Ships Recognition Manual

[badwolf]

Thankyou Fr8monkey
The more info the better the silhouettes and ship data.



I'm doing the tankers and I've got 4 unsure when I compare old sils to Museum !

[coronas]

Another interesant link for US merchants: http://drawings.us-maritime-commissi...rawingmain.htm.

[badwolf]

Thankyou coronas

The Museum is a pain to use. If you have 3 large tankers, the sils change but the info remains on the first. Your not 100 % sure what is correct. I've got to put them in the sea file one at a time and also change the roster each time.

A note for those who want it in a printout form.
As years progress some ships change, i.e. guns added etc. How would you like this to be done. A manual for each year would be nice, but I think is too much for minor changes.
Ingame has no problem, I'll use SH3Commander.

[Doublefox]

badwolf,

Nice work! A good quality printed manual is something that is really needed.

I might be able to help you by providing an alternative for the museum.

I made a script a while ago to extract the true height and length of the ships from the actual 3D data. As a side effect, I could draw the ship silhouettes with relative ease. I was able to add some texture mapping and edge drawing, and now I can automatically generate pictures that look a bit like hand drawn.

There are still some oddities, like every ships being armed to the teeth as well as some misaligned turrets, but I think these can be sorted out. Anyways, if you are interested, let me know.

A few examples:

[badwolf]

I made a script a while ago to extract the true height and length of the ships from the actual 3D data. As a side effect, I could draw the ship silhouettes with relative ease. I was able to add some texture mapping and edge drawing, and now I can automatically generate pictures that look a bit like hand drawn.

Hi Doublefox
Those pics are spot on, I'm very interested in your 3D script. If you could upload it to FF, I will credit you on it's use. Thankyou very much.

[Doublefox]

I'm not sure if the script itself would be very useful. It is written in Python and has dependencies on several packages which can be a real pain to get installed correctly. Also, the script would have to be changed to make it run on someone else's system. But if you still want it I certainly can send it to you.

I have already uploaded a zip file containing 201 png images generated from my Sea data folder. They are not scaled or cropped in any way - the waterline is at the middle of image. Because of some flipped polygons a few of the pictures need touching up, and some are pretty much useless.

Here is the link to the zip file

http://files.filefront.com/SH3+silsz.../fileinfo.html

Could someone please tell me what texture file should be used if there is no [name]_T01.tga file present in the Data/Sea folder?

[msalama]

S! Doublefox.

Reminds me of a ground object generator I wrote for IL-2 in Perl a while ago But then lost interest in the game itself, plus was met with mostly incomprehension when trying to explain the usefulness of the bugger... in addition of having to constantly warn about the hurdles of getting it to run at all (installing Perl, etc.), that is

Know what U mean in other words

[Doublefox]

You have my sympathies, msalama. In my opinion, everybody should run an OS with pre-installed Perl and Python. I know I do

[badwolf]

It is written in Python and has dependencies on several packages which can be a real pain to get installed correctly.

The ship sils are excellent, thankyou. It's unfortunate the script is so difficult to set up.

[Doublefox]

You're welcome. I'll let you know when or if I am able to get the rest of the ships textured and rendered correctly.

I guess it would be possible to rewrite the script in Java to get it easily running on anybody's system. Pack3D already has the 3D data reading part done, and the rendering is all OpenGL. I don't think, however, that this kind of script really has so much use that porting would be time well spend.

[Doublefox]

I have just uploaded a new batch of sils to filefront, you can get them here

http://files.filefront.com/SH3+Ship+.../fileinfo.html

I finally managed to get the script to work as I wanted: all structure are now drawn on correct locations, no weird gaps in hulls, and all ships are textured correctly using the right maps. My apologies to everyone who downloaded the first set - I should have checked my code better .

The archive this time also includes the script, in case someone wants to take a peek at it.

Oh, and I realized that by using InDesign a complete recognition manual can be generated automatically with a click of a button. How cool is that!

Originally Posted by Doublefox

Could someone please tell me what texture file should be used if there is no [name]_T01.tga file present in the Data/Sea folder?

If there is no XXX_T01.tga file then the unit uses an internal TGA file.
It's in the dat itself.

Generally, it's named the same as the dat itself.
But not always!!
Some clone and change the external name but not the internal name.
So you may have a NLUIS.dat
But the internal names are NLSS_
If you see what I mean.

Hi fellas

does this mean someones making an organised , accurate and easily visible recognition manual for SH3?

Or is this a real manual you're working on?

As stated by someone earlier, the RM looks a bit of a mess, especially with new ships added, and it takes so long to get through at times that by the time i've found the right ship it's gone past me, or . . in the case of destroyers. . . has forced me to submerge and is DC'ing me cos i've not been able to determine it's range and hull depth for a shot.

If you guys are working on the SH3 version, will it include the Community Units mod for GWX?

Either way, thanks for your efforts.

[Doublefox]

If there is no XXX_T01.tga file then the unit uses an internal TGA file.
It's in the dat itself.

Thank you, although I already did found the right textures after digging the files for a while. The embedded textures are used in the v2 batch. And yes, the modded files were confusing...

does this mean someones making an organised , accurate and easily visible recognition manual for SH3?

Or is this a real manual you're working on?

My personal preference would be to make a hard copy RM. It is much easier to compare several sils this way, and because I'm using OLCs excellent manual targeting mod, I have no need to enter the mast height from the manual.

My original intention was to only supply badwolf with suitable sil images, but after seeing how easily a manual can be created with InDesign, I might give it a shot myself. No harm having several manual available to choose from. Hopefully more proficient people are focusing on the in-game RM.

If you guys are working on the SH3 version, will it include the Community Units mod for GWX?

The sils are from base installation of GWX 2.1, something that I have totally forgot to mention. Adding the Community Units should not be a problem.

[badwolf]

My original intention was to only supply badwolf with suitable sil images, but after seeing how easily a manual can be created with InDesign, I might give it a shot myself. No harm having several manual available to choose from. Hopefully more proficient people are focusing on the in-game RM.

Hi Doublefox
That's great news, as you have all the software and producing excellent sils, then for you to carry on the project would be the best solution. It would enable me to carry on with my other mod (GUI) which is more than enough work. I've had a look at the in-game manual for improvements, this will be difficult, but I'll keep trying.
As well as the Community units there's also the AOTD-AA-Ship-Schleuse-Bugfix, there's some ships in there also.