[gouldjg]

Originally Posted by Ducimus

I think i may be on the cusp of something and i wish i could try it out right now, but can't.

Unless someone has evidence to the contrary, i think max hydrophone ranges are *almost* irrelevant.

Let me give you a little metahphore here if thats the word for it.
I dont care how good your hearing is, when you put in a set of ear plugs and ear muffs over that, your not going to hear much.

The earplugs and earmuffs to which i refer are wave factor and noise factor.

We know this much, zeroing out the noise factor and wave factor, a 1940 DD can hear a dolphin fart in the indian ocean from the bay of biscay.

I ran into this once and i need to reproduce it:
Noise factor at 1, wave factor at 0, at silent speed, DD can heard me at a close range radius (with2K i think) regardless of what i do. (almost as if the noise factor was 0 when close )

I ran into this once, and thought "well thats no good" and immediatly put the wave factor back in. IN hindsight i think that WAS good.

My thought now is this:
Use noisefactor 1, wave factor 0.
Find the edge of the detection radius. If its consitant, lower the noise factor to see if you can enlarge this radius. If you can get this radius to a favorable size, THEN add the wave factor in, and start adjusting it to taste.

Now IF this works, heres the thing.
Need a standard DD to adjust too. You can dial in your test DD perfectly but you'll still have dumb and uber DDs. Can we mod all DD's to use the same equipment?

Doing that, i think you can mod the sim.cfg to adjust the hydrophones under ideal conditions. Infact under ideal conditions i think you should uberize the DD, to account for the constant crappy weather conditions in campign. Near perfect hydrone conditions are rare.

Yes your right but here are my thoughts (you will see the similarity)

You mod waves and noisefactor which in effect makes the existing settings better or worse at hearing however when I was trying this, it become very difficult as you say with equipment etc and thus may have needed much much work.

I am lazy so I looked at other ways to get similar results.

Now I look at ranges of equipment and then get them to match roughly what they should be detecting me at according roughly to real life but not if it kills gameplay. this is where i am lazy.

I test this in happy times mission as seas are calm and I am 8000 mtre away from any DD. I zip into middle ground of convoy and approaching DD.

The convoy DD uses type123 as it is a Huntclass1 if I remember rightly.

Once I got an average good pickup rate (not precise but good enough for my gameplay) I then added the same range nerfs as I did with that of type123 to all other passives.

Look at rough example. the figures are not accurate but this is just to show the method.

e.g. Type123= original = 6000 mtrs my conclusion = 14500 which now shows good pickup ranges and I could still go slow or silent untill very very close.

So the difference between the original and the nerfed = 8500 This will later need sorting to be more precise

I have now added 8500 to each passive and changed the main hydrophone max to the highest passive.

SO now I have DDs with a crewrating of 4. Under calm seas they are now picking me up at good ranges when I run flank etc, depending on range. ( I now need to start getting historic)

I can slip by them if i am silent and my aspect is good.

I have yet to test the same results in rough water but suspect/HOPE it will be a standard compinsation effect of the waves and noise factors.

I am no way finnished but almost convinced as I always have been, that this is the best way to go. If waves factor is too severe later on in testing then I will adjust each piec of equipment individually to compensate. I do however want some situations where noise and bad weather work in favour for me. This is my randomness rather than enemy crew.

Now here is the problem,

I have to spend many hours tommorow to actually get this all done at a reasonable level.

I am pretty convinced that Redwine and CB or even Yourself will end up with more historic factual ranges here. We are so close, I know it. ( a spanner drops) this is turning out to be a search for the baseline I was talking about earlier.

p.s. I also think that each sensor has a individual sensitivity which will automatically make early war DD's less effective. I suspect each sensitivity was also effected by crew ratings in a massive maths formula. You just have to look at fatigue formulas to get an idea of the depth they went too.

Like I have always said, putting Crewratings in this game IMHO really screwed this up. It was meant to be a very diverse and complex system which suited many many playstyles, plus the multiplayer aspect. Time and testing could not be done properly.

This is why CB was really onto something when he said things were better without them.

I am very interested in what range differences you are noticeing per tweak. If you do this in small steps, it may give us clues for later on should we need to do final tweaks.

All in all great work and keep at it.