Creating OAW - type EAW Missions - Page 4 - ver. 2



~ Adjustments to the Tutorial Mission ~

In Page 3 of the Tutorial I showed you the Airfield.dat editing.We coded 4 active airbases and deactivated all others.Now since this is shaping up to be a nice little scenario we might as well go all the way through coding it.I think we'll use a few more airbases.So at this point its time to pick some more airbases.

One extra one is Orianenburg.Its conveniently located between the moved airbases and Berlin and according to our Frontline is now on the Allied side.
But there's a slight problem.It is coded as a French base.This means we have to change another byte.

~ Back to Airfield.dat for what I forgot! ~

Actually to be truthful, I didn't forget it.Its just I never recoded an airbase this way.The base showed before on the Allied side, but couldn't be selected for use.So I had to look into it.
I knew it was probaly all there in Moggy's pages.While it doesn't spell it out exactly in regards to this I took a guess and change the nationality code at byte 42 from 01 to 00.It works.

Here's the original Airfield.dat byte coding:

The code 01 for * German is highlighted at the cursor.
(* update: Corrected this from original Page 4 that incorrectly listed 01 as "French")

And here's the new edited version:

Code 00 is used for British

Next its on to activating some more airbases.. Briest for Allied looks good.Borkheide and Magdeburg for the Axis.All 3 of these need to be Un-FF FF'd and for Briest the same changing of the nationality code is necessary.


New German airbase Magdeburg is at the Iron Cross and Borkheide at cursor.

The now Allied airbase Briest is at the red x

This scenario is really shaping up!Now that there are 4 active airbases for each side I think its time to move on to setting the regular bases ;)

~ Base appearance, Or Not , Activation and "The Bomber Fix" ~

If you remember, on Page 1 under "Finding a Base to move, Targets.dat and the relation to Griddata" , in the pic example of the OAWM1 Griddata.dat it showed the base address was "zeroed".
Griddata.dat addresses for unwanted bases / cities / targets are simply "zeroed" out.Then they do not show up in the EAW World.At least not when you are flying - Ufortunately they will still show in the preflight target selection screen from the hangar menu, and inflight map as dots.
Of course, if the base is set in a Griddata address that also codes other bases you still want to appear, then you would not zero the address, but just remove the unwanted ones from the code.
Take for example where you coded Rattlesden and Knettishall - if you had set 3 bases there and the first had been Bodney with a T-code; 41 then later wished to remove it, you would recode as done starting with Rattlesden T-code; 42.
If you have an address that codes many bases and removing them would mean skipping some and it would not be sequential, i.e. if you wanted to keep T-code 41 and 43 but remove 42 then you would have to move 43 to another Griddata address.

On Page 3 you also learned how to deactivate Airbases.But this doesn't solve the problem of bases of all types being fully removed from the scenario.They will still be selected automatically for targeting by EAW during Online Missions.
The solution is to apply what I call "The Bomber Fix" .

All that is needed is to "zero" the Targets.dat byte 19 (byte 20 of 32) which is described by Moggy in his techtargets.htm as, "Bytes 18-19 fix the numbers of records (or lines) pertinent to this target location in tardata.dat, and therefore the number of actual target mods in this location."

Note that; as far as I know, only byte 19 is used! - I believe this was confirmed by Moggy in a recent post.

This "zeroing" of that byte 19 "tells" EAW that no targets are present at the base for targeting, and thus the bases are not selected bomber missions, etc.

(edited 4/2007) **********************************************

Here's an example of Berlin's address byte 19 ..

Berlin has 43 tmods present by defaut which converted to hexidecimal = 2B.

If you added more tmods(objects) at the tardata location or removed some,you would need to recode this number.If you wanted none at all to appear or be targeted, you would need to zero it.

Of course there is even a remedy for this replacing process, in that; if you use newer Tardata edit tools to code the the bases, usually those programs will recode the byte 19 with the new number of tmods present.
**********************************************

~ Bases chosen for the scenario ~

For my tutorial I decided to just use the 4 Airbases for each side and additionally, for the Allies ; Stralsund and Tutow coded just as they are.For the Axis including Brandeburg , Erkner and Anklam coded also as they are currently.

more