation of an entirely new campaign theatre. I think most noticable are the graphical changes visible in my screenshots, as for everything else I've changed I think the community is well capable of making up their own minds as I'm only just now beginning to have fun with the game.

VonBeerhofen

My comment was referring to the eaw.exe, so a new campaign theatre does not come into consideration. I agree that from your screenshots we can see the exe handling your more complex sprites very well. However, I have not noticed your changes to AI behaviour. Of course I am running EAWPro in Win 7 and Win 10 on a faster PC without any memory or framerate problems, so things that you have done to help users of legacy PCs are not noticeable on my PC. On the faster PCs there is a significant problem on mission selection screens. Mark was promoting your work on sprites in his post, and I was asking about other exe related improvements

As I wrote before, the eaw community is well capable of making up their own minds without your "help". I don’t think that was called for. I think you were being over sensitive to something that, to me, was not meant in a critical bent. Let’s nor start the ball rolling.

VonBeerhofen

... and as I wrote my post was a response to Mark's comment which got me thinking, and hence my questions
Are we not allowed to ask questions as users of EAWPro with faster PCs?

You can ask as many questions as you like Mr. Jelly but I doubt Mark can provide satisfactorily answers as I haven't given him details of all the changes and I see no reason to try and explain what was done, it would only spoil the surprise. Besides that your remark "I do not see much difference in the exe that he has released." is a statement and not a question.

VonBeerhofen

That statement is true. It is what I have experienced using EAWPro, and the reason why I was asking about other changes in your eaw.exe.
When I try to note the differences I use 1.26 as my baseline.
Are the people downloading your current release meant to get the surprise that you referred to, or is it about something to be released in the future?

Promoting? I was just writing what was relevant to the topic. man.

Anyhow read the things VBH told me and others on the FXEXE Patches Help Document on my EAW Help Site.

https://eaw.neocities.org/fxexe-patches.html

(Some recent info has not been added yet. and Tons more he kept to himself)

If you want to compare download numbers then sorry, I have no dowload counters in place. Wether they're downloading it is not my concern and shouldn't be your concern either. As I explained previously I'm not doing this to get into the spotlights but to improve my programming skills and have fun learning more from the Source Code. If that can additionally bring more fun to the EAW community then it already pleases me if only one person has fun with it. Changes are happening constantly and so does optimisation, a comparison with the latest release shows that with the current one in devellopment app. 2000 bytes were additionally removed by optimisation and testing is ongoing in the EAW Launchpad. People may occasionally find a newer version in the same download link, which I think is an unimportant fact as long as they're not trying to fly online with the Launchpad pilots. Since I haven't seen new pilots for years it doesn't make much of a difference anyway but my pilots have witnessed a steady improvement in AI skills, noticable in the time it takes them to score kills and how often they get shot down.

VonBeerhofen

Let’s all peacefully cooperate without rancor.

I've said this several times before Mr. Jelly, when EAWPRO with it's default ExtraSquad setting=1, it's producing twice the amount of planes with the same setting in v1.26. Besides nearly all effects use a quadruple amount of sprites in all effects. Even an EffectsDetail=1 setting will very likely produce more sprites then v1.26 in it's highest setting. Besides that the EAWPRO sprites are 4 times higher in resolution and use many more colors for each drawing. So there's a framerate trade off for all these goodies and if EAWPRO matches framerates on your high end computer then I achieved my goal and am satisfied with the optimisation results.

However those are not the only things I've done, obviously making the AI smarter also comes at the cost of framerates, using hires terrain and showing ground objects at further distances then v1.26 is also pretty costly. You can't tell the game to check AI or the terrain more often without drawing framerates away from something else, nor can you implement twice as many polygons and nodes without paying the price, as they need more rendering times. As such EAWPRO is doing a lot more then v1.26 and a lot more just comes at the cost of framerates too.

As such EAWPRO stands up admirably well against v1.26 and with the Launchpad's pilot's ancient computers it performs even better in comparison with everything else I've tried. For comparison I've not been able to fly an ExtraSquad=3 setting ever on my WinME machine with it's 256MB internal memory and it's 32MB gForce2 but I can now and in HDMI too and it's running VERY smooth. However when I throw in my full polycount 3D supertrees II, things change dramatically and the game becomes choppy and unplayable. It's just a comparison on how framerates work, so in your v1.26 comparison EAWPRO is holding up brilliantly and confirms the results I've been trying to achieve.

With every new optimisation it will gain more speed so I can do more things without loosing overall framerates, I can't describe it simpler then that and it's one of the main advantages of programming in Assembly language vs using a compiler.

VonBeerhofen

I just thought I would bump this in case it was missed.

I never mentioned download numbers, and fail to see the relevance of this response

I saw no muzzle flashes in that video

Gents, I'd just like to add that if you are looking at your lovely ( or not so lovely ) muzzle flashes................................you're going to get your a*s shot off.

That's all.

Yeah Ray both jelly and I noted you should be looking out the front when firing,,The thing I'd like to see if it isn't there already is flashing inside the cockpit when flying night missions or around sunset

Duely noted O.G., sorry I couldn't respond earlier but I was a bit occupied.

Visibillity of gunflashes on videos depend on framerates of the recordings. In many photographs they may look like white but that's only because of shutterspeeds but in fact most muzzleflashes produce a blue/green to orange/yellow flame (colors which aren't present in v1.2 sprite effects), but I guess it also depends on the used explosive which may influence the general color. The explosion tends to evolve in time thus causing different colors being captured when photographed as the moment of capturing the flash can be a few hundreds of seconds delayed which means that the flash is captured at various stages in it's evolution.

With 16 frames in 4 times higher resoltion and custom colors available in EAWPRO, the flash can easily be animated and that goes for any smoke related effects as well. Fact is that if people prefer white then they can be made white or any color, but personally I prefer anything which is closer to a flame or something with some color in it, as displayed in my screenshot.

VonBeerhofen

That’s OK. Thanks for responding. I really hope we can keep things smooth by avoiding triggers (intentional or not) that start the ball rolling.

Good info.