Quote:
Originally Posted by cdrsubron7
If people are just starting to look at you funny, Billy, consider you're self lucky. I've been getting strange looks for years. 
BTW, how's work coming on your sinking model for the ships in FOTRS?  |
Ahhhh... That's the side-effects of been depth charged too many times.
I was kidding myself thinking that I could achieve a serious damage/sinking model working only with the zones.cfg file. This method has been tried again by Ducimus, Bilge Rat and Maddy. The results were good, compared to stock arcade sinking ships, but this was not enough for me. Took me a lot of time to roughly understand how this file works. I did make some progress, good progress I could say, correcting some of the side-effects, achieved some of my goals. But my vision on how a ship takes damage and sinks cannot be achieved by the zones.cfg only. My modding skills are insignificant to try the method used by Observer and Werner Sobe. I have to work with the default ship compartments.
The \SEA folder is the key. That means making changes to all the ships.
And Maddy was generous enough to provide A LOT of ships!
But, in the \SEA folder I found treasure! I exploited it and it worked!
It's an entirely new approach, never been used in SH4.
After that I had to revise a formula for altering ship hit points based on tonnage and armor. Everything worked as intended. After that, another formula to simulate the damage mechanics of individual ships. All of this was done to each and every ship. After serious testing, the formulas had to be altered again and again and again.... Each time changing ALL of the ships.
I've reached a point where all the work in the \SEA folder is complete. I'm now fine tuning the zones.cfg in order to get the desired results. But with the new damage system in effect, I had to unlearn the things I've previously learned on the zones.cfg. That's where I'm working now.
I don't like to say big words, but this model will change a lot the way ships are damaged and sink. You can forget sinking a BB with a torpedo at it's magazine. The ship will suffer, greatly, but it will not sink. It's up to the captain to finish it with 1-2 well placed torpedoes or 5-6 more. In fact, hitting the ship in wrong compartments may reverse the damage done previously.
I tried to exclude some arcade things in the damage model. This is a realism mod. Sometimes realism is achieved by extreme ways. The Yamato, for example, had 1500HP in stock. Now it has 7280HP!
But a whole lot of mechanics working under it, to make it sink more realistically. But that's for all of you to decide.
I'm in a good way, I believe that v1.0 may be released for testing next week.
As a bonus, it includes some changes to ship acceleration. It's not perfect, but the ships do not accelerate like my Yamaha XJR1300 does!
Sorry for the long post,
Regards,
Billy.