Realism- and gameplay-related hardcode fixes for SH3.EXE

[Myxale]

That's the one thing that alway baffled me; the fact that UBI Ro did make the other watch guys change Places automatically, but not the WO.

There must have be an limitation beforehand. Maybe its because the other Guys are dummy's and the WO is interactive!
(on a Code-related level they surely differ!)

Just shooting blind hre!

[h.sie]

@Tessa: Please excuse my late response. I had to read your post multiple times and it took some time for me to understand. It is surely a good idea to affect the crew health (hitpoints) in order to simulate chloride from damaged batteries, but at the moment and without SDK I have no hunch how the crew management is programmed and so I fear to touch it. I have to restrict on easy-to-fix solutions. The only solution I can offer at the moment is to drastically enlarge the amount of Co2 that is produced per time in order to simulate cloride coming from damaged battery cells so that the UBoat has to surface immediately. But even for that simple-looking idea I have to program someting like a states-machine that controls the different possible states that have to be handled correctly in order to control CO2 cumulation. And since I'm not able to STORE the current state of that statesmachine when saving the game, after the reload the current state will be lost. So I fear that LGN1 is right by saying this would open a can of worms. But let me first program a simple solution: CO2 cumulation depending on Silent-Running. Even this is a great step forward. If that works stable, we can think about more.


@Myxale: I have the same suspicion, that there were concrete (programming-related) reasons for the devs not to move the 1WO to the bridge. But I stopped to think about that, because other things are more important.

h.sie

[LGN1]

Another point about the chlorine gas is that, AFAIK, it was only produced when water came into contact with the batteries. So, not battery damage, but water inleakage should trigger it (maybe together with battery damage). Since leaks happen quite often in-game, the question is how much water has to enter,... can of worms.

Concerning wolfpacks: I have no news from Iambecomelife. I just saw his pictures and his comment. I think he uses somehow an 'aircraft' object because:
-aircrafts can change their altitude/depth
-you can call them via contact reports
But I have no idea how ships would attack such an object (with depthcharges?), how they would detect the 'airsub', how the 'airsub' AI would choose the altitude/depth,... tons of things I would love to know.

Anyway, even if the 'airsubs' would just be spawned and more or less quickly destroyed it would be a step forward because it would be similar to the present AI subs, but this time the subs would be triggered by the player and getting them into the campaign layers would be much easier. I hope Iambecomelife will tell us more in the future.

Cheers, LGN1

[h.sie]

BETA TESTING?

Nice one. Under normal conditions my VII can stay submerged for 36h. But when in silent running, I can now stay under water for 72 hours.

:-)

Before I try to add more functionality, I need help from some beta-testers with computer-skills. interested people please contact me via PM. Thank you for helping.

h.sie

[h.sie]

Just uploaded a Patch-Kit for V15B. It's a Batch Skript which automatically does all steps described in the tutorial of the first post of this thread.

Instructions:

1) Create empty Working Directory somewhere on your Disk (you need write permission.)

2) Copy your original (unpatched, uncracked, unhacked) sh3.exe into that Working Directory.

3) Download SH3_V15B_Patch-Kit.7z archive and extract all contained files into the Working Directory.

4) Start Patch_SH3.bat. If your sh3.exe has correct checksum, it will be patched. Skript makes backup of your original sh3.exe. It's called sh3.old.

5) Copy patched sh3.exe into your SH3-Installation.

That's it.

h.sie

By the way: This patch adds code to sh3.exe. Some Antivirus-Programs maybe don't like this.

[h.sie]

@LGN1: It could be programmed e.g. in pseudo-code

IF ((BATTERY_DAMAGE > 0.5) AND (FLOODING_LEVEL > 0.5))
THEN: CO2_CUMULATION = 10*CO2_CUMULATION

but to be honest, I think that it is too provisional and I better leave that out.

Regarding crew number dependency: AFAIK the UBoats had Oxygen supply. What if they took a certain amount of Oxygen supply for each crew member (e.g. 30 bottles for 30 men ; or 35 bottles for 35 men.) In this case it would be wrong to make diving times depend on the total crew number. Is there any historical information available??

h.sie

[LGN1]

Hi h.sie,

just download the pdf

http://www.filefront.com/16383685/M....VIIC-1940.pdf/

and take a look at page 84. The air refreshing system is described there. It mentions some additional oxygen devices to adjust the oxygen according to the crew size (p. 85). But to me this part is not fully clear. I can't imagine that they installed more supplies when there were a few guys more on board. Anyway, I think a crew independent mod is already good enough and another version is probably not worth the efforts.

Just to make sure, the new version also takes into account multiple switches between silent running on and off, right? So whenever it's on, CO2 accumulates with rate a and when it's off with rate B?

Cheers, LGN1

Will you also offer the version V15C as a binary difference on your website?

[Stormfly]

Originally Posted by h.sie

@Stormfly: Correct programming provided, he would behave exactly the same way as if one manually moves him up.

h.sie

oh, thats not what i ment... i thought moving him manualy, give a nature delay reporting sightings after surfacing, of course maybe a programmed random delay would be perfect

[h.sie]

Hi LGN1,

at the current state there is only one switch: Silent-Running (SR) ON/OFF. This affects the CO2 cumulation rate with a factor of 2.0 (can be fine-adjusted later). So every time SR is OFF, the stock SH3 cumulation rate is used, which leads to diving times of approx 36h (Type VII). Every time when SR is ON, the cumulation rate is divided by 2.0 so that diving times of max. 72 h are possible (provided that SR = ON all the time).

For the next version I'll add a possibility to fully bypass (disable) this mod for people who don't like the changes. And I'll also add 4 individual correction factors (one for every Uboat type) to allow for max. diving-time adjustments according to historical data. If I remember correctly, the XXI had much longer diving time than currently implemented in SH3.

I don't think that I also want to consider the crew number, because beta testing of the first version took so much time (without any help from others). It mainly depends on how difficult it is to determine the crew number. (This problem seems to be sooo simple from the user's point of view, but since addresses of the internal variables are not fix but change often, I have to work with pointers of high rank in order to access these variables, and it's often not easy to re-construct these pointers. I think everyone who worked with pointers in Asm or C hates them).

V15C will be released as "binary difference" as usual plus Batch skript for easy patching. But before publishing, I'll look into the compressed air problem mentioned by Rubini.

On my mediafire page (folder V15C beta testing) one can download a SH3_patcher, which applies V15C beta temporarily into RAM, everytime one launches SH3 with this patcher/launcher. But don't forget to press Shift+Ctrl+P after SH3 is fully loaded.

h.sie

[SquareSteelBar]

Originally Posted by h.sie

...the XXI had much longer diving time than currently implemented in SH3...

Up to 400 hours:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-Boot-...rwasserbetrieb

[makman94]

wonderfull work you are doing here H.Sie !

are you going to post sometime the parts that need to tweak in order to adjust WO output ranges to individual tastes ?

thank you

[h.sie]

hi makman, thanks again.
yes. after releasing V15C I'll publish the addresses of the factors and switches for tweaking. Just be patient a little bit.


Currently adjusting the maximum diving times according to historical data.

Type II: No information. So I let it untouched. But diving time doubled with Silent Running.

Type VII and IX: With Silent Running, now the historical diving times (about 72 hours) can be reached.

Type XXI:
Squaresteelbar found 400h max. diving time.
LGN1 found 150h, which is not exactly the same.

SSB: Wikipedia.
@LGN1: Where did you get your information from?

h.sie

[SquareSteelBar]

I think 400 hours is a theoretic value related to oxygene reserves.

Max. diving time mainly depends on the capacity and loading state of the batteries...

[h.sie]

V15C is available.

New in this version:

1) CO2 production of the crew (and thus the maximum diving time) of Uboats now are strongly affected by Silent-Running status.
While in Silent Running, the crew produces only 50% of the CO2 compared to standard situation, so that diving times are doubled.

2) Enlarged maximum diving time for Type XXI from 46 hours to 75 hours.

3) All previous and following fixes (repair times, range estimations) are now switchable ON/OFF by changing a single Byte. Description will follow.

In V15C, the diving times are as follows:

Type II: 30h - unchanged.
Type VII: 36h - unchanged.
Type IX: 40h - unchanged.
Type XXI: raised from 46h to 75h.

When in Silent-Running all the time, the following maximum diving times are possible (Factor 2):

Type II: 60h
Type VII: 72h
Type IX: 80h
Type XXI: 150h.

which more or less conforms to historical data. Thanks, LGN1, for research.

Note: I decided not to take the number of crew members into consideration when calculating CO2 production and diving times, because it is not totally clear if Uboats had additional Oxygen supply for additional crew or not. Also I have historical data (regarding diving-time and number of crew) only for 3 Uboat types, but there are 8 different types in SH3.

h.sie

[Volk2]

Thanks for another essential step to improving the game!