[REL] Ship Conversions SH3 merchants to SH4, Beta Release

[CaptainKobuk]

Great. Fantastic.

I hear these will be on the ocean in a campaign. If so, that will sure add some VARIETY.

Maybe we can sink some Kraut ships over in the eastern area. Excuse being, they were in the Indian Ocean. We know that. And maybe we can have a few Nazi tankers loading up on the IndoChina Southeast Asia oil. Optional for those of us who can play a hypothetical game.


Maybe the SH4 game engine can't deal with any more enemy nations than the Japs. I don't know. Though i hear Thailand was on the Japanese side of the war.

[Dustyboats]

Originally Posted by clayton

Are these ships for mission development or will they be cruising the ocean?

Bless you my son......Dusty.

[rascal101]

Hi to all, and thanks to the moders who have made this possible.

Will the ships in this mod have the same damage profiles as the native SH4 ships, will they smoke and explode the same, will they exhibit 3d damage.

Will these ships skins look like the native Sh4 ship skins, or will they look like sh3 skins sticking out in sh4, will they exhibit the same lighting and environmental characteristics as native sh4 ships

[Redwine]

Many Thanks !!

But... are you sure they will be automatically included into the campaign as random units ?

Or are they ready only to use into single mission up to the campaing files be modified ?

Best regards, Red.

[tater]

Originally Posted by Boris

That depends on the number of generic entries in the camapaign files. Not sure how much in the SH4 campaign is generic offhand, but there should be some. At very least the merchants should spawn as single contacts.

Almost every merchant ship is generic in SH4. I'd wager way over 90%.

The one liner that is white on top totally disappears against the sky right now, other than that they seem to look pretty much like other SH4 ships to me.

[akdavis]

Aren't there some new graphic effects for objects in SH4? Do these take advantage of those new effects?

[Meridian]

Just a quick question regarding the following line from the Readme: "add the following lines to your English.cfg file, located in the roster folder".

There isn't an "English.cfg in SH4, unless mine disappeared somewhere.

[jmjohnson36]

I was use to Sh3 ...should have corrected that....Im working on a few things to enhance the ships...PEOPLE...I am working on version 2.0 now....

I really think the guys who made the ships should get most of the credit..I just converted them...although that takes time...we wouldnt have these ships at all without them.

Originally Posted by Meridian

Just a quick question regarding the following line from the Readme: "add the following lines to your English.cfg file, located in the roster folder".

There isn't an "English.cfg in SH4, unless mine disappeared somewhere.

[AG124]

On the subject of whether or not the ships will show up in the campaign, there are generic entries for the following nations:

Japan - Any of the new merchants installed for Japan should appear, except for Troop Transports; there don't appear to be any generic 103 entries for Japan.

US - Generic entries for both tankers and freighters. I can't find any generic Troop Transport entries though.

Other nations - no generic entries of any type.

To sum it up, Oil Tankers (type 101) and Freighters (type 102) installed for Japan and the US will show up in the campaign, but none of the other vessels will (unless users script them in themselves or make some appropriate entries generic).

[jmjohnson36]

OK so what do I need to do to get them to show up? point me int the right direction mate...:hmm:

Originally Posted by AG124

On the subject of whether or not the ships will show up in the campaign, there are generic entries for the following nations:

Japan - Any of the new merchants installed for Japan should appear, except for Troop Transports; there don't appear to be any generic 103 entries for Japan.

US - Generic entries for both tankers and freighters. I can't find any generic Troop Transport entries though.

Other nations - no generic entries of any type.

To sum it up, Oil Tankers (type 101) and Freighters (type 102) installed for Japan and the US will show up in the campaign, but none of the other vessels will (unless users script them in themselves or make some appropriate entries generic).

[Boris]

You need to use the mission editor to change the ships in the campaign layers.

I did this once, using the text editor on the campaign files, just changing out the values, for SH3.
I'm not exactly sure how, I'm pretty sure it's the SCR layer that controls ship traffic in SH3, but it looks completely different in SH4.

[jmjohnson36]

eh.....sounds way over my head...maybe someone can do this.

Originally Posted by Boris

You need to use the mission editor to change the ships in the campaign layers.

I did this once, using the text editor on the campaign files, just changing out the values, for SH3.
I'm not exactly sure how, I'm pretty sure it's the SCR layer that controls ship traffic in SH3, but it looks completely different in SH4.

[AG124]

Making entries generic using a word processor so that they will spawn different types of ships is easy in itself - I will explain some of it later (I have to study right now). The hard part in this case (at least as far as I can see) is determining which of the many campaign files will support generic entries. In SHIII, the random layer would easily do so, while the scripted layer would crash unless a class name was specified. In SHIV, the only campaign file type which can definitely (as far as I know) support generic entries is the 'merchant' type - these already have lots of those entries, except for the "other nations" ones.

I'll give you a quick lesson. Open one of the campaign files (I always use WordPad) and find an entry like class=KSQ. Put a semi-colon in front of the line, so it looks like ;class=KSQ. Now, instead of choosing the Split-Superstructure freighter (or whatever KSQ is in SHIV - I don't remember right now), the game will choose one of any of the type 102 (Cargo) vessels assigned to whatever nation the entry is for. That's pretty much the basics of it. Make sure you make a backup file of course. Also, using the find and replace options of whatever program you choose to edit the files can make things go faster.

Adding entirely new entries and new traffic for other nations is trickier - I'll let someone else explain that.

[tater]

Sergbuto's steamer:


would be cool, they used stuff like that along the China coast...

[down and out]

Originally Posted by tater

Sergbuto's steamer:


would be cool, they used stuff like that along the China coast...

:hmm: