MAW Campaign Play Mod Uploaded

[Daiwilletti]

Hi, once this is made available by the Moderators, you will find a package under CFS3 Other Addons - Betas.

"This package consists of a BETA set of modified .xdp and .xml files for MAW version 1.31a. MAW must be carefully installed with all the upgrades, following the instructions carefully, for these amended files to have any hope of working properly.

DO NOT install unless you are comfortable backing up files, testing CFS3 for problems, and are familiar with the Application Data for your install, etc. ** In other words, use at your own risk, it works for me, but no other warranty is implied. ********


This set of changes allows for Malta 1940 and 1941 and Greece 1940 campaigns to be played with fewer crashes. I have not yet looked at the North African campaign spawns.


Essentially these changes were driven by a desire to reduce crashes in campaign play."

Hope all five of the MAW fans out there enjoy this....

 

[HouseHobbit]

Thanks Master David,
looking forward to dancing with this one..
BRAVO!!

 

[Kodiak]

Thank you very much, Dai!

Got side-tracked by real life over the last week or so, but headed out to download now and get back to my attack on Malta (Italy 1940)

I'll let you know how things go...

Cheers!

 

[Kodiak]

Hi Dai,

Hit an error right away. With your mods installed (I downloaded and installed both of your uploads) when I run the MAW Spawning Setup Utility I get the following error:

RandomSpawningToggler
Run Time Error
File Already Exists

I backed out your files and ran it again and it runs fine. So some kind of conflict and I'm not sure what to do.

Will wait to hear back from you. I've got your files setup to install with JSGME so just one click and they are in or out and easy to reinstall.

Thanks!

 

[Daiwilletti]

Hi Dai,

Hit an error right away. With your mods installed (I downloaded and installed both of your uploads) when I run the MAW Spawning Setup Utility I get the following error:

RandomSpawningToggler
Run Time Error
File Already Exists

I backed out your files and ran it again and it runs fine. So some kind of conflict and I'm not sure what to do.

Will wait to hear back from you. I've got your files setup to install with JSGME so just one click and they are in or out and easy to reinstall.

Thanks!

Hi Kodiak,

Did you set up the spawns to Allied Malta 1940 before transferring over the spawns? I can't see how the random spawning toggler would have problems if that was done per the Readme.

HTH,

 

[Kodiak]

Hi Kodiak,

Did you set up the spawns to Allied Malta 1940 before transferring over the spawns? I can't see how the random spawning toggler would have problems if that was done per the Readme.

HTH,

You mean I should read the "How To Install" file first...lol My eyes went right past it looking for a readme yesterday...lol

Just followed your instructions this time and no problem with the spawns. I'm going in to start playing as Italy 1940 Malta now and will let you know how it goes. I never could finish a mission at all without a CTD flying a Malta 1940 Italy campaign so it can't be any worse...lol

Also, another question from your instructions:

4. The effects.xml file is only slightly modified, removing the duplicatory 16 in gun effects.
Q: I'm using your Missing Effects Textures mod so I got the warning of a file overwrite from JSGME. I pulled Missing Effects Textures to get this new version. Does your new file also include the missing effects textures in addition to the 16 inch gun effects fix? If not maybe a new version with both missing effects textures and the fix on 16 in gun effects? Would a combined file with both fixes be for MAW only (I've been using the Missing Effects Textures in ETO, PTO, and KTCS also). I had planned on testing the pilotattributes file in other versions also.

Thanks!

 

[Daiwilletti]

4. The effects.xml file is only slightly modified, removing the duplicatory 16 in gun effects.
Q: I'm using your Missing Effects Textures mod so I got the warning of a file overwrite from JSGME. I pulled Missing Effects Textures to get this new version. Does your new file also include the missing effects textures in addition to the 16 inch gun effects fix? If not maybe a new version with both missing effects textures and the fix on 16 in gun effects? Would a combined file with both fixes be for MAW only (I've been using the Missing Effects Textures in ETO, PTO, and KTCS also). I had planned on testing the pilotattributes file in other versions also.

Thanks!

Errm, too many questions for this time of night, lol!

The thing with the so called "missing effects" is that the original effects.xml called for some .tga files. Hence I've provided some. However
a) I don't know if they are strictly necessary as the game may use the .dds files with the same name
b) I don't know (although it's likely) whether the MAW effects.xml contains the original "heritage" references to the .tga texture files.

It can't hurt to throw in those textures however they are no different AFAIK from the ones you've already uploaded. the thing with the 16in effects is I'm sure it will run better without a duplicate entry in the effects.xml but it has nothing to do with the .tga textures.

The pliotattributes should be portable across installs. If you look at the knowledgebase sticky you will find some stuff I put in there about what entries you can put into the pilotattributes file - essentially any of those found in the campaign. somethingorother file (sorry I'm tired) under the campaign entry in My Documents.

But of course care is required, because it is quite easy to end up with a squadron full of Admirals or Air Marshalls if you tweak up the default attributes too much

 

[Kodiak]

Thanks for the reply/info above, Dai.

Well, I flew two Campaign bomber missions last night as Italy 1940 against Malta and got a CTD both times. It is very predictable: Always on my return leg after bombing Malta at about 30 miles from my home airfield I get the CTD (same as before I added your new files). If there are any log files I could look at or send you I would be glad to. To recreate it, just start a campaign as an SM.79 bomber pilot Italy 1940 Malta in MAW, then select AN21 and choose the Ammo Dump as your target and bomb it. I'm interested if anyone else gets this CTD like I do so predictably...always about 30 miles out from my home airfield on my return leg on the first mission of the campaign. I've never made it to mission 2 under these circumstances.

Thanks, and willing to keep testing if you have any ideas or changes you want to try. It seems to me like the CTD is at the point a file is loading as memory overload or something along those lines I wouldn't think would be so predictable.

 

[Daiwilletti]

Hi Kodiak,

In my first thread about reinstalling 1.31a there was mention of something about the mesh. IIRC they suggested turning the scenery level down. It may be you only have to make the changes when flying campaigns in some areas.

Yes I am still getting those frustrating crashes when flying from Sicily as an Axis player (which was a while ago as real life intrudes). I don't remember if I got those crashes in QC mode too? In which case that would eliminate the random air spawns from being a problem (although ground.spawns are still in play). However testing changers to sliders would be quicker in QC mode.

keep us posted!

 

[Kodiak]

Thanks, Dai.

I remember reading that now from your earlier thread. I'll try turning the scenary level down. So far, knock on wood, I've had no other CTD's in MAW, and I'm flying all sides, all locations in MAW other than Greece.

Also, whatever you did was great in another aspect. In route to Malta from Sicily I had always flown over some British ships doing nothing. After I added your files there was a naval battle going on down there. From 12,000 ft altitude I could see the water plumes from misses and the large guns firing!

 

[HouseHobbit]

Yea several years ago there was a long thread on this problem in MAW.
In areas of MAW the Scenery level Must be set a 3 and the terrains must be set at 3.

I don't remember what was the final decision why this was.
But when I built missions in MAW I found this CRT problem disappeared when I changed my settings .
Other then some spawn issues MAW is and will remain a well loved and flown expansion.
Grateful to the Masters for this expansion..

 

[Kodiak]

Thanks for the info, HouseHobbit!

I waited until I had flown 4 sorties as an Italian bomber pilot in the 1940 MAW Malta campaign before reporting back:

1. With all of Dai's files installed and the Scenery turned down to 4, but Terrain still at 5 I flew my first two missions without a CTD.

2. Then I uninstalled Dai's files but kept Scenery at 4 and flew two more missions without a CTD...yea

So I'm able to now run missions with all sliders at 5 except scenery which is at 4 (5 and 5 killed me every time with a CTD). Sounds like it is machine dependent as I read that 2 or 3 years ago folks were having to turn Scenery and Terrain down in the 2 to 3 range, which would make sense as I had hoped I had a stronger machine than from back then (I bought my machine in 2012). If I get more CTD's I'll turn down Terrain to 4 as my next step, but so far so good.

For the learning experience I'm now going to slowly install Dai's fixes one at a time (as he suggested in the Readme), as I saw all sorts of good stuff happening in those first two missions with them in. I was just in a hurry to get things running so I added them all and turned down scenery to 4 all simultaneously, but decided to back up and do things a little more pragmatically once I realized the fix was in there somewhere

Thanks to both of you for helping me get the MAW Malta Italian campaign running!

 

[Kodiak]

More questions

1. I just got my first air start in MAW. I don't like air starts. Is there a file I can edit to eliminate them.

2. In defending Malta I'm outnumbering the Italian flights 8 Gladiators to 3 Italian fighters or bombers. Is there a way I can change the flight size maybe to something like the reverse (3 or 4 Gladiators to 8 SM.79 for instance - and hopefully escorted by 6 or 8 CR.42's).

I've poked around in the campaign file but couldn't find anything related to either of the above.

Thanks!

 

[Daiwilletti]

Answers?

OK, good to hear you've gotten beyond the dratted CTD problem. I also experimented with the sliders.

I found that Corfu also had a big CTD problem (Greece 1941 campaign, flying for the Allies out of Corfu). I moved scenery and terrain sliders to 4, and flew a couple of successful missions, no CTDs. I was waiting to fly a few more before reporting back.

However I did note that on the frontline, Axis artillery was not working well - whereas Allied artillery was banging away nicely. Also in the DR_Greece_1941 campaign, some of the aircraft in the techtree are listed as available, before the entered service dates in their xdp files. I tend to edit the availability date in the campaign file to match the xdp, however this sometimes causes an unacceptable gap in availability of aircraft for a particular country, so another aircraft has to be added.

To your questions:

1. I just got my first air start in MAW. I don't like air starts. Is there a file I can edit to eliminate them.

- Air starts occur when there is a mismatch between the global layer of the era you are playing and the *.lib file found in the campaign data for your character, which is found under My Documents pathway. Some sort of corruption has occured unfortunately - perhaps forgetting to re-run the campaign spawn setting utility when switching campaigns. If you go into the campaign data for the particular character affected (the pilot you have created for the campaign) you will find some *.cmpstat files with matching *.lib files under the My documents pathway. Go into the last *.cmpstat file, (using notepad) and try replacing the problematic airbase with another airbase (the easiest way is to take another airbase from within the *.cmpstat file, appropriate to your nation)

2. In defending Malta I'm outnumbering the Italian flights 8 Gladiators to 3 Italian fighters or bombers. Is there a way I can change the flight size maybe to something like the reverse (3 or 4 Gladiators to 8 SM.79 for instance - and hopefully escorted by 6 or 8 CR.42's).

- altering the number of enemy aircraft is easy. Altering the number of friendlies in your flight is a bit harder but also possible.
If the enemy aircraft are the mission objective (eg. CAP, intercept, sweep, etc) then you go into the spawn files for that particular campign mission type and change the number of units. If the small number of aircraft are encountered as random spawns, you can tweak the random air spawn files for enemy aircraft (eg. eub, eeb, etc).

In order to change the number of wingmen on your campaign flight, you need to open the _mission.xml file under the Mission folder in the Application Data pathway for CFS3 Mediterranean Air War. Be careful to ensure the mission format is followed with unit numbers sequential etc, when you remove some of your wingmen from that file. That Mission xml file is generated each time you select a campaign mission objective (eg Strike Railway) for a particular sector. So the hard part is to select the desired mission objective ingame, then tab out of CFS3 and go into the _mission xml flight and edit it, before going beyond the Briefing screen to the takeoff position. I'm sure the boys at OFF do this tweaking of the _mission.xml through their Manager. It would be a lot easier if we had a Manager too. I cannot remember if the Scenery Manager v 4.7 that Winding Man created, is able to edit the number of wingmen you have on a campaign mission.

Something I looked at a while ago was instead of using the complex Mission Manager, to use a hotkey process (there is a Hotkey exe freeware available). What is needed is to script an instruction which the Hotkey executes. I got very close to a successful script so that in the game, when I hit the designated hotkey, the script edited the _mission.xml file (in my case, I was editing my wingmen skill to 3 from the default 1). Close but no cigar, I'm sure someone with some base knowedge could whip something up pretty quickly. I did not sink enough time into it, real life intruded too much darn it.

HTH, sorry I tried to tread a line between complexity and readability in this reply

 

[HouseHobbit]

Yes with the newer faster machines we have now, settings of 4 or 5 could work.
Compared to what we had years ago when 3 was needed in certain areas of MAW.

I am going to Dance with Master David's work as soon as I can.
rather tied up with real life issues right now.
Haven't had the time to dance in my CFS 3 stuff, much the past week or so here.
Bummer.
Grateful for ALL the Masters who keep improving our Beloved CFS3 and expansions.
Bravo Guys! Much rejoicing!!

 

[Kodiak]

Thanks for this great info, Dai!

I was able to immediately go to the mission file and scale down my Gladiator count to 3 and take up Faith, Hope and Charity in my early defense of Malta

Also adjusted the plane count on some of the Italian formations in the spawn files but haven't seen those plane types yet so don't know if I got that right, but looked pretty straight forward. Lot's of nice variation in plane count in the spawn files so won't be pushing everything up to 8, but did on a few, and can also vary the count from time to time now. Couldn't figure out the airstart problem by fixing it, so just restarted my campaigns and all is well. I've been mucking around with so many things I probably got something out of whack...lol

I really appreciate all your help!

Cheers!

Now I'm going to see if I can solicit a favor in a new thread

 

[Kodiak]

Dai,

A question I forgot to ask earlier regarding the plane count in the spawn files:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- enemy unescorted fighters -->
<AirFormation Directive="strike" Country="italy" FormType="diamond" Points="1" DamagePercent="50" GoalID="generated">
<Unit Repeat="8" Type="ai_sm79_49a"/>
<Route>
<Waypoint Type="turn" PositionType="player-die-roll" Die="2d6" Speed="100"/>
<Waypoint Type="bombing" PositionType="facility-die-roll" Distance="100" Die="2d6" Speed="100"/>
<Waypoint Type="turn" PositionType="home" Speed="100"/>
</Route>
</AirFormation>

I increased Repeat from 5 to 8 in the file above. The largest formation I've seen in CFS3 is 8 total planes. Is that a hard number (ie: it will blow up with 9 for sure) or is it a common sense number (ie: the AI probably can't handle larger numbers).

Also, is "Repeat" in addition to the first plane, or is it the total number of planes in the flight. In my example above will I get 8 or 9 planes in a flight, and based on my question above, if 9 will the game crash.

Could you talk a little about this number, how it works, and the limits?

Thanks!

P.S. After this I'll go away for a while and just enjoy the game, but this all very interesting to me!

 

[Daiwilletti]

OK that's great Kodiak, sounds like editing the _mission.xml was useful.

Do read the latest *.cmpstat file for one of your campaigns. Use Notepad. You can tweak up your squadron's skill points and attributes there if they need brushing up. Also, IIRC I put a longer explanation in the knowledgebase sticky, about the interrelation between the campaign file, the *.cmpstat file, the UIsel.xml, the pilotconstants and the pilotattributes files, and how they work to create your gameplay experience in a campaign. Hence some of the files in the MAW tweak I uploaded will be most noticeable in campaign flying.

By the way I've spread myself pretty thin on this stuff so I hope anyone else will jump in anytime who knows a bit more about some of this stuff, I enjoy learning too!

The Unit repeat = 8 is the total for the flight. No it is not a hard and fast number, but for campaign play 8 is the default for your own flight, it seems to be a hard coded thing. Hence the need to edit the _mission.xml, which they do so well for OFF.....

By the way, there is an alternative way to get a higher plane count of differing planes. In the spawn table file (in this case air.spawns but could be cap.spawns or another) it is possible to refer to two or more spawn xml files, for a single die roll. So on one line of the spawn table eg:

<Spawn ID="4" FormationType="air_euf"></Spawn>, it is possible to reference "air_euf,airfighterslow,takeoffintercept,unescortedbombersmedium" all on the entry for ID=4. Hence if the automatic die roll = 4, four different spawn events are triggered, each iwth a specified number of aircraft. (By the way those spawns mentioned are fictional) I've played around with this in the past and it works well, but if the spawns are too similar there is a helluva tangle there for a while, so I tend to put in altitudes in the spawn xml files if I do that, so that the different formations are spatially separated. Could use other methods like making a spawn event relative to a player or facilty of course, but then the appearance of some formations becomes problematic if there are differing variables in each of the spawn files called for the entry.

Limits, there was some talk of limitations when some mission builders wanted to build some massed formations for the BoB era over Britain. Everybody went down the AI standalone track, with lower res skins and basic M3D files. That way the old computers could handle a few dozen aircraft up there at a time. As time has gone on, more aircraft can probably be handled by newer systems. I've deleted all the low res skin options in MAW, for example. But AFAIK there is no particular number.

In CFS2 there was a hard limit on the number of aircraft installed, but never heard of a hard and fast limit of aircraft in the air simultaneously.

Back to CTDs I forgot to mention that it looks like the terrain is bodged up around Corfu, the sea is not delimited. It's green from the island to the mainland, except for the coastline effect, which looks wierd. I did wonder if some things around the terrain could be fixed, to do away with the CTDs. It would be great if the problem was simply an overlap of landclasses (as defined at the beginning of the campaign file) or a mismatch with the list of landclasses in the campaign xml, and the list defined in the landclasses.xml document (found in the Terrains folder). That would be relatively easy to fix.

Anybody got a Round Tuit I could borrow to get things done?

 

[ganesh]

Dai,

A question I forgot to ask earlier regarding the plane count in the spawn files:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- enemy unescorted fighters -->
<AirFormation Directive="strike" Country="italy" FormType="diamond" Points="1" DamagePercent="50" GoalID="generated">
<Unit Repeat="8" Type="ai_sm79_49a"/>
<Route>
<Waypoint Type="turn" PositionType="player-die-roll" Die="2d6" Speed="100"/>
<Waypoint Type="bombing" PositionType="facility-die-roll" Distance="100" Die="2d6" Speed="100"/>
<Waypoint Type="turn" PositionType="home" Speed="100"/>
</Route>
</AirFormation>

I increased Repeat from 5 to 8 in the file above. The largest formation I've seen in CFS3 is 8 total planes. Is that a hard number (ie: it will blow up with 9 for sure) or is it a common sense number (ie: the AI probably can't handle larger numbers).

Also, is "Repeat" in addition to the first plane, or is it the total number of planes in the flight. In my example above will I get 8 or 9 planes in a flight, and based on my question above, if 9 will the game crash.

Could you talk a little about this number, how it works, and the limits?

Thanks!

P.S. After this I'll go away for a while and just enjoy the game, but this all very interesting to me!

Hi Kodiak,
I have been playing around with some mission building and as far as i know the max nr of planes per group is 8 but you can place as many groups together in different shapes and create bigger formations. Here some pics of a B17 protection mission with 48 b17's, 16 p51's, and loads of enemy groups coming in



After the mission they all land together at one airfield, b17's everywhere

 

[Daiwilletti]

Hi Kodiak,
I have been playing around with some mission building and as far as i know the max nr of planes per group is 8 but you can place as many groups together in different shapes and create bigger formations. Here some pics of a B17 protection mission with 48 b17's, 16 p51's, and loads of enemy groups coming in

After the mission they all land together at one airfield, b17's everywhere

Hi Ganesh,

thanks for adding info from a Mission Builder

so are you saying that for each unit the max number =8?
IIRC you can have multiple units within the spawn file?
Have you encountered a maximum for the number of units (with 8 planes in each unit) in a single spawn file?

(That is as distinct from the example I gave of referring to multiple spawn xmls for the one die entry in a spawn table.)

cheers,
Dai