[REL] Natural Sinking Mechanics

Isn't this game supposed to be realistic already? What's the deal with all these realism mods?

[DeepIron]

Isn't this game supposed to be realistic already? What's the deal with all these realism mods?

Not really. It's a game and it wasn't tweaked too well when it was released for accuracy or historical correctness... If it weren't for the dedication of a number of modders, SH4 would be fairly "mediocre"...

Many of us enjoy the historical realism that the mods like RFB, RSRD and tater's Campaign Levels provide along with more accurate enviromental (sky and ocean, etc) effects such as what is found in TM and ROW, to name just a couple.

Don't forget, you don't HAVE to install any mods... But I would suggest you at least install the game patches...

[Sailor Steve]

I think the emphasis in on "supposed to be". SH3 went through the same process: it's good, but it can be a lot better; and it's getting there, thanks to talented and dedicated people at both ends.

[Calbeck]

I'm with SS on this: SH4 remains the best all-time "out of the box" subsim experience. That said, every subsim ever done has had some major problems out of the box, and SH4 was no exception. Very playable, but with lots of room for improvement.

I'd say, all in all, that with the right set of mods you will easily double your gameplay value. SH3 has been so heavily modded for so long, that it is currently superior in many ways to SH4...but SH4's "top-mod" rating is catching up very quickly and promises to surpass SH3 "top-mod" rating very soon.

[DrBeast]

Thought I'd share some more funny screenshots with you, courtesy of NSM, my own home-brewed Torpedoes From Hell but also core game mechanics...

Is this fireworks?



Nope, it's a fishing boat hit by a "supercharged" Mark14 Torpedo! I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the torpedo hit and the fishing boat vanish...so I went into free camera, heard some explosions coming from high up in the sky, looked up and...well, results are shown in the picture above

A few seconds later we had touchdown:




And here's one for the lovers of Synchronized Diving:


That's the front half of a Subchaser and a Destroyer. The Subchaser half had lodged itself on the Destroyer, when I torpedoed it first, only to dislodge when the Destroyer was in turn hit by a Mark 14 From Hell. Pity I didn't notice it until torpedo impact, when I saw it spin off the Destroyer!

[billko]

Originally Posted by DeepIron

Not really. It's a game and it wasn't tweaked too well when it was released for accuracy or historical correctness... If it weren't for the dedication of a number of modders, SH4 would be fairly "mediocre"...

Many of us enjoy the historical realism that the mods like RFB, RSRD and tater's Campaign Levels provide along with more accurate enviromental (sky and ocean, etc) effects such as what is found in TM and ROW, to name just a couple.

Don't forget, you don't HAVE to install any mods... But I would suggest you at least install the game patches...

I know this is quite late in this discussion, but you have to remember that this is a game, and as such, the developers tuned it more towards arcade quality than realism. I guess they felt that spectacularly exploding ships that sunk like a rock is more thrilling to watch than a ship slowly sinking for hours and then slipping quietly under. I even enjoyed watching that scenario unfold, but after using NSM, I realized it was much more satisfying to sink a ship because you used your torpedoes intelligently. Also, now if you have a dud torpedo, it ruins the torpedo attack and it's much harder to sink the ship because of it.

The fact that thedevelopers gave us the ability to make it "our" game is what really sets this game apart from most others.

Bill

[waldopbarnstormer]

I recently installed this mod over TM1.6.5 and ROW making sure to use the correct classic file from ROW, and everything seems great except for the deck gun and some of the physics used. As an example I have used the gunnery tutorial.

The goal of the tutorial is to sink the merchant ship with the deck gun. At the current time I have so far expended at least 110 shells 50 HE, 60 AP into the hull at close range (< 500 m) along its length (although I did focus on the bows) and I have had the resulting effect of seeing the merchant with its decks completely awash, however it still refuses to sink? According to rules physics, the ship should have sank, there is no reason why it should still be afloat and yet it is. I was begining to wonder if this ship has a cargo of cork ( I have read of a heavily damaged merchant ship that remained afloat after a torpedo attack because it did have a cargo of cork, which kept it buoyant).

Having a knowledge of physics the shear weight of water entering the ship would have dragged it down and once it reaches the deck the water would rush in through open hatches and holes, thereby flooding the unbreached sections. Have you modelled this effect in your mod?

As the deck gun causes many little holes rather than one big hole it could be considered to be more effective in causing flooding as each shell which penetrates the hull would flood that section, a torpedo unless it causes catastrophic structural failure, may only flood one section. So 10 shells can breach 10 compartments without the need to use a valuable torpedo, even though 1 torpedo may have more destructive power than 10 shells.

There is also the matter of increased structural loading on the hull as the weight of water increases from flooded compartments. As seen in the sinking of the titanic, as the forward compartments flooded, they dragged the bow under, however the unflooded rear compartments remained buoyant on the surface. This put a tremendous amount of bending force through the pivot point, and so just as if you would bend a rule, it can take only so much before structural failure occurs and the ship splits in two. I guess implementing this action is not possible within the current game engine.

Finally I would like to consider secondary explosions. You have tried to replace the hit point system with a system based around flooding and buoyancy, but does this account for secondary explosions causing structural failure after the fact. Secondary explosions are often more fatal because they not only breach bulkheads and create more flooding, they also compromise structural integrity of the hull. I believe that the hitpoint system can be modified to represent "hull integrity" rather than the ships life force.

Example if using your work on flooding and stability, the hitpoint system was reworked so that a ships hitpoints would only decrease due to actual hull damage, say for example everytime it was hit by a shell or a secondary explosion or decreased slowly over time due to increased bending forces on the hull, I think this would allow for an accurate and realistic sinking model that not only took into account the effects of flooding on causing a ship to sink, but also on the effects of hull damage.

[mrbeast]

If you read the first page of the thread it describes that NSM works by replacing hit points with flooding. The ship in question probably would have sunk but it might take a long while. How long did you wait? In RL some ships took days to finally go under others sank in less than a minute.

There are a vast number of factors which affect the way that a ship sinks and NSM simulates the sinking of ships fairly authentically IMO. The game engine doesn't model all of them so the stress place on the hull of a ship at the point it rears ot of the water is in all probability not modelled either. It must also be remembered that the Titanic was an exceptionally large and heavy vessel compared to most of the merchants that where encountered, so I think her sinking should not be taken as and average example of a ship sinking. Would the amount of stress be the same at the pivot point of a shorter vessel? Just because the ship doesn't sink the way you expect it to doesn't mean that there is neccsarily a problem with NSM.

Are you suggesting that 10 DG shells are a more effective way of sinking a ship than 1 torpedo? Have you ever seen the size of the hole that a torpedo hitting a ship creates?

These are exapmles of shell holes, remember the DG on a US sub was either a 3, 4 or 5 incher:




These are photos of torpedo damage:

[waldopbarnstormer]

sorry you misunderstand what I was trying to say because I did not say it very well. The damage created by a single torpedo is huge as shown by your pics, and I am not contesting the point that it takes many shells to sink a ship, unless you get lucky like the Bismark did on the Hood, but what I was trying to say was that in my particular case the merchant ship was hit with over 100 shells along the water line and hull, the ship looking like a swiss cheese along one side with 5 large holes from the bow to just underneath the bridge. The bow up the superstructure was under water and yet it stayed afloat for about 1 hour. I then decided to hit the stern of the ship until the deck was under water along its entire length but again it did not sink for about another 1/2 hour, when I got bored and started pumping shells into the bridge, when it finally capsized. The whole process took about 2 hours game time.

On the deck of the ship were two large cargo holds front and rear with large hatches, both of these should have been full of water once the deck was under the surface and the ship should have sank quite quickly, as another example in the quick mission battle of Samar I watched single Fletcher class destroyer take on 4 battleships and 2 destroyers including the Yamato, being pounded remorselessly for about 20 minutes before it sank, it RL I think that destroyer would have been a burning wreck and blown to bits within 5.

Imagine taking holes for a deck gun from those pictures and putting them inside the hull of a ship, you would have lots of little holes flooding many compartments, far too many to patch up with damage control teams and too much flooding to handle with pumps, if the ship is split into a forward and rear hold, engine room and fuel bunkers, and crew quarters, as soon as the hold had been flooded the ship should have negative buoyancy and sink. Maybe I am wrong and the ship has many more compartments than I think and I only hit the ones along the edge of the ship and the ones in to the centre were not flooded so it remained afloat, but I doubt that is the case.

What would be helpful is knowledge of how NSM calculates speed of flooding, and how many zones each ship has and where they are located. Then I could come up with a more informed assesment and conceed that the shell effect modelling is accurate.

[Doolittle81]

Originally Posted by FooFighters

Thanks, in what .dat file can I change this ?
What were the original SH4 values ?



UPDATE : I found it.. thanks WernerSobe

I could use a little help finding the MinEF and MaxEF values....thanks.

[Doolittle81]

bump...

[panthercules]

I'm not sure which mods have wound up touching the same things here, so maybe something else has changed the basic NSM, but I have not had any problem sinking a couple of freighters with my 4"/50 deck gun on this latest patrol (running RFB 1.31 swdw update, then NSM classic, then ROW (with zones for NSM classic), then RSRD for RFB1.31). The 6,000 tonner took about 80-100 shots, and the 1,800 tonner took about 40-60, but both eventually sank fairly quickly (I kept firing till they sank - it's quite possible that they would have sunk with fewer hits if I'd wanted to stick around and wait to see, but they were both daylight encounters and I didn't want to risk waiting around and getting surprised by some aircraft or escorts wandering by.

I have seen this sort of lingering death occasionally before, with decks awash seemingly forever, and it seemed to me a little odd that it would take that long for a ship to sink once it reached that point. Maybe it would be good if something could be tweaked further to speed things up a bit once a sort of "tipping point" was reached, but I don't think that it's the deck gun shells that are the problem at this point, at least in my current setup.

[gimpy117]

can this be done in sh3 as well??

[Laffertytig]

just an observation here but im of the opinion that maybe torps seem overpowered with this mod. every merchant ive sank so far has taken no more than 2 torps and has resulted in the ships back breaking and then sinkin in a few seconds.

wasnt ships sinkin this fast and in this way the exception, not the norm. dont get me wrong, it sure looks cool but for it to happen everytime just seems off.

im runnin ROW (inc ROW classic zones special effects), RFB and of course NSM classic and NSM 3,3 hardcore torp mod bein installed last. RSRDC is installed last but this shouldnt affect your mod right?

[DrBeast]

Originally Posted by Laffertytig

im runnin ROW (inc ROW classic zones special effects), RFB and of course NSM classic and NSM 3,3 hardcore torp mod bein installed last. RSRDC is installed last but this shouldnt affect your mod right?

It will affect only the ships added by RSRDC, as in they'll keep stock game sinking behavior. Also, if you find sinking ships too easy with this mod, delete the US_Torpedoes.zon file from the mod's Data\Library folder. Goes without saying that you'll have to disable the mod first, then delete the file, then enable the mod again Oh, I said that? Well, better safe than sorry