questions about the deck gun stabilisation

[Sammi79]

Hi all, sorry for dragging this ancient topic up again. I've trawled through hundreds of posts relating to the deck gun stabilisation, most of which are 2+ years dead now and were relevant to pre 1.5 versions of the game, I've downloaded 'real deck gun mod' although have yet to test as I play Op monsun I just wanted to see if I could implement the same change therein, and nope I can't. In cameras.dat the stabilsation seems to be linked to the AimCannon entry which has no settings, If I remove it the stabilsation is gone (the sight is still stabilised however by the MoveCannon entry) but the cannon will not move - this could be usefull, if the camera was setup with 0 rotation on the X-axis, it could be used to tell when the boat was level to give the fire command while the sights could be used purely to set azimuth/elevation, unfortunately when coming back out of the sight view the camera becomes unlinked from the boat and stays in the same position while the boat moves on.

Questions :-

Is there a way to get rid of the stabilisation of all the deck guns and their sights?

As the AimCannon and MoveCannon entries seem to be calls to SHControllers.act is there anyway to edit this file? Its 99% garbage in notepad/wordpad is there a specific program for editing these files?

I assume not because I've never seen a modified .act file in any mod and I assume the answer to my first question is no because it does not seem to be implemented in any of the mega mods (have not tried RFB yet though), but perhaps someone could just put my mind at rest on this? I've been bashing my head against and mutilating these files for a good while now. I even put SHcontrollers.act into a hex editor and started randomly deleting sections of code, how desperate is that!

[Sammi79]

Hmmm. Taboo subject? It should be in the mods forums I guess only I didn't want to post twice (ATO/Fleet boats).

So anyone? no idea at all?

[Fishbreath]

IIRC the guns in RFB are not stabilized. Or at least that's how it feels to me; firing coming over the top of a wave has sent my shot high more times than I can count.

[Sammi79]

OK, thankyou Fishbreath for your reply I shall have a look at RFB before I give up on this completely.

[Wilcke]

Originally Posted by Sammi79

OK, thankyou Fishbreath for your reply I shall have a look at RFB before I give up on this completely.

PM LukeFF on the topic, this is something that has always been a compromise, but he did delve into and has the knowledge base regarding stabilization. Good luck!

[Sammi79]

Wow 2 replies in 1 afternoon? must be my lucky day . Thankyou Wilcke I shall PM LukeFF and see if he can help or at least tell me why it ain't possible.

To be continued...

[KlassenT]

I don't mean to burst your bubble, Sammi, but I dug this up out of the Subsim Archives:

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/arch.../t-149571.html

From the looks of that post, there's no known utility for opening and editing .act files, which would indicate to me that they're likely either a proprietary format, or raw hex / binary files. If they end up being hex or binary, it would be *possible* to modify them, maybe even to the extent of rewriting the stabilization system, but the big problem is knowing what to look for and what to modify.

Edit: Thought I'd save you a bit of trouble; I opened up SHControllers.act in XVI32 (Hex editor) and... well, it's not pretty, lol. Quite a bit of the file still shows up as gibberish, so it's not just hex-encoded. That's not to say there isn't ANY hex encoding in the file, because there are quite a few readable hex characters in it, insofar as some filename references, but one that raised a red flag was a reference to `MoveCannon.cpp'. If you're curious as to what you might be getting into...



If they have a source file for it, it's probably not going to be easy by a long shot to do any sort of modification (Unless the source is available somewhere, but that seems pretty unlikely.) Hopefully LukeFF can weigh in with some more useful information than me shattering your dreams, but you might be barking up the wrong tree with the .act files until you get some solid details on the format.

I promise that my intention was to help a brother out, I just hit a brick wall!

[Sammi79]

Originally Posted by KlassenT

I don't mean to burst your bubble, Sammi

'Pop..' Awww...

Only jokin'... Yeah I was kinda thinking that was probably the case. Like I said I loaded it into a hex editor and started ripping it up a bit but as yet the only results I've had are 1.No change at all (which is a bit spooky, I mean I just overwrote a load of information with 0s) and 2.CTDs on load (now that's more like it!) and it's very much a case of me trying to repair a circuit board with a flamethrower so I'm not too hopefull on that. sighs...

Anyway maybe LukeFF can give me some further info on it, otherwise I will just have to admit defeat.

[Rockin Robbins]

We've tried many times over the past two years to remove the stabilization. However, much of the gun's behavior is hard wired. As modders we're careful not to edit files found outside the /data subdirectory. Ubi was good enough to make that game moddable and we try to stay within the intended bounds. Messing with .act, .dll. or .exe files is outside the scope of legitimate modding and enters the field of hacking.

There was a short-lived mod called New Real Deck Gun that achieved destabilization at the cost of all usefulness and consistency of sighting the gun. It was a monstrous failure. If you'd like to play with it I might be able to scare it up from wherever it's hiding on my hard drive.

[Sammi79]

OK, Thankyou Rockin Robbins I think I understand now am going to leave those files alone (I very much doubt with my limited knowledge there is anything I'd be able to achieve anyway) I am certainly no 'Modder' by any standard let alone a 'Hacker', I used basic interpreters back in the day that's about as deep as my computing knowledge ever got. Did some scripting in Operation Flashpoint and Neverwinter Knights and would like to learn some higher level stuff, but I don't work in the industry so it's in my free time only... well, maybe one day when I get a life transplant. heh.

By the way that 'New Real Deck Gun' mod is that the same as 'Real Deck Gun' or is it perhaps a newer one? I only ask as I have already downloaded the latter, if there was another version I would love to take a look.

Anyway at least I can stop giving myself a headache over it,

Regards, Sam.

[Rockin Robbins]

OK, here's the state of the art. Keep in mind that I found this mod. Upon finding it with no identification in a readme file or anything I attempted repeatedly to find the author. Nobody would claim it. That might be a clue as to how successful it is....


It is still fun. Aiming is really lousy because the sights just don't work. Ideally you could set the sights for the proper range, wait on the uproll or downroll for the target to be in the crosshairs and pull the lanyard. Alas, it doesn't quite work that way.

However, I did stuff the thing with my patented Slightly Subnuclear Ordinance, so IF you happen to get a hit it will bring a smile to your face.

Oh, I bet you may want a link: http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/downloads.php?do=file&id=1824.

Now it's in the wild. God help us all!

[KlassenT]

For all the 'dead' this topic might be, I have to weigh in on it one more time, and it'll probably die and get buried somewhere in Subsim land, but I actually put my programming cap on today and played a little game of Let's Pretend. If I were Ubisoft in this case, and there's no easy way to disable having a stabilized deck gun, I think we're looking at it from the wrong angle. Given the current behavior of the deck gun and watching a few skirmishes in multiplayer, I'm not entirely sure that deck guns are "stabilized" in the first place; I think it seems a lot more likely that the firing points were just treated as free-floating points from their inception; in a sense, an imaginary/invisible pseudo-model completely detached from the sub itself.

On the other side of the coin is the argument that there's no easy way to disable it because Ubi spent a whole ton of time and resources in getting it just right, then decided their work was so perfect that they declared it must be hardcoded, and no-one was to ever disable it! Possible, but not plausible, I say.

All in all, it really kinda seems to me like the issue isn't removing an existing stabilizing feature, but rather adding a destabilizing feature in... After looking at the New Real Deck Gun files in S3D, I'm sorta following the idea behind it, but I'll have to let it sink in for a bit and mull it over. I don't necessarily think it's a lost cause, but it's certainly not a weekend project, either.

[Sammi79]

Hmmm.... curse my curious mind... I looked through the 'New Real deckgun' mod thank you kindly Mr Rockin Robbins, seemed the only real difference was in cameras.dat involving the 'ShocksCollision' entry, and the look at horizon in 'MoveCannon' was set to false. I think KlassenT is right, there may well be a more satisfactory way around this though it's going to be at least partly a case of adding more controllers to try to keep the camera in line with the boat as it pitches/rolls. I tried adding a 'FollowParent' controller after the 'ShocksCollision' and have succesfully negated the anti-roll however pitch is still automatically levelling... TBC

Another thing I notice is that the camera entries are split into 3 parts I.e :-

DeckGunCam
-label
-ctrl
--ctrl parameters
-ctrl
--ctrl parameters

-DeckGunCam1
--label
--ctrl
---ctrl parameters

--DeckGunCam2
---label

And controllers have markedly different effects depending on which part you place them in, I thought at first the reason for having 3 parts was the 3x Axis but it dosn't seem to work like this intuitively, but obviously with all the different controller types there a suitably large number of possibilities to test...

[Rockin Robbins]

Great detective work! It would be so great to be able to use the sight and have a destabilized gun so you would have to time the roll for the shot.

[Admiral8Q]

Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins

Great detective work! It would be so great to be able to use the sight and have a destabilized gun so you would have to time the roll for the shot.

I agree on that! I don't like zooming in because you lose the pitch and role. I only zoom in if I can barely see the target. But if this was fixed, that would make my day!