bump - anybody got any ideas about how this could be done?

I've been debating whether or not to make ships nationality-specific myself. I've been aware of the problem with vessel names for some time - there's no way to prevent, say, American ships from having "Empire" name prefixes, or British ships from being named after famous Americans. The main reason I considered doing this, though, was as part of my replacement for the Merchant Variety Pack. Just as names are currently assigned incorrectly, paint schemes for the MVP have the same problem. I'd like the MVPII to be more realistic; commanders should be able to ID vessels based on funnel markings, company names on the hull, etc - as was the case historically. Creating nationality-specific ships would essentially kill two birds with one stone - we'd have appropriate names AND ship colors.

It would literally take about ten minutes to get this done with Pack3d, since it wouldn't involve 3d editing. However, there are a couple major "cons" -

-Filesize. A mod like this will incorporate a lot of DAT, SIM, ZON, and other files, making it difficult for some users to download.

-It will also add a very large number of unnecessary pages to the ID book. I'm already having some difficulty with the book because of the new merchants I've created; it will be really annoying to have 10 pages for the C-2, 10 for the T-3 tanker, and so on.

I think we'll need a pretty advanced file compression program to take care of this, especially for 56k users. Does anyone know of anything better than 7zip and WinRAR? It may also be necessary to use a printed-out copy of the original ID book to avoid thumbing through dozens or hundreds of duplicate pages ingame.

I knew you were da man! :up:

Would there be any duplicate files that could perhaps be included once with a batch file copying and renaming after extracting? Or (and excuse my naivity here), if we had ten sets of each ship type, all different ship skins are included but only one set of controlling files are included? Then, after extraction, a file is run which makes the appropriate copies of each file and modifies them for each nationality (I hope this is clear)? I'd volunteer to develop such a tool if needed.

lzma/ultra (ie 7z with ultra compression) is the best that I am aware of.

Okay. What we COULD do is include one set of cfg and eqp files per unit, as long as there was a way of extracting them to each nationality during install. However, this might be more trouble than it's worth, since these files are pretty small to begin with. The larger files in the data\sea\ [unit] folders, like the DAT's, DSD, SIM, ZON must be unique for each ship to avoid ingame crashes. You may remember how I couldn't release the hospital ship when I first made it; this was because it had an identical ID to the NPTR, its parent unit, and was causing crashes.

As for the ID book, we can whip up a DOC file with the default ships in no time. If time allows, I'm going to create a more substantial version of a printable ID book that will hopefully include all the new cargo ships being made, as well as tips for identifying the MVPII's paint schemes, funnels, and structural features - just like WWII merchant ID books. This will hopefully make it interesting, and make up for the hassle of needing to print out a hard copy of it.

I'm going to take a look at that zip program you mentioned to see how well it works. Thanks for pointing it out to me.

OK, scrap that idea then. :)

And perhaps someone could convert it to PDF for maximum flexibility?

Cool. There's a number of programmes that handle the 7z compression method, most notably 7-zip, WinRAR, PowerArchiver, TUGZip and IZArc. Apparently, 7-zip with ultra solid LZMA setting provides the highest compression out of all of these tools. Some people are against solid compression because if one file becomes corrupt, then the whole archive after that point becomes unreadable, but my argument is that if one file is corrupt there's every likelyhood that I'll need to re-download the whole archive anyway!

Well, I'm glad I bumped this - really good to see you mod wizzes might have a way of making this work. I had wondered if you'd have to wind up with multiple pages in the recog manual (I agree, having to page past 10 pages of C2s before getting to the next basic ship type in the book in game would be a crappy solution).

Not knowing how this stuff works, this could be a dumb idea, but do all the countries' C2s have to all wind up in the one "handelschiff" section of the book? Could you not just leave one (the original) set of generic cargo types in that section of the book, and have the country-specific versions of (for example) C2s show up in their country-specific section of the recog manual?

It seems to me that if you could have all the new, country-specific cargo ships show up in either (1) a second cargo ship section you'd basically ignore and never really have to look at since you can get all the vital stats you need for targeting your shots from the original generic section, or (2) their own country's section of the manual (in which case when you look at the Norwegian section of the manual you would see both the cargo ships as well as any war ships, but who ever really needs to look in the Norwegian seciton of the manual?), that you would still have a workable, in game manual.

Any chance that this might work?

bump :up:

Looking at my personnel files logs in SH3 Commander with the ship names next to my victims, as way cool as that is, has whetted my appetite to be able to have them ID'ed with country-appropriate names (I did manage to get rid of the extraneous "S.S." prefixes - that helps a lot). Unfortunately, I have the appetite but no skill/knowledge about what it would take to add ships like this - anybody got any encouraging angles on making this work maybe?

Thanks to all you mod masters for all the great work :rock: