Ship Names February 2011

[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.