[REQ] Changing radio washington to many small stations

[tedhealy]

Yup, I'm going to conclude that the power portion of the antenna line is indeed in kilometers.

This mod is very doable, everything is working as I expected. I tested a Manila station with range of 1480, or roughly 800 nm, that was to cease operation on the dec 20, 1941 and it did just that. The range was perfect too, the station started to fade out at about 750 miles out of Manila.

I also had a station in australia starting on dec 25 1941, the start date happened perfectly and the range was as expected.

Stations that are not currently broadcasting due to being the wrong date will still "tune" on the radio. As you search for stations, the radio will stop at the frequency of a station and give you the name even though it is not within the broadcast dates. I suppose this isn't too bad as it serves to help keep frequencies from overlapping. You'll only get static when you tune in stations out of date.

I'm going to start coming up with dates of operation and latitudes and longitudes and test those.

We need to come up with names for these stations. I'm terrible at coming up with names. They can't all be the same name it would seem, but I think the name should make it known somehow that even though the frequency is different, it is still broadcasting the same content.

So far, I just came up with the simple solution, Washington-Pearl Harbor, Washington-Manila, Washington-Australia, and so on. Anyone more creative than that? Please suggest some names.

We also need frequencies. Any suggestions on those? I was thinking along the lines of increments of 5 or 10. 22, 32, 42, 52, and so on. I don't want to use frequencies used by other mods already though, so maybe something really high would be good like starting at 100.

For dates so far, I have

Pearl - Entire war
Manila - start of war to Jan 2nd 1942 (date Japanese take Manila)
Australia - Jan 15 1942 - end of war (I've sort of picked that date out of thin air. Anyone with a better suggestion?
Guadalcanal -august 20 1942 - end of war (start date for the day the airfield was built there)
Saipan - June 22, 1944 - end of war (start date a week after invasion)
I'm thinking of just leaving Pelilu out
reactivate Manila Jan 45 to end of war
Iwo Jima - feb 23, 1945 - end of war (suribachi "taken")

and if I did a simple radio tokyo station it would operate the entire war.

[clayton]

Will these stations be broadcasting what is in the Washington file or will they have different content? Seems like a lot of work with changing the content per site, though I would love to see three main stations: CBS (exellent mod BTW), Hawaii, and Tokyo. All with the type of content that the CBS mod has. Maybe, in the future we can come up with a Australia station with accented radio. Makes sense! I will work on finding a way to rip those longer Tokyo Rose files...

[Banquet]

Good luck guys.. this mod is very exciting.. will add so much atmosphere to the sim!

[tedhealy]

Originally Posted by clayton

Will these stations be broadcasting what is in the Washington file or will they have different content? Seems like a lot of work with changing the content per site, though I would love to see three main stations: CBS (exellent mod BTW), Hawaii, and Tokyo. All with the type of content that the CBS mod has. Maybe, in the future we can come up with a Australia station with accented radio. Makes sense! I will work on finding a way to rip those longer Tokyo Rose files...

Right now, I would plan on the content being the same as radio washington, but expanded. Along the lines of the Radio Honolulu mod.

I guess I could also release it as 2 different versions. One would just uses the content from in game already. It would just kill the current radio washington and turn it into the smaller stations. It basically would be a text/ini file and readme with instructions on copying content already in the game into new folders

A 2nd version could be a rather large download with added news events and music that would supplement the audio files already in game.

Also anyone could take the radio.ini and edit in new stations to their liking and provide different content for each station. The file structure is set up to provide for that. If you want to provide new audio content played on specific dates and times, you'll have to get familiar with the events.ini which is very easy.

[OSO]

Originally Posted by tedhealy

The problem right now with the longer ones is that they are streaming files so someone would have use a stream ripper to grab them.

You should be able to use any sound recording software and windows to accomplish this.

Just set the recording options in Control Panel\Sound and Audio devices (Audio tab)\Sound Recording to "What U Hear".

Then create a new audio file in your recording software, set it to record, and finally begin playback of the streaming audio file on the website.

[tedhealy]

Originally Posted by OSO

You should be able to use any sound recording software and windows to accomplish this.

Just set the recording options in Control Panel\Sound and Audio devices (Audio tab)\Sound Recording to "What U Hear".

Then create a new audio file in your recording software, set it to record, and finally begin playback of the streaming audio file on the website.

Ok, I'm downloading those files. I'm not sure if it's enough content to justify an entire new mod or not. A proper Japanese version of this mod where many small Japanese stations come and go as the war progresses would be nice, but I don't think there's enough content to do that for the entire war considering these tokyo rose files are all for 44 and 45. I thought they started the tokyo rose broadcast in 1943?

As of now, after I finish the allied side I'll plan on throwing together a radio tokyo that will play mostly random music with these zerou hour broadcast played on specific dates. If more content is found, a whole separate radio tokyo mod could be made.

[tedhealy]

I've got all the stations set up by date. I need to test the ranges as pearl is coming up funny.

The last number in the antenna line now does not look like a range in any distance now. For ranges around 1000 nm, you can get away with doubling the distance you want in nm and plugging that in as the power. You want a range of 700 nm, put in 1400 and it works more or less. When I put in a power of 5400 to get a range of 2700 nm out of Pearl Harbor, it only reaches out some 1500 to 1700 nm.

When I up it from 5400 to 20,000, the range only goes up to 2100 nm. So I'm now beginning to think this power number is not related to any actual distance unless something is bugged.

[tedhealy]

Lol. I finally figured it out. Radio station ranges do not cross the international date line at 180 longitude. Any station to the east of the date line, say one originating in pearl, will not be heard to the west of the date line. That is why no matter what I was setting the range to, stations out of pearl would die at the same range.

The reason you can hear radio washington is because it is set so high, it actually gets you from the other side of the world and hits the date line from the opposite side.

It was easy to test once what was going on hit me. I just made a station with about 2000 nm range at longitude 178 E in the central pacific and what do you know, I can't hear leaving pearl. As soon as I crossed the date line the new station comes in just fine, and it doesn't fade in like it normally does, it just came in quickly. Cross back over the date line towards pearl and away it goes.

This will probably mean another station, but at least I think I"ve solved this.

Here is how the ranges look now



I'm thinking I will move the Guadalcanal and Saipan stations some distance the east and increase their range to make up for the lost range out of pearl. I might add a Tarawa station for November 1943 too, I'm not sure.

And here's a revised range map



I've added a midway station to the west of the date line to reach up to Japanese main land waters. Guadalcanal is moved to the east some and given more range while Saipan actually shrinks some.

Midway would be running for the duration of the war.

[clayton]

Good find! That may explain why when subs entered Empire water all they had was Radio Tokyo too listen to. Looking forward to this...

[tedhealy]

I'm no electrical engineer, but the invisible radio wave force field at the date line is a bug...or I've botched something...which sort of gives me an idea, a station actually on the date line at 180 longitude. I'll have to try that.

xxxxxxx
Nope, that didn't work. It's odd because the game recognizes the difference between longitude 178 and longitude -178, but it treats the 2 as if they are worlds apart. Rather than a bermuda triangle where strange things happen, we have a pacific line where radio waves get eaten.

[tedhealy]

I'll probably release some sort of beta version to play with tomorrow. It will just be a radio.ini and instructions on mod setup. Basically you'll just create a new folder for every new station and copy radio washington's content into those folders. I'll create a new thread with a [WIP] tag when I do.

It's unfortunate that I can't seem to get different radio stations to draw content from the same folder. Without being able to do that, the size of this mod will balloon rather quickly as you must have duplicate copies of files in different folders. This isn't too bad with the default radio washington files, but I'd really like to add a heck of a lot of news clips which would add a lot of size to the mod.

[castorp345]

Originally Posted by tedhealy

Adding a back slash before the folder name in the radio.ini file allows the sharing of content from one folder. The size issue I was worried about no longer applies.

brilliant!
keep up the good work, mate!

[tedhealy]

Lol, you caught me. I didn't want to jump the gun too quickly on that one to make sure it worked so I re-edited that out. It seems to work though. Not only that, now the radio wave blocking international date line seems to be gone. I need some sleep.

It's all just very odd. I can get the backslash to work for one folder/station, but not another. I'll attack this again tomorrow to recheck syntax errors.

Also odd is that when I set radio realism = No instead of Yes in the radio.ini, the international date line radio wave blocker is gone. Is there something I don't know about the international date line?

[tedhealy]

Turning radio realism to =No in the radio.ini I'm going to guess just tells sh4 to ignore the range of a station to make theml heard anywhere on the map. So it doesn't really fix the date line radio wave blocker, it fudges it like setting the range to 100000.

Now for the magic backslash oddity. In order to get new stations to feed off of the same folder, you seem to have to add a backslash to the front of the folder name for every new station.

So you end up with

[GENERAL]
RadioRealism=Yes
StartCh=1

[CHANNEL]
Name=Washington
Folder=Washington
Freq=22
Antenna=01.01.1930-01.01.2000:21.36,-157.96:6000

[CHANNEL]
Name=Washington-Midway
Folder=\Washington
Freq=42
Antenna=01.01.1930-01.01.2000:28.00,179.00:2800

[CHANNEL]
Name=Washington-Manila
Folder=\\Washington
Freq=52
Antenna=01.01.1930-02.01.1942:14.40,120.35:1600

I've tested this and it works, I need to do more testing though to see where this crazyness ends. Without the one backslash for Washington-Midway and without the two backslashes for Washington-Manila, those stations simply do not work. Not only that, using one backslash for Washington-Manila does not work. It had to have two.

Folder=\\\\\\\Washington for a 7th station feeding off the Washington folder seems like where I'm headed. I guess I don't have to understand it as long as it works


EDIT

SUCCESS! The magic backslash is indeed how you get successive stations to draw off the same folder. With this discovery, keeping the number of stations to a minimum is less important. I might go wild and draw up a radio range map with more stations of even smaller range and see how that looks. I'll then make a [WIP] thread and release some sort of early test version with no new content. You'll just recycle the current radio washington content (or actually any folder of audio content you want).

[tedhealy]

Now a WIP

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...630#post465630