Answer to the mysterious searchlights!
 

For a long time I haven't really understood why sometimes the enemy ships use searchlights, and sometimes they don't.

I finally understood the searchlight triggering of enemy ships.


I made a test mission with a couple of destroyers.
I tried a lot of different settings, and after a couple of hours i found the answer.

It only has to do with the weather. The time of the year or crew status doesn't play a role.

clear sky, at night - no searchlights
clear sky at daytime - of course no searchlights
light, medium and heavy fog at daytime - no searchlights

when i turned clouds to heavy things startet to happen:

heavy clouds, at night - SEARCHLIGHTS
heavy clouds, at daytime - SEARCHLIGHTS
medium clouds or less at daytime or nightime - no searchlights

This means that the use of searchlights by enemy ships is triggered by the clouds.
So as long as there are heavy clouds their searchlights will be turned on!

FINALLY! :D

Nice find mate! I've been wondering about that.

Most of the merchants don' have any searchlights.

I did another experiment. A convoy of different freighters. Including one tanker - no escorts.

When I was spotted the large modern tanker switched on 4 searchlights.

Cool!

Lol, I had that happen with a tanker too. I thought at the time... not the brightest move on a ship I'm trying to target. :88)

:rock: Would prefer they used their searchlights when it was dark and no clouds, though. It's obvious they would have problems seeing. I also wonder why the Akizukis don't use their searchlights-.

Tried to see if I could tweak or change some values, but didn't figure it out.
If someone has looked for it, great if you post your findings here :yep:

I'm also wondering if it is the same regarding the use of starshells! When do they actually use them

As to the starshells I saw them the other night for the first time in probably close to 100 hours of play. We were on a surface attack on the lee side of the convoy from the DD's As we were shelling the merchant all of a sudden I see rounds flying from the DD and poof star shells ! Wow.. cool... uhhhh... Crash dive !

For what its worth...

Ive been trying to "read" what the semiphores are sending. So far all Ive been able to "copy" is the word "contact" multiple times followed by apparent jibberish.

The tempo of the code is pretty bad and its hard to read flashes of lights instead of dits and dahs...

Semiphores?

Whats that? ;)

Sorry not following... :oops:

Semiphores should mean to be those little blinking lights that they use to transmit morse code between eachother with.

Which btw are somewhat bugged. I'll se if I can get a screenie of this. But basically in fog at least, it looks like this light get reflected off the fog "wall" quite a distance off from the transmitter. At least there is a small flare lighting up way off there in the distance. And no, it's not another ship, I checked for that. Plus the flare moves in perspective to the transmitter boat, like it is linked to it. It's no biggie, just a (very) small graphical glitch. Also it is synchronized on all ships using it. Brakes the immersion somewhat when you see 3-4 (or more) DDs transmitting the same thing in perfect sync with eachother.

This has always been a neat option in SH3 now 4.

RDP

Hmmm. Ok, I get it ;)

Thanks for explaining.

This flare thing is quite strange. Looks like some kind of insect flying around :doh:

a few days ago i had enemy DDs popping flares:o tryin to find me, not that they had much luck as i was 200+ft down:D

:up: Cool!

Well, maybe your sub was that deep, but you yourself were obviously playing Superman and flying above to take a look.

Or maybe just using X-ray vision.:rotfl:

No it was that clairvoyant sensor man. You know the one that tells you your passing thermal layer... and previous to that they knew "We have been detected Sir"....

You can scry through him and see the action 80 feet above you.... oh.... uhhh wrong game... :p

I can honestly say I play with external camera on.. too much eye candy...

That being said the only time Ive seen the flares is when I was in a surface attack to kill off a straggling merchant. The convoy had begun to move on, I came up behind to finish off the listing merchant...

A few star shells were lit up a little behind us.. probably to get a good shadow off of us.

Long story short... 4 or 5 more rounds of AP into the heavily listing tanker and she went down.

Crash Dive ! got deep quick and switched to silent running. We continued a slow but determined dive to crush depth.

Cruisers never had a chance to find us. They DC'd here and there but were just fishing.