Such a dangerous place for the navigation as Chausey shouldn't be left without maritime beacons signaling the hazard. Actually the main island is home, in its SE tip, to a relatively small lighthouse which is my intention adding to the game together with several houses, a
jetty, a
Napoleonic fort, a
castle, a
chapel and a
semaphore. The following map shows clearly the location of each building on the island:
http://geologie.discip.ac-caen.fr/pr...sey/cartes.htm
If any willing subsim mate wants to volunteer for creating some of those models, I will happily accept his contribution
In the meanwhile, I am working on a model of the lighthouse which some of you might have seen in an early state, as I started working on it long ago but then I put it in standby. This is how it looks after several additional hours of work:
I will add for reference a few historic views and a modern picture of the real thing:
As you can see, even though still unfinished, my model reminds quite closely the original.
According to the essay
"Les phares français pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale" by Jean-Christophe Fichou, though with dimmed lights, French lighthouses kept in service until the Fall of France, when the occupying German forces ordered the deactivation of all the minor lights not essential to their shipping, starting from the offshore installations and from the lights that were facing the English Channel.
For this reason, I will set this lighthouse as a land unit rather than a terrain object and I will set its light effect as eqp-file-controlled equipment. Doing so, will enable us to switch its light off when the right time comes, with the additional advantage of being able to use a LOD model (terrain objects don't have those). There a few more advantages in this approach which I will discuss later, but there is also a a big con though. If the method I am suggesting is followed, a new campaign layer will be added where I will store lighthouses and similar units, but the game will read them only when a new career is started or, at best, on changing campaign.
What do you guys think?
