[WIP] Japanese Merchant Marine

[tater]

Japanese Merchant Marine for RSRDC, TMO and RFB.
By Sergei and Tater

Additional content by:
Keltos1 - Japanese small arms.
Miner1436 - Japanese small arms and the Type A Dihatsu landing craft model work.
Poul and the SOM Group (for the use of some of their merchant ships)
Others have some WIP we hope to add

Thanks to:
Skwasjer for S3D, without which this simply would not have happened.
Lurker_hlb3 (for RSRDC)
Ducimus (TMO dats)
LukeFF (RFB dats/sims)
Observer (RFB dats/sims)
Nisgeis (for helping to set me straight on a number of issues )
Motoyuki Iwashige (for his amazing models and book that provided such inspiration) http://ww6.enjoy.ne.jp/~iwashige/
The credits are by no means complete, but they will be sorted out for release.

The additional content has been altered by sergei and tater, and we accept any problems that might have resulted as our own.

Background
This all started with Sergei's wonderful ship skins. Doing them in the stock game is, well, a nightmare. So Sergei rebuilt all the texture maps on the actual 3d models so that the hull was as continuous as possible. I immediately started bugging him with images of Japanese dazzle paint schemes, colors used, etc. The result was a stunning collection of skins by sergei.

Given that this mod requires a new DAT file for all ships that are reskinned, I decided that my contribution could be to do any work in the DAT files that might make the merchants better, and more variable to the player. What we have done is to place many "Y" nodes in the dat that allow gun platforms, deck cargo, or anything else we'd like to be placed with just changes to the eqp file. This means we can have variant ships with so-called "BP-clones." These are cloned ships that borrow an existing model. All they have are cfg, eqp, sns, _sil, and _shp files.

Scope
New skins for all merchants including:
Civilian skins, which will be rare, and will slowly disappear as the war progresses. Around 4 per ship.

Wartime Grey. Common throughout the war, though less likely late in the war when green takes over as the standard. 2-3 variants per ship.

Dazzle schemes. The Japanese used 2 and 3 tone dazzle schemes in shades of grey. Sergei has replicated real patterns in use by the japanese.
Around 4 per ship.

Later war Green. Starting in '44 (late '43?) you'll see the green measure used. 2 per ship. The green was possibly used earlier on new construction, but in June of 1944, it was ordered to be applied on ALL merchants over 500 grt. By the end of '44, get used to green

Humanitarian schemes. Hospital and POW supply ship schemes.

There are 20 stock merchant hulls, so the total skin count is huge; over 260 skins are included!

New equipment:
Most ships have revamped eqp files and dats. This means that they will have gun platforms that vary or change over the course of the war, even possibly alternate mast arrangements, false funnels, deck objects, etc. Some will even draw different amounts of water, so the stock heavily laden ships, and "light" ships riding high.

New Ships:
We're going to add a few ships from Battle for the Baltic with their team's kind permission, because they bear a strong resemblance to Japanese units. As we have brand new ships we will add those as well.

Miner1436's Type A landing craft is in as deck cargo, and will be included as a functioning ship as well.

Campaign changes:
JMM will use some "zero file size" layers in RSRDC to allow for some traffic outside the initial scope of RSRDC. The Hospital ships, for example. To start these are not TROM copies, but they are informed by the places they went in the TROMs. I'll try to get some precise TROM based content in there as we go forward. As we see more small coasters, we'll likely need to add in more coastal traffic (sea trucks, barges, etc).

The benefit of using the zero file size .mis files is that it doesn't mess with the RSRDC campaign.cfg.

New Recognition Manual:
Because we will be cloning many (nearly all) ships at least once for variant versions, we need to do something with the rec manual since rec manual entries are auto-generated for all ships (which is unfortunate). Since we don't wish to clutter the rec manual with 2, 3, or even more entries for a single ship, I have taken a different tack with the rec manual. The mod will rewrite all the merchant rec manual files (the _sil images) with direct copies of ONI manual pages reformatted for SH4.

Also, some ships were better known by ONI, and had more data. We might have some ships with more than one rec manual page per ship. Such a ship might look like the following as you click through the manual:

You'd get to page one for Kasagisan and see:

Click to the next ship, and you see:


The lower "page" of a single entry will, instead of computer generated perfect matches of the SH4 ship, look like this to start:


The reason for ONI images is twofold. One, I like them, and the stock manual makes ID too easy. Two, I want to have non-repeating entries for our cloned ships. As a result SOME entries in the rec manual will be dummies. I might make a variant designed to actually look like another class of merchant, in which case the rec manual will refer to the ship in question, or it might be a similar sized ship that is not yet in game. In the above Kasagisan example, the two ships are identical, but might have variant gun platforms, paint schemes, or even different drafts.


More later...