South Pacific Air War (SPAW) released.

On behalf of the ModSquad, I am pleased to announce that,
South Pacific Air War (SPAW) is ready for your enjoyment.

Click here to get the installer: South Pacific Air War Installer

Please be sure to read the installation notes for a succesful install.

The ModSquad stands ready to provide any assitance you may require
with the installation of SPAW.

Have fun, and enjoy.

Cheers,
MadProf

WOOHOO!!!!!!! Great news, guys!!!!!

Dang it. I'm at work.

*COUGH* *COUGH*

Boss, I'm not feelin' so good. I'd better go home.

Hi ModSquad.

Great news your project is finally out.

I'll be giving your baby a test drive this evening, for sure. To hell with the P40 update!

I can't wait to see what you've been up to, all these months.

......and i also dont feel good tomorrow and the next week. See you next year!


Getting the package now.

Congrats!!!

Knegel

Let me say that this was a monumental production. I'm grateful for the effort that the other members of the MODSquad put into this campaign.

Moggy, thanks for the help on so many facets of setting up a "world" plus providing many of the ship models.

Mike, what can I say? Great skins make the game so much more enjoyable. Wait 'til you see the new list.

Brian, thanks for providing the boost that we needed right at the end to get this over the goal line.

David, your BETA testing was absolutely critical for finding all those last minute bugs. It's amazing how many little errors can slip through. Plus a couple of nice skins, too.

Jeff, your administrative efforts putting this together are only overshadowed by the great graphics you provided. If I never see another P-61 it will be too soon.





Also we owe the coder group a big thank you for providing the foundation on which SPAW was built.

In particular, Mr. Jelly and his numerous file editors, Knegel for so much that I can't name all of it here and Pobs for providing the rest of the ship models.





As Jeff mentioned, we will be right here to answer any questions you might have about the install or about the game play. If you find a bug we'll do our utmost to squash it.



Let the games begin.

Congratulations to the SPAW team,

a great effort guys, I am looking forward to flying it both online and off...


cheers,



Pobs

Guys,
thank you for letting me be the benificiary of so many countless hours
of flying your betas. I know I was supposed to be testing and looking
for stuff.....but I was gone.......
In a world of my own flying missions......."Copy that Red leader...banking left!"
AO

Congratulations to all the SPAW team, really happy with this release guys, hope you can enjoy it, as I'm out of EAW.
Hope to see some pics of Stratos field soon

congrats blokes...

thanks for a new scenario and the mighty
production effort, will give it a squirt
as soon as..

Great work Guys!

Stratos- with the new JIM you can set up a SPAW single mission and fly it.



Jel

In response to a post by AO in another forum

SPAW Music and OAW128



The OAW manager selects music based on a "music.ini" file in the EAW folder

Mine currently reads:

Finnish Music
Russian Music
No Music

The manager looks in my EAW folder and it only finds "Finnish Music" and "No Music" folders.
It cannot find "Russian Music", therefore by default the folder named "Music" must be "Russian Music".

If I select "Finnish Music" it re-names "Music" to "Russian Music", and then "Finnish Music" to "Music".

So, I could put a "SPAW Music" folder in my EAW directory, and add an extra line ("SPAW Music") to my "music.ini" file and select it next time the OAW manager runs.


BTW I have a "SPAW" folder in my EAW directory (from the installation), and the "Dir.set" file which was installed with it in a "C SPAW" folder in the OAW128 folder, so I do not use a separate SPAW installation.

Jel

So I did!



Jel

Congrats to the ModSquad for the SPAW Release!

My SPAW/OAW128 setup

Note the "SPAW" folder in my EAW directory:


......and the "C SPAW" folder containing the "Dir.set" file (which came with the SPAW installation) in the "OAW128" folder:


To use SPAW I just select "C SPAW", then launch the eaw.1.28C exe.

Jel

My first impression:

totally unplayable on my 1.7 Ghz with 256MB onboard ram and FX5500 also with 256 MB.
FPS with no groundobjects in sight, default gamesetting and 4 planetypes active, is between 0 and 15 FPS. Looking at the bomber formation only, dropped FPS to a near halt.
When the enemy arrived framerates sometimes stopped for seconds, sound was stuttery and sometimes slowed down. Watching the bombers drop their load into the sea was quite funny but even rendering the bomb in follow camera, with only the bomb and an empty seatile visible, FPS dramattically fluctuated, also sometimes freezing for a second or more. Sound played in a simmilar way, stuttery and sometimes speech came in slow motion.
Very strange this high fluctuation in FPS, on occasions I think I got about 35 FPS but only for very short moments.
Due to tripple buffering the frameswaps can be seen happening realtime as in between each frame the HUD isn't shown, so it switches on and off in the same timing as the frames.
I doubt any groundobjects were of influence as there were none in sight. I think the default resolution of the setup is 1024*768, which makes trying it in widescreen 1920*1080 a useless effort.

VonBeerhofen

Upgrade that wheezer. Add memory. Or something. You are missing a good campaign. Oh yes it uses the Code Group 1.28C exe. Humm....

Ah, there is the mythmaker.

You should defrag your HD.

Even on my K7 700MHz PC, 384MB RAM, Win98, GForce MX460/64MB RAM , i get a normal FPS of around 25, very seldom it drops below 15 and extreme seldom below 10 fps(only when i zoop up out of a big 4mot pulk while the rest of my squad still attack it).

When iam not close to the Bomber pulk(27 naval B24), the fps raise to the normal 25-30 fps.

Exact the same result i get with a clean EAW1.2 installation!!

Myth Busted!

I would say its your PC that is unplayable, not SPAW.

You should call someone with knowledge, who is able to set it up correct.

Greetings,

Knegel

Hi there,

I have a seperate installation of spaw and it works fine, thank you mod squad....great work!!!!

Jel, can you make a screen of your 2 spaw folders? I wanna see what is inside so i can
copy and paste the files from my installation, oaw needs to run spaw.


thx
stelto

Hi Stelto,

its one and the same SPAW folder.

Just copy the SPAW folder to the EAW1.28C root and create a "C SPAW" folder inside the "OAW128" folder.
Into this "C SPAW" folder you need to place the "dir.set" file which comes with SPAW.

By loading the "C SPAW" folder you load SPAW(the "dir.set" point the EAW.exe to the correct files).

Greetings,

Knegel

Whooho,

it runs like a dream!!!!!!

thank you

greetings

stelto

I wondered how long it would take the troll to come out from under the bridge.

Congratulations guys.



I know you have put a lot of work in SPAW and it certainly looks impressive from the screen shots I’ve seen!

Cheers

Hi,

regarding the "Music":

This simply got forgotten to be included into the new "Folder System".
I just created a exe for myself, where the SPAW "Music" folder is placed inside the SPAW folder and it get used when i have the SPAW "dir.set" loaded.

With other words:
With this exe the "Music" is automatically related to the current scenario that is loaded.

Since this is not a critical changing regarding the gameplay, we could offer a EAW1.28c+ with this feature, without to get into any other trouble.

Just for fun I loaded SPAW on my son's computer, which is a 1.2Mhz, with 256 MB of memeory using a STB 128 memory card with 4 MB of onboard memory. Did a mission of 16 F4Us escorting a group of SBDs to attack the Zuikaku. Encountered two groups of Zeros, A6M2s and A6M3s. Had a nice furball as the SBDs made their attack run. Lots of flak coming up as well.

Ran very smooth, mostly around 15 to 18 fps, dropped to 14 at one point. Very nearly the same fps I get with my computer.

Hi Ralf,
Much simpler approach. The OAW music selection approach worked for me, but renames the folders and
moves the files around. Let me know when you put it up!
thanks,
AO

First and formost, congrats to the modsquad. You hard work is appreciated.

I think some owe VBH an appology. Ever since 1.28a I have reported unplayable frame rates on my computer using D3D. The code groups responce has always been use Glide. Since this thread is for SPAW, I will move my conversation.

My system:
ASUS M2A-VM
AMD 64 x2Dual 4600+
2Gb Ram
GeForce 7600 GS with 256 ram

I get 7 FPS with a fresh install of EAW 1.2 and 1.28c.

Hi Aldo,

the extrme slowdown you talk about happen same with clean EAW1.2(i reported that when we was discussing your problem) as such its not a SPAW or EAW1.28c problem to be mentioned here!!

Therefor noone need to apology.

Since the extreme slowdown only seems to happen in rather modern PC´s under XP, to use glide is realy the only solution. Under Vista this extreme slowdowns seems to be history.

But again thats not just a SPAW or EAW1.28c problem, if a PC have this problem, all versions of EAW have it.

There is no known special drawback due to EAW1.28c and SPAW on slower machines.

Greetings,

Knegel

Since we seem to be talking about FPS.....

The only time I've had difficulty with reduced Frame Rate
was when I flow the HR P40 Warhawk. When this bird is in formation
my system takes a big hit.....

I don't think that it's a direct problem with either 1.28c or SPAW
but rather with the heavily over-worked 3dz files....

Had the same problem with the HR P40 Kittyhawk in DAW too....

But I've been told that 'Col.Gibbon' was looking into it.

Yep, that P-40 model has some kind of problem that causes severe FPS drop. Happens in every scenario from standard EAW to SPAW. You'll mostly notice it at the beginning of an encounter when a bunch of them are on the screen together. Once they break up into individual dogfights the problem becomes a lot less noticeable.

Thank you, Guys

Now we are truely expanding and really making this Sim a World class World war two representng Sim!


Fantastic!

It's kind of sad to see people react with words like troll or worse when someone is providing genuine feedback, I guess some people still think they're Neanderthal instead of rational grownups. It's quite appearent that one should go oooh and aaah even when an addon runs crappy. I can only say that I have about the most powerfull system of the Launchpad members and allthough they're free to give things a try it's not really recommended to em. Unlike me they don't have the money to buy a new high end system.

I mannaged to get things going and I found the culprit of the bad framerates. A bit of analysing, hexediting and messing about solved the problem.
More problems were noticed with left and right snapviews, they wouldn't stay fixed and moved about irrattically. I couldn't repadlock groundtargets after first padlock and switching views.
The pilotmap switched on and off with FPS which made reading it very tiresome.
Seeing the single tile PTII terrainset and original elevations didn't add much to immersiveness and made the terrain look boring (as it was in PTII), a few islands appeared to have waterproperties seeing watersplashes with bullet impacts. On top of that I think my D3D videocard was only capable of reading the lores tiles and textures but it was quickly fixed.
Having done a lot of research on the right order of the battle I wasn't really impressed with the historic accuracy of the frontlines. I did like the carrier take off (once fps was fixed) as well as the groundbattle effect.

I probably could have said lots more but to be honoust I lost interest and went back to the current version of PTIII without remorse. Good luck with fixing the problems and thx for the promised support.

VonBeerhofen

Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Sorry to disappoint you Rotton but I'm not on my way out, not with so many people in Launchpad relying on me.

VonBeerhofen

Then do everyone, including yourself, a favor just stay out of our posts.

Remember what happened the last time you tried to trash SPAW.

To the ModSquad:
I downloaded SPAW and I have flown several single missions.

You people are unbelievable! No wonder it took so long for the release.
This is one of the best single projects that has ever been done for EAW.
It is a tremendous effort.
SALUTE!! You have renewed my interest in an old favorite.
I am looking forward to more of the new formatted projects from all of the community.

VERY WELL DONE--BRAVO ZULU to all involved.

ezlead

I didn't trash anything Rotton, I merely debated something which was perceived as a stab in the back. I also don't recall anything happening except the usual Neanderthal remarks from you and the others, just like the ones above.

I suppose it's OK for you guys to invade my threads and move attention to your own stuff, in which case it's OK for me to invade your threads and move attention to my stuff, like the FXEXE and PTIII.
As I said, I'm no longer interested or worried, more amused,





and that's just the old version. Feel free to do what I know you do best and what you accuse others of doing.

VonBeerhofen

Don't go away mad, just go away.

congrats guys!!
BTW,the P-40 FPS issue was solved years ago,do a search onit,one of the 3DZs is huge,and wrong,once replaced it rendered normally and the FPS issue went away...do a forum search around 2005,maybe 2006

There, he rises and beckons...

Sherckster, can you get us any closer to the post you are mentioning. Oh yeah, cheers to you.

So far so good with me. I do need to stress it a bit more.

Older rig: 2.6 P4 with 2G ram and 512M Geforce 6800GT. Current drivers.

Seems to run fine at 1024x768 in D3D in XP. No 7xxx errors.

Also seems to work fine on my Win98 partition with a 16M Voodoo3 and 512M Ram.

Very nice work.

btw, for now VonBeerhoven always claimned he cant install EAW1.28 version on his PC, does this changed now or did he test SPAW, which is ONLY made for EAW1.28c, with his EAWFX.exe??
That would explain some of his problems. lol

Congratulations, guys, to this awesome effort - I´ll try this asap on my new PC.
Does this mean for me I can play EAW again - not only on my old Win98 rig? This would be wonderful



Which files is this and where can i find it? Maybe Sandbagger can include it on Captain Kurt´s and Flying Tiger´s pages where one can find the HiRes P-40s

The Hi Res P-40 will not benefit from any older fixes that exist for the P-40. It was developed from an older model as were all when he did it, but this one has made EXTENSIVE use of piggybacks and action codes for moving features, in and out of the cockpit. Some elements have nearly a dozen piggybacks on them, and they are spread all over the model. Col. Gibbon is in the process of rebuilding the model to eliminate all of these pigybacks, and I am building an "interchangeable" nose for it. Hopefully we can get this model running smoothly.

Cheers!

Thanks CJ.

That model satrted life as the PAW P-40 model! It did not even have a proper cockpit, or Prop. All that wss added to the model over the years, ending in Capt. Kurt's superb P-40 model which worked in D3D but never worked in Glide.

The new model is clean, so it will not suffer from the problems which the old one did, and will be available to skin in bith 8 and 24bit.

That´s excellent news to hear, gentlemen. Captain Kurt´s P-40 is really worth those efforts but it gives me problems in my DAW set. Not to mention Ade´s P-40 skins...

And most of all...the new Kittyhawk surely will be glad to be in company of a nice Tomahawk...

clang - "Error 7217"
..was doing all according to the readme.

So - where to begin with? I thought 1.28c would solve the problem?

Could someone point to the procedure?
Thanks in advance...

What video card are you using? I have an infamous nvidia card (6800 GT) and my vanilla install of SPAW worked flawlessly. I even have pretty current drivers (191.07). I did notice the "plane flying around the microprose globe" did not play but I figured that was part of the fix.

1.28C should not give a 7217 error. It may give garbled screens, but not 7217. Your post suggests you were not running the 1.28C exe.
Please supply details of your system anyway so that we have at least some information to work with.

Jel

Vid Card ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro
Comp Intel Corel2 Duo CPU
E8400 @3.00GHz
3.00GHz, 2,00 GB RAM

Now your verdict...?

Btw, I use the exe provided first in your setup - from 27.10.2009. Isn´t this the 1.28c?

Fran, it is strange that you are getting a 7217 with an ATI card. I have a 4860 and drivers from mid summer. I get SPAW and EAW in general to run without any errors. The little plane circles the MS Globe and the only thing is that the briefing screen tears.

Have you tweaked your vid card or is it running stock right out of the box?

Hi,

you say its a new PC, did you intall DirectX 7 or later??

Greetings,

Knegel

In which folder do I find DirectX? I don´t find any specific folder.

Concerning the vid card I didn´t change the settings of my seller. Any ideas?

Hi Fran,

This is not going to be much help but I too had the dreaded error on a Radeon card a year or so ago but got rid of it by upgrading my drivers as I recall. Ended up with 2 versions running and just had to close down the earlier one. Will try SPAW shortly and feed back any info I get.

Cheers

Peter

Hallo,

unter "Ausführen" "dxdiag" eingeben, dann wird Die die DX Version angezeigt.

Grüße,

Knegel

Fran this link is for the 2600 and XP

http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx?p=xp/radeonx-xp

and for driver cleaner pro
http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=745

you need to remove the original driver. Do it through control panel

then use driver cleaner pro to completely clean th registry of ATI entries.

Restart you computer and say no to search for and install new drivers. Lrt it use the basic vga driver.

Then run the ATI driver file.

Mike-- I believe Driver Cleaner Professional has removed its driver cleaner.
The Guru 3D download site recommends this one:
http://downloads.guru3d.com/Guru3D---Driver-Sweeper-(Setup)_d1655.html#download

Lots of thx for your info, guys - I´ll have a try and tell you the results

Thank ya!

Gday all

Have read thru all this thread but can't find an answer to my query. Will SPAW run in Windows 7/32bit ? I can run bone stock 1.28d EAW.
Specs:
Intel i5 750
4G Ram
Sapphire Radeon 5770 1gb 10.5a Catalyst

CV

If you can run EAW then you can run SPAW, but the screens are made for 1.28c
I have a version of it running in 1.28e

Check the OAW links in my signature- there are some workarounds.

Hi Jelly,

still having problems with jerked briefing maps using 1.28C (running with ATI card under Win XP) and there's no way SPAW will work with 1.28d.

You say it works under 1.28e, so can you kindly give me a link to this patch? Wasn't able to find any. Thanks!!

XenonS

1.28E has not been released. One of the key features is the end of those 30 plane files like "planes.dat", but that means a lot of work for us in splitting them to have individual skin and FM folders. My report re SPAW was just to indicate that I had done that successfully, and was able to use SPAW with 1.28E.

Anyhow, back to solutions.
Have you tried the d3d windower? It usually fixes the map problems, and if it works for you it will be the easiest solution. It works fine with my ATI HD4670, and the driver that Vista installed.

If not we will take the 1.28D path, with a workaround that uses the 1024x768 1.28D screens and menu files in place of the 640x480 SPAW ones.

Jel

Thx very much for your proposal, Jelly. In fact, I've overcome the map problems using 1.28D for the stock campaign, not installing any furhter mods and campaigns until now.
I will try out your solution immediately, would be very nice it this works.
Will let you know.

Thanks!

XenonS

Have installed and played with some settings of D3D Windower 1.88 (English);
Also hook.ini is pointing to the right path.
Have put all the files in the main SPAW directory, so dll's should be read fine.

- chosing a resolution 1x inferior to desktop resolution (1280x960 against 1280x1024).
- chosing "DDraw Emulate" in the Window Mode tab.

After starting with this configuration, all screens & briefing maps appear great, BUT:

eaw CTD when you try entering 3D world (Fly or Quick Mission).

Thanks for any help!

XenonS

My hook.ini reads as follows:

[KnownProgram]
G:\EAWGameranger\eaw.exe=eaw

No other settings just the path.
It then uses the window sizes of the various screens (640x480 or 1024x768) and hthe game screen itself is 1440x900 which is my eaw.ini setting.

The CTD could be due to several things.
Try deleting any "defaultxx.msn" files in the the savedata folder inside the SPAW folder, and from the savedata folder inside the EAW folder.

Then try flying a single mission.

Cheers

Jel

Have just taken out the defaultxx.msn in the EAW folder, no one in the SPAW.
I've then removed all entries in the hook.ini, except the path entries.
EAW will then launch, but with a jerked menu screen (only color lines to recognize).

Any time when i chose "DDraw Emulate" EAW starts fine - at any resolution i chose.
But still the CTD with the error message: "Pic not Found alcty6.ter !" after i chose Fly.
Do you start EAW with the default settings of the Windower, or have you changed any?

Also with some settings of the Windower EAW will lauch fullscreen, but then, the maps are jerky as without the Windower.
I wonder if there is some key command to tell the Windower to go fullscreen. If there is such one, it may work. ALT+Enter doesn't do it. Too bad that the readme is in japanese...
So, still no go.

[Update]:
I have some damn spaces in my directory names. Will change that and try again !!! no, No, nO...

XenonS

Hi Xenon.

Welcome to this forum.

You need to go into Config game screen and alter your graphics setting to either D3D or Glide.

You get that pic missing error in software mode.

Thanks a lot, Gibbon, but I have already Direct3D in the config screen.
Also, I tryed with Zeckensack's Glide Wrapper and switching to Glide, but this is useless for the GUI, only for the 3D world.

Thx anyway!

XenonS

...tribulations....Success !!!

Using Zeckensack's Glide Wrapper
Configured D3D Windower successfully

Will post results separately. Anyone who has problems: Don't miss it!

Finally I can concentrate on flying again after a EAW pause of 6 years.

XenonS

Is SPAW working OK?
If not let me know, and remind me whether or not you are using OAW128.

Hi Jelly,

yes, SPAW works very fine, I ran it yesterday with some B27 bombers but had to interrupt because testing other patches and procedures. I don't use OAW, i don't like online games.

With the workaround i found I'm now able to use 1.2, 1.28c... and load all these mods i couldn't before. Using 1.28d when playing the stock game.
I saw your preview for 1.28e. Congrats for your engagement!

Cheers,

XenonS

OAW is first and foremost a switcher that gives the ability to move everything associated with EAW in or out of the game at will. It isn't just for on-line flying.

OAW was originally built for online flying because unless the players in a game have exactly the same aircraft data the game will not launch. Countless frustrating hours were wasted while a player tried to find out what was wrong and fix it, or just leave.
So, apart from editing the "eaw.ini" file to give the same flying conditions, OAW was made to copy files from folders and paste the copies in the EAW directory when a folder was selected, and to delete these copies when it was deselected. This meant that onliners with the same set of folders could agree which ones to load before a game was launched, and the game was guaranteed to run.

The loading and unloading of files meant that it was no longer just a tool for onliners. It grew to be a very powerful file manager for all EAW users. Some of the errors that you reported in earlier posts were a good indication that you were not using OAW