mikew

DrKevDog is our global texture expert...and he also found seaworld in the files which are not extracted from did.dat. This consists of a small island about 30 tiles square. Those other world names appear to come from TFX. I have all the components for a tool to search for arbitrary filenames in did.dat, but have been too lazy to put it all together. I'd imagine the .c files relate to the source code but these is not a single text file from did.dat that looks like source. Nice work with the radio messages.

Awesome video.

ハ、それは日曜日だ！残りの一日。申し訳ありませんが。

Dead heat in a Zeppelin race...

Good logic! The 8/256 resolution comes from an analysis of the ACMI files, but it makes sense that this is perfectly adequate for the renderer. Internally, you'd want to be working with a higher resolution in order to avoid rounding errors causing the view to jump around. For MSFS this is discussed here: http://www.microsoft.com/Products/Games/FSInsider/developers/Pages/GlobalTerrain.aspx DID seemed to have some sort of debug mode where certain parameters could be printed out. Here's a bit of dissassembly: .. .. AUTO:0045070B fstp [esp+54h+var_54] AUTO:0045070E push offset aAlpha3_1fDegsS ; "ALPHA: %3.1f DEGS SIDESLIP: %3.1f DEGS"... AUTO:00450713 push 7 AUTO:00450715 push 1 AUTO:00450717 call sub_44F66C AUTO:0045071C fld dword ptr [esi+8Ch] AUTO:00450722 add esp, 1Ch AUTO:00450725 fmul ds:dbl_630FE8 AUTO:0045072B sub esp, 8 AUTO:0045072E fstp [esp+4Ch+var_4C] AUTO:00450731 fld dword ptr [esi+88h] AUTO:00450737 fmul ds:dbl_630FE8 AUTO:0045073D sub esp, 8 AUTO:00450740 fstp [esp+54h+var_54] AUTO:00450743 fld dword ptr [esi+90h] AUTO:00450749 fmul ds:dbl_630FE8 AUTO:0045074F sub esp, 8 AUTO:00450752 fstp [esp+5Ch+var_5C] AUTO:00450755 push offset aYawRate3_1fDps ; "YAW RATE: %3.1f DPS PITCH RATE: %3.1f "... AUTO:0045075A push 8 AUTO:0045075C push 1 AUTO:0045075E call sub_44F66C AUTO:00450763 fld dword ptr [esi+84h] AUTO:00450769 add esp, 24h .. .. This may help to see what sort of maths they were using. I notice some floating point stuff in there at least.....

Great! That explains a few things. While the basic unit in SSDs is 8 feet, the smallest unit that (I suspect) is used in the game is 8/256 feet.

Heh, reminds me of this... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgnDHbeVGG4

That's because you're flying some 1970's piece of junk. Would you trade in a 2010 car for one built in 1975?

Good stuff. Unfortunately, my best monitors are 1280x1024.

As I understood it, while 'Miss America X' was indeed the fastest boat in the world, it took a whole heap of engines to achieve it using raw power.....and it was the british boat 'Miss Enland III' that was used as a template for the PT boats due its more efficient hull which enabled it to travel at roughly the same speed with only two engines.

Thanks! That's the one I've got since it's the first in the series. So far so good.

FaceTrackNoir (with PS3 Eye camera) worked great with TAW on my old machine which had an Intel I7-920. No doubt, TrackIR is better, but you have to wear the dorky headgear.

I've just found a file on my PC from 2001 called 'tawhack.txt' containing the following. Presumably this was written by Manteau..... Just for those of you who are interested, I'll do my best here to explain how I patched TAW to allow 1024x768. Basically, I used Windasm 8.9 (Disassembler) and Ultraedit (hex editor) as the main tools, but any disassembler or hex editor will do. ---- The first step was to open up f22.dat with windasm and examine the output - what disassemblers do is parse the .exe program and list the readable asm (assembly code). This process takes quite a while. When it had finished, I then searched for "SetDisplayMode". This is a directx function that sets the screen resolution the game runs at. I'd have hoped that I would have found the location for the link reference to the function in the ddraw.dll library but I didn't. Luckily, DID had put in an error message just after it which said basically the same thing. If you do a search for SetDisplayMode, you should find the following line: * Possible StringData Ref from Data Obj ->"SetDisplayMode to %dx%dx16 failed. " The first bit of the string may vary depending on what disassembler you use, but it basically means the same thing. Underneath that (about 5 lines below), you'll see a line: :005F984F 90 nop the :xxxxxxxx bit is the hex address. the 90 is the hex code for nop. and nop is the instruction. The nop instruction doesn't do anything (except waste a few processor cycles), but it happens to be added by most compilers where TRACE or breakpoints are added for debugging - for some reason, Release builds also have this info. This nop tells you that something special is happening here, so lets have a look what happens after this: :005F984F 90 nop :005F9850 8B442404 mov eax, dword ptr [esp+04] :005F9854 81780C20030000 cmp dword ptr [eax+0C], 00000320 :005F985B 750F jne 005F986C :005F985D 81780858020000 cmp dword ptr [eax+08], 00000258 :005F9864 7506 jne 005F986C :005F9866 83785410 cmp dword ptr [eax+54], 00000010 :005F986A 7450 je 005F98BC I’m going to miss a few bits out here or only fly over it (I’m only going to concentrate on the very specific res stuff). The mov instruction moves a DWORD value to the accumulator register. The cmp instruction then compares what’s in the accumulator register with 00000320 (which happens to be the hex for 800), so this is one part that needs to be changed to 1024 (400 in hex). The jne instruction is a jump if not equal instruction. It will basically move the instruction pointer (what the program is doing at the moment) on to the hex address given, if the value given in the instruction is not equal to what the last compare instruction returned. After that, another compare is done on 00000258 (600 in decimal), and the same jne instruction is repeated for that. The 258 needs to be changed to 300 (768 in dec).

No, but since I trust this site for book recommendations I've added 'Safehold 1' to my Kindle. It had better be good.... +15 deg C and turning cloudy

Thank you Donster! I was on the right track.

Unfortunately I'm foreign, so have no idea who Betty Crocker is. Some analysis of the joke context would seem to indicate the Betty Crocker would normally perform one of the following activities: 1) Pr0n star, hooker or similar 2) Bake cakes If 1) then this implies that a cake was baked but this does not fit in the wife's response so we should assume 2)...in which case:

Interesting article on Slashdot today about the lack of civilians in FPS games: http://games.slashdot.org/story/11/09/13/0113201/Why-Arent-There-More-Civilians-In-Military-Video-Games

...or send the data over a network to a secondary PC. Another of the things I haven't got round to doing yet is analysing the packets that TAW sends during multiplay. Maybe that data could be sniffed and visualised. Then there's the ACMI system. We did start to decode the .acmi files a while back. Just thinking out loud here.....

Well, I intend to still be around in 14 years so I'll look forward to it. What would be nice to do is somehow link the viewer to events in the game. Eagle_Flight knows the part of memory where the current position of the player's F22 (and other objects) is stored. If this information could be exported, we could theoretically create a real time game viewer. .....but I'm probably ignoring some impossible technical problem.

When have I ever done anything in a focused way? In this situation you have a point though, Typhoon is just too different to be of much use for the moment. Eagle_Flight, Some good ideas.....

My Install of Typhoon Gold contains 2 big data files, typhoon.dat and typhoon2.dat. I think the first one is used for the original game and the second one for 'Operation Icebreaker'. typhoon.dat contains 13920 files at >340Mbytes with no compression, while typhoon2.dat contains 14675 files with 'RA' compression, so is about 160Mbytes. I take back what I said about the engine....it looks very different to TAW. At least the textures are saved in some variant of .bmp though.

Well, you started it by mentioning it in your viewer source code. The priority is still TAW, but I'm somewhat curious to see what the Typhoon data files contain.....

I notice you've included Typhoon in the series as well. This was supposed to use the '3Dream' engine that was developed for 'Wargasm'. The model files are not in .3 format, but I'm not sure how different the engine is. There can be a lot of marketing hype. Typhoon has a similar .dat file structure to the earlier games, but unfortunately the program won't run inside a debugger to allow the extraction process to be examined. The game is now 10 years old though, and as Rage Software is no more, I no longer feel bound by the T&Cs about reverse engineering it....so will start treating it the same way as the earlier games.

I wonder if Ben is going to get court martialled for showing the jap fighters the way to that squadron of Liberators on 6th Sept.

Nein!