Changing AI ship gun ranges?
 

I'm trying to design some surface based single missions using playable ships and AI vessels, but can't quite get the game to work as I had hoped.

The main issue is getting AI ships to fire at halfway realistic ranges. In a test mission, with the playable North Carolina and a Kongo class, the Kongo acts like nothing is even going on until 7000 meters. It just goes waypoint to waypoint, then finally fires on me at about 7000. Accuracy isn't too much of a problem at the time being, but I can't get enemy ships to recognize and fire on my ships at a reasonable game distance. Something like 8-10 miles would be decent at least.

What can I do to get enemy vessels (primarily BBs) to recognize and then fire on other ships at a more reasonable range?

Try taking the cfg files from one of my ships. That should make them fire long before you can.

/data/cfg/sim.cfg

Yeah, I was wondering about that, but what needs to be changed? I've tried setting AI Cannons to a higher max fire range, but they still don't fire at that set range.

When an AI opens fire is based on three things:

a.) max gun range as set in the sim.cfg file
b.) Max gun range as set in whatever gun model it happens to be. For example. Guns.sim. Probably located in data/library/shipparts or something like that
c.) If it visually see's it's target or not.

I got a hex editor to try to make sense of the guns.sim file. I found what looks to be the range for the 14" inch guns.

Any tips? I see two ranges listed. Is that a minimum and max? What kind of changes to these values should I try?

http://i397.photobucket.com/albums/p...155/guns-1.jpg

use s3d editor once yo're ydentify what gun you want modify

Right,:up:

Thanks for the suggestion.

I modified the main guns in the sim file, and now am getting 15" Bismarck to fire at me at 9100 yards. That's better than 7000, but not enough yet. It doesn't matter if I increase the gun settings more from here (it's still 9100 yards), so the ship must not be detecting me until then. What can I do to get the vessel to detect me at least as well as my own crew detects it? They see the Bismarck several minutes before.

Don't even bother with a hex editor when making changes to any sim/dat/zon/dsd/ files. S3D is probably better then an SDK in many respects.


If you want to edit a ships gun directly, look at its EQP file and see what 3d object node its calling on.

Then look for that node in one of the dat files. Hell S3D has a search function and can scan all files in an entire directory. Open the dat file, find the node, copy the parent ID, then open the sim file, search for same ID, It'll be a child ID somewhere. So it should plop you right to the appropriate entry in the sim file. Edi it to your heats content, save, etc etc.

I figured out how to edit the different gun ranges using S3D, and they are all set well past 9100 yards.

I guess the enemy ships aren't detecting me until somewhere around there, so what can I do to increase their detection range?

program_files/ubisoft/sh4/data/library/AI_sensors.dat
copy file, open it with s3d, find ai_visual (node 6, i think) change range from 11000 m with your preffered value
save it and if you want it jsgme ready for future use save him in a corespondent folder tree egg Long Range Visual/Data/library/AI_sensors.dat copy Long Range Visual folder into MODS and you can activate him with JSGME

I tried changing this value, but haven't gotten good results. I tried 15000m, and it actually reduced the range the enemy ship fired at me. In fact, anything above the default value (mine was at 9000 something) had the opposite effect.

I would like to get the enemy ships to detect me as well as my own crew detects ships. They see the enemy ship at about 7 miles (11,000 something meters) at the moment.

That is some informative information. Even so, I'm running into an issue. I adjusted some of the values in the sim.cfg, and got the Bismarck to detect and fire at me at about the same range as my own crew would fire back (about 14000 yards).

I can't say the same for the Japanese vessels. From the Yamato to the Fuso, they don't detect and fire until about 9500 yards. What is different between the Bismarck vs. the Japanese ships to have such a disparity in range? Does it have something to do with the individual ships files?