night missions

from yesterdays and todays night intercepts at gameranger









the last one is MrJellys landing



2./Jg1_Luth

rob

Who put that tree there LOL!

Hope you found it not too difficult to take off in the dark, hehehe. It's kind of hard to stay on the runway eh?

VonBeerhofen

Sure is VBH, especially from Hawkinge which is a grass runway and gives you the WW1 style take off across the paddock. However, today I set an airstart.




Both missions were a lot of fun though!

Jel

What a shame, a scramble airstart, ah well just too bad, better luck next time Cooper. I'm sure you gonna love it,

VonBeerhofen

Hey Guys,

you need to make it on "Ace" difficulty, then you will get the radar, without icons.

I dont know a better immersion killer than icon hunting at night.

Use a Bf110G vs B24th and Mossies as oponent, a few WildeSau 190´s or 109´s could help you.

Greetings,

Knegel

radar? what radar?

Need some runway flares

Moggy DCM

capt_cooper, when you fly in "Ace" mode, you don't get icons, but you do get a red arrow pointing to any plane that is OFF screen. This helps you move into the general direction of your target, which you eventually acquire visually.

This is very similar to the methods available through most of the war...

So I "adapted" your nightblitz Moggy, and a WW1 takeoff is very hairy indeed as I suspect the "flares" are fuel dumps, and a collision with one is terminal LOL.

Jel

Capt Cooper and I just flew two great groundstarted intercepts

Jel

The radar is the normal HUD systhem, but you dont get icons.
You need to have the "Target Director Display" (alt D) activated(in the little arrow on the screen edge to show you the shortest way to the current target.


You toggle a enemy with "Target best enemy" or "target next enemy". If a enemy i close, you will see its speed and height like usual and the little arrow on the screen edge show you the direction you need to turn to, to get the target in front of you.
When the arrow dont show up, while the target speed etc still get displayed, the target is in your current sight, although you might not see it cause the darkness cover it.
By using zoom, you can decrease the possible area, where the target can be.

Once you got close enough, you should be able to see the target like a shadow, then you can sneak in and shoot it down.

Like CJ wrote, thats somewhat the way the WWII Radars did work. They gave you a rough direction and height, but finally you had to find the target by eyesight.

When its night and Ace mode is active, the reaction distance and the "sight possibility" of the tailgunners is decreased very much, so you have a good probability to sneak up very close, without that the tailgunner shoot.

Appart from the real no icon "Wilde Sau" like night fight, this is for me the only way to make a immersive night combat.
Icons are already ugly at daylight, but at night it make the screen looking like packman.

Greetings,

Knegel

OK I have a version working using Moggy's flares, with a TMod.dat file where the "fuel dumps" have a hit bubble of zero size so you can drive over them in complete safety







I took off, and later landed back at base with no trouble

Jel

All 100+ airfields (times +/-10 lights per runway) and fully relocatable so it works on all airfields, or just the one Moggy tried before he gave up?
The only way to make this work is to either have all airfields on the same terrain tile facing the same direction or to modify the targets for each base in every campaign (1000+ objects each).
Must be a new feature in the 1.28d version. Awaiting this one with much anticipation.

VonBeerhofen

1.28D is an exe not an addon, and is is extremely flexible because of the 1.28C/D folders system. The upshot is that some of us are having plenty of fun flying groundstarted night missions in real time online with 1.28C or D as they are completely compatible. The external TMod.dat works well, with Moggy's flares on a number of fields we use which are ideal for groundstarts. The seasonal terrain switch is a bonus.
From what you tell us you cannot fly 1.28C or D, so I do not know why you are waiting in anticipation



I have added this so that VBH can flog it

what i really need is a radar that "sees" trees, so i dont fly into them on landing approach like last night. ouch.


thanks for the explanation, Knegel. now i understand what you were talking about.

the night takeoffs and landings arent really a problem, if you take your time and have a little patience. it adds a lot to the "immersion" factor.


2./Jg1_Luth

rob

Sorry to hear that Ralph, I was hoping it was something new, some new idea or something. But it's no different really from what I have by extracting a few files into EAW. I can't see it'll make campaign creation any easier or shorter, only more difficult and more timeconsuming.
The only good system I can really think off is an ingame theatre selection controlled by the host but that won't work when players don't have the campaign installed. It's the same with OAW, that's why you have to stick to unified and why it can't do anything ununified, unless files are shared and put into some subfolder (more choices then filetypes). You say it's so easy, I say it's not after 5 years of OAW frustrations and constant changes which require upgrading about every week. As I said before, there's nothing easier then plunging a .ZIP into a fresh install and it works just as fast too.
Just the opinion of someone who's into creating this stuff every day and who thinks that more choices isn't necessarily better, easier or faster.
BTW, I've had what you show there on my computer since around 2002 I believe, the same goes for illuminated hangars, control towers and a few other objects.

VonBeerhofen

Iam not sure what this have to to with my post??

Anyway, the foldersystem of EAW1.28c/d have some extreme advantages over just a new unzipped addons.

1. The different setups stay untouched, so a user cant mess them up.
2. Each of this setups got its own savedata folder, so simgle mission and campaign files are stored fitting to the theatre(less CTDs etc).
3. The loding time of a complete new setup goes down to almost zero.
4. No disc fragmentation.
5. Still additional addons can get loaded into the EAW directory, like usual.
6. Each theatre can have up to 5 plane sets, the plane set is controlled by the Host.
7. We even can pack additional CDF´s and point the exe to them, alongside the folders.

All this gets more important, when someone use Multiskins, cause they have a huge size. To load/unload one Skin set would need a long time and would fragment the HD very much.
Of course you dont need this, cause your exe dont support multiskins and of course you dont like them.
But also for very big setups, like SAW, SPAW etc this is very nice.

Looks like you never did understand OAWunified, cause OAW unified wasnt static. We always could add things.
OAWunified is still the most flexible EAW setup ever, where 200 planes could get used without a static plane set, just by sharing one file of just 1kb size!!

And for sure you never had a radar as host setting.

Of course you dont need all this, cause unzipping is as easy and flexible and in general you had all this already when EAW got release.

Btw, i just got the planes.dat splitted and we are just working on splitting the loadout.dat.

When we have this, we will have real freedom regarding the planes, and yes, iam able to implement the current selected planes as host setting!!
Then we can have a huge folder with several hundret planes and the host determine which planes get used.
But of course you also dont need this, unzipping a new plane set into the EAW diectory is as good as this.


Greetings,

Knegel

Unlike you VBH we provide links here so that anyone who is interested can download our stuff as 7-zip self installers to run in their single EAW folder. Nothing else needs to be done:



Check out the number of different scenarios available with a single mouseclick.


Something you would be gloriously ignorant of is the ability of 1.28C and D to handle different planesets:


These can be set by OAW128 which conveniently modifies the ini. This could be done manually if necessary.



The planeset number is transmitted by the host to all players, and becomes automatic without their having to do a thing.

Now it is a "statement of the bleedin' obvious" that two players cannot play a campaign unless they both have it installed. With these campaigns we may need to post the occasional link at GameRanger, but the users soon learn what to do, and there's never any need to create yet another EAW directory.

Whilst we are considering what gets transmitted by the host are you aware of what does not get transmitted in 1.2 and your FXExe?
When you do a 1943 sweep does every player always see the same AI's, or does one guy in a 190A see a P38H and someone else sees a P47C because each player's PC generates the AIs.
You claim to be a champion of online EAW, but would any serious gamer want to use an exe where they can only pick a region, not a target, and no bases? Of course, they could run parallel systems with multiple EAW folders so they could use yours if there were no other choices, or OAW128 with 1.28C or D.

As Ralf noted we cannot see what relevance your comment had in this thread, you just used it as another chance to flog the OAW dead horse.

Meanwhile, another night intercept is under way at GameRanger - gotta fly!

Ralf- just to confirm that it is transmitted Dumo and I flew the "C PlanesetTest" I set up which has the entire Malta campaign as Planset1. I set it to 1, Dumo's was 0, but it was transmitted and we both flew Malta


http://www.users.on.net/pam_biddell/PS.exe

Jel

Night Blitz is getting on a bit - must be 9 years old! Quite probably the "lights" had "unintended consequences"

Many of the airfields in Dunkirk had a "flarepath" (principally because there was a whole "night intercept" part of that scenario)and the lights there were better edited.



The relevant planes had nav lights, and the Defiant model had landing lights keyed into the undercart rather like the old "close cockpit" mod, which came on when the undercart went down



The thing with the nav lights is that they were always on. I did originally pursue the idea of having visible exhaust glow, which was what the original early nightfighters actually looked out for. But development of night blitz ended at Christmas 2001, and I never picked it up again afterwards. The control tower 3dz is dated 20th December 2001



Moggy DCM

Don't forget, I did a mod for the HR Hurricane, which gives you realistic glowing exhausts.

I did forget that. . But am glad to remember it now.

Remind me how you did it Col - did the exhaust sprites take the glowing colours?

I last edited that Ju88 with the prototype "glow" in November 2001.

Here's the original thread on lights: http://simhq.net/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/793397/1.html 27th August 2000

If we are going to have more extensive night fighting, it would be good to have realistic glowing exhaust on all relevant planes.

Perhaps the nav lights could all be tied into the undercart code so they are only there on take off and landing?

The flare path could have its Tmod properties edited so that it only becomes visible within a short distance of the airfield.

Moggy DCM

Hi Moggy.

I changed the exhaust elements from code 5 to code 3, and added a glowing orange colour.

Your Tmod problem is easy, just use the H model for the lights, and use a blank for the L and M and S 3dz's then the light would only go on when you got close.

I was thinking of doing the same idea but in reverse for the houses. The L would be lit, and the H would be unlit, then as you approached a city, all the lights would go off.

UAW160 with the "Added searchlights ETO" theatre and the mission time set in parameters.


Runway with flarepath and searchlights F9:



Alt-N



A kill

More piccies



Being able to set the mission time based on sunrise and sunset really helps you to get just enough light intensity for your mission, and the new map is great for locating the enemy.
Each circle is a tile- 4.096 kilometres














Tracers often help to locate the action

I would add that the seachlights in this theatre do not come on unless the light intensity is low. Additionally they are triggered by nearby aircraft.

A view from my six moving away from a searchlight:

Tmod indicator and searchlight visible at 17000 feet


Shortly afterwards the TMod indicator switched off:


..and a short time later so did the searchlight:

I like that ,Jel. Always had a thing for EAW at night. Is actually playable if you do it in a darkened room and drink plenty of carrot juice

Yeah, it gave me quite a few headaches when I created those lights. My newest model can now also be attached to any 3D model and any target in any addon as described, anywhere in the EAW world, instead of coming out of the roofs of hangars at one specific location, like the old versions did. Hence I also gave it it's own dedicated 3D model, which in this picture ofcourse has the light switched off during daytime



and in the evening and nights remains on standby when no aircraft are near



VonBeerhofen

Neat
What controls the speed of rotation?

a few appropriate counters in the game's zero page for the lights, not the 3D object. The object uses rotation from the camera view, it doesn't actually rotate but uses a trick to make it appear to rotate when the camera is moved.

VonBeerhofen

I use an external file with the settings in it that the exe reads and uses.

I know, doesn't sound to me as a good reason to drag this particular 12 year old topic from the depths of the Underworld and open up old wounds in spite of the specific warnings from the SIMHQ moderators. You better stay away from raking up these past attacks as you are risking the total annihilation of this EAW forum!


VonBeerhofen

Trip down memory lane. Some screenies from my first experiments with lights November 2001, over 21 years ago:





Here's the thread from the archive where I posted the first experimental night fighting package:

http://simhq.net/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/790586/Experimental_Night_Flying_pack.html#Post790586

Things have come a long way since then,





VonBeerhofen

BTW the initiator of this thread hasn't been seen since 2014

Certainly have.

The facts are simple.
Two days ago when I checked to see who was online I saw a new member who was reading this thread. So I had a look too, and realising that it was way out of date I added some posts to update it.
Nothing more and nothing less

What an extra ordinary coincidence, I added a few more things too but more as a teaser for the general public. I hope your guy picks up on it and understands why my creations belong to me and will only be available for download when I choose so, irrespective of external pressure. Their campaigns are still far from finished. Just saying. Maybe some day he will even understand my difficulties when instructing dozens of online pilots in the art of file managing for a decade and to make what I consider the best choice for the Launchpad pilots, which is why we're still flying every other day and having fun. Things haven't changed much in that respect since then, and I doubt they ever will, we'll see,

VonBeerhofen

Since I hadn't had the opportunity to react in the original thread on Jelly's claims of none transmitted plane data in 1943 on line missions with FXEXE, I decided to have a look at that myself and ran 3 entirely different missions with two computers in an on line home environment.

First an observation of this thread which began with something about night fighting but soon started to change shape into something else which oozes intimidation, not uncommon in this 'forum' and a typical code group modus operandus. 5 dead horses on one single page, wow! It almost looks like an abattoir. A thread started by a guy who hasn't been seen since 2014 and revived after 12+ years, showing multiple pictures of MY old searchlights because some guy was caught browsing this particular thread from 12+ years ago, .

Anyway, I tested Mr. Jelly's claims and found that all v1.2 derivatives, including FXEXE and EAWPRO produced the exact same aircraft, same numer of planes, the same mission type in the exact same location in EAW, even human flown heavies, on either machine. So that proofs that these guys were just as little all knowing as anyone else at the time, including myself probably. I already believed it to sound weird as we spend a lot of time investigating these mishaps with Pobs and JG51, which even could result in flying in areas more then 500 miles apart. We used to call these missions Search and Rescue, since regularly one player had to deal with all enemies and his supports could only try to reach his location ASAP to help. Of course that could take a pretty long time so it wasn't something we did regularly. Anyway, the cause of these discrepancies was identified and from there on everything worked as it should, just as it does now with all v1.2 derivatives. It just shows that people aren't always right, even though they claim they are and that the other guy doesn't know what he's talking about, which is probably the lamest excuse for not entering an honest debate about these issues. I'm also sure that the entire EAW community took his word for granted, they just couldn't proof the opposite. I think I didn't even bother to respond knowing that Jels's claim was nonsense and left for 5 years of fun with my on line friends, that was until a guy who called himself Hector infiltrated the Launchpad in 2015 and ran off with my creation (including my searchlights).

So this once more leads to the question, where did this fake news about FXEXE and v1.2 come from? I mean, both versions work 100%OK, and if you don't believe me try hooking up 2 computers through your router with the game on it and start counting planes as I did. If the claim was not coming from a 1.2 version or it's source code, then the code is much more likely to be a 1.1 version, where not all AI were taken care of yet and all other things mentioned in the official v1.2 upgrade were also not implied. After all it's clear that the claim didn't come from testing existing versions, because that would have clearly shown they work fine. This is also much more in line with the v1.1 EXE's filesize of the first code group release, as I already mentioned long ago. Mind you I haven't tested v1.1 but I wouldn't be at all surprised to see it does have the problem Mr. Jelly is talking about and undoubtedly the first code group releases prior to this particular post probably will have too, although it's something which is very easy to deny, after all it can not be proven unless someone other then a code group member can still test those.

Not that it matters much today, but this attack on the FXEXE was clearly nonsense and just another attempt to glorify the code group's version. It highlight's the animosity which was playing out at the time and puts it right back in today's animosity, throwing more dirt on the FXEXE and EAWPRO for a 2nd time, and that goes entirely against SimHQ's ignored warnings. So I hope SimHQ doesn't mind me giving it all back to Mr.Jelly so justice can be served. Stop your silly attacks by using my creations Mr. Jelly and stop dragging old attacking posts from the past into the now!


VonBeerhofen

Fact:
1.2 did not always produce the same AI planes.

We discovered this when I was flying a co-op mission with Knegel. I saw him shoot down a P-38H but according to him the aircraft was a P-47C.

The key to this is the MISN40.DAT, MISN43.DAT, MISN44.DAT and MISN45.DAT files on the individual players' PCs
These files have the probabilities of AI plane types appearing.

In the case that I mentioned the one on my PC generated a P-38H and the one on Ralf's PC generated a P-47C.
The AI planes generated on the host's PC are not passed onto the players. Sometimes they get the same, occasionally they get different ones.

We sorted this out in OAW unified.
The OAW selector was able to edit these files and set the probability of the selected AI fighters and bombers to 100%.
A script was transmitted by the host to the other players which edited the files on their PCs. In this way all the players got the same AIs.

What you describe are exactly the problems Pobs, JG51 and I faced when instructing people in the art of file managing with OAW and my own main reason to abandon it's use. It was too vulnerable for these mistakes. However the fact remains that it wasn't an FXEXE or v1.2 problem as you said it was.You don't have to proof the cause to me Mr. Jelly, I learned about that when we still used OAW and fixed such issues when FXEXE was still AFB. You see we weren't all knowing back then either but we did try stuff to solve problems. The changed MISN**.DAT are causing issues when you edit them wrongly, when done correctly the game constantly produce the right planes as in EAWPRO and the stock .DAT files, if that's not how it works in your versions then there must be something wrong with your coding. I'll accept your reply as an apology but that apology should have come in 2010 when you figured it all out. Reviving the thread was still against SimHQ rules, so I will let them deal with that.

VonBeerhofen

Exactly.
Editing these files fixes the problem caused by the 1.2 exe not transmitting the host's AI planes values to the other players.

From Gunst's notes


MISSION FILES (MISNxx.DAT)

There are Mission files: MISN40.DAT MISN43.DAT MISN44.DAT MISN45.DAT

Presumably these affect the aircraft available in missions in the various years.

Each file is 60 d bytes long, divided into 3 equal chunks of 20 d bytes.



MISN40.DAT

0400 0000 [090a 1013 0000 0000] ff80 ff40 0000 0000 04=4 flyable aircraft.

Types=Hurri(09),Spit 1(0a), 109E(10), 110C(13)

ff etc= probability (?) of appearance

0500 0000 [091c 1319 1b00 0000] ffff 2080 4000 0000 05= 5 aircraft

Types=Hurri, He111, 110C, Ju88A, Ju87

ff etc=probability as bomber(?)

0200 0000 [1c19 0000 0000 0000] ff80 0000 0000 0000 02=2 aircraft

Types=He111, Ju88A

ff=probability as bomber (?)

A few days ago I posted this as the reason why the thread was revived:



Your reply was as follows


It seemed that you were happy with my explanation, but in later posts you appear to believe that I revived the post to attack your work.
I have several issues with the EAWPro release that is publicly available, but I have not raised them.

Ooooops

Did posting a few counter pictures give you that impression? I think my initial reply about the warning was pretty clear I wasn't at all happy as you posted an attack on the FXEXE for the 2nd time, and with a lame excuse I think. I can't proof there wasn't a guy but I can proof you falsely attacked the FXEXE and I hope you can leave it at that. Whatever is true of other versions has no further impact on that, as I said the function of the MISN**.DAT was long known, even before the source code was available and you didn't test it's functionality but merely posted an assumption without any valid testing or proof, probably after making the exact same mistake with OAW as my players did to screw up our games.

VonBeerhofen

I did the same test with stock v1.2 and it behaved exactly the same. Glad it did as it would have turned EAW into a pretty stupid game for me and others, not even mentioning that the original programmers not catching the issue would have looked pretty stupid. Also there are no references to this issue anywhere, not in anyones notes or this forum, besides yours in this thread. I do however have an alternative explanation, which is that when a particular system file in EAW isn't present Windows will try to find that file and use a replacement where ever it finds a file with the right name. .DAT files are system files and I've seen such mishaps with .INI files too, but that was in Windows Me and XP. It's been another problem in OAW when people weren't doing things right as it had heaps of system files in it's folders, so occasionally we were just as baffled when after comparing folders things still weren't working right.

VBH

Ok, this has become acrimonious for no reason. VBH, there was no need for you to have made the issue. Stop it.