[WIP] major floating lights on Nav Map

[oakdesign]

After starting with SH5 after beeing away for about 2 years I have my mod soup up and running looking for as much realism as possible.

With OHII we got bouys but I was always missing the feature to have those bouys been shown on the map.

On the last weekend I did a lot of research on how to achive this tried different approches. Some ideas have been thrown away. Looked into some mods dealing with the navigation map and finally came to the following conclusion / workflow.

1. The facts:

In OHII there are six different buoys


these buoys are part of the Harbour.mis of the different Campaigns

2. The Idea / The Workflow

The first idea was the create to create a *.raw files for the nav map like done in the MQK mod, but this would limit the possibilities in terms of zoom and placing the major floating lights on the their accurate position seemed to be impossible.

Second idea was to use *.shp files like used for Location Names. I played around with the obviuos xyz data and different tools like Grass GIS and Meshlab. I was quite clear the creating a point model for some simple icons would not be the problem, but connecting to faces and dealing with the *.shp format would be quite a lot of work.

Third and preferred idea was to use *.dds files. First Problem here I'm working on a mac and there is no out-of-the-box dds plugin for PS on OSX. OK so switched to gimp.

For the moment I've created 6 different navmap signs out of "public domain" *.svg files found. I'm still gathering information on historical navmap and might create proper ones in the future. BTW a good resource for historical nautical maps is greif.uni-greifswald.de

For the moment I just tested if it's possible to get my icons shown up on the navmap on the correct position.

Here are some screenshots of what has been achived so far
Misson editor.
The 6 existent buoy placed just in front of Helgoland Harbour in order to have a feeling of proportion. Underneath each of the buoys I placed a Map Location Object and assigned a *.dds as Image2DMap


Here are 2 Screenshots what it looks like on the ingame nav map


and full zoomed in



Currently I'm still playing around with different *.dds sizes and scale / zoom factors.

Next steps in the idea are to grap all buoys position and types out of the Harbour.mis and generate an separate *.mis as kind of an overlay.

Another future Idea might be to place Lighthouses and create a lighthouse almanac.

One of the missing things I have is that I have no idea what's the difference in using *.dds files instead of *.shp in terms of performance. Maybe on of the guru's might give an advice.

That's it so far.

Any suggestion are welcome in order to see if it's worthwile to go on or not.