Historically correct Harbour Layouts!
 

some time ago, i dealed with the idea of new layouts for the really sterile harbours. and i might have found a way. what about in deleting all objects in the harbour dat (make empty obj-files) and replace the harbours by a special designed landobject, which could be designed individually and placed on the map in the editor. this possibility would give us the chance to have historical correct harbour layouts and known landmarks!!! like famous churches, buildings, etc.

possible, or not? i didnt give it a try...so its just an idea.

:hmm:

I really like this concept! It may take a bunch of work.

Also realistic updates to the harbor lighthouse flash patterns. Often unique at each location for nav. spotting. Most were kept active during war; however, some may have been darkened along the events of time (for coastal darkening, lack of war-time maintenance, damage...).

YES!
 

That would be GREAT if it could be done.

I miss The distinctive layouts (with their inner basins) of Saint Nazaire and La Rochelle in particular.

Yeah i agree...sounds like a great idea...but whew, it would be tons of work me thinks.

Guys, the problem isn't that such a thing cannot be done...

It should not be done.

Even in stock SH3 there is a nasty FPS hit in and around harbors with no traffic.

Anytime you change harbor composition and surroundings, you must walk a tight rope.

Building up harbors to look more like the actual locations will have even high powered systems screaming for water.

<Trust me!>:yep:

Wouldnt hurt to creat a few new smaller harbours though :hmm:

One thing lacking in game are those
Modelling St Naz inc the Normandie basin would look cool but you would take forever to get out and all be back to empty harbour days

:rotfl:

Still never one to stop anyone
Crack on and lets see the finished article

I say if there guys who are willing to pull this together. Go for it. I'm all for realism.

Great idea by the way:rock:

not really. by the way...its just a case of polycount. as one sees most of the harbour and the surrounding city at a distance, there can be a lot done by textures. so you can build low poly houses, buildings, etc. and fit them with nice textures. so there would be NO increase of fps as long, as you keep the poly-range of the existing harbour. right?

:know:

Not quite true, even if you keep the polycount low there will be a big FPS hit, the sh3 harbours are made from prebuilded blocks, something like a big lego, the engine loads the first instance of the object and then copies it as many times it's necesary, reducing the amount of memory requirements for both polygons and textures, if you make a full model of the harbour it'll probably use 6 or 7 times the memory used by the actual ones.

Ref

ok, understand. then its just another dream i dreamed. so if one might change the layouts and wants to keep the memory-load, one has to change the layout in the code of the harbour.dat - that makes it a lot more complicated. would have been a lot more easy, if ubi released the matrix for changing harbour kits...as promised years ago.

:shifty:

The harbour layouts are not dificult to change, just tedious, the structure is simple, the complicated part is the amount of objects in them, If you make a new layout in a 3d program using the objects of harbourkit, or even want to build some new buildings that repeats itself in your design I can guide you through the import part.

Ref

Could this start with realistic harbor lighthouse flash patterns & beacon colors?

Well you could always cheat. Farther away the obj can it switched to a 2D texture? When you close in to the Harbour with in lets say 5k a higher level 3D buildings obj shows in place of the 2D. Wouldn't that save on some memory? What do you think?:hmm:

That's not something that can be modeled, I don't know if the engine uses lod levels, there are some models in the harbourkit file that have the label lod00, but there's not a lod01, etc so It's not clear if the game uses them not.

Ref