[REQ] To OLC, Mikhayl, Joegrundman and other GUI modders

[dertien]

Hello fellow Kaleuns,


As I am not an expert on SH3 modding, I call out to those who are more experienced in the field of GUI modding such as OLC, Mikhayl and of course the GWX members who have done a great job so far.

So what is this about ?

- Maybe I have found a workaround to enable a sextant like tool to work successfully ingame, dependless of the celestial body positioning in relation to the horizon.

Let me explain a little more in detail:


As mentioned before, with particular cameras.dat files, Polaris cannot be 'shot' with Vanjast's sextant accurately and celestial navigation is a PIA in SH3.

What do we NEED to make a sextant?

1) A rotating scale ( from 1-90°) this can be easily made as we transform Kaleun Freddie's (vanjast) draggable vertical linear sextant into a rotating disk like the one OLC created to find the AOB.

2) A station to implement the sextant in: OLC has made a very nice uncluttered and usable observation periscope, where we can implement the disk nicely.The observation persicope is also stabilized, which makes it useful for celestial body shooting without being swung up and down by the waves. Hence more accurate readings. A cameras.dat file can be easily modified to have a different zoom level. Maybe we could even get a different disk loaded at the two different zoom levels to even have greater accuracy, as to read not only degrees but also minutes.

3) We have 2 dials on the TDC that follow our periscope view when we move the mouse horizontally; those are Bearing and AOB.
Furthermore OLC has the outer disk of the Attackdisk that follows the heading of our boat automatically.

It is hence possible to convert mouse motion (and thus view) in a scope to a rotary motion, and a valid reading on a dial.


If we were able to convert this available HORIZONTAL motion reading to a VERTICAL motion reading and 'attach' this reading to the new disk and make it rotate accordingly in the observation scope we would have a working sextant close to the one in RL.


What do you guys think ?

Doable ?

[ichso]

Would it be that useful ?
I've given up using the whole Real Navigation thing introduced by Vanjast because over the long run the longitude measurements (by sunrise/set times and sun almanac) just weren't accurate enough.
So the pretty precise star readings weren't of much use and I through the Real Navigation mod out again (sadly, though).

[dertien]

Well Ichso I have read on this forum that Georg_Unterberg can calculate its position within a 10 km radius, when triangulating 3 different stars, using a free little tool called nautictools from www.nautictools.de.

Find it here http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=114812

The triangulation method is only possible in SH3 if the star to shoot is exactly on the East/West/North (read the files in the realnavadditions.7z for details). With 52 stars to choose from I guess you have quite a choice on which ones to pick.

Download Kunsa's little addon tools and read the readmes carefully. It's quite complex, at least for a newbie like me.

Download here: http://hosted.filefront.com/Kunsa/RealNavAdditions.7z

You can find his post here

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...ighlight=Kunsa

With his tools you can shoot the sun during daytime, using the Obs scope, He also has a different scale to use on the scope that goes beyond the 1024*768 normal 60° vertical view.

I have made an excel sheet, not quite as fancy has Kunsa's tools to calculate Longitude by using GMT time, Local Time, and Calendar time from Vanjast's Calendar.

Dont forget that Vanjast's calendar is for 1942. He has taken these values as a basis to make the calendar values for 1939 till 1945 because they were a good average and wanted to keep the calendar small (12 pages for Northern and 12 pages for southern latitudes). To be able to do precise readings however you should have a calendar for every day of the waryears.

That could be accomplished with sh3 commander with or without JSGME loading the correct files for the correct year at the start of a patrol so your navmap is not cluttered with calendar sheets.Now, If we use this formula by Hadrys : longitude (in km, per 1°) = (111.320 + 0.373sin²φ)cosφ where φ is latitude

and we can triangulate 3 stars, we should get an position fix, even if we can't use the sunset/sunrise times in SH3 properly.

No, I think this is doable, with my childish method, I can track my position (with sunrise times alone and Vanjast's draggable sextant) to 60 Km accuracy.

We are so close to make this happen. Why not give it a try.

[joegrundman]

Originally Posted by dertien

If we were able to convert this available HORIZONTAL motion reading to a VERTICAL motion reading and 'attach' this reading to the new disk and make it rotate accordingly in the observation scope we would have a working sextant close to the one in RL.

Doable ?

This bit is not doable, I'm afraid. You also cannot use the stadimeter to get an angle reading as the stadimeter only works when there is a ship in the crosshair.