Ship Names February 2011

[Sailor Steve]

I don't get it either. It seems like it shouldn't do that. It might be something that IABL got wrong in the files, or it might be...I don't know, gremlins maybe.

I'm sure JScones will be around soon enough to at least try to clear it up.

[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.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Damo

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.

If I remember rightly IABL says in his instructions to do that for all his ships.

As to the rest, I don't see the point for the whole thing. Neutrals are neutrals, and shouldn't be attacked anyway. If an enemy ship was disguised as a neutral, and (as you say) they didn't acknowledge its existence, then the logical extension for me would be that you don't get any credit at all, since it doesn't exist.

I think you're overcomplicating this.

I also think that something like this would work far better in SH4, which lets you add different countries without any penalties to frame rate or loading times.

[Damo]

The Interim version of the mod (no neutrals) has the details to be added into englishnames.cfg whereas the full version does not, but that's beside the point and not the reason I posted. What IABL has done is add the 'X' ships to the British and American rosters so actually 'Neutrals are NOT necessarily neutrals', I just sunk a merchant with Argentinian markings simply because it had Tanks on deck and zig zagged when I approached it. My suspicions were correct as it showed as an enemy ship on the map after it sunk. The reason I want to do these edits is because a sub captain would add these ships to his patrol log for the simple fact that he knows he sunk them, and that he considered them legitimate targets.

Given that it's only after you finish a patrol and update your patrol log in commander before the names and cargo info is added simulates to me a checking of details by Bdu where the patrol log and details of allied ship losses are compared to get a reasonably accurate record of what was sunk. It's a little detail I know but it's something I wish to implement so I guess I'll just go and experiment myself by editing shipnames.cfg.

Thanks anyway.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Damo

The Interim version of the mod (no neutrals) has the details to be added into englishnames.cfg whereas the full version does not, but that's beside the point and not the reason I posted. What IABL has done is add the 'X' ships to the British and American rosters so actually 'Neutrals are NOT necessarily neutrals', I just sunk a merchant with Argentinian markings simply because it had Tanks on deck and zig zagged when I approached it. My suspicions were correct as it showed as an enemy ship on the map after it sunk. The reason I want to do these edits is because a sub captain would add these ships to his patrol log for the simple fact that he knows he sunk them, and that he considered them legitimate targets.

Okay, that's pretty cool!

Given that it's only after you finish a patrol and update your patrol log in commander before the names and cargo info is added simulates to me a checking of details by Bdu where the patrol log and details of allied ship losses are compared to get a reasonably accurate record of what was sunk. It's a little detail I know but it's something I wish to implement so I guess I'll just go and experiment myself by editing shipnames.cfg.

Thanks anyway.

Sorry I misunderstood. Also sorry I can't help, because we're way outside my knowledge of how it works. Best of luck with it, though.

[Damo]

Also, I was just wondering about Frau's post about British ships taking American names. Is it possible that what she thought were British were actually Canadian given the similarity of flags? Given that in MFM there are only M##A (American), M##B (British) and M##X (Neutral) classnames, where do Canadian ships draw their names from? I haven't actually checked whether MFM adds ships to the Canada Roster as I'm not at my gaming PC but if it adds M##A ships to the roster, and Frau mistook the Canadian flag for British, it might explain the situation.

[frau kaleun]

I'm actually playing around with possibilities for the Shipnames with regard to the neutrals and "neutrals" in the MFM, for the same reasons Damo has stated.

And also still wondering why three British ships got those American ship names. I wondered if maybe they were the neutral 'X' class for that ship but showed up in-game flagged as British because the class was also included in the British roster, but I guess the idea is that they would be British (or aiding the British) and NOT look British in that case... so that doesn't seem to make any sense. Also wouldn't explain why they got 'A' names from Commander.

I may actually redo the Englishnames.cfg and do a patrol so I can see what specific class it was that I sank and what happens with the shipnames afterwards.

Plus I'm still looking at making a different Shipnames file for different time periods in the game.

Actually right now what I do mostly is open the Shipnames.cfg, open the "working" txt file Steve sent me, look at the huge amount of info contained therein, sigh, and close both files and then play Purble Pairs for a couple hours.

[frau kaleun]

Originally Posted by Damo

Also, I was just wondering about Frau's post about British ships taking American names. Is it possible that what she thought were British were actually Canadian given the similarity of flags? Given that in MFM there are only M##A (American), M##B (British) and M##X (Neutral) classnames, where do Canadian ships draw their names from? I haven't actually checked whether MFM adds ships to the Canada Roster as I'm not at my gaming PC but if it adds M##A ships to the roster, and Frau mistook the Canadian flag for British, it might explain the situation.

I'm wondering about that too. BUT the thing is, I'm still using the Contact Color Mod, which means that other ships are coded red/green/blue on the map. Those ships were red when they appeared on the map, long before I made any attempt to ID flags, which means the game recognized them as enemy shipping as soon as they spawned and were sighted or reported.

[Damo]

Britain join the war on the 3rd of Sept, Canada joined on the 10th of Sept. The only time Canadian ships would show as green icons would be in the period between those dates, which is only a week. If you know you sunk them in that time then it's a mystery to me as to how they drew American names as the 'X' neutrals are not included in the shipnames.cfg and don't draw any info whatsoever, which kind of ties in with what I'm trying to achieve.

[frau kaleun]

Originally Posted by Damo

Britain join the war on the 3rd of Sept, Canada joined on the 10th of Sept. The only time Canadian ships would show as green icons would be in the period between those dates, which is only a week. If you know you sunk them in that time then it's a mystery to me as to how they drew American names as the 'X' neutrals are not included in the shipnames.cfg and don't draw any info whatsoever, which kind of ties in with what I'm trying to achieve.

Yeah, that's the thing. The real mystery is how they ended up getting names from the list for M01A, which AFAIK is a class of US ships only and which should not be ID'd by the game as "enemy" shipping in 1939.

I don't think any of them could've been Canadian, wasn't their merchant naval flag at that time the Red Ensign with the Canadian coat of arms or other emblem on the right hand side? AFAIK the only flags I've seen on ships I've sunk have been the "plain" Red Ensign of the UK Merchant Navy and the RN White Ensign. I think I would've noticed a Red Ensign with some other emblem on it besides the expected Union Jack in the top left corner.

[Damo]

Well I'm gonna be spending a fair few hours buried in the relevant files so it's highly probable that I'll stumble across the answer by accident, if so I'll let you know.

[nikbear]

Thank you for the update SSteve Much appreciated

[iambecomelife]

Originally Posted by frau kaleun

Yeah, that's the thing. The real mystery is how they ended up getting names from the list for M01A, which AFAIK is a class of US ships only and which should not be ID'd by the game as "enemy" shipping in 1939.

I don't think any of them could've been Canadian, wasn't their merchant naval flag at that time the Red Ensign with the Canadian coat of arms or other emblem on the right hand side? AFAIK the only flags I've seen on ships I've sunk have been the "plain" Red Ensign of the UK Merchant Navy and the RN White Ensign. I think I would've noticed a Red Ensign with some other emblem on it besides the expected Union Jack in the top left corner.

That's pretty strange; nothing like that has ever happened to me. Maybe the naming file is automatically giving certain ships American names...?

As for naming neutral ships, I modified my SH3 Commander files to give generic names for the "_ _ _ X" class disguised neutrals, such as "Neutral Merchantman" or "Neutral Tanker". I also tweaked crew sizes & cargos (neutrals were a bit less likely to carry war supplies than British & American ships).

The game can reuse these generic names with no problems. If there's enough interest & with Steve's permission I could modify the next release to do this.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Damo

where do Canadian ships draw their names from?

Anybody at war in 1939 gets their names from the British set. Anybody joining in December 1941 draws theirs from the American set.

What are some of the names you've been getting?

Originally Posted by Iambecomelife

If there's enough interest & with Steve's permission I could modify the next release to do this.

No problem. You'll have to update me when it's out, just so I don't turn around and screw it up again.

[frau kaleun]

Originally Posted by iambecomelife

That's pretty strange; nothing like that has ever happened to me. Maybe the naming file is automatically giving certain ships American names...?

Ya, really odd. And I know several of the names came from the list for M01A. The ships in question were all Medium Merchants, but unless there's some game file where I can find what class I actually sank, I don't know which list (if any) their names should've come from.

I do know for sure they were not American ships, lol.