[gap]

Originally Posted by Kendras

I remind you that it would be a wonderful addition if you could create enlighted portholes for the night...

Originally Posted by gap

I have looked into this while working on ship's smoothing groups. For portholese to look illuminated, the central part of them should be given a "luminous" material. Unfortunately, the 3D portholes currently in place have only the external ring modelled, but not the central glass.

I was wrong: after having looked more closely into the unit VonDos is currently working on, I have discovered that porthole's central portions are modelled. At first I didn't notice them, as thei are stored in diffrent submodel than the frames.

Originally Posted by VonDos

PS About light question, please try to dowload and install my Queen of Bermuda mod. Try this unit in a single mission with mission editor in 1939 before war start date, in 1939 after war start date and in 1942. This could be interesting about portholes lights and timeline (neutral enlightened, war duty darkened..) and about textures management issue.

Originally Posted by gap

Is the ship illuminated before her conversion to armed merchant?

Originally Posted by VonDos

She is illuminated only before war begin date, sept 1939. With war start, every porthole is darkened because unità is no more neutral..

I have had a quick look into your Queen of Bermuda. I see you have followed my advise to store different ship parts in a separate library file, but I think you have actually overdone my suggestion lol

The only parts that actually had to be set as external equipments, are the ones that were historically modified during the conversion (vents, funnels, masts, part of the superstructure, etc). Imo the main hull and all the parts not modified during the conversions, should be stored directly in one of the dat files in the sea folder. Only one, not the two of them, because two (similar) units can share the same dat file (so you might also scrap the second dat file).

How can you do that, you may ask? The answer is easy: by adding the following line to the [Unit] section of the cfg file, for the unit that you want to use another unit's model:

[Unit]
ClassName=BBPennsylvania
3DModelFileName=data/Sea/NBB_Colorado/NBB_Colorado
UnitType=11
...

The example above is from SHIV's USS Pennsylvania which, as you can see, uses the same files as the USS Colorado. The only files found in Pennsylvania's folder, besides the cfg and the shape files, are eqp and sns files, used for customizing the ship relative to her sister (the Colorado):



In this example, the Colorado and the Penssylvania use the same texture, but if devs wanted the latter to use a special texture, I think they could have done that by editing the following entries in her ROSTER cfg file:

[Texture 1]
TextureName=data/Sea/NBB_Colorado/NBB_Colorado_T01.tga
LightmapTextureName=data/Sea/NBB_Colorado/NBB_Colorado_O01.tga
NormalmapTextureName=data/Sea/NBB_Colorado/NBB_Colorado_N01.tga
StartDate=19000101
EndDate=19991231
Frequency=1

I think the same settings can also be used in SHIII, though they are not found anywhere in stock files.

One last note: In the case of the Queen of Bermuda, having the ship set as two separate units (one being a proxy clone of the other), makes sense because the two versions of the ship had different roles and they require different unit types. For the Queen Mary, we just need one unit whose paint scheme and equipments (including the lightened windows) can be switched by date, through eqp and cfg files' start/end date settings.

PS: check your PM box