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Originally Posted by Boris
Hey JScones, If you roll back SH3 Commander every time after using it, how does that maintain th effects of things such as the combined skin pack. The skin pack only installs at certain dates, and if you start a patrol not near that date, the skins won't install. Or am I wrong?
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Let's say the next patrol start date is 15 Feb 1942. When SH3 is launched via SH3Cmdr, it will copy everything found in every Date folder between 1 Sep 1939 and 15 Feb 1942. Thus it takes a "building block" approach, with newer files overwriting older files.
This makes tasks like changing ship skins quite easy. For example, let's say you wanted to change NKGN skins based on date. You may want early-war skins between 1939 and 1940, grey skins between and 1941 and 1942 and camo skins thereafter.
You'd set up the following SH3Cmdr folder structure...
\SH3 Commander\Date\19390901\data\NKGN\NKGN_T*.tga <these are your early skins which will ALWAYS get copied into SH3>
\SH3 Commander\Date\19410101\data\NKGN\NKGN_T*.tga <these are your grey skins, which will be copied into SH3 if the next patrol start date is 1 Jan 1941 or after, thus overwriting the early skins>
\SH3 Commander\Date\19430101\data\NKGN\NKGN_T*.tga <these are your late war camo skins, which will be copied into SH3 if the next patrol start date is 1 Jan 1943 or after, thus overwriting the grey skins>.
So if you had 15 of each type of skin, the early skins would get copied first, but then overwritten by the 15 grey skins and so on. If you only had say 14 grey skins, then one early skin would always remain as it would never be overwritten (and you may want to deliberately do this).
You're not limited to total changeover at any given date either - you can stagger change, by perhaps introducing some grey skins earlier and some later than 1 Jan 1941. Then players would stumble across convoys with both early and grey skins. More mix and variety.
The other good use is for reflecting historically accurate warship schemes. For example, the Bismarck. You can model her sea trials scheme up to 6 Mar 1941, then her Operation Rheinubung scheme up to 18 May 1941 and her final scheme used when she sailed into the Atlantic.
Rolling back will return all skins to "stock", but when you next run SH3Cmdr, the appropriate skins will be copied in again dependant on the new next patrol start date.
Hope this is clear.