NEW MIDWAY SEA AND TERRAIN INSTALLATION There are five .zips Choose one of the first four (not the utilities, of course) Open the .zip. There should be seven files about 50 k each in each set. --LRcoast3.ter --LRcoast5.ter --LRfield1.ter --LRfield2.ter --LRfield4.ter --LRfield5.ter --LRwater.ter Copy them to your EAW "Sighted Main Body" Midway directory. Copy only one set of seven tiles at a time. Each set overwrites the others. Play the game. REMEMBER you have to go to a BRIEFING screen and LOAD the actual battle set. Any aircraft Briefing Screen will do. If you want your own mission instead of Moggy's LOAD list, say as a Japanese pilot, you have to set all the times, weather, and aircraft. Results are unpredictable. To un-install, remove all seven LR*.ter files. The game defaults to the CDF core files and you're back to a regular appearance. FOR A NEW SET, just copy over another seven-tile set chosen from other terrains included here and answer "yes" to overwrite. WUDPECKER'S MIDWAY TERRAIN MOD SETS The sea has many moods, as I watch it often. Midway Islands are in the upper tropics at about 28 degrees north. On the summer days in June of the battle in 1942, the skies were cloudy to partly cloudy (I trust Moggy on this). A wonderful chance to vary the appearance. Choosing some new skies to go with the new terrain sets will dramatically increase your pleasure and amazement at the luminosity of Pacific waters (Try the take-off in the PBY seaplane. And at dusk in the second PBY flight, you can see little lights in the towers). Clouds in the tropics in summer are usually piles of cotton-balls, big and fluffy . But no one can tell you or the Pacific Ocean what you like. Four terrain sets are available to match your mood. SET 1. PACIFIC BLUE Is the "normal" set, for all-round use. (pacific.zip) It's the closest match to U.S. Naval aircraft color with a blue-green tinge. SET 2. DAWN is lovely for a morning flight, and a color compromise so that land and sea still looks good later as your flight continues. Works for general use, too. (dawn.zip) SET 3. DUSKY SUNSET is designed for day's end. (dusk.zip). Okay for dawn, but never brightens. SET 4. TROPICAL BRIGHT DAY is just that under intense sunshine. (tropic.zip) CREDITS (AND TECH EXPLANATION FOR MODDERS BELOW) ---MOGGY for creating "Sighted Main Body" and doing all basic work. Moggy recognized this battle as one of the most critical at the start of U.S. Pacific involvement in 1942. Credit him for hosting this set of mods, of course. ---CRASHIN' JACK, VON BEERHOFEN, COL. GIBBONS AND OTHERS who provided important information and encouragement. ---SANDBAGGER for his comprehensive site that contains useful utilities and much more. MAX188 got me started. ---RAF Roy for supplying the low-hi-resolution and the P-Conv batch file converters. He credits RedEyes, and Max188 did the renaming utility. gpmwapl did the .ter to .pcx and .pcx to .ter converters, I believe. RAF_Roy has some good advice and explanations for modders on his website. This utility saves gobs of time from the tedious process of running a DOS window, then typing in picpac -p (filename) lr*.ter for each file to re-set the mods. ---FLIGHT SIMHQ for hosting the EAW forum. Visit some of their advertisers if they pop up to raise their ad hit count and keep SIMHQ going. Ditto for the EAW LAUNCHPAD. --- TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN for the CDF converter to break out the terrain files so they can be used. Couldn't run down the name. TECH BACKGROUND AND EXPLANATION Anti-aliasing, which means smoothing or fuzzing the edges to soften the horrible "jagged" edges of early computer graphics, was a major breakthrough (I tried, but too late). If I'm not mistaken, the technique was taken to the extreme by not only softening but enlarging the pixels for use as a background. Best example that electrified the game industry was "Castle Wolfenstein", a shoot-em-up, followed by the very popular "Doom". This made wonderful background-in-motion scenes possible without impossible demands on the memory and central processors of computers at the time. This "engine" was quickly adopted by the gaming industry, and EAW. Now with much fasters CPU's (central processors) and vastly more memory, the fuzzing is getting gripes from people who want to see higher ground detail. Enter the EAW modders. They developed a trick to increase terrain resolution in European Air War. Many beautiful terrains became available and gave new life to EAW. WANT TO MODIFY? I've include a utilites kit for modders of terrain. Of course, some are useful for other mods as well, like PICPAC and the break-out utility for CDF files. Use the one with the "W" for Windows (not Wudpecker). The first step is always to create break-out (uncompressed) files for your use. EAW does not normally use hi-resolution terrain tiles, but they are present as BN*.ter in the CDF (compressed data files). As RAF Roy pointed out, the original game developers probably intended to use them, but didn't for some reason. My guess is the limits of most computers at that time. EAW only uses the LR*.ter (low resolution) files. Since high resolution looks better, 'tis said, that's the target. You can use the LR*.ter files included here to experiment. For all the files, break out the .ter terrain files by using the CDF file extractor. What to do with them all? Convert (uncompress) them out of the CDF for use in a paint program. Two utilities by others in EAW community make this batch converting easy. There is a .ter (terrain) to .pcx (standard graphics) converter and a pcx. to .ter to put them back into game format. A second utility re-names the BN*.ter (high resolution) files to LR*.ter (low resolution) for game use. EAW can be tricked into using hi-resolution by simply naming the BN*.ter files LR.*ter Using the .ter to .pcx converter, the break-out CDF tiles can be uncompressed and loaded into a paint graphics program as .pcx's and modified. It takes a good paint program to do a good job. This one was done on a shareware program called "Project Dogwaffle". There's a free version. The demo version won't let you save (though I got around that). Its greatest drawback is only displaying one image at a time, and two tiles need to be compared side-by-side for seamless scenery. As you may notice. REMEMBER: *** The new hi-res tiles you create MUST be saved back as 256x256 in size and 256 colors. *** Anything else turns tiles black or the program won't run at all. (If you can make larger tiles run, you will have transformed EAW to the forefront of modern flight sims.) Tiles are then turned back into LR*.ter files by using the two converters above. You can do without them by using PICPAC in a DOS window. PICPAC is the file converter that came with your EAW CD in the Art Kit directory. Format can be .pcx, .gif, or .bmp For our use, .pcx is standard for batch converting. Open the DOS window in the directory you have your newly created picture files saved as .pcx (or .gif or .bmp files). And PicPac has to be in there, of course. Type PICPAC -P (NEW FILE NAME) BN*.TER. The * star is one of the seven names above in the case of the Midway scenario, such as "field3, field5, coast3," and so on. Rename the BN*.ter into "LRfield3.ter , LRfield5.ter, LRcoast3.ter," etc. For some reason, direct converting your new paint file into LR*.ter doesn't seem to work. Slog through the procedure. ---Simple enough (for this kind of stuff), but as a newbie I did everything wrong. The information above is from "blood, toil, tears and sweat" by several people. Work carefully and don't forget 256x256 and 256 colors. COMMENTARY (to save useless searching) Woolfman's EAW Terrain Editor I'd like to praise this editor, but I can't. Never got it to work for me, nor found it helpful, except for finding the location of Midway in the terrain map. To do this, you have to tap "Refresh Map" and then enter "1" in the pop-up box and you get a sketchy map of the terrain. My ignorance is at fault, no doubt, but Woolfman is not around to tell me better. It has such great promise. Somone else may know the secret. I don't. Strike Fighters Terrain Editor Another flight sim, Strike Fighters on this SimHQ forum uses EAW terrain tiles. A guru there has developed a map editor said to work very well. There has been talk of back engineering it for EAW use, but too many hoops to jump through right now. ---The Wudpecker