I've been doing a hell of a lot of testing and the Mast Height Problem just wasn't adding up.
As your aware from the First post I announced that I had a fix for the stadimeter bug, and after impute from others that this and that didn't work due to mast height not being sent.
I went on to getting the Sh4 Recon Manual working in SH5 with the working send mast height to TDC.
Excellent everything work perfectly,
Hmmm I still wasn't convinced.
So I started doing a lot of tests on different ships at different ranges and the results did not add up. So I did a bit of searching on the SH4 forums (As SH5 is built on SH4 - what applies there applies here).
And came across this which validates my results.
Quote:
Originally Posted by CapnScurvy
I know a bit about Mast Heights, Manual Targeting, the relationship between the Stadimeter reading and the Position Keeper, and what results one gets with a poor firing solution ( SCAF). May I say, with some of RFB 1.52's mast heights, you couldn't hit a bull's behind with a base fiddle!!! OK, so maybe you could if you were 600 yards from target; the torpedo's don't arm themselves before 400 yards!!
I've spent a lot of time testing, calibrating, retesting, finding manual range using the stadimeter, to know the stock mast heights are on average 25-35% incorrect. Enough so that one meter (the internal game files are all in meters) on average, will produce a little less than 50 yards of difference for a manual targeting solution compared to an automatically found one. This is with the range being taken at a standard 1200 to 1300 yard distance, and with an average mast height of 19-23 meters.
If you use the auto targeting feature you can stop reading now. The relationship of correct range finding with auto targeting compared to manual targeting is like day and night. The devs developed auto targeting to keep accurate track of targets for you. In this regard they did it very well. You can still screw up, but most of the hard work is done for you. In auto targeting the game doesn't use the mast heights to find range but rather object coordinates to find the correct relationship's between one another. The game keeps track of hundreds of objects, so finding the distance between just two is a piece of cake.
In manual targeting the player makes the inputs for a firing solution. The one I'm most concerned about is mast heights since this one figure is out of the players control (it is placed in the game through the ships .cfg files), and yet it makes part of the equation for manually finding accurate range when doing it yourself. The game crunches the numbers for you, but the solution is only as good as the input figures you use. |
This is exactly what I was noticing in my Results:
If I use my fix for stadimeter as in the first post I was getting good results.
Now if I use the (Send Mast to TDC) which you would imaging to give more accurate results, this was not the case it gave results close to the Non TDC ones but still a bit off.
So the game is actually using accurate results when in Auto Mode and less accurate results whan using the Send mast Height to TDC method.
The reason for this is the game measures the distance between objects (ie Ships) in Auto Mode (Accurate) while the manual mode uses the .cfg file to get the Mast Heights which are not so accurate.
What this means is the Fix for the stadimeter is
NOT in "
sending Mast height to TDC" but in "
sending range and bearing to TDC" as in my first post.
Expect a proper Stadimeter Mod Fix soon.