Is "Height of Mast" to the deck or the waterline?

[DanielCoffey]

Got it, thanks.


I will build a list of corrections for the FotRSU team of any egregious offenders. I will have to assume the Length of the vessel is correct but will offer a revised Height from waterline to top of mast for all ships.


The Heito Maru and Zimbu Maru are by far the worst offenders so far with the actual height being 60% more than the stated Height.


Speaking of the silhouettes, should I continue the convention of the red lines? Once corrected, the very large majority will be mast tips (with perhaps some of the larger warships being the tower or funnel).

[propbeanie]

I will say this: "If you make a mod, it is your mod. Do it how you want it to be. If others like it, fantastic. If they don't - tough cookies. It is your mod. If you want to consider special requests, that is your decision."

With that said, "consistency" is the main complaint. This is one of several areas we have not gotten to yet, and we had no immediate plans for the RecManual itself, only for better accuracy with the height figures. That was not going to occur though until after we did a few other more important sets of alterations in the mod.

As another little note, the "Length" figure may or may not be correct for each of the ships either. I have not checked them. We were in the process of doing menu_1024_768.ini file edits to add a "Length: xxx" field to the RecManual, which was accomplished... sort-of... It is NOT pretty, and not fit for human consumption, and we'll have to try a re-do, with the movement of other fields being involved. I haven't even drawn up the artwork for it yet. You have to find the longest "field" for each of the entries, and then try to lay them out "logically"... In the meantime, since you started working on this, I'll put the "Length" idea on hold and see what you are able to come up with in the mast height and images department...

[DanielCoffey]

In that case I will work on Mast Top being the default and only mark in red any exceptions.


I do need to assume the Length in the config is correct though otherwise the Height will still be off. One way of making absolutely sure is to find one of the well known ships and find its official Length. Then we can measure the length of the in-game model and that will give us one confirmed measurement to correct all the others from.


Progress on the silhouettes is slow (11 of 300 done so far) so I will concentrate on the Merchants first. I really wish the S3D export had a setting to "Apply Offset" to Objects because most of them appear at 0,0,0 and need manually putting into place in Blender.

[propbeanie]

There are several ways of measuring the length of ships, and I have no idea which they used in SH4, though surely something like the Iowa Class would be close on one way or the other... Those ships are still around, and surely they haven't performed any major surgery on them for length...

[DanielCoffey]

Just an FYI - it is very easy to get the overall length and total height of a model in Blender. A few camera tricks then lets me slice it in Photoshop above and below the waterline so I can get the Height and Draft too.


At a quick glance, the vessels I have checked are pretty accurate in Length (1-3% error) but the Draft is a little iffy in places (5-10% error) . It is the Height that is way off for a large slice of ships by up to 60%.

[propbeanie]

Look in the ships' Sea folder, cfg file, and quite a few of them have a "DisplacementVariation" figure... by the way, if I remember correctly, if you set a vessel's Speed= to zero, then it does not "move" in the Museum... maybe... a mind is a terrible thing to let get old... lol