GroupLinkId?

[vdr1981]

Originally Posted by gap

. I am now searching for any "free nation" possibly missing from OH which should be featured in game, and setting their roster and allied/axis alignment appropriately. I have also reworked a bit OH's flags.dat, removing unused entries, adding a few new flags/nations, and adding to each flag the global wind controller required by TDW's flags-aligned-with-wind patch. Last but not least, I am creating the new campaign messages wich will provide the player with updates on any switching of sides and on valid ship targets.

This sounds exactly as it should be...

Just keep in mind (you are probably already aware of this) that from a quick look in Convoys.MIS file, it seems to me that waste majority of convoys/groups is set to spawn randomly through out entire war (from 1938 to 1945)...To match all those dates with entries from other campaign files could be...I'm even afraid to think of it...

You were talking about some "quicker" solution? I'm really interested to hear which one?

[gap]

Originally Posted by vdr1981

This sounds exactly as it should be...

Glad you like my working plan

Originally Posted by vdr1981

Just keep in mind (you are probably already aware of this) that from a quick look in Convoys.MIS file, it seems to me that waste majority of convoys/groups is set to spawn randomly through out entire war (from 1938 to 1945)...To match all those dates with entries from other campaign files could be...I'm even afraid to think of it...

No, they are not random. If you compare convoy data available on convoyweb with some of the convoys featured by OHII, you will notice that most start/end dates, as well as departing/destinations ports are historical. The longest convoy series have been split in several subseries, each with different spawn dates, to reflect changes in daparting/destination ports, convoy composition, veterancy levels, etc.
Anyway I agree with you that having to deal with such an huge files and all the relevant data is a real PITA.

Originally Posted by vdr1981

You were talking about some "quicker" solution? I'm really interested to hear which one?

That's easy and I think you had something similar in mind: we could set most if not all of the "free" nations as Allied (=2) for the whole timespan of the game. That's easily done by changing free nation's start/end dates in sides.cfg. the second step is replacing all the nations represented in Allied convoys (in GroupTypeDefs.cfg) with their "free" counterpart, if they have one, or remove them at all, if they have not. The third step is adding a "random" merchant roster to those free nations which are already set in game, but are lacking a roster. That would be enough for a quick start.

In future we could further refine our patch by adding or removing some free nations, giving them realistic rosters as for ship types and their tonnage, making their ships to spawn within the convoy series that they actually took part in, and with a realistic number of ships for each type (on a statistic base), etc. We can even control from when and for how long a given nation will spawn ships, within a given convoy (taking advantage of the fact that long convoy series are split in several subseries with diffrent dates), or in general within any convoy that each nation is represented in (by changing roster entrie's start/end date). We can even attain the level of detail of deciding which kind of armament, camouflage and cargo the ships of every nation should sport, based on ship type, and convoy/subconvoy that she spawn in. All of this will depend on historical information collected from the web, but I am afraid that processing that huge amount of data will take a loooong time...