Greetings

I’ve been lurking in this forum ever since Cas141 posted a thread about Wings of War in the Battle of Britain forum about a week or two ago. I’ve waited until now to post because I’ve never really visited this forum before and I wanted to do my homework first to find out what exactly was going on here. I had noticed the Knights Over Europe forum before while scrolling down simhq’s forum home page, but, to be honest, I never really gave it much thought. I thought, “Oh, it must be a forum for some old game that I’ve never heard of before”. Boy, was I wrong! I’m now very sorry that I never took the time to come in here before. I had no idea that this forum was for a new WWI sim (I’ve been looking for one of those for a couple years now) that hadn’t even been released yet and was still in the development stage. I must say that I’ve found the discussions going on here to be utterly fascinating. However, I was deeply saddened to discover that KOE has been, for lack of a better term, “indefinitely postponed”. But then along comes Wings of War. As I said, I’ve done my homework so I’m aware that WoW is a game and not a sim despite the fact that I don’t even own it yet. I have, however, ordered it from EBgames.com and it has been shipped but not yet delivered. I’m practically foaming at the mouth to get my hands on this thing; especially after reading everyone’s description of it. What amazes me even further is that WoW was just released (in the U.S., that is) a few days ago and most retailers don’t even have it in stock yet, but already the community has begun to mod it(!); which brings me (finally) to the topic of this thread: Modding WoW.

To my knowledge, there have been three “mods” created so far for WoW, right? A cheat to make all flyable aircraft available to the player in Instant Action, a no-CD crack, and a way to get rid of the rockets, am I missing any? I have a question or two regarding the no-CD crack: No-CD cracks usually have .exe file extensions. The file I downloaded from here has a .rar extension. Did I download the right file? If so, it didn’t come with any instructions. What do I do with it?

Thanks.

Best regards,
Tattered Boots

P.S. I would just like to say that I think what the community has done so far is most impressive and, moreover, I hope it’s a sign of things to come.

I'm also looking forward to getting WoW--it's on the way from EBGames.

The .rar file is a compressed file, like a zip. The .exe is inside it. You will need wrar34b5 (current version) to extract it. Search google and you can find where to download the .rar extractor

I have had Wow for about a week now but i am not allowed to touch/install it untill the 16th Sept(my birthday)I normally dont get excited about birthday and christmas presents but this one is the exception,roll on the 16th.


Kemal.

Welcome to the forum Tattered_Boots, and as Quasar said, you'll need to decompress the rar file to "unzip" the no-CD EXE.

Hey, let all us WWI flight sim fans here extend an early Happy Birthday to you Kemal!!!

My WOW CD is on the way

Thanks guys.

Now all I have to do is wait for the game to arrive.

By the way, I should probably mention that I'm what you call an "end user". I'm the kind of person that has enough trouble keeping my operating system, graphics card drivers, and anti-virus software virus definitions up to date, as well as making sure that I have the most recent definitions for my spyware/adware removal utilities. You'll have to forgive me for having never even heard of .rar files before.

I do have a suggestion, however. Would anyone with some available webspace be willing to package the mods that have been created thus far into a .zip (Winzip) file and build the folder structure in such a way so that all the user would have to do is tell Winzip to "use folder names" and "overwrite existing files" and then extract the contents of the .zip file to their main WoW directory and all of the files would be put in their proper places? I think that would go a long way to making the available mods for WoW more easily accessible to a greater range of users since Winzip is more "mainstream", if you will, than Winrar (for example, I have had Winzip for quite a while, but I've never heard of Winrar before). I think it would also be good to bring the three mods that have been made for WoW so far "under one roof", so to speak. For instance, include in the .zip the wow.exe edited with the no-CD crack and flyby1's "no-rockets" edit and then put the p99.sav into a cascade of sub-folders, if necessary (like I said, I don't have the game yet, so I don't know how WoW's main file directory is structured). I could probably create such a .zip file, but I don't have any webspace to host it on.

Does anyone think that would be feasible or do you think it’s a dumb idea?

Thanks again, guys.

Best regards,
Tattered Boots

Well that's certainly a good suggestion Tattered Boots, and sounds like you've already had plenty of experience with what can be some of the greatest difficulties in patching up our games (knowing how or where to put the stuff).

Now although Polovski doesn't have the various files uploaded to his website, he does have some game tweaks listed for WoW:

POLOVSKI\'S Red Baron 3D & Wings of War site

Perhaps a "no-CD" hex-edited EXE can be hosted, that allows people to swap out their original to eliminate the in-game rockets? Still, it's always a good idea to copy and save your files so that the originals can be reinstalled if things go awry (for this reason it's always good to know a game's file structure, as overwriting without back-up is pretty final.......w/o reinstalling that is).

I think Tattered Boot's is making a good suggestion here though, that is to anticipate at this early stage what might work best for an organized effort to move the WoW tweaking process forward, and how to facillitate access to these tweaks too........if patching of WoW on a large-scale becomes possible/probable in the future of course.

FlyXwire,
Thanks mate,much appreciated.

Kemal.

Oh boy, where do I begin, FlyXwire? Well, somewhere near the beginning would probably be a good place to start, wouldn't it?

Shortly after I wrote that stuff in my above post, I went outside to my mailbox to check my mail (you know, regular mail) and what do I find sitting on top of the ordinary envelopes? A small brown cardboard box with the words "EB FULFILLMENT" on the return address label. "Holy s***!", I exclaimed, and then I said to myself, "Shhh, keep your voice down, it's 4:00 AM". My copy of WoW had been delivered yesterday (Friday) afternoon, but I didn't know it was there because I didn't check my mailbox. "Why didn't you check your mail earlier", you ask? The short answer: because I'm lazy. Anyway, I've been playing WoW for about the past four or five hours. However, I over the past few days while I’ve been waiting for the game to arrive, I’ve been making sure that I had everything ready so that when the game did arrive I could just install it, patch it, and start playing. For instance, I downloaded the "unlock all aircraft" mod (p99.sav), the edited "no-CD" wow.exe, and, following the recommendations of those on this forum, I got myself Winrar (to extract/uncompress the .rar file that the edited wow.exe was packaged in) and I got a hex editor so I could do flyby1's "no-rockets" edit. I then extracted the edited no-CD wow.exe from its .rar imprisonment and went to work on it with the hex editor that I downloaded (Hex Workshop, I think it's called). Now THAT was a new experience! For a few minutes there I didn't think I was going to be able to do it, but thanks to some excellent instructions written by Ivor H for Cas141 in another thread, I managed to figure it out (barely). This preparation that I did paid off. When I came back inside after getting the mail, WoW in hand, I sat down at my computer, installed Wings of War, and ran the setup program (you know, the one where you select your graphics card, refresh rate, screen resolution, whether or not you want antialiasing on, etc., etc.). Then I made a back-up copy of the wow.exe that had just been installed. I then replaced it by copying and pasting the edited wow.exe into the main WoW directory. When asked if I wanted to overwrite, I said yes. Now I had a game that no longer needed the CD to be in the drive for the game to load and was rocket free. While I was moving files in and out of my main WoW directory, I noticed that there wasn't a "Savegame" folder in the directory yet so I didn't install the "unlock all aircraft" cheat at that point (you probably can, but just to be on the safe side, I didn't). Instead, I started the game. The first thing you are asked to do is to create a pilot/persona/alter-ego (call it what you will). Once I had done that I thought, "I bet now there's a 'Savegame' folder in the main WoW directory". So I exited the game and looked in the directory and, sure enough, the folder was there. So then I installed the "unlock all aircraft" cheat. Now the game was fully modded with what is currently available.

The above is the crux of my reason for wanting to create a single, comprehensible, easy-to-install file. The process that I just outlined above is waaaaay to complicated for the average user. We here in this forum can use such a process because we (sort of) know what we're doing. I think most casual users will be quite put off and won't even bother going through all that hoopla just to install three small mods. Now that I have seen the (very simple) folder structure of WoW (I'm used to FS 2004 and IL-2: FB) I feel confident that I could compile the necessary files into a .zip archive in a matter of minutes. However, I would like to write a short readme.txt file to be included which would contain installation instructions and that could take a little while to write (because I really don't feel like writing it right now ). Also, it would probably be a good idea to give credit in the readme to those who created the mods. Flyby1 obviously gets credit for the "no-rockets" hex edit, but who created the no-CD crack and the p99.sav and would they give their permission (would we need their permission?) for us to use their mods in a more user-friendly, all-in-one mod? Finally, we have to realize that such an "all-in-one" file probably wouldn't be relevant for very long. I'm sure that Flyby1 will be back here before too long telling us that he's hacked more of the .exe so then we'll have to create a new .zip incorporating his (and hopefully other) new improvements.

Oh man, don't get me started. :rolleyes: Here's a list of the flight sims that I currently own:

IL-2 Sturmovik
IL-2: FB + AEP
FS 2002 Pro
FS 2004
Rowan's Battle of Britain
MiG Alley
CFS2
EAW
Jane's USAF

All of these have been patched and modded to some extent. EAW, for example, is modded to hell and back. However, my greatest learning experiences recently have been: 1) A few months ago I volunteered to help test a preliminary version of Rowan's BoB v0.98 for the BDG. Its installation was, well, a little tricky. 2) Lately I've been downloading and installing a lot of freeware add-on aircraft for FS 2004. There have been a couple that have been packaged into their .zip files so poorly that I completely took them apart and rebuilt them into new .zip files just to make them easier to install.

I'll talk about my thoughts and impressions of WoW's gameplay later on. Right now, I'm so bleary eyed I can't type anymore.

Best regards,
Tattered Boots

Hi guys

I've gone ahead and compiled the three existing mods for WoW into a .zip file that I’ve named wow3in1.zip (still haven't written the readme.txt for it, though ).

Here's a picture of the contents of wow3in1.zip extracted to a temp folder:



The "Savegame" folder contains the folder called "p99.sav". This is, of course, the "unlock all aircraft and campaigns" cheat. The wow.exe that you see has been edited with both the no-CD crack and Flyby1's "no rockets" edit. All a user would need to install it is WinZip (they would just need to remember to make a back-up copy of their original wow.exe first).

To install: Open wow3in1.zip using WinZip and then, when you go to extract it, make sure you select "all files", "overwrite existing files", and "use folder names". Then point WinZip at your main WoW directory (the default directory is C:\Program Files\Wings of War) and click "Extract" (see image below) and voila! All three mods are installed in one fell swoop.



As I said, I unfortunately don't have any webspace to host this file. If anyone is interested in hosting or just using it, please don't hesitate to send me a private message containing your email address (or post it here in this thread if you feel comfortable posting your email address publicly) and I can attach wow3in1.zip to an email and send it to you. It's only 488 KB in size.

Best regards,
Tattered Boots