Starshells for NYGM ships

[Commander Gizmo]

Since the idea is a signal flare used to alert other ships to your presence, would not a daytime firing make sense? In RL you could see a star shell (and certainly hear the shot) during the day, yea?

[Oneshot/Onekill]

Originally Posted by Commander Gizmo

Since the idea is a signal flare used to alert other ships to your presence, would not a daytime firing make sense? In RL you could see a star shell (and certainly hear the shot) during the day, yea?

You are somewhat correct, but starshells in terms of military usage were to illuminate objects at night, they would not illuminate objects as brightly as they do in the game during the day.

But as far as using them to signal other vessels, you do make a good point. My only other objection to this point of thinking is that most vessels carried signalling flags and lights to signal other ships during the day, starshells or flares were used specifically at night mainly to illuminate an area to compromise the U-boat's position.

[h.sie]

nice one! worth to be ported to gwx3!

[Commander Gizmo]

Originally Posted by Oneshot/Onekill

You are somewhat correct, but starshells in terms of military usage were to illuminate objects at night, they would not illuminate objects as brightly as they do in the game during the day.

But as far as using them to signal other vessels, you do make a good point. My only other objection to this point of thinking is that most vessels carried signalling flags and lights to signal other ships during the day, starshells or flares were used specifically at night mainly to illuminate an area to compromise the U-boat's position.

Isn't it the case then that we should be trying to create some sort of lighting or signal flags for uboat sightings rather than star shells? This could be accomplished by triggering an animation usch as howraising the flag on the users uboat is done, but with an illuminating surface on the animated object.

In my GWX + SH4 effects game, the merchant ships already fire star shells at night, but not in the day. Is there some sort of issue I'm not aware of?

[Stiebler]

In my GWX + SH4 effects game, the merchant ships already fire star shells at night, but not in the day. Is there some sort of issue I'm not aware of?

I presume you're referring to Racerboy's "GWX+SH4 Effects" mod.

Racerboy assigned four special nodes (M96-M99) to each merchant ship, by supplying a .CAM file for each, a most ingenious idea which works well for those ships which permit it (eg NKSS).

Unfortunately, ships from IABL's merchant fleet do not permit this solution - it doesn't work. (If you check Racerboy's GWX +SH4 mod, you will find the .cam file is missing for IABL's widely released M35 and M36 ships, presumably because RB found he could not make it work either.)

NYGM has a complete set of re-zoned, well-tested, stable merchant ships from IABL for which I cannot get appropriate .cam files to work either. I think it's because the NKSS ship has lots of nodes called cfg#NKSS_1, or very similar (I forget now), but IABL's ships have a mish-mash of named cfg# node names.

So I have adopted a different route. Just about all the merchants in NYGM have at least one unused deck gun platform, depending on the year. I fitted Racerboy's star-shell cannon to one of the unused gun platforms. It fires whenever the merchant would have fired a deck gun, if it had one on that platform. This means there can be no differentiation between day and night when firing star-shells (in my implementation), because guns fire day and night.

Does it matter if star-shells are fired during the day? Of course it does not! Just pretend the star-shell is a distress signal. [Edit - changed 'at night' to 'during the day'.]

I'll bet no one ever realised that I charge consultancy fees for this kind of work. All readers, please send me $100 (plus $15 agency fee for Uncle Neal Stevens).

On second thoughts, I'll waive the fee, because I've just discovered I can't find the contract.

Stiebler.

[Commander Gizmo]

Thanks for the explanation. Please forgive my apparent lack of knowledge, but why don't we just add some nodes to the ships then? Is it just a workload concern since they are already tested and stable? Surely the devs weren't foolish enough to hard code the nodes on ships.

[Stiebler]

Please forgive my apparent lack of knowledge, but why don't we just add some nodes to the ships then? Is it just a workload concern since they are already tested and stable?

I'd say it is a workload concern, yes - plus the fact that I personally lack the skills to do it.

Even for those 'skilled in the art' (as the Patent Office likes to say) it would be quite a labour. Every new ship would have to be retested. And where would you place the extra gun platforms?

I'm somewhat doubtful about the effect on IABL's ships too, which are beautiful but can be temperamental (= unstable).

Stiebler.

[Oneshot/Onekill]

@ Stiebler. Thanks for answering my question.

@Commander Gizmo. There are so many merchant ships for so many different mods and super mods that it would take an enormous amount of time and effort to make daytime signal flags. It is a nice thought though.