your ships look absolutely stunning, but I'm missing AO maps (the shipname_O01 textures). You might want to consider adding them as it makes them much better looking.
A good tutorial for automatically creating them using the free 3d editing program Blender: http://www.katsbits.com/htm/tutorial...ng_terrain.htm

Looking forward to this mod:up:

I'm not much good with this sort of thing, but this might be a great time to learn.

As I mentioned, the merchant ships' boats are appearing successfully when I designate them as torpedoes. The problem is that I have to overwrite one of the torpedoes with the boat model.

What I need is a weapons node exclusively designed to launch/fire boats, so that the torpedoes and the boats etc. can coexist. Preferably several different nodes, so that I can spawn different types of boats & passengers. I have been trying for hours to clone the torpedo launcher or create a gun with a boat model as its "shell" - so far, no luck.

wonderful work..that dazzle paint job is spot on. Uniforms are great as well. They started out clean at start of cruise :) surface ships were hard too, as they were coal fired many of them.... coaling ship was a dirty dirty dirty job, my grandfather used to describe it saying for 3 days everything would be black on board and on all hands. :)

great great work going on here. that idea of the torps triggers is just wizard!.

And yet another great mod in the making, and from the looks of it a keeper too! Brilliant work guys :rock:

I understand how you will make the merchant spawn a boat that brings papers to the U-Boat, what I don't get is how you will make then a trigger for the merchant to stop and send the boat, and most important, for us to check wether it has contraband or not and decide if sink it :hmmm:

Trust me - this has been thought of and if my ideas work (and depending on my real life workload) I will have a working demonstration within several weeks at most.

The one thing I might not be able to get around is the merchant stopping; however, the player should be able to position his sub in front of most merchants to trigger the collision avoidance "stop/reverse" routine. I will also tweak vessel acceleration values so that a merchant can't flee like a sports car once it has stopped its engines - hence there should be plenty of time to take care of business.

Some ships will have their behavior modified so that they slow & spawn boats; others will maintain stock enemy merchant behavior and try to escape from you - the latter will mostly be fair game.

I am thinking about using particles.dat and a water interaction controller instead of a torpedo clone to spawn the boats - more news later.

Just managed to make the 4.7" gun "fire" a boat. :DL


This means that there is no need to use the torpedoes as boats, which had been very problematic.
If someone could tell me how to copy entire nodes & subsections using S3ditor, I'd be grateful - this will speed up the process immensely.

awesome, that means you can knock the range down to like 250 meters and it won't "fire" a boat until you are within that range

LOL just the opposite of the real life praxis ... else the Kaleun wanted to give the merchant fellow a good ramming chance :haha: but anyway better than anything :up: I just hope the merchant AI is not also programmed to ram submarines :D

That's a much needed tweak in any case. I have heard reports of this causing problems with convoys -when they need to turn, but hopefully with the much smaller WW1 ones it shouldn't be that bad.

The main problem is that so far all SH series (SH1 I'm not sure however) have insisted in making the convoys turn in a completely unnatural way. They pretend the ships to the sides to suddenly speed up hugely and make the long way around a semi-circle to keep their position any time. However, the logical way to do a turn with a formation of miscellaneous merchant ships IMHO is in to turn unsimultaneously X degrees (Not much more than 45) and then the sides slowly speed up to regain the original position and spacing. In real life convoys, the outmost columns were not occupied by the fastest ships, but simply by the less valuable ones, which normally weren't also the fastest.

Great idea!

Very impressing :rock:

With Best Regards

Stary Wuj

Check on making a ship stop, i think there are problems with this. I know in the development of the Japanese Campaign there were problems with stopping ships completely for simulating landings....check with Peabody on that, as he may have good info on that. I am very excitied about this mod, i really love this era and if this works out will be happy to help make expansions with the surface warefare aspects.

shouldn't this thread be in the ATO mods section? ;)

If the ATO Mods got more traffic then yeah, it would be.

This thing is a 500 pound gorilla. A 500 pound gorilla goes anywhere it wants to.:D

Regarding the placement of this thread, there may be a small amount of Pacific/Indian Ocean warfare in this mod, so it's not totally out of place. Although obviously, warfare in the Channel/North Sea is the top priority for now.

I spent some time on merchant shipping and cargo manifests this weekend, but not much work that's screenshot-worthy. More news later.