Classic EAW Guide

The primary reason for the popularity and freshness of EAW today is due to the large number of excellent user enhancements and add-ons available.  The scope and depth of these add-ons is amazing.  Pilots can choose from dozens of planes and fly in many different theaters and campaigns.  Whether you want a Zero in the Pacific, a Yak in the Eastern Front, or just a Spitfire over the Channel,  there’s something for everyone.  Improvements have come in almost every area and its not slowing down either!

With all these excellent add-ons available, it can be a bit overwhelming to someone just starting their pilot career in EAW.  Its almost like buying several flight sims together and trying figure them all out at once.  Well, to help you get in the air as quickly as possible while still experiencing some of the best EAW has to offer, I’ve put together what I call the “Classic EAW Guide”.

This guide will help you build out an improved EAW that is based on the original European theater, planes, and terrain.  It is a big improvement from what you get out of the box, but still has the flavor and charm of the original EAW.  I recommend this as a good starting point, then you can move on to all the other wonderful add-ons depending on your areas of interest.  

Note: I have provided links to the various add-ons and/or sites, just click on them and you're set.  If a link appears to be broken, check Sandbagger's site, where you can find alternate sites for most of these.

EAW version 1.2

Start with the 1.2 patch.  If you don't already have this with your copy of EAW, you can get it from Cord's EAW Page under Utilities/Patches.  Next, get EAW Control 2000 by Alan White.  It lets you set the all-important resolution and Extra Squads settings from a nice gui interface.  Otherwise, you can check the 1.2 readme and set these directly by editing the eaw.ini file.  

Resolution-  don’t get stuck using 640x480 resolution.  I recommend 1280x1024 or 1280x960 if your system can handle it as the field of view is close to the default.   You may want to try different settings to see how they work out.  Be aware your FOV changes depending on the resolution.

Extra Squads -  this adds additional squadrons of planes to each mission, and is also set in the eaw.ini file.  See the 1.2 documentation for details.   I like to use a value of 3.   It is not uncommon to see well over 100 planes in an engagement with this option set.

Realism-  Fly full realism!  You will have problems at first with stalling and spinning, but this is what makes the difference between an arcade game and a sim.  You will get the hang of things with a little practice.  And if you don't have rudder controls of some type, you will want to get them, whether its rudder pedals or a twist joystick.  Myself, I'm very happy with the MS Precision Pro 2.

SKINS

The ability to customize aircraft is what started the first of all the EAW mods.  Literally hundreds of beautiful skins exist which include almost every plane you could ever want.   I won’t suggest any specific skins, but here are some good sites to check out by some very talented EAW skinners.  Its easy to go crazy downloading skins, I’d just start out with one or two favorite skins for each model of the original planes.

Mosi's Flightsim Page - Many beautiful skins of all kinds of planes.

Migge's EAW Pages - Migge has been around a long time with a ton of beautiful skins.

Aces Rising -  Julio has many absolutely beautiful Bf-109Es and Fw-190As as well as others.

Flying Sheep's Flugwerke - Some very nice skins of many different planes.

The Hanger - A very large collection of skins from various artists.  

Serb's EAW flightline - Me-262s, Thunderbolts, and more.

Sandbagger's EAW Links - as always, check here for a great index of more EAW sites and skins.

TERRAIN

I am a big fan of the look of original EAW terrain for the European Theater.  But, out of the box, there is room for improvement.  To start, get the cleaned-up and enhanced version Hi-Res Summer EAW Terrain from this site.  You will also want to pick up the Summer Airfields to match. 

EAW has hills and mountains, but by default they are so subtle, you may hardly notice them.  Dominique LeGrande has come up with a way to increase the scale of the hills and mountains so that things look really nice and natural.  Hilly EAW World is a good fit for the European terrain.

SKY

As a start, download the EAW Sky and Clouds add-on from this site.  It includes a new sky, clouds, and sun.

EFFECTS

A popular add-on is the EAW Effects Pack. This provides better-looking smoke, fire, flak, and tracers.  Also check the download page for the Flames Enhancement mod.

SOUNDS

Several people have created add-on sounds for EAW that are a big improvement over the standard sounds.  Meatwater’s EAW SoundPack was the first and is still very popular.   Some other very good sounds that are preferred by many people are also available in the sound section at Serb's EAW flightline.  Or, I have zipped up a collection of the sounds that I like, which is a combination of sounds from both Meatwater and Serb, as well as a few I have adapted from other sources.  You can download it here.

FLIGHT MODELS

Hakan Langebro and Charles Gunst have teamed up to create the most accurate flight models for all the original planes in EAW.  The package is called Enemy Coast Ahead Online 1.4.  The install for ECAO is very easy, just unzip all the files into your EAW directory.

OTHER

A couple other mods you will want are the  hi-res objects provided by Redeyes and the 3D Forest Kill by HarryM.  This hi-res objects give you better detail in the buildings and ground objects, while the 3D Forest Kill eliminates the ugly 3D forests.  Just unzip and copy the files from both these downloads into your EAW directory.

In addition, I recommend the EAW Plane Rendering Mod download from this site, which increases the detail and clarity at which you can see planes at a distance.

Finally, just a pointer to help you really enjoy the game even more.  Make sure you make liberal use of F9 (cycles through all planes) and F12 (movie mode) to look around at the action.  If you're not in the heat of battle, you can put your plane on autopilot and watch the action unfold, or just admire the view.  Use the mouse to move around and zoom in and out.  I find myself spending as much time just looking around this way as actually flying.  Just like watching a good WWII movie!

Beyond the basics 

Once you start getting a collection of skins, cockpits, seasonal terrains, gunsights, sounds, and other stuff, you will quickly see the need of having something to keep track of it all.  I am very fond of Relent's Skins-n-More utility,  MattM also has a popular program called STAB.  Both are both excellent programs that will solve this problem for you, and also have very helpful tutorials available.

If your interests lie outside of the original planes provided in EAW, you will definately want to get Enemy Coast Ahead and ECA Panel by Charles Gunst.  This is an amazing piece of work that models and lets you fly over 200 aircraft.  You can get these from Charles' EAW Website.

There are a wide range of campaigns, terrains, skins, and speech packs that have been made for many different theaters not originally available in EAW.  Even the European theater campaigns have been enhanced and improved.  Emil has produced many excellent new and enhanced campaigns for EAW, all available from his site Emil's EAW Campaigns.  I could go on forever with add-ons, but I will direct you to the links page for a good starting point of what else is available.  The amount of excellent add-ons of every type is truly amazing.  

If you have an interest in on-line flying, please check out the EAW forum on www.simhq.com for the latest activity in the on-line EAW community.

I also have to put a plug in for Desert Air War, a comprehensive add-on that models the N. Africa and Mediterranean theater, complete with new terrain, planes, in-game screens, campaigns, and more.  You can visit the DAW page on my site here.

Running EAW under WindowsXP

Yes, with some tweaking, EAW should work fine with WinXP!  There are a few important things you need to be aware of:

XP Updates-  make sure you have XP Service Pack 1 or later installed.  The Service Packs will automatically install the latest Application Compatability Update, which contains a custom profile for EAW that will allow it to work properly.  DO NOT manually change the compatability mode using the compatability tab, or it will override the custom profile and cause problems with your joystick and keyboard in the game. 

Video Driver Updates-  If you have an Nvidia GeForce card, forget what you know about always upgrading to the latest driver.  For EAW you must use a driver version 66.93 or earlier.  Anything later will give you the dreaded Error 7217.  I recommend you stick with version 66.93, as it is the latest EAW-friendly driver.  You can get it from Nvidia here.  Warning!- some newer games require a driver later than version 66.93.  If so, you may break those games if you "downgrade" to 66.93.  Nvidia has been made aware of the problem, but there is no promise of a fix.  I often try later drivers when they come out, only to end up going back to 66.93.

Installation-  If you are still having problems after updating to SP1, uninstall and reinstall EAW.  If you have the version of EAW with the 1.2 patch on CD, and are getting the error "eaw.exe is not a valid Win 32 application", ignore the CD instructions and run the 1.2 update immediately after installing EAW. 

Add-ons-  the main EAW executable has to be named eaw.exe to be recognized properly.  If you are using a add-on version that names it something else (eaw12a.exe), you will need to rename it to eaw.exe.

Joystick-  If you are having problems getting your joystick to work or be recognized, here are some tips.  First, make sure you did not manually check any compatability mode checkboxes for eaw.exe.  You should rely entirely on the MS Compatability Update to automatically set the options.  Also, check the settings under the Game Controllers icon in the WindowsXP Control Panel.  Click on the Advanced button and make sure the Preferred Device is the appropriate joystick.  Finally, if the joystick is acting erratic in the game, go into the eaw.ini file and find the line that says "Windows Joystick=0".  Change the value to 1 (or 0 if its already 1)  and see if that clears it up.

Special Notes for GeForce Owners

As explained in the section above, you will want to stick with version 66.93 of the Nvidia drivers.  I recommend you enable d3d anisotropic filtering to minimize terrain shimmering, it makes a huge difference in image quality.  Also, there is finally a fix for the corrupted briefing and map screens, the infamous "GeForce Bug."  Detailed information on both of these issues and their fixes is available on the downloads page. 

Error 7217

There are a couple common causes of Error 7217 on startup. 

Nvidia GeForce graphics cards-  if you have an Nvidia GeForce card and are getting this error, your video card drivers are probably too new.  You must backrev to version 66.93.  See above for more info. 

Intel graphics chipsets-  if your computer has an Intel 810/815/830/845 family chipset, you will probably get the Error 7217.  This is a common on-board graphics chip that is found in many newer, inexpensive computers.  The only way to solve this is to use an add-on graphics card and disable the on-board video.  A graphics card like a low-end Nvidia Geforce series (which is still better than any on-board Intel chip) can be had for less than $50 if you shop around.  If you don't have an on-board Intel graphics chip and still get this error, make sure you have the latest Microsoft DirectX and drivers for your video card. 

Other Common Issues

ATI Radeon Card-  EAW will work on a Radeon card, but it will not be able to display any horizon fog (there will be a sharp boundary between sky and ground) which detracts from the visual quality.  Also, the briefing screens will be garbled.  There is no known fix for either issue.

Windows 2000-  If you somehow get EAW to run on Win2k, consider yourself lucky.

Other problems-  If you are having other problems running EAW, the best place to get help is the EAW forum on www.simhq.com.   Don't be afraid to post any question no matter how stupid or obscure it may seem.  There are plenty of friendly people willing to help and the combined EAW knowledge on the board is enormous.

I lost my keycard!-  Sandbagger has a downloadable version here.