Okay, here is my somewhat detailed report, played about 3 hours and saw all sorts of things! This time I used map contacts, for testing purposes. Not all issues are related to this mod :DL

First off I don't think the zone.cfg is compatible with a latest FX Update, the numbers are totally different (checked them with Winmerge). Latest FX Update has ten times higher values in most entrys...

Anyway, my mission was the "Rock" where I needed to sink 20.000 tons in Gibraltar area. I started in La Spezia and was immediately suprised how narrow the harbour passages were. While I was wondering this, we hit our boat to the harbour concrete! :oops: We'll it was only a small scratch but a very bad omen about what is to come... Before anyone could notice what had happened, I escaped to the open sea.

So we started our journey to Gibraltar and after a couple of uneventful days, the weather turned bad. Light fog and windspeed of 15 m/s. I ordered to dive because there was no hope of contacting anything in that weather. So we kept going submerged and only surfaced to recharge batteries. One night, when weather was still really bad, we finally got a contact, but it wasn't too pleasant suprise: a task force was coming our way! I ordered to surface we fled the scene. It would have been a suicide to try anything in those conditions and with that opposition.

We were maybe half way to Gibraltar when the soundguy spotted a merchant convoy! Maybe 8 merchants, no warships nearby! Goldmine! We surfaced to get in to good position, but the cursed fog took all hopes of visual contact. So maybe hour later we were in good position and waited for the merchants to come closer when I remembered something. I rushed to the sound guy and grapped the listening gear. Screeches and whining everywhere. I actually was horrified at first, like choir of the damned was coming closer. But no, my contacts were a pack of dolphins! I gave my sound guy an evil look, and continued patrolling.
http://i1138.photobucket.com/albums/...-12_233155.jpg

Finally we reached our patrol destination, but no contacts again. Crew was getting frustrated, so I decided we take a small peak to the nearby harbour, Oran. I was pretty nervous because of the mines and maybe patrol boats I kept hearing about, but to my suprise it was totally empty. So we took off and continued patrolling.

And then finally jackpot! A huge (real) convoy was coming in our direction. There was maybe seven escorts too, but I couldn't miss this chance. Battlestations! We got ourselves to good position between the escorts, dove to 100 meters and shut engines and then just waited and prayed that they don't spot us. The escorts passed us by and I ordered speed of 1 knots and periscope depth. I looked to the periscope and the water was full of ships, all around me. I spotted one new, but very familiar looking white ship. I think it was Small Split Freighter from eastern waters... The bad thing was that the waves were too high to get a good view, all i could see was masts. And then they spotted me too. I panicked and fired all five torpedoes to differents ships, no calculating, just guessing... Ordered to dive to 140 meters. The escorts started to ping me, and I listened and hoped for torpedo hits while diving. Then two explosions, my bird eye view told me that I had injured two small boats... Not too great result.

http://i1138.photobucket.com/albums/...-13_000344.jpg

And you know the rest. Three escorts depthcharging and pinging. No damage yet, but it's only a question of time. Good thing is that the two ships sunk maybe 20 min later (I use FX updates zone.cfg) and I could see the lifeboats in the water. Saved the game and went to sleep, I'm not sure if I'm going to make it... Anyway, not the most exciting patrol, but I had fun!

So to make things clear I'll list some things that came to mind while testing this:

-Zone.cfg overwrite issue
-Dolphins need a voice! The hydrophone audio is good but there should be a sound when you are close to dolphins.
-New ships seemed to work okay, they looked whiter than the rest because shadows don't affect them the same way. You could spot them form the convoy. Maybe the textures need to be darker to compensate this? Also the ship you used, Kasagisan didn't have crew on board, and the equiptments were using un-textured SH 5 models. I can fix this and send you a new version.
-Also I didn't see the new ships through water. The shader was working, it affected all other ships and shallow water but not this new ship.:hmmm:

Anyway, great work and a good start!

I think too that we should add sound to dolphins not only in hydro... the entry is in the sh file... you just need to put the name of the wav on it... i think the wave it is also there

Thank you Zedi, works fine!:up:

Thanks a lot Rongel, I enjoyed very much your report :)

Regarding the zones.cfg .. I hope that TDW is reading this. Because he said is compatible with his mods, I cant do anything about.

Regarding the ships.. yeah, Im very disapointed about how they look :nope: These days I wil try to play with the alpha channel and add a darker texture, even if Im not sure at all that this trick will solve the problem. I have the same problems with the buoys too, they are almost white, no matter how dark I make the texture.. the occlusion, bump and uv map need serious fixing but they are missing or need to be redone.

Im surprised to hear that you also fail to see the ships hull underwater... but at least its not only me. More reports can help to figure out why some of us can see the hull and some not. Send me your work because these ships are from one source, TDW. Thought its a merged mod.

Oran is a friendly port and is not mined. Same as any friendly port.. none will raid our port anyway. I can set up few taskforces that will raid the enemy ports, but that would be not realistic, sound more like an invasion and I dont wanna change history. But on the later campaigns I wanna increase the air raids on our ports, so you can feel that things are start to turn bad.. no more happy times. And if we manage to add at least 1 new campaign, that will have to be dark and hard to survive.

And about the dolphins sound.. Im sure that Stoian can fix this part, he did a great job on buoys so far. Hope he will work out the whales too, then the sonar guys will be really busy in finding a valid target :P

Don't be too dissapointed with the new ships! You know they don't look that bad, I think it's more that they stand out from SH 5 ships. And it's pretty much because of the SH 5 shadows that don't work with these ships. All the SH 4 textures are working, we aren't missing anything. And I wasn't that bothered that the ships didn't show underwater like others.

Also I think it's possible to have several skins for one ship. So that in convoy there are different variations of the same ship model. For example the Kasagisan ship comes with two textures in SH 4.

Almost all SH 5 ships are dark grey colored, so these white ships are easy to spot. Maybe just make them more gray?

When I have time, I could take a look at the Kasagisan ship, it has become quite dear to me! :DL I'll add the crew, fix the guns and try to get second ship texture to it.

The texture is already dark, if you use the texture I made for these ships on any sh5 ship it wil become almost black. Is why there is not much control from the texture file but from occ map. And those whos video card dont support pixel shader will never see the hull under water. Also the missing shadows and water reflection is also annoying.

This kinda makes me angry... yeah, we can import ships but no tool or proper documentation is given :/ And I dont want to go backward and make the game to look like SH3.. it must be a way to make these units to look better.

Hey Zedi, upon hearing that there was a problem with the shading on the new ships, I took a look. The main textures are embedded in the .dat files for these ships right? Well, I looked at the shadow maps for them, and they are only about 30% opaque!! Shadow maps should be 100% opaque, that is probably why they are showing up in game way to light colored.

They should be made opaque and then they will need totally blank places in the shadow map filled in.

If you like I can go ahead and do this conversion for one of the ships and send you the file.

Now this sounds very interesting :DL. I have to try this too when I get off from work. Ary you seeing any change Steelviking when you mess with the opague value? Darker shadows? And what does that mean: they will need totally blank places in the shadow map filled in? Anyway I really hope you are into something :yeah:

Just to see if I was right, I went ahead and redid the NMFMPC, and sure enough, I can make her as dark or as light as we want!:D

I will PM you a link to a JSGME ready mod so you can see for yourself.

Only took me about 30mins to completely fix it, I can do this for any ship with a properly UVed shadow map.

Might take a look at the occular occlusion maps next.:yep:

nice... now the imported ships will fit better in sh5 graphics:up:

Thanks for the link! I did a quick test but it's hard to say anything about that boat, because I haven't seen it in game that much... I have to confess that I don't really understand these textures and how they work. We used stock SH 4 textures in our imported ships and they had this alpha channel in this particular texture, not white as you have it in your texture, but partially visible, partially masked. I thought that is the way it should work in SH 5, but I might be wrong.

Anyway, you know these things better, please continue examining those textures :yeah:. And maybe you could explain a bit more so I wouldn't be so confused :DL.

Can you send me that link also? I'd like to see/understand what you changed. I was just about to re-write the pixel shader responsible for rendering these maps......

PM sent with link. If all agree with me that what I did to this ship fixed the problem, I would be glad to redo all the shadow maps for the ships. It is really easy for me since I have redone so many other shadow maps in the game.:yep:

It appears that you just made the alpha channel totally white :06: Well not totally, there are a few bits and little pieces of black here and there.

Exactly. increasing the intensity of the Alpha channel is what needs done.

Edit: when it comes to shadow maps, you can actually remove the alpha channel all together, the image has to be 100% opaque anyway. Alpha channels are only used for transparency, which is not needed here.

2nd Edit: I also filled in where there was no color at all.