[QUE] Individual ShipNames/-Markings-Numbers on the hull?

[pontius]

Moin,

While building at a ship I thought about the possibilities to have individual shipnames or numbers on its hull without doing several skins. I don't know if there is already a solution because I was away for quite a while and couldnt follow everything in modding.
But my idea and question is: Is it possible to use the sub-emblem-function for other ships to produce names and numbers on their hulls?

Thanks,
pontius

[bigboywooly]

Originally Posted by pontius

Moin,

While building at a ship I thought about the possibilities to have individual shipnames or numbers on its hull without doing several skins. I don't know if there is already a solution because I was away for quite a while and couldnt follow everything in modding.
But my idea and question is: Is it possible to use the sub-emblem-function for other ships to produce names and numbers on their hulls?

Thanks,
pontius

Been away myself so not seen one
As you build ships Pontius you know all about nodes
Pretty sure you could attach a node to ship hull - or use a redundant weapon node A/M/T etc - and attach a number via the eqp file though will always be the same number I guess

[pontius]

Hi BBW, nice to see you

I thought about something like this:
Extracting the sub-emblem-entry from the Turm.dat and importing it to the new ship and define a place where tga's show up. The different tga's maybe controlled by eqp-file? I can't test it at the moment, so I thought maybe someone already did this or something similar.

Thanks,
pontius

[iambecomelife]

The British collier "Sandalwood", homeported in London. She's one of the merchant ships built for my "Wolves of the Kaiser" WWI mod. It requires a very large texture, but nowadays most people's computers should handle it fine.

[pontius]

Beautiful work!
So you use the shipskin and paint the name on it, or do you have a different method?
I think when I remember correctly, SH3 uses only 7 external skins. (Did that change with SH4?) Problem for me would be, that I just need to change the number of the Unit and doing a seperate skin for the whole ship just because of a number would too much mb's for such little difference.
But after searching abit more, I found this mod by privateer:
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=149906
Which makes it possible to get a personal emblems on different locations.
When I have time, it should be possible to transfer this to a new built ship I think. This way just little texturefiles would give different shipnumbers.
Another idea is to make a transperant 3d space at the wanted part of the shipmodel and link a texture with alpha-channel. But no idea if it works and I can't try at the moment , just thinking loud

[iambecomelife]

Originally Posted by pontius

Beautiful work!
So you use the shipskin and paint the name on it, or do you have a different method?
I think when I remember correctly, SH3 uses only 7 external skins. (Did that change with SH4?) Problem for me would be, that I just need to change the number of the Unit and doing a seperate skin for the whole ship just because of a number would too much mb's for such little difference.
But after searching abit more, I found this mod by privateer:
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=149906
Which makes it possible to get a personal emblems on different locations.
When I have time, it should be possible to transfer this to a new built ship I think. This way just little texturefiles would give different shipnumbers.
Another idea is to make a transperant 3d space at the wanted part of the shipmodel and link a texture with alpha-channel. But no idea if it works and I can't try at the moment , just thinking loud

The name is part of the tga file, not a decal. Unfortunately I'm not sure if I can help you with a more simple method for adding numbers to units. I have thought about trying decals for hull flags & text but my last attempt did not work.

In SH4 you can have different skins appear on different dates - it would be fairly simple to make names appear & disappear each week/month of the war to avoid repetition. Plus from about 1916-1918 in WWI and 1941-1945 in WWII most merchants would have had their names painted out, so you wouldn't need to have names throughout the entire war.

[Sailor Steve]

The only problem I see with that is that the name would be on the skin, but if you sink that ship SH3 Commander has a real good chance of giving it a different name in your patrol log, as those are randomized. If SH4 makes it work better I'd be real happy, but it seems that SH5 will be the first game to make that possible.

@ IABL: That ship looks real purty.