Nope, the real ship names function only works in Commander, it's not part of the MFM (or any other mod) and works independently of any mods you've added to the game itself.
First off, make sure that you have checked "Use real ship names" in Commander's options. If you haven't selected that option, Commander won't give you real ship data for anything at all.
When you finish a patrol, also make sure you open Commander and update the Personnel file for your kaleun. Do not skip this step! It's what triggers Commander to "consult" the Ship Names file and add the real data to your patrol log.
Now if you open the folder on your hard drive where Commander was installed and look in the Cfg subfolder, you'll see a file called "Ship Names.cfg" in there. That's the file that contains all the real ship names and crew/cargo data.
If you open the Ship Names file and scroll down, you'll see that where the ship names are listed, they are divided by class: AK03A, M01B, etc. The classes listed here correspond to classes of ships in the game (you'll find folders for all of the classes in your game in the game's data\Sea folder, or you can see a list of them by opening up the EnglishNames.cfg file in that same folder). The version of the file that was current at the time of Commander's release is installed as part of Commander, but Sailor Steve updates it with more data every so often. Watch the Mods Workshop forum, he always posts a link when he does this so you can go download the newest version. (The new version is for January 2011 and that's the thread I linked to in my previous reply).
Some "classes" in the Ship Names file, like [GenericMerchantsAndTankers], are "catchall" lists for several different classes that appear in the game. Those classes will have been mapped to that list by the CLASSMAP that appears near the top of the Ship Names file.
If there is no list of names for a particular class, and that class hasn't been mapped to an existing list in the CLASSMAP, Commander can't give it a real name and data in your patrol logs because it consults the file and doesn't see any info there for that class. Usually this is okay because the Ship Names file covers just about everything you would normally sink in the game.
The issue with the MFM currently is that it adds a ton of new classes to the game, some of which - the "neutral" ships - aren't represented in the Ship Names file in Commander. There's just no data there for those classes, so Commander can't give them a real name or list the cargo even if you follow all the right steps and it gives you that info for the other ships you sink.
The "neutral" ship classes in the MFM are the ones whose class name ends with 'X': M02X, T18X, etc. My understanding is that Steve didn't add data for those classes to the Ship Names file because they were (in theory) neutral and therefore you wouldn't be sinking them anyway. But the way the MFM works is, it adds some of those "neutral" classes to the shipping Rosters for countries you are at war with, like America and Britain, as well as to the Rosters for neutral countries. So when they appear in the game they might be neutral or they might be enemy ships and you have to make a decision based on observation about whether or not to attack them.
Steve couldn't have known that since he hasn't been able to run the game with the MFM installed on his existing computer, so I don't think it ever occurred to him that some of the supposedly neutral ships it adds would be legitimate targets and get sunk and then need names and data from the Ship Names file.
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only way to get real ship names and data for those 'X' class ships from the MFM is to add data to the Ship Names file for them, or map them to existing lists in the current file. That's kind of what we were discussing in that other thread.
