[TorpX]

Thank-you Cap'n!




I thought I'd take time to comment on some of the details of the mod. Hopefully, I've explained things well enough in the docs, but I'll talk about some of the hows and whys, in case anyone is interested. If any players want to know more detail on this sort of thing, now would be the time to ask. In three months, I'll have forgotten 3/4 of all this.

1. I corrected a fog/visibility issue that creeped into the previous RFB version. Most likely, I used the wrong scene.dat file as a starting point (the pre-patch version). Anyway, I redid that, so we should be able to lock on to ships as well as we could in RFB 2.0. An Odd thing I noticed in the scene.dat file is the large number of 'fog' items. No wonder problems occur here.

2. I made changes to the rec. manual. Mainly just accurate mast heights. I corrected the lengths in the files, but these are not displayed in RFB, so it doesn't really help much. This actually took a lot of time, as I had to measure the hights and lengths of all the ships' game models. I found the RFB concept of using the top of deck, or stack, or mast, depending on the ship, to be unacceptable. I never was sure what I should use.

Along with the above, I relocated the ships' flags to the top masts to make them more visible. Range finding will still be difficult at longer range, but this should be of some help at medium ranges. I was amused to find one IJN carrier has no flag at all. Since it has no island, or mast, there is no place to put it - makes me wonder how they operated on that ship.

3. I would have liked to implement the fixes Cap'nScurvy made in OTC, but am not well enough acquainted with the details, so I settled for dealing with the mast height issue above.

4. I noticed that in the museum, one has rec. manual pages for everything, even the aircraft, so I assume it is possible to put them in the game. If I had a better understanding of that part of things, I would have put them in. I did make some minor changes to types of ships, so the order of things in rec. manual is altered.

5. I toyed with the idea of doing my own version of a damage model, but dropped the idea when I realized how long it would take to do it properly. This is probably the sort of thing one could spend a year on, and still not be finished. I consider the present damage system to be a weak point in the game.

6. I attempted to put a periscope 'splash' effect (as distinct from the 'wake' effect) on the periscopes. Either the idea just won't work, or I didn't do it right. Most likely the later. The idea was that you would have to limit your speed to under 4 kn., if you wanted to have a good view out of your scope.


More later...