Krycztij
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Posts posted by Krycztij
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Yes, I had seen the preview for Assault Horizon and never gave a s**t about that piece of crap again. Eew.
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I'd like to ask the same question. Do they just stick in the air, or do they turn before reaching the border?
Edit: The "compare x to 400, jump if greater" instruction encodes to the following bytes:
if x is in eax: 3D 90 01 00 00 7F
"jump if lower or equal": 3D 90 01 00 00 7E
for 399: 3D 8F 01 00 00 7F
Maybe you find some of those bytes in the EXE. Those are all 32-bit checks. If TAW uses 16-bit checks, I don't have a compiler old enough to generate such instructions
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I loved Ace Combat 1–7, which were pure arcade. Ace Combat Squadron Leader (A.K.A. The Unsung War) has a fantastic storyline and is one of the best games I ever played. I hated Ace Combat 3 when it was released, but nowadays I must admit it was revolutionary.
None of EF 2000's / TAW's strengths (realism, tactics, dynamic campaigns, stealth) can be found in Ace Combat, and none of Ace Combat's strengths (great storyline, emotion, dedication to characters and moods, rapidly different locations) can be found in EF2000 / TAW. They complement each other very well.
This video sums up pretty well what AC is for me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icm19eT_Tvo
Pure fiction, but AWESOME entertainment; and you can't compare it at all to TAW. Love to play both
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The WIDE sidelengths accepted, thus far, now include 400, 640, 800 and 1200. Height appears to be fixed.
Holy cow — 6000 km. With 32-bit precision, even if I magically solved integer wrapping problems, I could only address this to 1.4 mm (or 0.055 inches). I already feel accuracy problems in TFXplorer with planes rolling on the ground, and my current accuracy is about 1mm
I could instead use 64-bit coordinates, but these would be overkill (submilimeter precision from Earth to Jupiter), they would make the 32-bit version pretty slow, and it would be a pain to program (I'd need 128-bit intermediate results).
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Me too. I'm still thinking about the new coordinate system for TFXplorer; tough stuff …
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Isn't that image also wrong? It should be 256×1024 so the tiles are square …
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So, only 400 and 640 are accepted and all other sidelengths cause in-game errors or CTDs?
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Awesome! That would be 3200 km sidelength. If that area was accessable, it meant I'd have to change my fixed-point math. Maybe if you edited mission files, you could place A.I. planes in the new terrain and see if the simulation works … please keep me updated!
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One suggestion? On Post #1, point (ie. give link) to Post #44 which is far more comprehensive in detailing changes than Post #1. Just a thought.
Done
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Update!
I updated the links in the post above. Changes:
- improved TFX2 compatibility
- can select only active parameters in SSDs (just like with 3s)
- now supports 512×256 and 512×512 true-color textures
- renamed AGP on/off to version Glide/Direct3D
The SDK link above now includes source code for TFXplorer.
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announcing the first
Update!
System Requirements:
Tested on Windows XP, 7, 8, and 8.1.
You need a Direct3D 9-compatible graphics card (ATI Radeon 9500 / Nvidia GeForce MX or higher — basically any decent GPU you bought after 2003).
Download:
https://app.box.com/s/nq75ymmleu2fbcyjvc6u
Setup:
If you have already installed an older version of TFXplorer, or if you use 3View, you can skip the following steps:
- If you have not already installed the DirectX End-User Runtimes (June 2010), get them here. Otherwise, TFXplorer will not start due to D3DX9_43.DLL and other files missing.
- The same goes for the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86).
If you have Total Air War 2.0 installed, place TFXplorer x86 in the Total Air War 2.0 folder.
If you have ADF or TAW installed, place it in their PROGRAM folders.
Double-click TFXplorer x86. A console should pop up and after quick loading you'll be in the game.Usage:
In-Game:
- Plane controls are just like TAW's (but the physics are a little different).
- Use the mouse to look around you, and F1 to reset the view. Mouse wheel zooms in and out.
- P pauses the game.
- SHIFT+S cycles the time of day. N toggles night vision at night.
- SHIFT+Q quits the game or switches to explorer mode.
- SHIFT+T toggles time warp.
You can switch to explorer mode via SHIFT+Q; X:
- Press the left mouse button to move forward.
- SHIFT+S cycles the time of day. N toggles night vision at night.
- F1 toggles wireframe rendering.
- F2 takes a screenshot and saves it as a bitmap with a reconnaissance-like look.
- F3 switches from Glide to Direct3D and vice versa (only important for developers).
- F4 toggles target names.
- F5 brings you back to in-game mode.
- Repeatedly press S to increase viewing range, or X to decrease.
- NUMPAD 6, 2, 4, and 8 glide north, south, west, and east.
TFXplorer is compatible to Super EF2000, but supports explorer mode only. You can place it in the same location as any supported DID.DAT.
64-Bit Version (it's faster!):
The 64-bit version requires Windows Vista or later; you'll also need the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 Update 3 (x64). All else is the same.
Download: https://app.box.com/s/ugo20lue8db5ejdsi4syChanges:
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In-Game Mode:
- view is more like TAW's
- added full throttle on numpad *
- engines can now be switched on and off
- engines have spin-up and spin-down time
- yaw on , and .
- screen savers and hibernation are suppressed while the game is running
- the game will automatically pause when it loses focus or when forced to hibernation
- removed all controls which are not in TAW, too (use editor mode to adjust viewing range, to glide over the map, for wireframe, etc.)
- fixed F1 not resetting zoom
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Explorer Mode:
- pressing F2 in explorer mode allows to save reconnaissance screenshots
- left mouse button accelerates gently
- limited yaw (you cannot stand upside down any more)
- same controls in TFX2 mode and TFX3 mode
- renamed "123W 123N" to "123E 123N" (because the numbers ascend to east, not to west)
- added compass
- added contrast to place names
- removed the keys for unknown flags
- fixed scrolling speed (should be 10 seconds end-to-end on all systems now)
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Graphics:
- more objects than before may be visible now
- now supports 512×256 and 512×512 true-color textures
- text is scaled at high resolution (if the hardware supports it)
- fixed invalid level of detail for some objects
- fixed blank screen after CTRL+ALT+DEL on Vista or later
- fixed HUD alignment
- major performance improvements
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Input:
- now supports mapping and naming of DirectInput axes and buttons
- now considers calibrated center of axes
- now honors preferred joystick
- now supports high-resolution mouses
- fixed a bug where some axes or buttons would not be recognized
- fixed input leaks
- fixed a minor keyboard throttle issue
- fixed minor bugs with text output
- minor performance improvements
- renamed "AGP on/off" to "version Glide/Direct3D"
- reduced console output
- resized console to match TAW 2.0 output
- fixed wrong version in title bar
- fixed SSE detection
- major performance improvements
Have fun
And again: if you run into any problems, or if you have suggestions, let me know here!
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Sorry — I meant, imagination on how I'll get nine-character names into my texture manager. Associating texture names with actual Direct3D texture objects is a pain, and it's one of my major performance bottlenecks … eight characters was alright, because I could directly stuff them into one 64-bit integer
And the clouds look nice not only for TAW but on an absolute scale, too
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Almost there!
One problem though: I cannot handle file names in non-8.3 format. So, I had to rename strm-flpl and strm-flpj to make it work … I'll have to use my imagination on that :-(
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Interesting. I always suspected the sidelength of 400 tiles was hard-coded, as was the tile sidelength of 2048 units.
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These screenshots are in-game TAW. TFXplorer does not yet fully support the true-color texture format DKD uses (though I'd love to have one of those modified files to implement it!).
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Awesome! Looking forward to it …
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Awesome!
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Oh … I'm sure the quiz was not there from the beginning; so: sorry, I didn't see the edit until Mike posted
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Me neither
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I'm unsure if that is Luxor on the first snapshot. Nah; my guess is Aswan
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I think on the 2nd snapshot, that's Aswan High Dam in the far distance …
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No; to .ssd and .3. E.g. for a shape, the entire state is 19 2-byte integers. Writing this to a file and reading it out again is not hard. SSD is more complicated, of course, but from what I've seen so far, it is also just values, indices, and some integer variables. I.e. in RAM it looks exactly like it does on disk, so game state could be backup up on HDD in real time.Are you referring to the .sav file here? -
Yes, but if you do that, you'll need to replay the 'blow up' animations. (I guess TFX just stores 'is this object damaged?' and if it is, it repeats the animation so it looks exactly like a damaged object has to. I, on the other hand, speak about dumping the entire object state, including animation progress.)
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I'm really keen on seeing that 'blowing up' appear in TFXplorer. It would be interesting to see if the state of *all* campaign objects could be held in RAM to avoid that animation.
(I guess that would be ~100 MiB for all terrain objects — 400×400 supershapes with 10 objects and 40 B of state information each, plus some state for the supershapes. More interesting: Seems like TFX's state information is just numbers and offsets, but no C pointers. So, technically, the entire scenario could be held in a 100-MiB memory-mapped file on your hard drive; and with dirty flags, you could save, load, or e-mail any scenario at any frame with exact reproducability. Just dreaming here.)
TAW terrain format
in F22: ADF / TAW
Posted
Sounds much like a hard-coded limit. I did the same in TFXplorer; if you reach the edge of the 399th tile, the plane just sticks in the air …
Because of the integer math problems, I will implement >400 worlds only if it allows playing meaningful missions in TAW, too. Please keep me updated!