LAND UNITS Tutorial
 

While looking at the posts on the excellent playable Japanese campaign I couldn't help but notice a shot of an American battleship attacking some Japanese tanks onshore. For an upcoming mod I would like to add miscellaneous destructible shore targets - including buildings and vehicles - off the coasts of Europe. I already have some of the models ready but I am not sure of the creation process, so could somebody please post a tutorial, etc explaining how to make them? Thanks in advance - I would be very grateful!


http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/5396/shellbeachjk1.jpg

http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/383...lbeach2qw1.jpg

http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/114...lbeach3yo3.jpg

Possible to destroy them annoying coastal bunkers? That one Chinese modder made coastal bunkers destroyable in SH3...

Be nice to take bunkers, ect. out. Why watching the US planes attack Rabaul, the planes attacked and bombed the shore guns over and over, no damage of course. Almost like they planned to add this and it never made it since the planes attack them.

Actually these are not meant to be "destructible" objects, only targets. When doing the invasions throughout the Pacific I wanted the BBs to shell the beaches prior to the Invasion forces and I needed something for them to shoot at. If I made it destructible then once the BB hits it, it would be destroyed and the ships would stop shooting. Not what I wanted. If they were destoyed I would have to put a LOT of targets and that could cause problems for people with slower computers.

While testing I found that the ships will shoot at Coastal Search Lights (but only during the day, not at night ????) so I cloned the Coastal Search Light and gave it a clever name, Coastal Search Light 2, changed the 3D model to the tank and placed it in different locations on the Island. I think I am going to either make some from trucks or change the tank to a truck, since there would be locations they did not have tanks.

Now the ships had something to shoot at, but it was kind of boring looking. So with some help from Nisgeis who explained the Particles.dat and how to get the effect I wanted, I simply added an entry for the oil smoke and linked it to the tank. So actually the tanks smoke all the time, not just when they are hit. But since you are in a sub and not sitting there watching the beaches, you don't notice that. As you attack the ships, you can see from your scope they are shelling the beach and things on the beach are smoking. So it gives a bit of "immersion factor" but is very easy to impliment. And this simple method gave me the effect I wanted without having to put hundreds of targets on the beach because they got destroyed as they were hit.

As for the comments on the bunkers, I do not know a lot about the damage zones. But according to Observer (not an exact quote) you need a collision sphere for the object to take damage. The sphere transfers the info to the damage boxes.
If you look at the bunkers you will see they only have a box. The box is "inside" the bunker and linked to a gun definition in the zones.cfg file. So it looks like they are only meant to damage the guns that are inside the bunker not the bunker itself. According to what Observer said they should not take any damage without the sphere. Maybe that was on purpose since the game probably can't replace or fix the guns once you destroy them. And I think in real life if you destroyed the guns guarding Tokyo bay, they would bring in some kind of artillary to replace it, even if it couldn't be put into the bunker due to it being damaged or destroyed.

So I think you can actually make the bunkers and/or the guns destructible, but there would not be any "damaged 3D model" so they would not show the damage. When I first started modding I made a Sen Toku playable and left the stock guns on the boat and when I got DCed and later surfaced the flakguns had simply disappeared, and in the zones.cfg the flakguns were listed as "distructible=yes" so maybe that would happen if you made the bunkers 'destructible'.

Peabody

We have established a method to make coastal defences destructable via the damage model for the TSWSM. We're going to create a very small invisible ship model and mount a single gun on it. This will work for coastal guns. Not sure it would be practicle for tanks though.

Thanks for the responses.

How do you keep the ship from incurring damage while it's on land? If I'm not mistaken all grounded ships accumulate damage & eventually explode.

hitpoints, lots of hitpoints :D

we'd then need a visible tank model to replace the ship's :O:

then you could place tanks anywhere, and they'd shoot at you, but they only had small guns if my memory serves me well, and weren't too well armored either..

keltos

Good idea, but like I commented I didn't want them destructible, I wanted the warships shelling the beach for "atmosphere" and once the targets are destroyed the shelling is over. In real life they would shell everything to clear the way for the Marines and that was the reason I did it the way I did, so I could have continuous shelling without having 100 targets.

Peabody

clever:up: this way you only need one object and the shelling will just go on and on
However we of TSWSM need destructible land targets as we want to add shelling missions for the playable ships. How polyfiller exactly wants to prevent the grounded 'ship' from taking damage - I don't know, but I'm confident he'll come up with some way.

Well actually the test I ran with an IJN crusier planted firmly on a nice peice of lawn in the solomns somewhere ...... the cruiser did not pick up any damage (could not here anyc reaking or colision noises). I'm not sure yet why .... I hate not knowing why something is / is not working.... may be something to do with the amount of butchering I've been doing in zones.cfg recently (trying to stop ships from dying before they sink ...which by the way is still driving me absolutely nuts !).

Well, there we all learned something today, we all know why polyfiller is nuts!!:har:
Seriously don't you hate it when you do something (like you ship in the mud) and you KNOW what is going to happen and it doesn't!!!

Peabody

why do the IJN subs (german clones) take so much damage so easily when the numbers in the upcge and upc are the same ? :damn:

so they have another way of computing damage for the german boats or there is only the famous zone=29 ? ;)

keltos

Keltos - what do you mean ? Maybe explain in a little more detail - I may be able to help .... I've done the damage model for human playable units to death so there's not much I haven't fixed.

Before I do go completely nuts ... I really would like someone to tell me if they know why an AI ship goes into a destroyed state before it sinks (and it's not hit points ... the Bismark I'm working on has gazillions).

here is the I-Boat Damage Mod IBDM :

http://www.mediafire.com/?c3jznkgbd0q

the main problem (peabody might help with telling more) is that we get lots of damage when hit by depth charges, even when they aren't close.. and I checked the numbers from the ups and upcge and they are the same even if the items are linked to different zones (i.e. US - German), I know Observer used fleet boat zones for the uboot damage mod - is there something wrong with the stock german zones ?

then the crew, compared to a fleet boat's crew, doesn't repair things before the compartment get flooded, even when we have a small leak.

the most tested ones were the Kaidai 3b and Jyunsen B.

I send you the mod link by pm

thanks

keltos