Phew !! You've opened a whole raft of issues here which would be difficult to answer quickly.
Looks like you’ve discovered that DC has huge potential for modding and improvement . But you would be largely reinventing the wheel on most of these .
DC used to have a lot of mods which were downloadable but have since disappeared because of SH3 etc. Over the next month or so I’m going to build up a site containing many of these “forgotten” mods as a kind of resource centre. You might want to hold fire until you’ve seen some of them .
Anyway a few specifics ….
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Convert Targa (.TGA) files to .BMPs so I can alter them and turn them back into .TGAs? I want to, for example, punch out the areas around the helm view ports and make them three big, square windows.
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Definitely been done . Why do you want to convert them to BMPs ? You can work directly on TGAs in photoshop. Although I think you can open up the windows by altering just the artwork you will probably want to go further than this and will need a working knowledge of how to alter the DSF files which control their allocation. The design that Ultimation used ( small texture plates ) was a bit obtuse because they were trying to save on memory demands for low end machines and video cards . Much better to use one of the modded DSF files which use larger plates.
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Alter the maps to make the apparent shoreline more closely match the actual shoreline? Yes, I know, it's a big world, I would do it for only small areas.
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No one attempted this because it was so difficult. I can’t quite remember all the issues here but I think the modelled world didn’t quite match the real physical world in the game I think the whole map system needs ripping out and replacing with a totally new system Another possibility was to get into the map bump files. These are JRF files so you would need special tools to access them and I’m sure it would be a very slow process. Perhaps someone else knows some more about this ???
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Find a simple line-drawing program that can design and print plans (sides and topsides) of ships so I can make them into damage control screens? How do I make them into damage controls screens?
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Much easier to scan existing line drawings and integrate into the artwork. I leave the copyright issues up to your own conscience. Personally I justify it by saying I’m using them for private use and distributing them ( sort of privately ) amongst a bunch of enthusiasts.
You then need to access the DSF files to reallocate the damage areas to the correct part of the drawing …. a long and tedious job you’ll get sick of. There is a much easier method that required creating a special DSF file that acted as a template for virtually any vessel.
The damage rectangles were allocated to a generic ship schematic underneath a drawing ( line or otherwise) of the ship
You could do worse than take a look at the Kriegsmarine mod which has examples of many of these things.
http://www.amberphotography.co.uk/na...ne/DC_KM12.exe