How to Use OAW

 

Okay, you have OAW installed, and everything is running smoothly. Now it's time to figure out what all this stuff does! Let's take a tour of the controls and see what this program is capable of. To begin, here is a screen shot of what you see when starting the program:

GENERAL SETTINGS

Looking across the top, we see a number of tabs. The first four are similar to the screen you see now. These are the screens you make your selections on. The General Settings screen is the one you are looking at now. We'll go through the next three a little further along in the tutorial. The blue button, as you can see, will launch EAW. The next button minimizes the Selector to the Start bar, and the pink button exits the program.

Below the Exit button, we see a purple button labeled "New OAW Directory". This is a rather interesting feature. It allows you to set up multiple OAW directories. Why would you want to do that, you ask? Well, consider how many files are available for EAW. There are thousands of aircraft skins, hundreds of ground objects, skys, terrains, and the list goes on. EAW is one of the most prolific communities on the internet, and fitting all of this work into one folder can make the system a bit unmanageable. So, you can set up an OAW directory for Europe, one for the Eastern Front, one for the Pacific, one for China, and so on. You could set them up by year. The possibilities are endless! The need for this feature will become more apparent as you add more to your OAW folders.

The next button in line is the yellow "Restore my original eaw.ini" button. When OAW is run for the first time, a copy of your eaw.ini file is saved. If at some point something goes a bit awry, you can restore your original ini by clicking this button.

The next button is VERY important. This is the red "Reset Completely" button. When you want to change your configuration, you need to click this button first. This will remove all the files that were added, and restore your EAW directory to it's pristine condition. Now you can reconfigure, relaunch, and fly in a whole new world! Please note that there are some unusual files used on occasion in some mods. Although OAW does a great job cleaning up after itself, once in a while there will be an anomaly when you change configurations and run the game again. If you notice this problem, exit the game, hit the "Reset Completely" button, and go into your EAW folder to check for extra files. Not sure what is original and what's not? Here is a list of files present in an EAW install with patch 1.2 and the no-cd fix installed:

Music - Folder
savedata - folder
3d.cdf
chatline.txt
COCKPITS.CDF
d3d.dll
DATA.CDF
Dsetup.dll
dsg.ico
eaw.exe
eaw.ini
eawcrk.txt
EAW-no_cd.txt
EXTRA.SPT
FLT.CDF
FONTS.CDF
grb_031.snd
GRBRIEF.CDF
hof.dat
Menu_eng.cdf
Movies.cdf
Music.cdf
PIC.CDF
readme.rtf
SMACKW32.DLL
SOUND.CDF
SOUND16.CDF
SPEECH1.CDF
SPEECH2.CDF
SPEECH3.CDF
Sprites.cdf
TERRAIN.CDF
Text_eng.cdf
UKBRIEF.CDF
Uninst.isu
Uninstall European Air War
USBRIEF.CDF
V1.1 Details.rtf
WSOUND.CDF
Wsprites.cdf

In addition, OAW has added these files, which should remain:

OAW folder
background
Kc
OAWbasic5.txt
OAWSelectV135F.exe

ANYTHING else can be removed. Don't worry about anything in the folders (Music, savedata, OAW) these will not adversely affect the game.

The next item visible is the screen resolution. You can change to whatever you like, as long as your video card can handle the change. If your video card is not capable of 1600x1200, this won't make it work. You'll have to play with this if you are unsure, but you can find your screen resolution by checking your Windows Properties by right clicking on the desktop and selecting "Properties", then going to "Settings". Move the slider in the lower right all the way to the left, and your maximum resolution will be displayed.

The next section is specifically for online use. These options include "No AIs" (no artificial intelligence, in other words no computer controlled aircraft are present), "Start on Ground" to begin an online mission as you would a campaign mission, "Allow Respawn" will allow you to appear in a new plane after being shot down, and 3 different sync rates - not sure about these, but if you are having problems connecting, you may find the solution with one of these.

Next on this page is the "Extra Squads". This is pretty cool. I turned it to 5 once in Nachtjager, and there were 36 Me-262s in my flight, with 96 B-17s escorted by 48 Thunderbolts! Awesome! Please note that this can severely affect your frame rates. You will have to experiment with this, and with how many things you add like ground objects or High Resolution planes, and so on.

Now we come to the big panel in the lower left, "Key Controls". If you move your mouse over each selection, #1 through #30, you will see a description printed over the image to the right. Basically, these items control what you see. If you want to fly with full realism, you would switch off the icons (the descriptions, range, etc about the enemy or friendly aircraft in the sky with you), or various cockpit views such as directly behind and so on. This puts you in an atmosphere very much like the pilots of World War II faced, They didn't have HUDs and the ability to see 360 degrees around themselves. This REALLY adds a challenge to EAW, especially online against human players.

There is also a check box for cheatcheck, to make sure that everyone is flying with the proper settings. But this being the EAW community, I have never heard of it being used.

Okay, that's the first page. Now let's move on to the real "meat" of this program -" World settings and Complete Sets".

 

WORLD SETTINGS AND COMPLETE SETS

 

On this screen, if you click on a subject in the pink area, a new list appears in the white area. In the above example, "Show All" shows a list of all folders installed in OAW.

To select something to be installed, simply click on a line in the white field to select it. You'll see activity in the blue bar at the top of the window where it says "OAWSelector V135 (With Nightswitch facility)" This will be a list of the files being added. At this point the white line you selected will turn green. If you decide you want to unload that change, just click it again, and it will be unloaded.

If you click on the second line in the pink area, you will get a list of all items that have been loaded:

(Note: this image has been cropped for clarity.)

Notice that all the items selected are in green. If you click on a green line here, it will unload that option, and the line will turn white.

If you look at the rest of the list, you will see everything broken down by category. These are controlled by the OAW.ini file. The OAW.ini file can be edited to add various categories to OAW. I will go into this aspect a bit further into this tutorial. But for now, we will continue our orientation. Here is the selection screen when I click on "Terrain Sets":

There are several things going on here. First off, notice the little gray box above the pink area labeled "Code Letter". This will tell you that for anything to appear in the white list area when "Terrain Sets" is chosen, the OAW folder must begin with the letter "T". You will note that in the white area, each terrain set has a "T" as it's first character. These names are taken directly from the name of each OAW folder. Also, note that the first line in the white area is gray, and has the caption "Only one selection can be made!". This is true of all categories except code letters G,X,Y and Z. G is for the Graphics, and X is currently used for Cockpits. These items can be changes. See the section on editing the OAW.ini file below for more information.

Now, one thing that is not apparent in the screen shot above is the location of my mouse pointer. Using the "Print Screen" function for a screen shot never picks up the mouse pointer. However, at the moment the screen shot was taken, the mouse pointer was hovering over the "T 4(EuroSummer) selection. Within this terrain folder, I have a screen shot of the appropriate terrain, and OAW will display this image in the window on the right. In earlier versions you had to name this picture "mypic". This is no longer necessary! (Thank you Mr. Jelly!!!) OAW will simply take any picture you have in the folder and use that. Whenever I download any type of mod, I generally download the picture that was displayed with it. Many people include such a picture in the zip file, but some do not, so I like to make sure.

Below the picture, you see a short description of the file, in this case "European Summer". This information is contained in a file called "contents.txt". This is a file that you must create yourself. A few people have started to include them, but most items don't since OAW is a fairly new program. I generally cannibalize the readme file, to include the author and other pertinent information, then save it as "contents.txt".

The next items of interest are the three buttons below the white selection area. The first is the "Nightswitch". This will allow you to turn any campaign into a night campaign! This is also available from Jelly's OAW Downloads as a separateutility. There has been some discussion about DOM's nightpatch possibly messing up some things in Windows. I have never had this problem personally, but this is such a great utility I think it's the way to go. If you click on it the following screen comes up:

If you installed OAW using the instructions in the OAW installation tutorial, you should have EAW 1.2 installed. There are quite a few varieties of the eaw.exe file, and they can all be used with OAW. Choose the appropriate one from the list and click the "Day==>Night" button. To return, click the "Reset to normal" button.

 

Next we have the "Edit Planes.dat". Clicking on this button brings up the following screen:

Note: This screen only comes up if you have a "Planes.dat" loaded into EAW. By default, this file is held in the file "DATA.CDF". CDF files are sort of like a zip file. When EAW needs something from one of these files, it checks to see if one is present in the EAW directory; if it is not, it is extracted from the CDF archive. This is the function that allows virtually all of the in-game mods that we do. If it were not this way, we would all be flying some other sim!! But, I digress..

Using this screen, you can make anything flyable, or a fighter into a bomber, or a bomber into a fighter, and so on. Simply highlight the aircraft you want to change, and the current settings will be displayed. Simply make your selections and close the screen.

The third button, labeled"Del MSN", is used to delete mission files.

The last item on this page is the Music Selection:

This section operates a bit differently than the rest of the program. There is a section below on setting up your music folders, please refer to that when adding music folders. As far as we are concerned here, you simply click on the music you want to use. The new folder will appear in the gray box at the top of this section.

 

PLANES AND SINGLE SKINS

Here is what we see when clicking the third tab:

Again, I won't go into loading the skin folders at this point, there is a section dedicated to that below. To select a skin, first choose the slot you want to fly in on the left. In this example above, I've chosen slot A-16, the Bf-109 E slot (shown in dark blue). Appearing to the right of the slot list is a new list. This is all of the folders I have set up in my OAW skinfolder that are set up to fly in the Bf-109E slot. I have chosen the last aircraft in the list, which happens to be a captured P-47 (shown in light pink). Once again, my mouse doesn't show up in the "Print Screen" function, but if I move my mouse over the various aircraft in the list on the right, the picture and description show up in the windows on the right.

Please note that to select an aircraft, you must double click on the name. To unload an aircraft, just double click it again. Also, you can go through the entire list and select a new skin for each slot. Note that of course you can only select one skin per slot.

New in version 135 is the little box on the bottom that says "Rename". This is a neat little feature that allows you to rename a folder without having to go into Windows Explorer or My Computer to do it. Just highlight the skin folder you want to rename, enter the text into the box, and click on the rename button.

Compare this to the image above. Neat, huh?

One other item of note is a little check box in the upper left that says "Include 'flt' files". For the P-47, I know that there is a flight file for this model in the folder, so I should check this box. Otherwise, I will still be flying a Bf-109 E for all intents and purposes, it will just look like a P-47.

That's all there is to this page. Pretty simple, eh?

 

AUTOSCRIPTS + WHAT"S LOADED

Clicking on the last tab brings us to what I think is the most amazing bit of this program. Look at the image below:

The Autoscript function is very handy indeed. Using it, you can create your own combinations of mods then save it with a name, and go back to it later without having to set everything up again. To start using Autoscripting, simply go through the World settings and Skins tabs making any selections you like, which loads them into the EAW folder. When you get to this screen, everything you have loaded will be displayed in the tan colored area in the center. To save it as an Autoscript, simply type in a name in the small white box where it says "Enter Autoscript Filename", click on the green "Save Current Settings" button and your Autoscript is ready to go! The new Autoscript will be displayed in the white area on the left.

When you want to load an Autoscript, first make sure there is nothing loaded in the EAW folder. If there is anything displayed in the tan area in the center, and it is not the Autoscript you want to run, click on the "Reset completely" button to clear everything out. Then highlight the script you want in the white area - the example shows Emil's Battle of Britain as being selected. Below the white area is a light blue field that displays all of the folders that make up the Autoscript for Emil's Battle of Britain. To load it into the EAW folder, click the bright green "OK load this one!"; the files will be copied to your EAW directory and will also be displayed in the tan area in the center. To quit an Autoscript, simply click on the red "Reset completely" button and your EAW directory will be rest to it's default setup.

If you want to delete an autoscript, highlight it in the white area, and click on the red "Delete the Autoscript" button. This will delete the Autoscript from the menu, but WILL NOT delete the folders that were used in it's creation.

SEASONAL CHOICES

The Seasonal Choices and Career selection sections have their own heading because they can get a bit tricky and are somewhat more complex than the other settings on this page. This is where OAW picks up on one of the neatest features of STAB - terrain switching. However, OAW goes one better. You can switch as much as you want - terrain, horizon, even skin sets! It's really very simple to do, so follow along below and you should have no problems.

First off, decide what campaign you want to use. For this example, I will use Emil's "European Theatre of Operations". To prepare OAW, remember to hit the "Reset Completely" button, available on the General Settings or Autoscripts tabs. I am going to fly the 1944 career, which begins in the spring and runs to the end of the war, so I will need all four seasons. I go to the "World Settings and Complete Sets" tab and select Paul Wilson's Spring Terrain:

Next, I switch to the Sky and Horizon Sets and pick +mia's ETO Blue sky:

Then I switch to Planes and Single Skins and select Alexander Alonso's Checkertail Clan P-51 D:

Now switch to the Autoscripts page and look at the "What's Loaded" window, the tan area in the center. You will see all of your selections:

Now check the box in the "Seasonal Choices" area that says "Spring" and click on the purple "Save as the seasonal settings checked" button. This will save your selections in a text file in the OAW directory called "Seaspr.txt".

Okay, now you need to set up the rest of the seasons. Click the"Reset Completely" button, and select a new set for summer, autumn and finally winter. I used the same skin, but switched the terrain and sky sets to something more appropriate. Make sure you click on "Reset Completely" before doing the next season. When you are done, you will have four text files in your Autoscript box. Actually, you should have them from the start, but now when you click on them, you will see a list of the files they "link" to in the light blue field.

The next thing to do is click on the "Reset Completely" button to clear the EAW folder. I had previously set up Emil's "European Theatre of Operations" as an auto script, with the eaw.exe in it's own file, a separate FM, sky, and career folder. Since I haven't flown a campaign in this mod yet, there won't be anything listed in the "Career selection" box. So, launch EAW and set up a campaign, flying the first mission of the campaign with the default terrain. Just make sure you fly a campaign using the same type of aircraft you intend to use. After the first mission, exit the game, exit OAW, and restart OAW. You should now see something like this:

If I place my mouse curser over the "CAREER00.SVE" listed in the "Career selection" list box, it changes to this:

If I click on the "CAREER00.SVE", it loads the appropriate seasonal settings, as determine by the files we just set up, and this is what you see:

Now, if you launch EAW, you should see your new terrain, sky and skins!!!

Very cool..

 

OAW INI

The oaw.ini file has a fairly simple function. It controls the folder codes for the program. The folder codes are displayed when you select the "World settings and complete sets" tab. Every folder you add to OAW must have this code in it in one of two formats:

H-Summer Storm

H Summer Storm

The letter code is always the first letter of the name of the folder. It is separated from the name of, in this case, a sky file by a hyphen OR a space. The files for the summer storm sky will be placed inside this folder, which is inside the OAW folder, which is inside the EAW folder.

The default oaw.ini looks like this:

Flight and damage models: F
Versions of the eaw.exe: E
Graphics (Multiple Selection): G
Career campaigns: Q
Terrain Sets: T
Skin Sets: S
Sky and horizon sets: H
Gunsights: O
Game sounds: N
Land Height: L
Online M folders: M
Non-career complete sets: W
Cockpits (Multiple Selection): X

Use Notepad to edit this file. You can then save it as "oaw.ini" without any problems. You can use any letter for anything you like; the above is simply the standard format. There are four special letters you should be aware of. In all categories you can only select ONE option, unless it's letter code is G, X, Y, and Z. These four letter codes are set up to handle multiple selections. For instance, there are many different ground objects you can place at once, so these are typically held in a "G" folder. You can use any letter of the alphabet you like. You just have to remember to add a line to the oaw.ini file. For example, if I wanted to create a folder just for buildings, I could use the letter "Y" because it hasn't been used, and since there are many buildings I can add at once, using the letter "Y" allows for multiple building selections. I then add the following line to the end of the oaw.ini file:

Buildings (Multiple Selection): Y

Make sure you leave a space between the colon and the letter.That's all there is to it. Now when I go into my "World settings and complete sets" tab, I will see it added there to the list:

Notice that the letter code "Y" is also displayed above the list. So, what now? How do you load things into OAW? That is our next subject!

 

SETTING UP THE FOLDERS

When you set up OAW initially, I'm sure you noticed a lot of folders in your OAW directory. When you go into OAW itself and try to see what might be in them, you will see in the yellow or tan (depending on the screen) description box something like this:

This means there is a folder set up for this add on, but it has not yet been loaded. You would do very well to just locate and load these particular items, but don't feel limited to only these. There are thousands of mods out there for use. The following instructions should give you a pretty good idea of how to set up these folders.

In basic terms, you download a mod, unzip it to a new folder within the OAW directory, and rename the folder according to the format suggested in the oaw.ini file. For example, you have Paul Wilson's summer terrain. Name the folder "T-Paul Wilson Summer", unzip the terrain into it, add a picture (I use the one from the page I got the terrain from in most cases) and a text file describing the contents of the folder named "contents.txt". That's all there is to it. The next time you start OAW it will show up on the terrain list.

Setting up the folders for OAW can be a bit time consuming if you try to do it all at once. I suggest doing them as you need them. If you look at the oaw.ini file, you will see a handy list that tells you where most things go. There are two items that DON'T go into one of these folders, the Autoscripts and the individual skins. Lets start at the top and see what's going on here. (By the way, ALL of these folders should be placed within your OAW folder inside your EAW folder.)

"F" folders - these are the flight and damage model files, also referred to as realism patches. The most popular of these are Knegel's rp2.3. They are available here . Using the Flight Models is a bit different than some of the other items in the list. When the FM is loaded and you go to the "Planes and Single Skins" tab, you will see the following screen come up:

This is the same screen we saw earlier, but there is a whole new panel displayed on the right hand side. If you look at the panel on the left, you will see that slot A-01, the P-38 J, has been selected. This brings up the second list, which shows which skins I have available for loading in the P-38 J slot. There are many P-38s listed. If you look at the fourth line from the bottom, you will see the following description:

A-01-p38j(Blenheim)_1

This is from RAF_Dumoulin's excellent Skinfolder 1.00 aircraft files. I highly recommend this set, as it will really get you going! To decipher it:

If you just click on the Blenheim to load it, it will look like a Blenheim, but it will actually be a P-38 J, with default armament and flight characteristics. Some models include a flight file, and if you check the box "Include 'flt' files", these will be included. However, if you look at the list on the right, because we have rp2.3 loaded, we see an option for the Blenheim. Click on it, and this Flight Model will also be loaded.

Below the flight model section there is also a place to change the fuel load for the aircraft. The amount next to the red "Fuel" box is the total amount possible for the aircraft. You can select a smaller amount by choosing one of the four percentages to decrease fuel load to that proportion. The gray box below that shows the maximum range of the aircraft.

"E" folders - These folders are for the various executable files. I have folders for each of Andy's mods, the default ones, some from campaigns, King Rats large fonts set up, etc. Load them all into these separate folders, rename them to "eaw.exe" and you are good to go! When selected, they will be loaded into your EAW directory, and when you click on "Launch EAW". this will be the one used.

"G" folders - This is where all the graphics go. That can be a bit misleading, because everything in this game (almost!) that we mod could be considered a graphic. I think of this in terms of ground objects. Buildings, trees, vehicles, that sort of thing. You will also note that you can make multiple selections in this category. That means you can load a building, a new set of trees, and some variety of vehicles all at the same time. I like to use a format of naming that includes which ground object it is, for instance if I'm using Col. Gibbon's excellent barns, they all use the tmod64 slot ( you can tell by looking at the files after unzipping) so I name the folder they are in G-64 Barn 1, G-64 Barn 2, etc. That way, you don't accidentally try to load three different barns into the same "slot" at once. There won't be any problems running the game, but you will only see the last one loaded. So, in short, I can load one graphic for each slot available, and there are a lot of them !!!! Keep in mind that many of these are High resolution, and loading too ,many may degrade performance of your system.

"Q" folders - These folders are used when you are loading a whole campaign set. Essentially any full mod that allows you to fly campaigns as opposed to single missions should go into a "Q" folder. When a "Q" folder is loaded, a "C" folder is created at the same time. This is where all of the career info is saved for the campaign. So, for instance, I load all the files for Desert Air War into a "Q" folder, the "C" folder is created automatically. After starting a career, if I look in the "C" folder for DAW, I will find the career and mission files for that campaign. These are copied into the savedata folder in the EAW directory. If you then reset OAW completely with the red button, the new career and mission file data will be stored again in the "C" folder, allowing you to jump back and forth between campaigns. So, you can fly a few missions over Europe, switch to the Pacific, go to the Desert, and son on without screwing up any campaigns, and no need to back up anything manually.

Please note that there are several ways to set up campaigns, and I will cover those in a section a bit later on.

"T" folders - Terrain files go into "T" folders. Simply unzip all terrain files into a folder, and rename it with a "T" and hyphen or space at the beginning. Make sure that you read the readme file that comes with a terrain set. Many terrains have special instructions, such as using high resolution versus low resolution tiles, and so on. Simply follow the instructions given by the author, except load the files into the terrain folder instead of the EAW directory.

"S" folders - These files are for SETS of skins only !!! Don not load individual skins into these. Although they should run okay, there is a different folder we will get to in a bit for individual skins. There is already enough folders going into the basic OAW directory; if you follow instructions below for individual skins, you will unclutter your life a bit. So, let's say you have a really great set of skins you put together for the Burma campaign, which doesn't have any skins with it. Put them all in one folder called "S-Burma". and you can load them all with one click, or include it in an autoscript.

"H" folders - These are very much like the terrain folders. Unzip your sky into a folder, use the "H" and hyphen or space, then the name of the sky.

"O" folders - Gunsights go here.

"N" folders - This is set up for game sounds - not music. Things like Meatwater's Sound Pack would go here.

"L" folders - This is for land height mods, like Hilly World.

"M" folders - These are for Online Missions. There are only a few of these so far, but as interest in online flying picks up, look for more of these. The idea behind these is that anyone flying online could simply load one of these pre-set missions, which would conform to anyone else loading the same thing. These missions aren't really designed for offline play as the bases are generally located very close to one another so people don't have to fly far after respawning (entering the game again after having been shot down) and they can get into the action quickly. RAF_Roy has been instrumental in designing these, and his work, M! and the Flying Circus missions, are must haves for this folder type.

"W" folders - This is where you can load complete sets that do not have a career capability. An example of this would be the original version of Knug's Russian Air War. It was designed only to fly single missions. Campaigns in this folder DO NOT create a "C" folder for saving data.

"X" folders - This letter is for Cockpit files. You can make multiple selections in this category, that is one selection per aircraft slot.

 

This covers the pre-established format for the OAW file structure. Keep in mind that these are basically the suggested format. You can actually put whatever you want into whatever letter code you want to do using any letter of the alphabet. Keep in mind that multiple choices can ONLY be made in categories using the letter codes G, X, Y, and Z. That is the only constraint, other than listing a heading and the letter code in the oaw.ini file separated by a colon and a space.

 

SETTING UP ALL IN ONE CAMPAIGNS

As mentioned above, there are several ways to set up the all-in-one, complete campaigns. The simplest way is the method described above, putting all files into one "Q" folder and letting it go at that. However, because OAW incorporates a neat little thing called the Autoscript, I use a bit of a different method. I have noticed in the various complete campaigns that many of them include terrains, executable files, skies, ground objects, skin sets, and so on, in addition to the required campaign specific files such as the mission and squad data. What I have done is split these files up so I have the terrain, skin sets, executables, etc. available for use with other campaigns and set ups, and I put ONLY the campaign specific files in a "Q" folder. Then I load all of these various parts, and create an Autoscript for the campaign. If you want to run Malta, for example, you need to do things this way because there are specific files that are needed for the German and British campaigns, as well as the single missions. These files conflict with each other and if you are set up for the Germans and run a British campaign, strange things will occur, like getting shot up on the runway. So, I set up the various files into folders, loaded the German Campaign set, created an Autoscript for the German Campaign, reset completely, loaded the files for the British Campaign set, created the Autoscript for the British Campaign, reset completely, loaded the files for the Single Missions, and finally created the Autoscript for the single missions. Now I can quickly switch between all configurations with ease.

SETTING UP THE SKIN FOLDER

The skin folder is actually a sort of "subset" of the OAW folder set up. Within the OAW directory, along with all the other letter-coded folders, is a directory called "Skinfolder". When OAW is first installed following the directions in my first tutorial, "OAW Installation", you will find a lot of folders in the Skinfolder with names such as "A-00-P38H()_Empty", or "A-23-190D(Gladi)_1". These are all empty folders that are set up to show you how to use the Skinfolder. In these examples, the first is essentially a place holder for the start of the folders using the P-38 H slot (A-00), and the second is an example of how to organize a folder name so you know the slot number (A-23), slot name (190D), the skin occupying the folder (Gladi - short for Gladiator) and the skin number (_1 - signifying this is the first of a number of Gladiator skins). Within each folder is a contents.txt file, and if you open it in Notepad, you will see instructions on how to the contents.txt files and what information and format is suggested.

So which skin goes in which folder? If you are unfamiliar with the file set up of the aircraft slots, there are 30 aircraft slots available for EAW as shown in this list:

00 p38h
01 p38j
02 p47c
03 p47d
04 p51b
05 p51d
06 bb17
07 b24d
08 b26a
09 hurr
10 sp2a
11 sp09
12 sp14
13 typh
14 temp
15 mosq
16 109e
17 109g
18 109k
19 110c
20 110g
21 m410
22 190a
23 190d
24 262a
25 j88a
26 j88c
27 ju87
28 h111
29 v1v1

When installing a skin into OAW, unzip the files to a new folder and look at any of the files. All skin 3dz files start with a "p", followed by the four number/letter code shown above, and then a few other characters such as F, G, TEX, etc. At the end is the file extension. So if you open a folder and see something like "phurrf.3dz", you know this skin belongs in the Hurricane slot which is slot number 09. So the OAW folder name should start with A-09 followed by a space, then some sort of name that identifies the contents such as "Hurricane Mk I 1940". In this example you would see "A-09 Hurricane Mk I 1940".

I use a little different format for my skins. I might list the above Gladiator as "A-23 Gladiator MkI Malta", for instance, so I know which campaign it is intended for. I know that this information can and should be included in the contents.txt file, but I have a LOT of skins, and this helps narrow the search. Work with it a bit and find what's right for you, but remember the folder name MUST start with the slot number !!!!

When you set up one of these skin folders, make sure that all of the files are in the main folder, such as my "A-23 Gladiator MkI Malta" folder shown above. Sometimes there is another folder within that might use variants, or a cockpit, or some such; I recommend all files be in one folder as I don't think OAW will copy a folder over to the main EAW directory, just the files.

SETTING UP THE MUSIC FILES

The latest versions of OAW are now including a function to set up music files for EAW. This is a very interesting aspect of the program. Most people quickly become bored with the intro, radio, and ambience music for the stock game. This gives you an opportunity to load your own music. On the "World settings and complete sets" tab in the lower left, there is a box that looks something like this:

At first, both the "Current Music" box and the blue selection box will be empty. If you look in your EAW directory, you will see a folder labeled "Music". If you look within, you will see a number of files with a .bgm extension. The name of the file is fairly self explanatory as to when the music is played. Open Notepad, and type "Default EAW" into a new document, and save it as "Music.txt". If you open OAW now, you will see as the selected music, "Default EAW" as shown above. Now create a new folder in your EAW directory, and call it "Music#1". Note there are no spaces, and of course don't include the " in the file name. Go into this folder, open Notepad, enter something describing the type of music you will be putting in the folder, such as "American Music" from the example above. Save this file as "Music.txt" (note that there is no number; in fact, it's the same name used previously) in the new Music#1 folder and start OAW again. You will now see a new option for music. To switch, simply click once on the music you want to hear from the blue selection box, and the music from the American Music folder will be used.

Please note that nothing is actually copied from the music folder to EAW; it is simply run directly from this folder.

You can have up to 7 of these music folders. To get started, I would suggest that you look at Sandbagger's on his "Screens, Sounds and Savers" page. Go to the "Music" page for a nice variety. If you would like to create your own, record the music you want with Windows Recorder or something similar, save it as a wav file, and rename it to the appropriate bgm file, such as "Menumus.bgm" for menu music. Very simple !

 

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, I would like the thank the creators of OAW, Mr. Jelly, RAF_Roy, and Knegel, as well as the people that have really promoted it's use like RAF_Dumoulin, and Oberst Herr Shreck. Also, I would like to thank VonBeerhofen for creating the EAW LAUNCHPAD, where we can all get together and use OAW for the original intention, flying online. If you haven't flown against a real person, you must really give it a go. It is quite a humbling experience !!!

 

 

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