Not showing single ship contacts on the strategic map is the most realistic way to go. U-Boats were informed by BDU of CONVOY position reports, not single merchants. The U-Boats found single merchants by just stumbling into them.

Read any U-Boat Commander or Crew Member's biography and you can see that single ships were surprises, not something they knew about way ahead of time.

Sure...

I agree with the above statement....all of my uboat readings have indicated the same.

The single merchant radio messages aren't from BdU. They are radio messages from the ships themselves. The U-boat radio officer would scan all the wavelengths to find 'chatter' from merchants, and the U-boat would find the direction and home in on the merchant based on that.

Good Point. Single ships were found that way. But I think it was much more common to just stumble across them with no advanced warning.

Yep, it is supported by: Iron Coffins, Operation Drumbeat, U-Boat Commander, Steel Boats Iron Hearts, plus countless U-Boat Reports.

The problem is that with RUb's lower overall contact frequency, it's balanced so that it's just hard enough to stumble on merchants, and in 1939-40 it's important that we are able to find lone merchants. Maybe it's time for me to try the new Improved Convoys mod - with no radio messages perhaps that mod will be more realistic in terms of contacts. But then the problem will come with later war contacts when they are supposed to be very few and far between. Also, the IC mod presumably comes with the standard (bugged) elite escorts and no Bay of Biscay patrol. Pentallion's 40/20 mod fixed these issues, and a lot of people don't seem to realise that the 40/20 mod is much more than merely a reduction of contacts.

Sorry I got back into this thread a bit late...just got home from work.

That's good to hear.:up:

It's going to have some compromises either way. I'll explain as best I can.

The "problem" is with the "Decay Time For Precise Sensor Contacts" in the Contacts.cfg. If you set the decay time to zero, as soon as a you lose sight of the contact, even for an instant, you must re-identify the contact in order to take range using the periscope stadimeter. If the decay time is set to >0 in order to avoid the identification problem the nav map is effectively restored to God's Eye Mode.

This means in order to eliminate the identification problem, decay time must be >0, but without precise contacts showing on the nav map. The size of the icon is controlled by these lines in the Maps.cfg (these are just the merchant ships)

And the "size" definitions are in this portion of the Contacts.cfg:

The problem is that the tgas used to display precise (think visual) contacts on the map in God's Eye Mod are exactly the same ones used to display opportunity contacts (think radio contacts) for two or less ships on the nav map.

In order to maintain ship identification, I erased the tga used for single ships (it's the UnitMShip.tga above), and set the decay time for precise contacts to something greater than zero.

I notice above the MatSymb10 line uses the same tga as the MatSymb11. It's possible, though I haven't tested it, one might be for precise contacts and the other for contacts of opportunity. It should be easy to determine by just changing the reference tgas in the Maps.cfg file to the UnitMShipM.tga or UnitMShipL.tga which I did not erase.

Long winded anser...sorry.

As I noted above, no contact memory was a big deal for player who are on 100% realism in heavy weather, or dip the scope. One workaround is to map a key for the WO to ID the ship, and another is to measure range on the nav plot, but I'm not crazy about either. I also worked up a set of generic range tables, but I find entering range a bit fiddly on the attack map.

This is possible if you want this as an option.

Agreed. I really like the size and color.:up:

I can simply erase the last dash. Easy to do.

I hadn't noticed this in the current version.

Unfortunately it's not fixed. I included the original Jace version in this download because of it. I'm not graphically skilled enough to fix it either. I think it's a driver problem, but I can't swear by it. Perhaps a solution is to include both versions, and let people pick the one that works best.

No problem. The more I use this mod, the more I really like it.

Observer.
Thanks for your work this looks like it will help out quite a bit. Most notably the protractor overlay.

Question for you. Aside from all thats been covered in this post I'm having difficulty with actually getting the individual ship contacts (pale round contact) showing up to make a mark on.

I realize that the scope needs to be raised (or the boat surfaced) you wave the mouse cursor over the general area and a circle is supposed to appear. That is the area that a mark gets put for plotting purposes. What I am experiencing is sometimes the contact circle appears and sometimes it doesn't. Even when looking at a ship just a few hundred meters away. I know it's there, the ship knows it's there but the map often times doesn't. Also, the amount of time needed for waving the mouse cursor "looking" for the contact circle is extremely frustrating. Especially when attempting to mark a contact for calculating speed/distance with the stopwatch running.

Any thoughts on the subject would be greatly appreciated.

Am I doing something wrong here?

I haven't experienced this problem. Try locking the 'scope to the contact and see if it helps. Sometimes the contact circle can be hard to find on the nav map. You might try selecting the attack map before the nav map to see if that will help you locate the contact. Remember to lock your 'scope to the contact before going to either map screen. Use this to simulate the WO on the 'scope.

another problem here :-?
I have not too much trouble to find the "contact circle" in the zoomed out map. But when I try to zoom in to do a more acurate plotting, I can't find the target (I'm pretty used to 100% manual plotting and targeting, so it's no that I've missed any shots because of this - but the adv. plotting mod so far is kind of useless to me :-j )

from what I could gather from the screenshots, I should see the contact circle and a bit of text with contact details on the zoomed out map, and only some text on the zoomed in map.
But I only see the circle (without text) on the zoomed out, and nothing when zoomed in.

I run SH3 v.1.4, with RUB 1.42, the "unreal Uboat clear water", Improved Convoys (latest version) and merchant variety pack.

any Ideas why I don't get the contact text?

You have to click on the contact zoomed in (bearing overlay visible) to get the text in the zoomed in view. The easiest method I find is to go from the zoomed out view with the contact circle visible to the zoomed in view (somewhat quickly) with your mouse cursor over the contact using the mouse wheel.

Is this mod the reason that when I am near a convoy at night my watch crew constantly calls out ships that they have called out a few seconds before. It is getting REALLY irritating! :x