GWX3 Unable to lock periscope to target

[Neutrino]

When I aim the attack periscope at a ship and press the 'L' key to lock it, the periscope does not track the target at all. It locks momentarily and then unlocks itself about 3 seconds later. I do not even have time to tick the box in the recognition manual let alone get a range fix with the stadiometrathingy.

Is this a bug or does GWX have a different locking behaviour that I just haven't sussed out, in which case can someone please give me some help :)

ty.

EDIT:

After some more investigation is appears I cannot lock anything further away than 3000 meters, stuff closer than that I can lock. Of course the only way I've been able to determine this is by having the God mode map on. Somebody please tell me this isn't by design.

[FIREWALL]

Your too far away. Get in to about 3000 meters or closer.

I play 100% realism so this is from past memory.


Hope this helps. Sink them all !!! :up:


Btw Welcome Aboard :salute:

[Neutrino]

So that means it's a bug right? After all why would I be able to lock the periscope to something at 3000 meters but not to something else I can see just as easily at 3010 meters?

Not that it's a real problem though, from the standpoint of accuracy there was no lock at all and given that you can take a stadiometer reading with the game paused it isn't something I'm going to lose any sleep over.

[FIREWALL]

I play GWX 3.0 Gold so I'm also baseing my answer on that.

I don't know if it's a bug. It's recommended somewhere to get within a 1,000 meters or closer for best chance of hit.

[Neutrino]

Is there a difference between GWX3 and GWX3 Gold ?

[FIREWALL]

Is there a difference between GWX3 and GWX3 Gold ?


No. I think it's their final version until GWX4

[Murr44]

Depending on the sea state you have to to be under 5000m to get your periscope to lock on to & track your target. With 0-8m waves I can lock on and stay locked at about 4900m. In rough seas you can be really close (1500m or less) & still have trouble maintaining a target lock. This isn't a bug. GWX makes your U-boat behave more naturally than in the stock game. Check the section in the GWX manual that I think is called "Your New U-boat" & it will explain these changes.

[Neutrino]

Hiya Murr44, I've checked the GWX manual carefully and I can't see it mentioned there, I've searched the whole document.

At any rate I'd like to suggest this feature is removed and the ability to lock a target at any range is re-enabled (or at least made optional) and here's why. Having a lock feature that works at some ranges and not at others doesn't make the uboat behave more like a real one at all since a real uboat doesn't have a lock feature of this type. The lock feature exists purely to make up for the fact that rather than having two great big handles moving a heavy and well greased scope to track targets, the PC Kaleun only has a piddly little mouse or a couple of keys and these are only provide control which is very limited in precision.

At short range this is not a difficult constraint to work around, but at long range it's a nightmare. One microsopic nudge of the mouse or a single press of a key rotates the periscope half a ship length in either direction.

I get the impression that there are a fair number of players in this forum who hold forth the proposition that any strategy other than getting with 800 meters of your target, opening up at point blank range, and then spending the rest of the evening on the bottom getting pounded by escorts, is somehow immoral.

I do not subscribe to that viewpoint. Given the necessary tools I can quite happily bounce fish off hulls at >2500 meters and then slink off into the night without the escort even knowing where the hell I was. I can then out flank the convoy again and set up a new sniper spot while listening to the gramophone and singing ribald sea shanties while the close range guys are watching depth charges make the bananas bounce off the pressure hull.

Making good long range shots is difficult enough as it is for realistic reasons which are submarine and maths related, it seems difficult to rationalise why it makes sense to make them even more difficult for reasons related purely to the limitations of a PC's input devices while at the same time retaining that mechanic which makes getting close range shots even easier than they already are!

[Madox58]

I'd reply.
But I'd just be deleted.
:haha:

[Jimbuna]

I'd reply.
But I'd just be deleted.
:haha:

Behave yersel :stare: :DL

Neutrino....we strived to do our best fully in the knowledge that whatever we released would be received in a myriad of ways.

One size will never fit all my friend.

There is of course nothing stopping people who wish to 'adjust' there game, attempting it if they so wish.

I sincerely hope you enjoy the GWXperience http://www.psionguild.org/forums/images/smilies/wolfsmilies/pirate.gif

[Sailor Steve]

I'm curious myself about this 3000m 'bug', since I've been tracking, locking onto ships and having the Weapons Officer identify them and then give me a range as much as 14,000 meters away. On a perfect day of course. And with the 16km mod enabled.

[Madox58]

Many so called 'Bugs'
come down to one thing.
Memory on the system involved.
SH3 is Memory Hungry!

If useing XP?
You are limited to about 2 Gigs usable.
Now if you have all kinds of junk running
then fire up SH3?
You get spotty results.


If you run Vista set up properly?
With say 4 Gigs?
Vista can use that memory and allow SH3 all it needs!
SH3 can not see beyond 2 Gigs.
But Vista can.
And can adjust.
Also, SH3 does not get better with Dual Cores and such.
It was never written to use them.

Also noted in many threads?
Not all users get the same problems nor the same results.
What is one persons problems may be a fluk.
After chaseing down verifiably several thousand problems?

Yours seem, at this point?
A matter that could be solved with a bit less,
Shall we say?
Hostility?

[Neutrino]

@privateer

Actually in Windows XP Pro user process virtual memory address space maximum is 3GB. The maximum physical memory the system can see is usually 3.5GB as long as the BIOS is modern enough. But this is splitting hairs. Your suggestion that my problems might have been caused by system resource starvation is a valid point but unlikely in this particular case. It was a single mission so possibly there are less units to track, SH3 was drawing only 1.2GB and I get 70fps. I have no other junk running while playing.

Internet forums are notoriously easy places for the meaning of ones words to get misinterpreted and I also have a habit of writing longer posts than most people. I tend to deal with this by trying to state the facts as clearly as I can with as little fluff as possible. This is occasionally seen as a bit abrupt, but not before have I been accused of hostility. Since the tone of my post must have come across that way I apologise, no offense was intended.

@jimbuna

You are of course absolutely right. My post wasn't intended to be a petulant rant about something I didn't like, just expressing the situation as it currently seems to me.

I was just hoping that if there was a reason to need to introduce an artificial mechanic to make long shots even more difficult than short shots than they already are, that someone would let me know what it was. I'm quite open-minded and perfectly able to reassess an opinion in the light of new information.

If it makes you feel any better I'd like to say that I'm genuinely bowled over by the quality of the modding that's been done for SH3, especially GWX3 which I've been seeding for the last week. I've played a lot of PC games and seen a lot of mods, but I can't remember ever seeing anything as professionally done as GWX.

I've only been playing SH3 for a week so it's far too early for me to have any fixed opinions of anything yet, yet alone to start coming up with ideas for mods. Maybe after I've been playing for a while, I can't see this game letting go of me in the near future, I love sub sims.

@Sailor Steve

I was playing the 'Happy Times' single mission, with the 16km mod enabled. The sea state was quite choppy and others have suggested that may have affected the lock range. It was the middle of the night so with the low light levels and the rough weather and not being able to lock the target I couldn't get any meaningful range, course or speed info at all until they were practically on top of me.

I'd been tailing this particular convoy though so I already knew their course and speed, and I had the map on in target update mode (just while I'm learning). But if I'd have stumbled across a new contact under those circumstances and not been able to lock them to get a range fix I'd be a bit concerned that in full realism mode I wouldn't really have had a fair shot at getting the information needed to set up an attack.

But like I say, it's only a first impression and I'm just throwing it out there to get other peoples views on it. I'll be interested to see how I feel about it after completing a few patrols and experiencing some proper rough weather.

[Otto Heinzmeir]

You might try Hitman's Optics mod. It doesn't use a stadimeter. It has hash marks along the side. You print out a table that has the hash marks on the right and the mast height along the bottom and you use that to determine range. This is a little more true to real life I think. I am not sure about the locking on this. Don't think that the mod affects that. One thing with Hitman's periscope is you don't need or want to lock the scope, because the hash marks are off the left side, so you tend to bring the ship's mast over to the left to get the reading.

Like in real life, beyond 3000m you can't get a real accurate reading. Once your around 1500m it is pretty dead on. Its a bit different but I got used to it and wouldn't go back to the stadimeter if you paid me.

[Pisces]

At short range this is not a difficult constraint to work around, but at long range it's a nightmare. One microsopic nudge of the mouse or a single press of a key rotates the periscope half a ship length in either direction.Using the CTRL-arrowkeys key combination you can use microstepping. Much finer than just ordinary arrowkey use.

[Neutrino]

Thanks for the tip Pisces I'll try that.

Otto everything I've read about the type VII subs indicates that they used a split optic stadimeter. With this system a second image of the ship is projected onto the eye piece by a prism which by rotating the periscope handle can be moved vertically independant of the main image. The proceedure to obtain the range consists of moving the projected image so that its waterline rests on the masthead of the first image at which point the masthead angle can be read off.

The advantage of this system was that since the two images of the ship were both moving identically on the surface of the sea, both images were completely stable relative to each other. This made it reasonably straightforward to take accurate measurements even in rough conditions. Which is why I'm wondering whether the GWX target locking behaviour isn't making something more difficult than it really was.

What the effective range and accuracy of the system was though I do not know, I will attempt to locate some information about this.

[TheDarkWraith]

Going by what I read about 'RestrictedRotation' controller in CameraBehavior.ACT it seems that this could be causing your locking problem. Has something possibly modified your \data\Library\camera.dat file?

RestrictedRotation..RestrictedRotation Action Controller....Azimunth....The azimuth parameters..Elevation...The elevation parameters....Tight...The object tight with parent. False means it keeps world Y axe..Targetable..The object can look at a target..K..................@...&... ........\RestrictedRotation.cpp

from what I read it seems that if you want to be able to lock onto a target then 'Targetable' has to be set to 0x1. Then to stay locked onto the target the object doing the 'looking' has to stay within the azimunth and elevation parameters. If it strays outside these parameters then it breaks lock. If you're in heavy seas and pitching and rolling then you could be exceeding these parameters and thus having the locking problem and/or the parameters are set too tight. Once again, I could be entirely wrong on this because I'm just going by what I interpret. Testing will prove whether this is true or not.

[panzerschutze12ss]

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/images/icons/icon1.gif
Going by what I read about 'RestrictedRotation' controller in CameraBehavior.ACT it seems that this could be causing your locking problem. Has something possibly modified your \data\Library\camera.dat file?

RestrictedRotation..RestrictedRotation Action Controller....Azimunth....The azimuth parameters..Elevation...The elevation parameters....Tight...The object tight with parent. False means it keeps world Y axe..Targetable..The object can look at a target..K..................@...&... ........\RestrictedRotation.cpp

from what I read it seems that if you want to be able to lock onto a target then 'Targetable' has to be set to 0x1. Then to stay locked onto the target the object doing the 'looking' has to stay within the azimunth and elevation parameters. If it strays outside these parameters then it breaks lock. If you're in heavy seas and pitching and rolling then you could be exceeding these parameters and thus having the locking problem and/or the parameters are set too tight. Once again, I could be entirely wrong on this because I'm just going by what I interpret. Testing will prove whether this is true or not.
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Has anyone tested this to be true. I am interested in incresing my scopes lock. My reasoning for this is that if I lock my scope (uzo/attack/observation) and go away from it. I would turn the scope over to one of my officers and he would keep the target in sight.

[TarJak]

I was playing the 'Happy Times' single mission, with the 16km mod enabled. The sea state was quite choppy and others have suggested that may have affected the lock range. It was the middle of the night so with the low light levels and the rough weather and not being able to lock the target I couldn't get any meaningful range, course or speed info at all until they were practically on top of me.You have described exactly why you are seeing this behaviour in the above. The lock hold time is related to visibility. In very bad visibility you can be as close as 1000m and the lock will still not hold on a target.

This is because of the way that the GWX handles visibility. It is related to the repetitive reporting by your WO when ships are on the edge of your visible range. IIRC a deliberate decision was made to reduce the ease of targetting by reducing the range that a lock could hold based on visibility.

Annoying maybe but not a bug.

A massive amount of work was put into the sensors for GWX over a long period of development and testing. What was released was deemed to be a reasonable compromised based on the tools provided by the game engine itself.

Some past references on the subject:
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=143625&highlight=Periscope+lock
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=122741&highlight=Periscope+lock
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=105761&highlight=Periscope+lock

As you can see some like it some don't but it is the way it is for a reason and not a mistake.