Captain Class Frigates
 

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A small "side quest" in between larger projects, this little mod plugs one of the gaps in SH5 ship roster by adding Captain Class Frigates to Royal Navy unit selection.

Captain Frigates were basically American Evarts and Buckley destroyer escorts that were built for the British as part of Lend-Lease agreement. America built the hulls and Britain supplied weapons (hence armament differs from their American counterparts). In total, 78 ships (32 of Evarts or GMT class, and 46 of Buckley (TE) class) served in Royal Navy - they destroyed or participated in destruction of 34 U-Boats and 26 E-Boats, at the cost of losing 16 frigates.

Since SH5 already has Evarts and Buckley models, this was simple addition to make - I just created clone units of both types with modified sensors, armament (not 100% correct, but as close to accurate as I could get without touching gr2 files), gave them Royal Navy camouflage and replaced ice cream machines with tea kettles in the galley. They will spoil your fun and hunt you mercilessly between March 1943 and May 1945.

GMT Type:
https://i.imgur.com/wWjw2Up.jpg

TE Type:
https://i.imgur.com/8cAjswn.jpg

Hi kapuhy,


are this one compatible with current version of TWoS or is the a special file necessary, like in past with your little ships?
I ask, because you wrote only TWoS in the readme but not the version of it.

In short: TWoS 2.2.22 compatible.

Longer version: the only shared file this addon modifies is Names.cfg (where the list of all ship/aircraft classes is stored). Since I currently use TWoS 2.2.22, I added frigates to Names.cfg from this version of the mod.

If you use older TWoS, what you need to do is overwrite my own names.cfg provided in the mod with your own, and then add following lines manually:

FFCaptainGMT=Captain Frigate Type GMT
FFCaptainTE=Captain Frigate Type TE

(I wrote about this in mod's readme as well).

Thank you very much.

Great work kapuhy!:up:

Very nice kapuhy :salute:

Well done kapuhy :up:

Quick question: other than possibly having to add a few extra nodes to the stock gr2 file, which other changes/additions would be required for attaining an higher level of armament accuracy?

As far as model changes go, not much: most visible changes were reserve depth charges stored on upper deck, additional lifeboat and some liferafts and crow's nest on the mast.

Most important change that can't be done without changing gr2 model is that Hedgehog was fitted between two front main guns, and current Evarts/Buckley models only have two weapon nodes on the bow, meaning you can have two guns or gun and a hedgehog. That said, considering Evarts/Buckley models will have to updated anyway to get rid of this bug, we can use the opportunity to update weapon nodes as well.

Thank you kapuhy :up:

The changes you have described are are relatively easy.

Once you know which Gr2-Editor version to use, bones-cloning/editing is quite straightforward.
Cosmetic stuff absent from the stock unit can be added to the British version as equipment. Likewise, stuff that needs to be removed, can be separated from the stock model and made into external equipment only used on the US version of the ship.

Keep in mind that equipment can be "nested". In other words, we can have equipment bones linked to an equipment. As far as the "external" bone is correctly named/numbered, it will work as any other equipment bone (tested in SHIII but it should work in SH5 too). This is useful for armament platforms which might have different layouts in Captain-class than in the Evarts/Buckley-class. :yep:

Amazing work mate thanks for sharing it with us! Brilliant!!! :up::salute:

Good job, this is going up on the Subsim main page now! :Kaleun_Salute:

hello kapuhy ,do you think it's possible to adapt world of warships ships for sh5?

Possible? Sure. At a glance, WoW models have higher vertice count but not by that much (SH5 VW destroyer: 53 k, WoW G-class destroyer: 98 k, so almost twice as much - still within limits of SH5 engine should handle).

Legal? Well, not really. So unless you somehow convince WoW devs to agree to share their assets for SH5 mod, it won't happen.

thank you for your reply . so there aren't really any technical barriers. it is probably possible to reduce the number of vertices, so as not to have any impact on performance? I imagine that it would also be necessary to adapt the management of the damages (3model + textures). Regarding copyright law, there is a difference between using models for free modding or for selling. I did not seek more information on this subject. I don't like the world of warships game, but it has a very rich library and maybe one day it will be possible.

Besides the ship models ripped from WoW and made available on Pack 3d Models, many WoW ships have been uploaded to Sketchfab by the user maxromash who is probably one of the main Wargaming 3D modellers.
In the past, those models could be downloaded freely (I don't remember their licensing though). Now they are for preview only, but I have many of them on my HD already.

As already said by kapuhy WoW models are pretty well done. Though a bit too high poly for SH5 standards (but not so high that they game can't handle them anyway), they have the advantage to be optimized for videogame usage, so they have much of what would be needed to make a good SH5 unit (main hull textures in one file, AO maps, normal maps, crack lines modelled, etc.).

Using them in a SH5 mod might be tolerated though not fully legal, but for sure they will provide an excellent 3D template if we want to create our own version of the same ships, especially for those ships whose plans are not easily found.

Another excellent alternative are the models by the Sketchfab user Thomas Beerens. They might not be as optimized for video-game usage as the WoW models, but they very well done and most of them are available for download under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence. I have talked to the guy, and he has not problems with his models being used in free projects as far as he is credited for his work. We have never discussed the topic, but he might also accept his models being reworked a bit for game optimization, as far as the changes won't alter drastically his creations.