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This mod is intended to increase the situational awareness of the SH3 player by providing more information on the map. In general, its purpose is to compensate for the impossibility to communicate efficiently with the crew members and ask them specific questions or give them specific commands (e.g., assign crew members the task to warn you if a ship comes closer than a certain distance during a convoy attack, to keep a certain distance during shadowing, to report you the position of destroyers,...).
The problem with having map updates on in SH3 is that the given information is much too exact and allows to obtain the course and speed of a contact (and thus a firing solution) in seconds without any errors. Thus, it spoils the excitement of manual targeting completely.
To circumvent this problem, the mod shows contacts at the navigation map only as groups and for a high zoomed-out level. If the position of the group/contact is marked on the map, it needs around 30 min. (for slow contacts) to get a decent speed and course estimate (similar to the time required without map updates by guessing the distance roughly up to +-1000m). However, on the attack map single contacts are shown also more zoomed in (but not too much zoomed in). Since the attack map does not allow to draw anything on it, this information does not provide too detailed information, but gives a good overview of the situation.
Many ideas of this mod have been used earlier by many other mods and I would like to thank the people involved for their work!
In detail, the mod changes the following:
1.) It removes the pencil circle shown around contacts when they are marked or the cursor is moved over them. This is done to avoid that contacts can be made visible on the navigation map by moving the mouse cursor over them or marking them on the attack map. Contacts can nevertheless be marked to obtain rough information (Course:SSW,Speed:slow) at the zoomed-out level (modified file: selection.tga). For the same purpose, the files en_menu.txt, de_menu.txt, and fr_menu.txt have been changed (the line 2101 to reveal the type has been replaced by empty spaces). In addition, the dashed circle around a ship has been removed (dashLine.tga).
2.) To prevent getting too detailed range information from the sonar man the file ContLine.tga has been modified. It is important to know that the line always shows a lower bound to the distance, i.e., the best estimate is obtained by the zoom level which shows the longest line.
3.) The *_shp.tga files for all GWX ships and allied submarines have been replaced with an empty tga file (Icebergs still show up on the map). If other ships are added one can copy the empty *_shp.tga from a GWX ship and rename it accordingly.
4.) The files NSS_Uboat*_shp.tga have been modified to make the player's boat more visible at zoomed-out levels. (I am not totally happy with this. If someone has a good idea how to change this I would be happy to know.)
5.) The file Maps.cfg has been modified to show contacts only at certain zoom levels. In addition, harbors are now shown on the attack map and single ships and small convoys use different symbols. Single ships have an 'S' now in the square.
I have also added an optional mod (install after the first mod and overwrite the file) to make the sonar lines and the symbols for small, medium and large contacts with colors, but not single ships!. The idea is that the sonar man should be able to tell you what a warship and what a merchant is. In addition, I think that knowing the nationality of a reported convoy is not too unrealistic.
I have added the ships of the MFM Beta 4.1 of iambecomelife. Users of the MFM mod should install the 'Map Update Mod MFM-Beta-4.1' after the first mod and overwrite the files.
Any comments, suggestions,... are welcome. The mod is jsgme ready. Don't forget to turn map updates ON when using it.
LGN1
The mod is based on GWX, but it should be possible to use it with any other mod. However, this might require changing the *_shp.tga for the non-GWX ships.
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