A way of sharing files for multiple mods working together?

I managed to combine a few different mods together (comparing files) such as 500 MAD, Map of operational areas, Russian Subs, US Subs Omitted, and Water visibility as well as the 2004 campaign. If I can get this into a zip, whats the policy if sharing to the community?

I take ZERO credit for the mods made (mad props (pun intended)) to each of the creators. I just fit them together to work for me. One relatively broad game change I made was increasing the number of potential units in the campaign mode to make it a little more challenging if not having to run silent run deep to get out of dodge. :-P

Thoughts?

Thanks

FNG :-P

[goldfish716]

Congrats if you got that all into one mod that works. The more the merrier I say. We had a bug from combining the Russian campaign and the Russian Subs mod where abandoning from a damaged or dead modded ship would break the game. It's not easy to do sometimes.

Pretty sure you can share any mod you want. Just give credit; that's my policy.

[The Bandit]

Originally Posted by goldfish716

Congrats if you got that all into one mod that works. The more the merrier I say. We had a bug from combining the Russian campaign and the Russian Subs mod where abandoning from a damaged or dead modded ship would break the game. It's not easy to do sometimes.

Pretty sure you can share any mod you want. Just give credit; that's my policy.

I agree too and I can see why people would want something like this as its more convenient. I personally don't have a problem with this but, I also feel that, since my work is based on the PRS mod, its not really my decision to make there.

The only other thing worth mentioning is that you may run into some issues especially when it comes to keeping updates on respective mods.

[origl_main_raptor2]

Look these "mods" are actually changes to strings with data file stored as text. A string can be parsed and rewritten. In fact you can cut and paste whole strings (or sections of string into these files). If you look at typical string from one of these text files. They kinda look like this:

EnemyWaypoints=-20,0|20,0


That enemywaypoints thing is DataPoint, and the numbers after it are used to populate values** in a database the game engine uses.

If we had a list of required data points for each type of data (Subs, Weapons, etc.) then a somewhat simple* program could be written and distributed as an app that would create a New Temp Overwrite folder, with the necessary sub-folders and text data files to be written to a desktop folder, say "CW Temp" and the user would be responsible for moving that overwrite folder in or out the location where the game was running from.

In fact the same sort of thing could be used to create a "Single Mission Generator". that would be based upon this New Temp Overwrite folder, so that the user could start right in playing with the "new" data.


*

**If you look in "Weapons.txt" you'll see that just about all of various weapons will have a Datapoint and value for warhead size in (I assume pounds). Has anybody tried increasing that size, say on a MK48 to say somewhere around 22500 (about the size of 1/10th of a KT)?

[The Bandit]

Originally Posted by origl_main_raptor2

**If you look in "Weapons.txt" you'll see that just about all of various weapons will have a Datapoint and value for warhead size in (I assume pounds). Has anybody tried increasing that size, say on a MK48 to say somewhere around 22500 (about the size of 1/10th of a KT)?

Yep been tried. That only has to do with how much damage is dealt to what you hit, no blast radius. DCs have blast radius but right now its not possible to get them to drop properly from a missile (thinking SUBROC) because the DC works off of launch values (detonation depth) that must be set by the launching platform (in this case some kind of aircraft like a Bear or even a Ka-25) which the missile is incapable of doing. Other than that, you could probably come up with some type of contact only charge but, you're looking and needle-in-haystack odds of actually hitting anything.

All that said, right now I believe it would be possible to make a Soviet equivalent to a Lulu nuclear depth charge but, I don't see what this would add to the game at this point as you'd just end up getting fried with little or no warning.

[flavio hc16]

Have you already put this mod out? it will be great!!

[origl_main_raptor2]

Originally Posted by The Bandit

Yep been tried. That only has to do with how much damage is dealt to what you hit, no blast radius. DCs have blast radius but right now its not possible to get them to drop properly from a missile (thinking SUBROC) because the DC works off of launch values (detonation depth) that must be set by the launching platform (in this case some kind of aircraft like a Bear or even a Ka-25) which the missile is incapable of doing. Other than that, you could probably come up with some type of contact only charge but, you're looking and needle-in-haystack odds of actually hitting anything.

All that said, right now I believe it would be possible to make a Soviet equivalent to a Lulu nuclear depth charge but, I don't see what this would add to the game at this point as you'd just end up getting fried with little or no warning.

Originally Posted by The Bandit

no blast radius. DCs have blast radius but right now its not possible to get them to drop properly from a missile (thinking SUBROC) because the DC works off of launch values (detonation depth) that must be set by the launching platform ....

But the DC's do...That suggests that there IS such a beast. If you have a special DataPoint for a single type of specific object, then that is bad software design, because you try and have the same number of properties within types for each object in that type, so to me there should be a Blast Radius Datapoint for every object within type WEAPONS. Killerfish just ain't showing it. In fact in the Soviets DC in weapons.txt it's there, I believe.

Originally Posted by The Bandit

All that said, right now I believe it would be possible to make a Soviet equivalent to a Lulu nuclear depth charge but, I don't see what this would add to the game at this point as you'd just end up getting fried with little or no warning.

Check out some of the YouTube vids, particularly the USN training films on the ASROC back in the 60's. The minimum "safe distance" was 3500 yards, with a max of 10000.

Operation WigWam back in the mid-50's used 10 KT at 2000 ft and found that even as close as 4000 yards submerged objects could survive.

Your looking for "area kills" with these puppies, not vaporization.

And since tactical Nukes weren't withdrawn from USN units until some time later in history then the era of CW, perhaps they SHOULD be in the game, particularly in the '68 campaign. Remember that using Nukes is not only a military decision, but a political one as well. And small ones, used only far out to sea, where they might not be noticed, makes the authorization of their use by politicos awfully tempting to those same.

Originally Posted by The Bandit

I believe it would be possible to make a Soviet equivalent to a Lulu nuclear depth charge.

To quote a character from one of my all-time favorite movie.....

"Mr. President, We must not allow a Mineshaft Gap!"

[The Bandit]

Originally Posted by origl_main_raptor2

But the DC's do...That suggests that there IS such a beast. If you have a special DataPoint for a single type of specific object, then that is bad software design, because you try and have the same number of properties within types for each object in that type, so to me there should be a Blast Radius Datapoint for every object within type WEAPONS. Killerfish just ain't showing it. In fact in the Soviets DC in weapons.txt it's there, I believe.

Depth weapons are treated differently and have a different set of fields. I've also tried to set an arbitrary detonation depth (say 300 ft.) to see if this would work but it's a yes or no field with the actual setting data coming as an input from the launch platform (the Ka-25 dips and pings you, knows you're at 350 feet and fuses his weapons accordingly).

Depth Detonation (True / False)
Contact Detonation (True / False)

By all means if you have any way around this or think you can get it to work give it a try but I'm just telling you what's already been tried / looked at before.

I've mentioned before that I'd very much like to see Nukes in the game because these weapons were deployed and often carried throughout the Cold War, but there are certainly game-play considerations to be made. What's to stop somebody from firing off a Mk 45 at the middle of every tender formation they get, or rippling off all four of their SUBROCs to do an area bombardment because they can't find that last contact. These have to be addressed and the answer (getting nuked by the Soviets in the inevitable tactical bombardment that would be sure to come) is one that few players would like or find entertaining.

[Aktungbby]

flavio hc16!

I admit that I have not played since the new patch, so I am not sure what is 'broken' as of yet. I'll have to get in game tomorrow and see what's what.

As for managing the individual mods when updates happen, I admit that it wasn't something that I had thought about at the time. :-P

I'm not a developer/software guy/game designer, I just monkeyed around with the files until I got them to play nice. Though I did have a game crash or two. As to what may have caused that? It could very well be just be my PC and not the software itself.

I'll report back in a bit when I tweak things to work together. :-)

Thanks for the responses, ideas, suggestions and opinions.