[REL] "New" old unit: Queen Mary ocean liner \ troop transport (Reworked 2017 edition)

[gap]

Originally Posted by Kendras

Just to say that the 3D portholes are wrong textured on the outskirts : there is a light wooden texture there.

Probably some of the porthole faces are using the same texture as the wooden decks. The issue should be easily fixable by switching all the faces to use the main texture/material.

Originally Posted by Kendras

And I remind you that it would be a wonderful addition if you could create enlighted portholes for the night (same way as the enlighted ships for GWX : a special light texture, but I don't know how it works precisely).

I have looked into this while working on ship's smoothing groups. For portholese to look illuminated, the central part of them should be given a "luminous" material. Unfortunately, the 3D portholes currently in place have only the external ring modelled, but not the central glass. That's something we can add, but there are hundreds of portholes: even if we illuminate only a fraction of them, putting all those small polygons is their right place is going to take some time.

Talking about the "special light texture", I didn't check how other modders (I think Anvart dealt with ship lights) have set it, but I think we can use the city lights controller to get porthole lights to be switched only after down.

Originally Posted by Kendras

I guess you should create a second unit for the war version of the ship.

I don't think so. Porthole "lights" could be stored in a library file and linked to the model through eqp file. By doing this, we should be able to switch them off by date, the same way that we change ship's paint scheme

Originally Posted by Kendras

Now, I think you are working on the bow section. This ship will be very nice !

Originally Posted by gap

I don't think so. Porthole "lights" could be stored in a library file and linked to the model through eqp file. By doing this, we should be able to switch them off by date, the same way that we change ship's paint scheme

Yes, but how can you control the paint sheme as well ? It's not by the eqp file, is it ?

[gap]

Originally Posted by Kendras

Yes, but how can you control the paint sheme as well ? It's not by the eqp file, is it ?

No, provided that each unit's main texture was set as configurable in its dat/gr2 file, the texture can by changed by date (and by nation) using unit's roster cfg file(s). Tha above is surely valid for SHIV and 5, but I am reasonably confident that it applies to SHIII too, though there are not examples of this feature being used in stock files.

[VonDos]

Hi mates!

Yes, i was working on bow section. Now i'm going to bed, but those are today results:





@gap: those are ship's part who need to be reworked for light\shadow bug:
https://www.sendspace.com/file/7fs77c

Best regards,
Vd

PS About light question, please try to dowload and install my Queen of Bermuda mod. Try this unit in a single mission with mission editor in 1939 before war start date, in 1939 after war start date and in 1942. This could be interesting about portholes lights and timeline (neutral enlightened, war duty darkened..) and about textures management issue.

Best regards,
Vd

[gap]

Originally Posted by VonDos

Yes, i was working on bow section. Now i'm going to bed, but those are today results...

Excellent!

Originally Posted by VonDos

@gap: those are ship's part who need to be reworked for light\shadow bug:
https://www.sendspace.com/file/7fs77c

Okay, I will work on them this afternoon

Originally Posted by VonDos

PS About light question, please try to dowload and install my Queen of Bermuda mod. Try this unit in a single mission with mission editor in 1939 before war start date, in 1939 after war start date and in 1942. This could be interesting about portholes lights and timeline (neutral enlightened, war duty darkened..) and about textures management issue.

Okay. Is the ship illuminated before her conversion to armed merchant?

[gap]

Hi VonDos,

I had a look into your files, and I must say that this time the problem isn't caused by erroneously split edges, but by some surfaces not being totally flat.

I can fix the problem easily, but maybe it is better if you send me the whole model (or at least the whole superstructure) for me to make sure that the perimetral vertices of the flattened surfaces will match perfectly the corresponding vertices of adjoining faces.

Sorry for making you to send the files twice, but as I said, at the beginning I thought the problem had a different cause

[VonDos]

Originally Posted by gap

Hi VonDos,

I had a look into your files, and I must say that this time the problem isn't caused by erroneously split edges, but by some surfaces not being totally flat.

I can fix the problem easily, but maybe it is better if you send me the whole model (or at least the whole superstructure) for me to make sure that the perimetral vertices of the flattened surfaces will match perfectly the corresponding vertices of adjoining faces.

Sorry for making you to send the files twice, but as I said, at the beginning I thought the problem had a different cause

Hi!
I'm sending you a PM

[VonDos]

Originally Posted by gap

Okay. Is the ship illuminated before her conversion to armed merchant?

She is illuminated only before war begin date, sept 1939. With war start, every porthole is darkened because unità is no more neutral..

Best regards,
Vd

[gap]

Originally Posted by Kendras

I remind you that it would be a wonderful addition if you could create enlighted portholes for the night...

Originally Posted by gap

I have looked into this while working on ship's smoothing groups. For portholese to look illuminated, the central part of them should be given a "luminous" material. Unfortunately, the 3D portholes currently in place have only the external ring modelled, but not the central glass.

I was wrong: after having looked more closely into the unit VonDos is currently working on, I have discovered that porthole's central portions are modelled. At first I didn't notice them, as thei are stored in diffrent submodel than the frames.

Originally Posted by VonDos

PS About light question, please try to dowload and install my Queen of Bermuda mod. Try this unit in a single mission with mission editor in 1939 before war start date, in 1939 after war start date and in 1942. This could be interesting about portholes lights and timeline (neutral enlightened, war duty darkened..) and about textures management issue.

Originally Posted by gap

Is the ship illuminated before her conversion to armed merchant?

Originally Posted by VonDos

She is illuminated only before war begin date, sept 1939. With war start, every porthole is darkened because unità is no more neutral..

I have had a quick look into your Queen of Bermuda. I see you have followed my advise to store different ship parts in a separate library file, but I think you have actually overdone my suggestion lol

The only parts that actually had to be set as external equipments, are the ones that were historically modified during the conversion (vents, funnels, masts, part of the superstructure, etc). Imo the main hull and all the parts not modified during the conversions, should be stored directly in one of the dat files in the sea folder. Only one, not the two of them, because two (similar) units can share the same dat file (so you might also scrap the second dat file).

How can you do that, you may ask? The answer is easy: by adding the following line to the [Unit] section of the cfg file, for the unit that you want to use another unit's model:

[Unit]
ClassName=BBPennsylvania
3DModelFileName=data/Sea/NBB_Colorado/NBB_Colorado
UnitType=11
...

The example above is from SHIV's USS Pennsylvania which, as you can see, uses the same files as the USS Colorado. The only files found in Pennsylvania's folder, besides the cfg and the shape files, are eqp and sns files, used for customizing the ship relative to her sister (the Colorado):



In this example, the Colorado and the Penssylvania use the same texture, but if devs wanted the latter to use a special texture, I think they could have done that by editing the following entries in her ROSTER cfg file:

[Texture 1]
TextureName=data/Sea/NBB_Colorado/NBB_Colorado_T01.tga
LightmapTextureName=data/Sea/NBB_Colorado/NBB_Colorado_O01.tga
NormalmapTextureName=data/Sea/NBB_Colorado/NBB_Colorado_N01.tga
StartDate=19000101
EndDate=19991231
Frequency=1

I think the same settings can also be used in SHIII, though they are not found anywhere in stock files.

One last note: In the case of the Queen of Bermuda, having the ship set as two separate units (one being a proxy clone of the other), makes sense because the two versions of the ship had different roles and they require different unit types. For the Queen Mary, we just need one unit whose paint scheme and equipments (including the lightened windows) can be switched by date, through eqp and cfg files' start/end date settings.

PS: check your PM box