Ship Names February 2011

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by STEED

Thank you, you old sea dog or is that pirate.

I am a respectable retired gentleman of the sea. And old sailors never lie.

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

I am a respectable retired gentleman of the sea. And old sailors never lie.

Pull the other one....it's a wooden leg

[frau kaleun]

@ Sailor Steve:

BTW, re that thing we were discussing in other threads about having different versions of the file for early war and late war, to avoid having sunk British ships of this or that class show up in patrol logs with US ship names prior to Dec 1941... I don't think it would be as simple as just working with the "mixed classes" and not worrying about IABL's ships.

I sank several British ships on my last patrol (1939), all were clearly flying a Brit flag and the game considered them enemy tonnage. But Commander pulled US names for them from the list for class M01A (which I'm assuming is supposed to be a "US only" class?). I'm still trying to figure out how M01A ships ended up being British in the game, that class doesn't appear in the Roster\British\Sea folder and there don't appear to be anything but US skins for it in the skinpacks. I don't know if there's something else that would factor into the nationality/appearance of a particular class when it spawns in the game, so I'm not sure where else to look.

I are now cornfused about the whole thing again.

[Sailor Steve]

I don't get it either. It seems like it shouldn't do that. It might be something that IABL got wrong in the files, or it might be...I don't know, gremlins maybe.

I'm sure JScones will be around soon enough to at least try to clear it up.

[Damo]

Ok Steve, back to pester you again...

Further to my earlier post about ship types and names not displaying in patrol logs, I discovered that a couple of MFM ships were not listed in the englishnames.cfg that came with the Interim version of MFM, as such when identifying them the display name in the rec manual and UI used their folder names, i.e. M33B instead of Medium Merchant 33. After adding the required entry (M33B=Medium Merchant 33) in englishnames.cfg they now display correctly in game.

Now, with the full version of MFM, you also have neutrals (M33X), but there is no englishnames.cfg included like it is with Interim. What I have done, is to open the Sea folder from the mod and then add each ##X ship to englishnames.cfg so that now, the neutrals also show up as Medium Merchant 33 instead of M33X in the UI. So that's that sorted out.

I realise none of this really concerns your shipnames.cfg so I'll get to the point. MFM adds some of the neutral ships to the US and British rosters, so now you have to investigate seemingly neutral ships and judging by it's behaviour, deck cargo and possible armament, make a decision as to whether it's a disguised enemy ship and then sink it. My problem lies with how these disguised ships are handled by the patrol log, in that they will be listed as Medium Merchant 33 now but again, there will be no Name, cargo or crew. Also, I can't alias the X ships to the A or B ships as there is no way of differentiating between the British and American names, causing wrong nationality ship names.

What I'd like to do, and here's my point (finally), is add another entry to shipnames.cfg that caters for these neutral ships. First I'd need to add the neutrals into [Classmap] and alias them to a new type. What I was thinking is that as disguising a ship by painting a neutral countries flag on the side and not flying a flag (as in MFM) would be a contravention of the rules, it would make sense that the British or Americans would deny knowledge of the ship ever existing. Therefore, I'd like to create a new class in shipnames.cfg that would result in a patrol log entry as follows:

Ship Sunk! Unidentified (No markings present) (Medium Merchant 33) #### tons Cargo: Unknown Crew: Unknown Crew lost: Unknown

My questions are; as commander tries to not re-use ships names, if I put a name entry under [M33X] as 0001=Unidentified (No markings present), would Commander only ever use this once? Also, under the Cargo_en entry would I be able to add 'Unknown' to the cargo list and using the [M33B] cargo entry replace the cargo values with the number that corresponds to 'Unknown'? Finally, where the crew entry is, it gives numbers similar to 64 / 38, would I be able to change that to Unknown / Unknown? It doesn't make sense to use numbers as this information would be buried like the rest of the ship's details.

I know it's a lot of effort for such a small detail but as you seem to spend a lot of time also with a 'small detail' I'm sure you get my mentality...

Of course, if I succeed in this task I'll gladly provide my edits to you if you wish to include it in any future shipnames, or make them available to other MFM users to 'fill in the blanks' in their patrol logs with your permission.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Damo

Further to my earlier post about ship types and names not displaying in patrol logs, I discovered that a couple of MFM ships were not listed in the englishnames.cfg that came with the Interim version of MFM, as such when identifying them the display name in the rec manual and UI used their folder names, i.e. M33B instead of Medium Merchant 33. After adding the required entry (M33B=Medium Merchant 33) in englishnames.cfg they now display correctly in game.

If I remember rightly IABL says in his instructions to do that for all his ships.

As to the rest, I don't see the point for the whole thing. Neutrals are neutrals, and shouldn't be attacked anyway. If an enemy ship was disguised as a neutral, and (as you say) they didn't acknowledge its existence, then the logical extension for me would be that you don't get any credit at all, since it doesn't exist.

I think you're overcomplicating this.

I also think that something like this would work far better in SH4, which lets you add different countries without any penalties to frame rate or loading times.

[Damo]

The Interim version of the mod (no neutrals) has the details to be added into englishnames.cfg whereas the full version does not, but that's beside the point and not the reason I posted. What IABL has done is add the 'X' ships to the British and American rosters so actually 'Neutrals are NOT necessarily neutrals', I just sunk a merchant with Argentinian markings simply because it had Tanks on deck and zig zagged when I approached it. My suspicions were correct as it showed as an enemy ship on the map after it sunk. The reason I want to do these edits is because a sub captain would add these ships to his patrol log for the simple fact that he knows he sunk them, and that he considered them legitimate targets.

Given that it's only after you finish a patrol and update your patrol log in commander before the names and cargo info is added simulates to me a checking of details by Bdu where the patrol log and details of allied ship losses are compared to get a reasonably accurate record of what was sunk. It's a little detail I know but it's something I wish to implement so I guess I'll just go and experiment myself by editing shipnames.cfg.

Thanks anyway.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Damo

The Interim version of the mod (no neutrals) has the details to be added into englishnames.cfg whereas the full version does not, but that's beside the point and not the reason I posted. What IABL has done is add the 'X' ships to the British and American rosters so actually 'Neutrals are NOT necessarily neutrals', I just sunk a merchant with Argentinian markings simply because it had Tanks on deck and zig zagged when I approached it. My suspicions were correct as it showed as an enemy ship on the map after it sunk. The reason I want to do these edits is because a sub captain would add these ships to his patrol log for the simple fact that he knows he sunk them, and that he considered them legitimate targets.

Okay, that's pretty cool!

Given that it's only after you finish a patrol and update your patrol log in commander before the names and cargo info is added simulates to me a checking of details by Bdu where the patrol log and details of allied ship losses are compared to get a reasonably accurate record of what was sunk. It's a little detail I know but it's something I wish to implement so I guess I'll just go and experiment myself by editing shipnames.cfg.

Thanks anyway.

Sorry I misunderstood. Also sorry I can't help, because we're way outside my knowledge of how it works. Best of luck with it, though.