:salute: A great Christmas present, thank you !

One "problem" with the control room screen...........the guy closest on the left is giving me the same "Do you have ANY clue on what you're doing !?!?" look that they give me in SH3 just before the boat is sunk......:har: !


Seriously, great work !

Haha! I didn't see it that way until now.. :haha:


Thanks a lot!

That is because you haven't had "the look" as often as I have !:D

Amazing job on the mod I like it a lot.

:up:

@Silent Otto: It would be very nice if we can improve these areas of AOTD as well, thank you very much for the offer. My hope is that we can all work together on improving the game. As for the awards, I haven't really thought of this yet, but all bitmaps can be extracted and improved. I will try to look into changing the insignias, but I just need a little break as my head is now all numbers and pixels. As for adding more to the game than the existing number of awards, perhaps it is possible by editing .dat files, but I havent gotten into that yet. About political correctness, I fully agree with you. History is history and cannot be changed.


Here's just some food for thought for everyone to think about.

We "could" reshape the promotions and awards altogether, not just the accompanying pictures but the whole basis of award structure throughout the game and perhaps assign some type of point basis for each award? It would be similar to what we already see on the Top Score List, where depending on tonnage sunk, overall mission difficulty, etc. determines the final score; in this case, towards any award or promotion.

Not every U-boat commander received the Knight's Cross and many who received it prior to actually having the lower Iron Cross 2nd & 1st Classes had those awards automatically backdated and entered. (Award rules mandated the member must have both levels of Iron Cross prior to receiving the Knight's Cross.) Still, many received the German Cross in Gold (est. 9/41) for award acts that didn't rate the KC. Others only ended up with the Iron Cross 1st Class as the top and final award. There were other awards as well that were not in the Iron Cross series of awards and didn't affect the KC series whatsoever; such as the GCiG, War Merit Cross, etc.

We could add game criteria based on dates that awards were established and actual criteria (though there were always exceptions to any rule). Promotions were also something established (time in service/rank) but changed somewhat throughout the war and again, exceptions to the rule (Luth case in point!).

It might provide some additional game incentives for continuing on and trying to do better. Getting the Knight's Cross series completed through Diamonds before the June 1940 timeframe just doesn't give the player much to try for IMHO and is just too easy to get.

I wonder if CAOD is easier than AOD with awards/promotions. :hmmm: In all my playing of AOD I've only got the diamonds once, mid-war, and I've had lots of tonnage, etc. many times.

The file size of the Subsim.exe between versions seems different.
Now that may be because I was sent upgraded Game files?
:hmmm:

That'd be my guess, especially since the patches includes the expansion pack.

I've got the original files from both now.
Nice thing is I can compare from the first release through all releases and patches.

Now given 010 can De-compile the files now? That throws things into Machine language!
Guess who just happens to have some knowledge of that!

Makes sense.

On a side note, it was the expansion pack that gave me a clue that AOTD could be modded graphically. The expansion pack works in the same way I have referenced in the tutorial, it just places the new files in the SIM folder outside of the .DYN archive. So when I was able to open and modify one of these files, namely the CONTROL3.SCR file (control room screen for the type XXI), I figured that the other ones must be in the same workable format -just packed away somewhere. From then it was just a question of finding information on the .DYN files and getting the graphics out of it.

So what could be done in the long run?
We create a blank DYN file and just have all the files open for install in the proper folders.
Reduces file size of the install and actually reduces download size.
Why a decrease in download size?
There's a lot of information in the header area of the DYN files that does not relate to the files in the DYN. I suspect maybe a guide of sorts to files contained in the DYN but not confirmed.

I can find no reason to even bother with the DYN format once all files are extracted!

How do we test this theory?
Extract the DYN files and place in the folder where the DYN was.
Once that is done? Delete the DYN and see what happens. Then work BACKWARDS from there!

I have to go to one of my Job sites to solve problems for the next several days.
So I'll probably not be around for 2 or 3 days.
Life on the road and all that. But I will be thinking about things.

That would be very interesting indeed!

By the way, here is a quick test I did with new ocean color. In fact I just lowered the exposure for the wave cycling frames. Looks more like the rough atlantic than the original tropical azure blue, don't you think?

The most interesting thing here is that this sprite bitmap SEA.BMP has BIN/VGA with LZW compression originally. I saved them all as BIN/VGA with compression NONE, and the game accepts them! This is in line with what I have read about other Dynamix games.

https://tinyimg.io/i/CSDHEVJ.png

https://tinyimg.io/i/eO7MxUQ.png