Windmills and searchlights working in EAW140

Thanks to GolG and Moggy for helping me with graphics files I have searchlights and windmills rotating in EAW140.
I have made a video of the start of a flight from Hawkinge where I have positioned two windmills and one searchlight.
There are two versions of the windmill files, hence the two windmills.
The seachlight file was made with no frills just to test that the rotation routine in the exe works.
One is a single object, the other is the combination of a static tower and rotating sails positioned at exactly the same (x,y) position.




The link to the video is:

http://1drv.ms/1CtfwuN

it is named as "WMSL.mp_" to stop OneDrive trying to play it. Download it and re-name it as "WMSL.mp4"

Just one comment Tony.

Look at the hanger, and the two windmills.

The windmills still look too small.

That scaling zoom factor is wrong in the Tmod.dat.

I can adjust that. The factor used was the one from TMod67 in the original EAW which is 2. The main issue was to get them working

nice work Tony, should be good doing a night bombing raid with the sky full of searchlights

Hi Blue
They will need to be positioned at selected targets in a new scenario

John- your latest creation has been up-sized to scale 3

Yes, that is better Tony, before the trees were bigger than the mill.

I'd say, job done!

Nice job, doesn't look contrived, as long as scenario designers don't go overboard with working windmills.

BTW, there's a German Wurzburg radar TMOD in one of my folders that would probably make a good base for a searchlight or at least help you get everything situated properly.

Already doing one Ray, based on this card model from the 40's



Has anyone got the pallet numbers for code 3/4 elements?

Tony,
Hard to tell from the clip but it looks like you have different starting positions and rotational speeds on the windmill sails. If not, it would not be too hard to set random rotation position at load time.

Hi Allen.

It's the same model, just Tony felt like making me work yesterday, by making 4 identical models, with each blade rotated slightly, so the model sequences 4 times to make it look like it's rotating.

We wanted to pinch the first prop animation, but Tony could not find the switch in the code to turn on the rotation in the ground objects, so this is the best option for now.

The value for this way, is we can make ships sink with a bit of model editing.

On my preferred model (which I scaled up) there are four different graphics TMod900, 901, 902 and 903.

The actual TMod placed at the target is 900.

As 900 >= 900 and 900 =< 949 a condition is met which cycles the image 900, 901, 902, 903, 900, 901....etc. The four graphics have exactly the same tower, but the sail set at 0°, 22.5°, 45° and 67.5°. This animation routine gives the impression of rotation.

So space is reserved by this exe for similar rotating TMods between 900 and 949.
For me this is preferable to having a tower TMod and a rotating sail TMod placed at the same point, and it renders better. The TMod pair system was used in the other windmill.
The searchlight and the rotating sail rotate using a different routine which kicks in if the TMod number >= 980.



John
You posted yours whilst I was in the middle of writing mine,and I had not seen it when I hit the button to send the post

Hi Tony.

Mine was a more simplistic reply, and you added the detail, so not a problem. How about, while I'm fixing up the searchlight model, you have a look at the toy soldiers? Maybe you could get some Germans/Allied troops to appear on the right side of the frontline, and civilians, instead of aliens? Realistic for a version of Calais 2015! As it's hard to tell who's who at the moment.

Hello

Really cool stuff for night mission !

Lolo

With setting up this new PC I missed this. Which toy soldiers are you referring to?

Replace our crappy soldiers with these:



And there are Germans too.

A day or two, and there will be something to attack.

Hi John,

for our game we need the images to be from high angles not from the side as in your image, the sprite would look like the men were lying on their sides with that image... have a look at the pcx files on my mod for the german soldiers on Sandbaggers for the type of image set you need.


cheers,


Pobs

I know that Pobs.

This model has a lamp, which is separate, so I can change the angle with there rotate 3dz program. 1st job is to finish the model, and make sure it renders, then adjustments can be made.

The soldiers are just a prod for Tony to make some much needed changes to the sprite code, so bigger textures can be used.

I found a great site, with hundreds of free srites, and like the ones above, just right for EAW.

FYI,while testing out Jels latest,I found the soldier sprites to be garbled,fragmented.....very weird

Just sent a finished search light model to Tony, now if the model is shot up, will the light beam go off?

It is not working here because you sent me the 3dz, the BMP and the PCX. Something is missing

I picpacked the PCX and renamed the 3dz to "TMOD990H.3dz", and a copy as "TMOD990L.3dz". I the files in the root folder and flew a groundstart from Hawkinge with "HawkWMSL" loaded as the dir.set file.
This is what you need to do to check these things out.
The "TMod990.dat" file had a large scale factor set for the original beam.
So I saw a very large rotating lamp, but no beam.


This is a simplified 2D pic but this is the type of thing we need we need as a single TMod:

Hi Tony.

If I make it as one model, you will have a fixed beam. I thought you could place the model at the point of origin of the beam.

I do not want people to have to use the target editor to place TMods at exactly the same point. The searchlight rotation code is different from the windmill code and that's how VBHs model rotates in EAW140
In my pic the black lamp and the yellow beam would be a single object rotating because they are at about 15° to the vertical.

Then the whole model will rotate, which I thought would look silly, so I don't know how to make this work.