Gyro Angles

[ColonelSandersLite]

So a question for you guys that are more active on the mod scene around here.

Did anybody ever put out a mod that would let you directly input gyro angles into the tdc in either sh3 or sh4?

[Rockin Robbins]

Other than a zero gyro angle, no. But in effect you can do that from the periscope by setting speed and optionally AoB to zero and sending bearing to TDC. This has the advantage of correcting for the parallax between the torpedo room of choice and the periscope. Angles are different from those three perspectives, you know...... Actually as I think about it the true gyro angle is from the point at the end of the reach and adjusting for the turn radius of the torpedo, all of which were directly enterable into a real TDC, as was torpedo speed. That way a new torpedo type didn't require new TDCs.

Although it should be possible, I know of no mods to let you directly set torpedo gyro angles.

[ColonelSandersLite]

Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins

Other than a zero gyro angle, no. But in effect you can do that from the periscope by setting speed and optionally AoB to zero and sending bearing to TDC. This has the advantage of correcting for the parallax between the torpedo room of choice and the periscope.

Yeah, I know, but I'm specifically looking to avoid that. For reasons!

[Rockin Robbins]

Originally Posted by ColonelSandersLite

Yeah, I know, but I'm specifically looking to avoid that. For reasons!

Would you be working on a more faithful external TDC? You don't have to answer that. Mysteries are good.

[ColonelSandersLite]

I'm toying with the idea of creating something that would provide more realistic targeting for a very special boat in the game. Want to make sure I'm not thinking of reinventing the wheel though. I'll talk more about it later. Got some things I gotta do.

[ColonelSandersLite]

Alright, I've got a few minutes now so here's what I'm thinking about.

The S boats did not have a tdc. Gyro angles where set manually. In my time with S boats, I have just been making do by setting the range and bearing, ignoring speed, aob, and the position keeper. That's a little hackish though and it would be pretty cool if a way to use the historical methods of figuring out the gyro angle and entering it could be devised.

My current line of thought is that it may be possible to fake it by:
Remove all of the buttons to send to TDC.
Remove the buttons to access the aob and speed sections of the TDC
Remove the us TDC box on the left completely
Hijack the german bearing entry dial
Resize the Stadimeter tool to make it larger for readability.
Remove the sonar send range and send bearing functions. (I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think that s boats had active sonar)
Possibly, if someone can show me that the S boats did not have stadimeters, even remove that as well.


This should:
Prevent sending any information to the TDC, locking the range at the default of 500 yards, speed and aob at 0, and render the player unable to send the periscopes bearing.

I could then figure out the gyro angles for the mk10 at various bearings, range 500y and reskin and calibrate the german bearing dial to read as a gyro angle dial.

Preferably, it would be possible to put a copy of this dial on the left side of the periscope views where the position keeper box was.

All of this is very much a *maybe* at this stage.

[Rockin Robbins]

Found something tantalizing. Here are the commands available for the keyboard relating to torpedoes.


Not all these commands relate to SH4: some relate to SH3 and SH5. Trial and terror is called for here.

My guess would be to set your button to Set_TDC_bearing. Exactly how the mechanics of that would work out I don't know. Ducimus made many things in the submarine clickable but isn't here to ask. But the secrets are all in TMO. Somewhere.....

[TorpX]

Originally Posted by ColonelSandersLite

The S boats did not have a tdc. Gyro angles where set manually.

...

This should:
Prevent sending any information to the TDC, locking the range at the default of 500 yards, speed and aob at 0, and render the player unable to send the periscopes bearing.

I don't know of any way to just enter a arbitrary gyro angle, but RFB allows you to set the range on the right slideout to 11,000 yds., iirc., so setting a bearing will make the gyro angle very close. This is the next best thing. Maybe you could increase the range figure further.

[ColonelSandersLite]

@RR
Those are the same commands used by the dials in the german attack map and can be seen in dials.cfg. As keyboard commands, they only send the dials default value. In the case of Set_TDC_bearing this is 0. You can try it in an american sub by pointing the periscope at some non zero bearing and send a bearing/range then pressing the key. You will see that bearing gets reset to 0.

As a quick test, that keyboard command won't produce results, but it actually does help alleviate a major concern of mine. That is whether or not the german dial could possible be used to enter bearing information into the american TDC. In other words, is there a hardcoded separation there or not? The answer seems to be no. I'm thinking that the german and american tdc is actually the same tdc "under the hood", and the difference is in the buttons and dials available to the user.

This is exactly what I was hoping for so this idea might actually work.

[ColonelSandersLite]

@TorpX
A quick test with the german TDC and there it allows a manually entered max range of 10 000 meters, so around 3X as far. This produces a gyro angle vs entered bearing difference of 2 degrees (+/- .5 of course). Still, as a possibility, it might be useful to help simplify the issue of getting the scaling and dial right at a minimum.

[ColonelSandersLite]

Oh, just realized that there is possibly a super obvious solution just staring me in the face.

You can tweak gyro angle by up to 20 degrees in the position keeper box. I don't know if it's possible to widen this range or not, but might be worth looking into.

[ColonelSandersLite]

So, I've been tinkering and I think the idea of just using the US spread dial is a bust. It seems that the game is enforcing a minimum/maximum of -20/20. I might be able to find a way around it, but I doubt it.

It might be nice if someone with more sh4 editing experience could take a look and see if my suspicions are true or if I'm just being an idiot.

[TorpX]

I too, wanted to implement a way to use an arbitrary gyro angle, but settled for calculating a correction for the TDC generated gyro angle (using the periscope/TBT to set it). Using the offset dial is ok for small angles, but even if you could increase the max./min. limits of the dial, it would be very difficult to make fine adjustments (the mouse control being what it is).

Perhaps, there is a way to use the mouse scroll wheel to make adjustments to the offset dial?

[ColonelSandersLite]

Making the dial bigger would be my solution. In the S-boat, the dial could replace the whole position keeper panel, and with a range of -135 to 135, control would be much finer than the stock AOB dial. Of course, getting it to work right for a boat that needs to PK panel, would take a bit more finesse. Still, that's not even an option unless a I can figure out a way to push the stupid dial past -20/20.

If I'm not mistaken, it should be as simple as changing:
[Dial52]
Name=PositionKeeper_TorpedoSettings_RealSpreadAngl e
Type=65; DIAL_REALSPREAD_ANGLE
Cmd=Set_realspread_angle
Dial=0x4206000A
CrtVal=0x42060003
NewVal=0x0
DialVal=-180,180
RealVal=-20,20
Circular=Yes
RelativeDrag=Yes
CmdOnDrag=Yes
;Dynamic=Yes

To:
[Dial52]
Name=PositionKeeper_TorpedoSettings_RealSpreadAngl e
Type=65; DIAL_REALSPREAD_ANGLE
Cmd=Set_realspread_angle
Dial=0x4206000A
CrtVal=0x42060003
NewVal=0x0
DialVal=-180,180
RealVal=-135,135
Circular=Yes
RelativeDrag=Yes
CmdOnDrag=Yes
;Dynamic=Yes


That is, unless the limits can also be defined somewhere else I don't know about.


Speaking of gyro angles, in my testing on this, I think I spotted a small game bug. It seems the max gyro angle is actually -135 to 134. Common sort of programming error there.

[TorpX]

AFAIK, that is the deal there.

Maybe, there might be some advantage in trying a non-circular control?

Do you know what these values are for?

CrtVal=0x42060003
NewVal=0x0

Speaking of gyro angles, in my testing on this, I think I spotted a small game bug. It seems the max gyro angle is actually -135 to 134.

I think the game does a poor job of rounding, in general. Like when we rotate the hydrophones; sometimes a bearing of '0' is displayed, sometimes it is '360'. I don't think the real values are much different, just a rounding issue, I think.