Real Navigation Mod - Delayed a Bit
 

I've sucessfully scaled the scope (and Obs scope zoom levels) to the Fleet boat manuals AND incorporated the Sextant into the Obs scope.

Preliminary sextant checks are looking very good. The next trick is to get rid of the sub marker, waypoint navigation markers and other goodies, just to make it velly velly difficult for you... :lost:

More news later
:up:

How odd! I was just looking through the old celestial navigation thread a few days ago and wondering if I could get it working with RFB 1.52, but I chickened out. :lol:

I'm a novice to modding and saying that is insulting novice modders everywhere and as I love RFB too much, I didn't want to break anything by messing.

Yep, this is really great news!

Thanks :up:

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeessssss! I was just looking at that thread too! Right now, I just settled on a pseudo star navigation system. I made a little mod to remove the sub marker on the map, and just Ctrl+Click & mark to simulate the navigator getting a fix at times when it would be possible. Makes sailing a lot more fun!

are the stars accurate enough.?
k

Sounds great! I've been waiting for something like this to come out ever since I saw that first thread.

So far with SH3 and SH4, it would seem so.

I must just play with the the sunrise/set moonrise/set times and game clock.

I have a problem getting rid the the mouse CTL-LClick, which looks to be 'hard-coded', but this is not the end of the world.

Must ask you guys a question:
What do you think of getting rid of the navigation bar completely for this mod - This would essentially disable anything the 'computer navigator' can do ?

:up:

No half measures eh? :)
I think that once I get this mod up and running, I'll probably not touch the nav bar, aside from the weather report button. However, I suppose that button could be shifted somewhere else anyway, so why not.

One vote for the yes column :)

Make sure the moon and sun are actually ~1/2 a degree across.
:up:

hmmm. i have an idea

maybe make lighthouses selectable as targets...then you can get range/position fixes from them....bouys, channel markers too maybe?

EDIT: about making the nav bar disappear...maybe have a "chicken out" option where it slides out?
then you can save/reload to reset?

If you can fix this, I will be, frankly, amazed. I'm very curious how you're going to do a "look up" for the values needed to accurately predict these times based on what data? I don't think there is a ephemeral table in SH4... It could be done by rote calculation but the game clock is certainly *weird* in SH4 so those calculations would have to be tweaked...

Normally you'd need at least on longitude fix to get the correct time and hour offset to correct for UT. A latitude fix will determine the moon and sun azimuth.

Don't get me wrong, I hope you have great success. I've always hated being off the coast of Japan and still in darkness at 11:30 AM, etc...

Cheers. ;)

heck yes!! remember, first star to the right and straight on till morning! you'll get to Japan in no time!!

After the SH3 nav mod, I did a lot more reading with regard to ship clocks, It seems that the game clock is correct. The ship navigator has to adjust the clock according to longitude, just as it's done in the game.. this was a wierdo one for me too.
I'll look more into this and how to simpify it.
:up:

All you need are 2 fixes to find your position, no real need to have a lock for range. I guess if you knew the height of a lighthouse you could find a range tho. If the ingame maps are good enough, you could also use mountain peaks and other land features to plot your current position.

my thoughts exactly

A Leetle update
 

Here's the Sextant inserted into the Obs-Scope.
I stopped at a British base, and asked them to modify the optics to something more suitable. The result is as follows.

The 1 degree divisions are now 16 pixels (instead of 17 :down:). This results in a slightly wider FOV ~ 2 degrees (I'm Skipper here and what I say goes - No arguments to the contrary..;) ). The FOV is scaled to compensate for this.

Doing this enables the vertical (sextant) scale to be manhandled more easily.


Preliminary Users guide :-
- Place Horizon reference on sea horizon and measure angle.
- For angles above 60, swing scope vertical to 90 and read in reverse (One has a 0.5 Degree compensation here - Nothing I can do... it's a game visual problem)
- Sextant is red, so you can see it at night.


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...bsSextant1.jpg

One of the gazillion tests...
Don't forget that Polaris is 0.5 degrees from North, Along the line from Cassiopeia

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...bsSextant2.jpg

That's the scope done... Now down to the Almanacs...
Later..
:know: