Novice tweaker needing assistance

[Bosje]

ok here goes nothing

my current setup is: 1.5, PE3.3, RFB1.5, RSRDC1.4 with patches

it introduces several minor issues, some of which I managed to solve all by my lonesome.

the Home and End keys for strafing up/down on the cameras got somehow disabled. I removed the ";" in front of the setkey lines in commands.cfg and that fixed it. no ill side-effects observed so far

The B key for toggle general quarters is removed by 1.5, I put some ";" in front of all B setkey lines I could find and copy pasted the line for 'toggle binoculars' over to the already present but keyless 'toggle general quarters' command. that now looks like this:

[Cmd436]
Name=Toggle_battle_stations
Ctxt=1
Key0=0x42,,"B"

and it seems to work fine at first glance.

the trouble is, I don't know exactly what I'm doing: what does that ctxt=1 and 0x42 mean exactly and what am I screwing up by tweaking my game like this?

the next step is a more complicated one
My camera is somehow corrupted, I can not click the sonar and radar consoles with the mouse from the conning tower without screwing up something somewhere. I have no clue where the fault lies, I didn't do any tweaking to any relevant commands afaik. all i know is this: when the game setup has a conning camera fixed in one place, the error does NOT occur. that's to say 1.5 without mods works fine, and the ROW camera mod 2b also removes the error.

here is what happens exactly: I click the sonar console and I am put in front of the sonar. i can work the sonar and I can hit the right mouse button. that right mouse button (previous camera afaik) puts me back in the control room (whereas the previous camera actually was the conning tower from where I clicked the sonar console)
so far so good, but when i turn around inside the control room, look up to the hatch and click the highlighted 'conning tower' to climb up there, I get moved into a big black wormhole with 'camera out of sectors'. moving around for a bit to try to back to known territory doesn't get me anywhere, I have no idea where the camera is at.

but
common sense tells me that this is due to the way the game tries to handle both US fleet boats and Uboots.

[Cmd11]
Name=Interior_aft_camera
Ctxt=1
Page=0x33000000,3704
GoBack=Interior_fore_camera

[Cmd12]
Name=Interior_radio_camera
Ctxt=1
;Key0=0x78,,"F9"
MnID=0x3F020007
Page=0x33000000,3708
GoBack=Interior_fore_camera

[Cmd13]
Name=Conning_tower_camera
Ctxt=1
Page=0x33000000,3715
GoBack=Interior_fore_camera

there, you see. that one has F9 not functional. instead, the functional F9 can be found here, which is exactly where it puts me in the game: the radar console

[Cmd530]
Name=Radar_view_ascope
Ctxt=1
Key0=0x78,,"F9"
Page=0x33000000,3725
GoBack=Interior_fore_camera

There are several other F9 commands in the commands.cfg. all of em with ";" in front of them. so that makes sense. Name=Interior_radio_camera (above) is one of them, which I assume is the fixed-in-place-conning tower camera from stock, a remnant of the original clean 1.0 installation before patching. Is that assumption correct?

My limited brain tells me that it might be possible solution to change the "GoBack=Interior_fore_camera" into "GoBack=Interior_radio_camera" and launching the game again to see what that does.

Am I doing things even remotely right? Or am I making a complete mess of weird and wonderful files hidden deeply inside my games folder which will completely wreck the whole setup?

any feedback would be much appreciated.

Edit: i can't reproduce the bug in the IXD2 as the sonar and radar consoles can not be activated through the mouse from the radio room. the guys just turn towards me as they did in good old SH3

Edit: what is the proper wording to assign the numpad enter key to the "time compressin 1x" command?

[Cmd6]
Name=Time_compr_normal
Ctxt=1,2,6,9
Key0=0x6D,s,"Shift+Npad -"
Key1=0x6D,s,"Numpad Enter"

ah, edit the edit: got that sorted by copy pasting the line from my SH3 folder
key1=0x0D,, "enter" sorts it out, i assume this is something to do with the way the game recognises my keyboard or something

[Bosje]

[Cmd12]
Name=Interior_radio_camera
Ctxt=1
Key0=0x78,,"F9"
MnID=0x3F020007
Page=0x33000000,3708
GoBack=Interior_fore_camera

activiting this F9 command and launching in a porpoise got here:


that camera appears to be rooted to the spot, as i can not move it about the place. somewhere back and to the left of the sub. back and to the left... (eek, conspiracy theory flashback)

can this be the position where i get spammed after trying to access the conning tower from the control room?

in that case, there is something wrong with where the game moves you after hitting locations with the mouse. there would be a file saying 'left mousebutton on conning tower hatch moves camera to Radio Room (the outboard area I just accessed with F9 on the screenshot) where it SHOULD direct me to the conning tower as usual.

for clarity: on startup it works fine, hatch leads to conning tower without problems. once i go to the radar or sonar from the conning tower, i can't get into the conning tower anymore (and i suspect i get to the outboard area on the screenshot, which turn into a pit of blackness as we are at that point in the moving camera, rather than the fixed camera)

does that make any sense at all?

[jimimadrid]

Bosje,
i can tell you that there are several undocumented camera positions which get rare Views.
I tested them with the Sh4Menumaker and decided to put them out of the available list, because of no good view results.

In Sh4Menumaker you can manually add the name of the viewcontrols for testing - see the manual.

It seems that they are old view commands belonging to Sh3. - but do not work correctly on Sh4.

[Bosje]

ok it would appear I am getting myself into one of those weird viewpoints.

but how did that get into my interface? and how can i fix it?

did some more messing around and there are some results:
i assigned F9 to conning tower and that works, same camera as the one up from CR or down from bridge.

i also changed "GoBack=Interior_fore_camera" to "GoBack=Conning_tower_camera" for the sonar and radar views. that works too, in that the conning tower becomes my view when i hit the 'npad ins' or 'rmb' from either station. but ONLY if i accessed the console from the control bar or through hotkeys. As soon as I access either console with the left mouse button from the conning tower, it gets screwed up.

so... there must be an entirely different thing somewhere concerning accessing stations by directly clicking the mouse button when standing in front of it. where can i find that?

I notice that the guy who used to be my 'Dive Officer' and when clicked, gave me the nav map (or was it the attack plot?) and there was the officer on deck in the conning tower who got me another map (that was the nav map?) when clicked

these things are gone with 1.5 -> no more tooltips for those guys, no longer an active function assigned to them. In fact, the only active functions that remain are the radar and sonar consoles, and the hatches up from the control room all the way up to the bridge. the CR/CT/Bridge route works fine, but the sonar/radar is corrupt

am I seriously the only one who ever had this problem???

[Bosje]

deactivated all mods and got TMO 152 with PE3.3 and RSRD instead

that fixes the sonar/radar problem entirely

weird, huh. i did notice several modlets inside TMO folder dealing with previous camera settings in the commands.cfg

ducimus knows more about this?

edit: so the problem stems from a conflict somewhere with RFB/pe3.3? or my rig is faulty, or most likely the problem sits between the computer and the deskchair

either way, if I wanted, say, the cameras from RFB (without the above radar/sonar weirdness) inside TMO/RSRDC/PE3.3...
I suppose I would be a real a-hole kind of spoilt brat? I dare not copy cameras.dat from rfb into pe3.3 and then forcing that onto TMO through jsgme before knowing more about how this stuff works

regards,

bosje

[Bosje]

bump

I'm respectfully requesting feedback from anyone who knows his way around cameras.dat on this one (at least i think it's cameras.dat)

i mentioned before the camera glitch i'm having. It occurs both with PE3.3 and RFB. It does not occur with TMO. The only correlation I can see is that TMO roots the conning tower camera to the spot while both PE3.3 and RFB provide a free roaming conning tower interior camera.

For clarity: the problem is that whenever I click the sonar guy or the radar guy, I get put in front of his console. From then on, whenever I try to access the conning tower camera it is screwed up, putting me in a black field with 'camera out of sectors'

I would think that a possible solution is to copy TMO's cameras.dat in a file as add that to the MODS folder, enable it through jsgme. But I wouldn't know what I'm doing so I presume I'm likely to mess up all kinds of files with that, as the supermods are not compatible. But then, I like the free control room camera so I'd really want a solution where the problem is fixed in another way. possibly by removing the clickable function of those guys in the conning tower.

One might say: if it screws your game, don't click the guys. Fair enough but it happens by accident every so often. you're in the conning tower, click the LMB to get the first person shooter-kind of view where the camera moves with the mouse. I'm sure we all like walking around our boats. If the mouse happened to be near either console, I mess it up and only a reload fixes it.

Is anyone able to recreate this problem at all? I searched and searched but I can't find any post at all which mentions any 'console camera glitches'

anyone?