LOL!

The video is great, and would be great to have something like that in the game. But any attempt of making the ships behave like that and the waves to be like that will only result in one thing: Ships sinking on their own.

I'll explain the best I can.

The ship movement in SH3 is retarded to the wave's movement. It means then, when the wave is going up, the ships is going down, and when the ship is going up, from the rebound of the water pressure, the wave goes down.

What happens?

When the ships is going down and the wave is going up, is the wave height is too great, the water level surpasses the ship's X point. If that happens, there's flooding. If there's flooding, the ship sitts lower in the water, causing more flooding and utterly causing it's sinking.

When the ship is going up from the bounce, and the waves are going down, if the wave height is too great, the ships will float in the air for some seconds. The interesting part is, the ship in SH3 engine is not heavier when it's out of the water. It keeps the same movement, the same weight, like there's no gravity, until it sits on the water again. I've tried for creating great storms, but the results are disastrous, when it comes to SH3's engine.

So I thought... "what can be done for SH3 then?"

If ships don't behave well in heavy seas, let's make them behave great in calm seas. That's what I'm trying to do with this mod.

The waves itself are another big problem. The waves in real life are waaaaaaay smaller then in stock SH3. Even in calm seas, there are 3 or 4 frequency of waves in the lenght of a long ship, while in real life, that frequency goes up to a thousand. Bigger waves makes the ships look terrible.

I explain: if you look very close to a bottle of perfum, and put a miniature plastic man aside of it, if the plastic man looks bloody real and you take a picture, the bottle of perfum will seems to be enormous on that picture. If instead of the plastic man, you put your finger aside of the bottle and take a picture, the bottle will look just like a normal bottle. The brain needs something to compare to create a mental idea of size and weight, and normally the closest thing to the object is the thing taken for comparation and mental creating of the object's mass.

So if you take this thought back to SH3, the closest thing to the ship will always be the waves. If the waves look huge, the ships looks like toys. That's what I've tried to do with my water mod. I reduced drastically the wave sizes, so the ships look more like 3 thousand tons 150 meters long pieces of steel, and not as plastic toys. I didn't manage to pull out the realistic stuff, cos diminishing the size of the waves makes the CPU and VGA card overhelmed with work, 10 times more things to calculate and render, the fps hit is huge. I tried my best to find the middle ground between real-life waves and playable stuff on medium-power computers. That's the best you can have. If you set the waves to be even smaller, which would be more realistic, two big problems pops-up:

1. major fps hit even on first class computers
2. pattern waves looking so obvious that the sea looks like garbage.

Smaller waves = more waves = more obvious patterns. You tell the game how do you want a block of water to be like, and it copy it side by side to fill the rendered part of the sea. There's no way around it.

So basically, SH3 is very limited when it comes to the ocean modding acceptances. Let us hope that SH5 has a better engine and that those guys at ubsoft finally found a way to kill the pattern waves, that makes the water look so awful sometimes.

:up:

Progress going along nicely.

Probably a first beta-version of testing purposes could be out tonight.

I didn't get any time to test the changes in game, deeply, in campaign, so I'm relying on you guys!

I need some constructive criticism! :up:

Rather that love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness... gimme this mod! :yep::yep::yep:

:p


Your mods just keep getting better and better, PT! :up:

PT,

Looks great!

I haven't been on any warships, but I have been on a few large commercial vessels in rough weather. Although they do rock a bit, they don't rock nearly as much as they do in SH3.

I wouldn't mess with it too much more. I think you've got it just right.

One question, does the behavior also affect player U-boats? (I hope so, U-boats in heavy waves seem to flounder like tin cans...I can see my crew all having concussions after the way they get thrown around in there.) If you adjust U-boat behavior, will this have a noticeable impact on fuel consumption? That may need to be adjusted accordingly.

First off, excellent work! I am so glad that someone managed to resolve this problem b/c no large vessel should bob like a toy boat. :lol:

I suggest that you keep the values the same for the Flower Class corvette because they were notorious rollers.

And yes - in the next month or two I will give you my ships so that you can make the necessary adjustments to them. Or you can simply PM me the changes that need to be made and I can make the alterations myself.

That's what happens when you keep modding and modding! :lol:

Funny about the concussions... :lol: ... and so true!
Yeah, the uboats are included in the list. Will change the way they behave in rough waters and in calm waters, they will look pretty sturdy aswell. About the fuel consumption, great question... I can tell you yet, I didn't test it. But if it does, it's easy to fix.

:up:

GREAT NEWS IBL!!! :up:

I'll make the adjustments for you if you prefer. If you want to do it yourself and release the merchant fleet already modded, I can PM you the values, once I have them. It's still in beta-testing, so I'm not 100% sure about the values yet. But I'm releasing a beta-testing version today, so people could test. Once people are satisfied about the results, the values will be defined, and I can PM you the values so you can change it yourself.

It's up to your decision. For me, anyway you prefer! :up:

Bugger...

I was going to release a beta version for testing purposes today, but I've just got home from work, 10pm here, I'm bloody tired... I just don't feel like tunning 250 ships, 5 values each.

Let's see if I can manage to release it by the weekend.:nope:

I'm going to hold my breath until its released!:o

:p

:shifty:

No pressure, dammit... NO PRESSURE!

:lol:

hi PT

just came on to say this looks great. it really cheeses me off when im in the naval academy torpedo trainer and the still boat accelerates to 10 knots in like 2 seconds to avoid my torp. so unrealistic.

Tell me about it!

A 10k tons ship can take up to 40 minutes to reach that speed starting from full stop.

No, no pressure at all, as I had to start breathing again after my eyes went funny.:doh:

:D

CTB, go for it!