New Adriatic/Balkan/Russian theatre for EAW

[Moggy]

First run over Ploesti. Flak is a bit intensive.

[rotton50]

Do you recall that the flak is adjustable?

The heavy flak adjustments are in the ini file and the light/medium flak is in a file named flakdata.mpf (or maybe now it's flakdata.dat).

Pretty sure you can put it in the root folder to cover all the scenarios but Jel will need to confirm that.

[Moggy]

Good point. I'll make a note for the final adjustments phase.

By the way - the Danube is a bloody long river. I am going gozzy putting that great slash across the middle of the tile map.

[rotton50]

Well, we don't want you getting gozzy so here's a little listening music to calm the nerves -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CTYymbbEL4

[Moggy]

I am of a certain age, so when I hear The Blue Danube, what I see is a Pan-Am spaceship dancing with a huge circular, but partly unfinished space station.

[Moggy]

Just a short update on this. I have done about a third of the tile map, adjusting the terrain tiles to the more realistic topography adjusted with DOM's utility. Hopefully it will move quicker once I'm in the lower portion of the map with extensive sea areas.

[rotton50]

I've been sidetracked most of the summer with all sorts of projects around the house plus we get a lot of visitors this time of year being on the Chesapeake Bay so no time for EAW.

I have a 1/3 complete Ju86 model to finish and about 1/2 the flight models for the Easter Front aircraft to do and the aircraft package will then be done.

I'm guessing late September at this point.

[Moggy]

I suspect the tile map won't be ready before that.

[Moggy]

It's taking longer than I originally intended to spend, but as I got into it, I thought I should actually do it properly, and actually finish something for a change. I've now moved it into a 1.6 setting, which also enabled me to sort out the two sides/capital city thing with the target lay out, AND to use Jel's new exe to sort out the Wall problem.

Still a bit of work to do on the map. And then there's railways and convoys.

It's what retirement is for:)

[Moggy]

So, after about six months work on the tile and height maps I have actually finished (more or less) making a new theatre.

I am now going to have a go at making a basic railway/shipping convoy layout.

[Jel]

I have found an issue that is not really a bug, but is a problem


This was a truck interdiction, meant to be ground-started but the convoy was nowhere near the target, and was too far to be flown in real time.
The target and bases had been selected to enable a ground-stared intercept to be flown.
To get the screenies I hacked the map names and flew a single mission, but they show what happened.


In single mission set-up the target is Peshkopi.

Note the cross shaped lake.

In the pilot map look where the convoy is generated:

It is nowhere near the selected target.

I think that the problem is caused by truck convoys being generated on a road, using the nearest road tile to the target.
In this theatre there would be no road tiles anywhere near the target, hence the result

This was in host-only multiplayer:
The briefing screen:

7 minutes to Peshkopi

Take-off and Ctrl-E

Not exactly 7 minutes

[Moggy]

What's the cure? Should I go lay a few more roads near any target missing them?

[Jel]

You have plenty more to do, so do not bother with the roads. I set up a different interdiction and it worked very well for multiplayer. All that I am trying to do is to build a collection of multiplayer scripts using the multiplayer front line that I made. I am happy to wait for your ships and railway system for the other interdiction types, and truck interdictions are easy to switch to escort or bombing missions on the parameters screen. Fighter sweeps are easy to set up, and I have several intercept missions done already. If I get lazy I can use the same base for the friendly primary and secondary bases, and set it as the target for an intercept. I can also use the same base for the enemy primary and secondary planes, and set that as a target for a bombing mission, an escort or an interdiction.

One issue that emerged is what I think is a wall problem in the Taranto area that gives sudden CsTD. This seemed to happen in single missions too with the normal front-lines
I am looking at a possibility of an extended tilemap with a 10 tile border making the map 680 x 340.

[Moggy]

Okay, I will carry on with the road/convoy layout.

About which, a few queries.

Do we know what the size limit on the rrd file is? I am assuming at the most it must be FFFF (65,535) sections, a section being defined by two nodes. Do we know if the game will run with a maximum size rrd file loaded?

I see a lot depends on the "flag for a section" and that depending on the flag that section will either be rendered rail or invisible and available for land or shipping convoys. I see also that using the associated "TListXY.mpf" file we can specify which tmods appear in that section and much else.

Does the idea of rendering at the same point to use multipart tmods (i.e. PAW type ships) still work?

This is the top section of the rrd file from the "train/barges" setup.



The first number ringed in red is the number of sections. Is the second ringed number the section flag? The numbers in between presumably the coordinates of the two nodes defining the section.

I have in mind different trains running on different segments of the railway i.e. armoured train running on the Russian sections etc.

[Moggy]

Does the rrd file actually hold the section and segment numbers, or is that something the editor generates and displays for convenience?