Quote:
Originally Posted by TheDarkWraith
I sat down and started making my 'plan' on how to implement this and I see some shortfalls. Follow target (visual) works because the game lets me read the contact's bearing while the periscope/UZO is on the target. The hydrophone does not give me this information. In fact the hydrophone doesn't give any information to the scriptmanager in the form of contact info for the hydrophone. I have ways to circumvent this but it's not going to be perfect.
In order for hydro follow target to work I'm going to have to sweep the hydrophone in a narrow arc repeatedly every x amount of time to determine where the target is. From that I should be able to discern which contact is the one you are wanting to follow (if there are multiple contacts around it). Hydro follow target could possibly start tracking another target if it is close in bearing and range to the one it was already tracking. This is where I'm trying to find a way to mitigate this currently  |
I was expecting a similar issue with hydro contacts. This is why I told you that just following the contact closer to the current hydrophone bearig, would be enough.
IIRC, while manually sweeping the hydrophone, there is a narrow angular range within which a single contact is both audible/detectable (within this range its name is shown on the notebook, close to the "send to TDC" button). Maybe you could use that range as range of your target acqisition sweep, centering it on the current hydro bearing.
Indeed, this wouldn't avoid te risk of acquiring another nearby contact, but it would be anyway an huge step ahead for us SH5 players; moreover I guess that even in real life it would have been difficult to discern between contacts so close one with another
On the other hand, if we got our target within visual range, we don't need to use the hydrophone that much. This fact makes the use of visual targets not so useful for hydrophone tracking. Nevetheless, you could leave it as an option, for when the target is in sight but we need to limit the use of periscope.
Ultimately, if you like the idea, we would have two new orders available for the hydro guy: "acquire and follow the nearest target to current hydro angle" and "follow current visual contact".