Quote:
Originally Posted by Immelmann
You're welcome. Yes what you say is consistent with my observations of the formation. If I find more I will let you know. Last night I was successful in reestablishing contact after breaking off and navigating north of the shoals while the task force passed to the south of them. This time I was able to actually put two boats on the bottom. An IJN destroyer with a MK27 and that Tanker that was way too low in the water (MK27 & later finished with deck gun after dark). Having no propulsion, after the MK27 hit, the formation had abandoned this ship. On second contact the flat top was also pitching more than I observed on first contact. Or seemed to me to be anyway. Wind was still at 8 m/s. Due to geography and the task force direction of travel I surmised that the group must be heading for the northern end of The Makassar Strait where it opens up into the Southern Celebes Sea. So I made haste for that position and believe that I got there ahead of them due to Japanese air cover direction of travel seeming not to be from the direction of any airfield in range. Saved and ended session there as I lay in wait hoping for a third contact with the same Task Force. This kind of running gunfight is new to me in SH4 and frankly a lot of fun. I guess it goes without saying that the full videos of my recent streams are available in the video section of my twitch profile page. Although there may be muted sections due to twitch AI making a copyright violation decision about music played on stream. Last night's stream was actually broken into two video segments however due to some disruption in my internet connection.  |
Back to this now Sir Immelmann... I have found several issues, especially with the 43a_Jap_TaskForce.mis file. This is similar to what I had found in the 43a_Jap_Convoys.mis file a while back, in some of the bad routing, most likely caused by use of scripting to add-in all of the zig-zags in the groups' routings. I can attest to the fact that this aspect of the game is very easy to overlook, just by the fact that with a lot of this, you have to zoom-in to the 10km level or closer, which is quite close, in order to "see" the "errors". Some of them are not visible until almost all the way in, such as if the group is routed through and over Betio Island in Tarawa Atoll
- The Convoys layer had the same problem, just not as many groups routed over land. Thankfully, the TaskForce layers aren't as populated as the Convoys layers are, but they all have issues...
However, there is another wrinkle in the pudding. We've made changes to ship configurations, as well as group make-ups over time, and those edits were done ~after~ the routing and speeds were set (by the FOTRS AOTD_MadMax team). The Mission Editor does NOT catch any issues if you stick a 12 knot Max Speed ship in a group that is set to do 18 knots across open water, nor would it catch changing the ship's configuration... This seems to be another factor in these "bad" spawns that we've seen all-too often. The game engine finds it extremely difficult to build a group that has not been "keeping convoy" for the last 912 waypoints...
I'm trying to come up with a script that can search for the Max Speed of the slowest ship in all of the groups, and find all of the waypoint speeds that are set at or above that... If I can do that, then I'll try to change them via another script, 'cause this "doing it by hand" is about to drive me bonkers - and that is usually a ~very~ short drive...
