mikew

That's the same as mine. It's just not as easy to break down as the british SEF2000 did.dat. What I've just noticed is that the US SEF2000 uses the same did.dat as the 3dfx version. Anyway, I have very little time to work on this stuff at the moment, and what time I've had recently has been spent on TAW.

The big extract on the last page is from a file called 'norway.asc', and the 2 files above are 'ssinfo.fn' and 'ssinfo.lab'. While the latter files are used to link the 3d models with their behaviour, 'norway.asc' (and its TAW equivalent, 'redsea.asc') is a bit of a mystery as most of the information in the file doesn't appear to be used in the game. I'd like to split did.dat into its component parts as we have done with TAW. This has partially been achieved for the british SEF2000, but I'd really like to use the absolute latest did.dat from EF2000 which is the one associated with the 3dfx patch of which I only have the US version. DiD were a bit sneaky here and obfuscated its index somewhat, so still a bit to do.

The last part, from about 2:52 onwards, looks a bit like what you see in the 'Myst' series of games.

We shall indeed...

Excellent visuals , but since the music is crap, best watched with the speakers muted. Appeals to the youngsters I guess.

Has it blown up yet?.

"1940: Britain promises financial assistance to Greece, starting with £5 million advance." ...and look what good that did us. Now they want another 109 Billion euro handout just to pay off the interest on what they already owe.

I've been too busy to experiment much with the DosBox settings. I have basic control of the plane with the joystick so I'll leave the key mapping until you've perfected it. The priority is to get it running smoother. I tried those audio settings suggested earlier but didn't see much difference, but I still think it's the audio that's involved somehow. In my case, the game will run smoothly for a couple of seconds, then the sound will stutter which is particularly evident in the F4 external view.

Thanks! Some interesting stuff over the last couple of days.... Anybody here got Black Shark 2 and/or Take On Helicopters?

Yes it would, and also miraculous. SEF2000 and the 3dfx version both share the same textures but 3dfx applies filtering so they appear smoother on screen. For SEF2000 to do that you'd have to hack its exe in a big way....and I don't have the 'l33t haxing skillz' necessary. For the smoothest EF2000 experience currently available, you should definitely stick to SEF2000. Personally, I find the 3dfx approach more interesting which is why I'm going down that route.

Logitech Wingman Force 3D...I'm embarrassd to say.

Well done! I haven't got my hat working yet..but I'll follow your trailblazing techniques.

HF, I guess that's the OpenGL version. This is fast but incomplete....but hopefully the future rests with this approach. The version that Neph and Eugene (I assume) are running is this one: http://ykhwong.x-y.net/xe/dosbox_data/143 Here, the 3dFX commands are rendered in software which makes it slow....but there shouldn't be any corruption. Neph, I'll try those settings......

Yes, I'm using ykhwong's recent SVN build and the machine is 3.4GHz i7-2600/GTX590 etc, so should be as good as any. I suspect that I just need some time playing around with the DosBox settings, particularly the sound which is where it seems to be stuttering.

Great! Probably DosBox can be configured to handle the IPX stuff in a friendlier way. I noticed that there was quite a stuttering in MP even across my LAN. I haven't yet got the 3dFX version running very well though,even though I don't seem to be going above 10% CPU usage. Anyway, it's nice to see that EF2000 can still attract some interest.

It only uses a single port and DosBox defaults to 213, which is what I'm using. You can set it to whatever you want though. Since it's past midnight here, I'm going to call it a day.....but this should work if you follow the instructions in that link to the DosBox wiki. You need to make sure that you establish the link between the 2 DosBoxs before starting EF2000. Use the commands 'ipxnet status' and 'ipxnet ping' on both IPX server and client to check the link is up. If that's OK then it's worth starting the game.

It's working now...although I'm not sure exactly what I did to kick it off. Maybe it's the wait that you mention. So, since it's working on the LAN it should work over the internet...but there's all that router port forwarding stuff to worry about.

It shouldn't matter what you use for the link between PCs since DosBox is converting IPX to UDP. I'm having trouble getting EF2000 to recognise the IPX network that DosBox is presenting to it on each PC...although I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to see. I'm guessing that EF2000 isn't happy since when I press 'startup' in the multiplay menu, then 'Restart Network', it goes back to showing the 'startup' button again rather than 'waiting for players' If I can't get it to work over a LAN, then there's no point in trying across country.... Anyway, I'm still not sure I've got my firewalls/ports set up right even though I'm seeing some IPX contact between the 2 PCs.

Neph, I'm not set up for TS3 or any voice comms... Yes, I'm trying to set up an IPX connection between 2 PCs using DosBox. DosBox embeds the IPX protocol inside TCP (or maybe UDP) packets for transfer across the internet. First we need to set up a connection between the 2 DosBoxs by following that link I posted earlier.

No, one's Vista64 and the other Win7 64. I now have some sort of an IPX connection between the two after turning off the windows firewall on the vista machine and changing some settings on the router. It's still not quite there though.... I tried starting EF2000, but I didn't see any 'Listen for Players' button that the manual mentions, so I guess it's not yet happy with the network. If I can get it work over a LAN, then it should work over the internet.

Did you get the IPX client to see the server? I'm trying to connect 2 PCs using across a LAN but not getting very far...I can ping one way, but not the other. Hmmn.

Happy Birthday Whizkid! ...also to all the spambots who also have birthdays today.

Sounds like a good start. I'd rather use Python than VB, but I think the situation is the same in that we should be OK if we know what the dll is expecting.

Cool! Well, that fundamental question needed to be asked first.... Thinking about the interface may help with understanding the game in general. Hope so anyway. The intital thoughts are to have a single .3 object viewer with the API controlling the same functions that are available currently using the keyboard. The main reason for this right now is to verify what I think are animations encoded in the ssd files, so I'd like to be able to send a sequence of state changes to the viewer at a certain rate. I'm sure there's much more I can think of...