[REQ] Bearing Tool for 1680x1050

[Jonny-Dog]

I have tried several Bearing Tools like 360 Degree Bearing Plotter and 3000 Yard/Meter Bearing Tool, but none of them scales correctly @1680x1050.

Does anybody have this Bearing Tool for 1680x1050 screen resolution, preferably in yards?

-or-

Could someone tell me how to scale/edit the overlay with e.g. Photoshop?

J.J.

[NonWonderDog]

You have to scale the textures by the x-dimension of your display. For something made for 1024x768 to work correctly in 1680x1050 you have to multiply each dimension by 1680/1024 or 164.0625%. The overall texture dimensions must be powers of two, however, so you'll need to add or remove some empty space so that you've got a 4096x4096 texture or something like that.

The proper map scale for a 1024x768 display, by the way, is 2 meters per pixel. That's what my 3000 yard/meter tools are scaled to, although I think the other one might be scaled differently.


Since I came back to SH4 a couple days ago armed with a shiny new computer, I've scaled the 3000 yard bearing tools up for my shiny new 1680x1050 display. They're now 8192x8192 textures (!) and are 85 Mb compressed (I believe/hope DXT5 is kept compressed in memory -- they're 256 Mb uncompressed).

They're too big for me to want to upload, they extract to nearly a gigabyte in total, they make the map screen stutter when loaded with even a top-of-the-line computer, they only work with a NVidia 8- or 9-series card (or possibly a Radeon HD), and installing more than one submarine class's tool at a time causes SH4 to exceed its memory limits, drop textures, and crash randomly. But I still use them, and they work.

If someone wants to make one, a 2500 yard tool for 1680x1050 should fit on a 4096x4096 texture. That would be much more compatible.


Of course, if one of the recent patches has added a way to scale these in-game, you can safely ignore everything I've written here and do that instead. Anyone know?

[Marko_Ramius]

Hi,

I really whish that too

I use metric, and my bearing tool is only 1100 meters ( 1680x1050 Res.). This ruins something in the game. Before, with my old CRT, it was perfect in 1280/960.

While i'm not able to make one, i must wait one of you guys If it's possible.

I'm just surprised something is not done yet cause it seems so many players have some 22 LCD ( or more !)

[Jonny-Dog]

NonWonderDog, thanks for the info.

As I see, it's more complicated than simply scaling the textures. However, I don't see the need for the bearing tool to be 3000 yards. What ever fits the 4096x4096 texture would be sufficient. Unfortunately, I don't have the knowhow to make a new bearing tool.

I'm also surprised that no hardcore simmers have mentioned this problem much. And 1680x1050 is pretty much a common resolution today, like 1024x768 was "a few" years ago.

This is, in my opinion, a very important tool for us that swear to manual firing solutions. How at all can you make an accurate manual solution without it?

Hope to see someone with the skills make this tool available. As for now, I stick to the 3000 yard version. Even if the scaling is wrong, it is doing the job of telling the bearing to the target.

J.J.

[jdkbph]

Try this...

<DELETED>
It's just a replacement DDS for the Gato, that you can drop into the data\submarine\nss_gato folder, but it can be renamed and used for any of the boats in the game.

At least it works for me in version 1.4 with TM, RSRD, etc.

If it works and you want to share, feel free to package it up or whatever.

JD



EDIT

Ok, that was just plain lazy...

Here's a JGSME ready package that can be quickly installed, and uninstalled if it doesn't work for you or you don't like it.

Sorry about that.

JD

[NonWonderDog]

Originally Posted by poker68

How at all can you make an accurate manual solution without it?

It's worth noting that you don't actually have to have your firing solution centered on your sub. If you were dedicated enough you could plot a solution with a completely blank map--you just wouldn't be able to get an accurate solution unless you kept the sub going in a straight line at constant speed. In fact, the only tool you really need is the ruler and its upside-down compass. The trick is that you have to put everything in the submarine frame. No matter your sub's heading, it must move only north on your attack map. (You could try to take your own heading and any turns into account, but it would probably take far too long to plot.)

On the real sub I'm assuming the weapons officer's entire job during an attack would be to plot the submarine and its target on an attack map. It's a bit of work, but we have the advantage of being able to pause the game and grab a calculator (although a slide rule would probably be quicker).

Of course, I'm supposed to be the captain, not the weapons officer. So I use all the tools I can get my hands on short of auto-plotting. My dream implementation would be if I could call out bearing and range to an arbitrary number of ships and have the weapons officer plot them all on his map automatically and compute speeds, headings, and torpedo solutions based on my input.



As it turns out, though, I should have tried to rar up the 3000 yard/meter bearing tools before saying I wouldn't upload them. They compress to only 21 Mb.

You MUST have a DirectX 10 capable video card to use these!
You don't have to have either DirectX 10 or Windows Vista, but only DirectX 10 cards support 8192x8192 textures. And if your card has less than 256 Mb of texture memory, I suggest you turn back now.

Additionally, you MUST NOT enable more than one bearing tool at once!
This is for memory reasons. 8192x8192 textures are BIG. Very big. SH4 can only allocate so much texture memory, and if it has to load ten of these things it won't have room for any other textures. Even with just one loaded I've seen a couple missing textures (my crewmen had no eyes on their last patrol!).

If you extract all of these, they will take up 1.08 Gb. If that's too much, you don't have to extract all of them at once.

Also, all the American tools are in yards. The German tools are in meters. If you want them all to be in meters, or want them all to be in yards, you can replace the American tools with renamed German files or vice versa. All the American tools are identical, as are both the German tools.


Download Here: http://files.filefront.com/1680x1050.../fileinfo.html

[Jonny-Dog]

Originally Posted by NonWonderDog

My dream implementation would be if I could call out bearing and range to an arbitrary number of ships and have the weapons officer plot them all on his map automatically and compute speeds, headings, and torpedo solutions based on my input.

I have had almost the same thoughts. I think the weapons officer shouldn't necessary have to compute speed and heading (at least it could be a choice), but instead put a mark on the map each time I send data to to the TDC. Any modders here; do you think it is possible to make such a mod?

As for the Bearing Tool, I will use JD's version, due to the problems large textures creates. But if you come up with a tool with larger range than 1500 yards, and smaller texture, I will certainly have a look at it.

Thanks allot JD for the 1500 yards version! It is working perfectly with U-Boat 1.5. Good work!

P.S. It would be nice with a metric version too, for the german sub.

J.J.

[Distortion]

Anyone had a update on this on? The link seems dead.

thanks

[jimbob]

Im using 1920/1200, the ratio is 16/10 and also.

I made a 2km Bearing Plotter some months ago but it's metric.

If I remember right, it should be possible to make a 3k-yards version to fit normal filesize, no need for 20000gilos of RAM or Visva.
(2GB should be 'nuff), or DX10.


The download section should have the 3k-yard version, if not several.

Get one and resize it in paint-dot-net to fit your needs.
I don't need it ---> i'm not doing it.
It almost as easy as resizing a picture.

[Distortion]

Thanks for your reply. Problem is: resizing to what. I dont know how to do that. Problem is I`m using the 3000 yards plotter, but its off by 1 degree. I really dont know how to fix that, thats why i was hoping someone else would like to share theirs

[jimbob]

Download the small free editor: paint.net.
It can handle *dds files.

Download some 3k yard BO.

Open the sub*_shp_dds file with it.

There's an effect/tool or something that you can use to rotate the 1 degree off.

I know this cuz i've done it to my bearing plotters. I noticed the same
"1 degree off" issue as I was doing my own version.

Im on my friends PC atm, so I cannot help you right now.
But when I get home I might take a peek on what I got and perhaps
upload it here some days later.

Laters...

[Distortion]

Cheers m8, thanks for the help so far.

[rosentorf]

@jimbob:
Hi, sorry resurrecting an old thread but I was wondering, how did you make that bearing tool? What software did you use? If I knew how to do it then I might make a 2500 yards version for 1680x1050.

Thanks

rosentorf

[mello85]

I'm going to give this another bump in hopes that maybe someone has a 2000-2500yd bearing plotter for 1680x1050 since all the links posted above seem to be dead. I checked the downloads section as well and I've found none for that specific resolution.

I'm clueless as to how to begin to make my own. I'm fooling around with a 1280x960 one in Paint.net but I feel like I'm trying to disarm a bomb blindfolded

Thanks in advance!

[Ships-R-Us]

Originally Posted by mello85

I'm going to give this another bump in hopes that maybe someone has a 2000-2500yd bearing plotter for 1680x1050 since all the links posted above seem to be dead. I checked the downloads section as well and I've found none for that specific resolution.

I'm clueless as to how to begin to make my own. I'm fooling around with a 1280x960 one in Paint.net but I feel like I'm trying to disarm a bomb blindfolded

Thanks in advance!

It will never happen here. I've put a lot of time into that subject. In our case 1500yds = 1100yds. No problem...