ship movement mods
 

has anyone been working on fixing the way ships move so they dont zip back and forth like jack rabbits?

i have rarely been around the last 5 yrs so i dont know

i tried to create one many years ago, and it had good results with the movements, but my work had issues with effecting the ship sounds, so i wasnt very satisfied with it since it made things bad for those doing sound detections on ships

just curious if there is a stand alone mod for this

I'll try to point s7rikeback here for you, since we do have a slight change in FotRSU, and he might remember what was done for that. He also has a few other files you might be interested in, if you are after a small (or large :roll: ) GFO update. :salute:

ya thanks, i was kinda wanting to look back into with a fresh perspective because last time i didnt consider how the sound changes when you change hp

and in a perfect world i would love to do a cleanup and refresh of GFO, but i only have limited free time so a lot depends on RLS

As time allows, we have the patience to wait on a new GFO. I'll see what we can do about getting you these other files...

thanks, i messed up on the manuvering mod and was too quick to include it in GFO but at that point i was really stressed and had so much going on

i only play single player missions and use auto plotting so when guys tried manual plotting and such, i found out it screwed with the way ship sounds worked and ships right on top of you sounded far off and far off ships had weak sound you couldnt detect.

i think step one for me with GFO is to take a step back and unwind the manuvering mod so its not a negative to guys who do manual plotting and such

i think if i concentrate on just the ships mass numbers, i might be able to get there to reduce the motorcycle like movements, but i definately need to start over from scratch with the ships movements to see what might work best, i do know hp needs to be left alone so ship detection sounds arent screwed up

there is just so much stuff broken in this game that doesnt work so its not easy and takes time. many ships dont even use the right files

Hey pb,

I'm pretty sure the Jack Rabbit mod or a beta was being held in area 51, I could be wrong, but it rings a bell... But I'm unable to check, as I no longer have the address.

Best way to do this is to change eng_power values in the ship's .SIM files - can be done with Silent 3ditor. A little advice - don't pay attention to what a ship's horsepower was in real life; just adjust values down until you get realistic behavior.

Be advised, the side effect is that ships with slower response time have trouble maneuvering properly in convoys/task forces - when I lowered the hp I noticed more collisions & weird behavior after a torpedo attack/when ships are "scared". I suspect the developers exaggerated maneuverability to keep formations together because they couldn't develop more realistic ship maneuvering behavior.

that is what i did when i made my maneuvering mod but..........

when you reduce hp it also reduces sounds emitted by the ship so some ships had literally no sound until they were within 1000m of you

i got results i was very happy with by changing hp but that also breaks the sounds of the ships so in fixing one issue i created another whicch is why i consider my maneuvering mod a failure based on that

yes but ships get into collisions & weird behavior after a torpedo attack/when ships are "scared" in the stock game, so its not a fix for that.

i think the developers wanted to increase difficulty so im pretty sure they used the motorcycle like rapid movements of ships in order to make the game more difficult, not to help with ships running into each other

You could try to experiment with the "mass" and "gc_height" figures, Webster. But definitely do some experimenting... each Class will have different requirements of course.

I swear Silent Hunter 4 is like my old car .... fix one thing and another thing pops up. At least it doesn't have me out $1400.00 :haha:

I will have to keep this in mind for my WWI mod; thanks for the info.

Nope, no stand alone mod. I'd made some changes in RFB on this. I can tell you the issue has to do with ship drag being too low and how the physics engine calculates the propulsion. Propeller differences are not taken into account. The devs told me they used a very simplified prop physics model.

You have to throw the engine HP numbers out the window as they are useless and play with values until you get ones that work. There were some other values too. Can't remember if there's a max RPM number or not. At the same time, you need to change the drag numbers for the ship and, if I remember right for the rudder too.

All of this can be done in S3D.

And let's not even get into what it took to get the subs to not coast forever, turn better, and yet still submerge within expected limits.

Don't know if those fixes ever made it into RFB though, as only some of the Japanese ships were modded.

Will look in an old backup and see if I have any of those files.