Trying to understand how SH3 Commander's "Date" folder system works....

[frau kaleun]

Originally Posted by pditty8811

Thank you very much, very informative.

It's too bad that commander doesn't load all the date folder up to the playing date, starting with 39' then overwriting that with the 40' folders and so on.

This makes the date folder feature alittle more difficult to deal with. Because say I want to add a skin to a ship in Nov. 39' because historically that ship had a certain type of ckin from Nov. 39' to say Dec. 41', so in the 19391101 folder the skin is in. But I start a campaign in April of 1940, so Commander uses the 19400401 folder? and nothing else? So my skin wouldn't even show up in the game when historically it should, because it isn't in the most recent previous folder?

Are you sure thats how the "Date" feature works in commander?

My understanding is that Commander loads the files from the appropriate Date folder as described above, and then removes them from the game when you exit IF you have selected the auto rollback feature. When you reach the date where another folder becomes the "current" one, it would load files from that folder instead. So, yes, I would assume that is how it would work.

However you could just put the same skin in every Date folder up until the one that matches the date where you want to stop using it.

Or you could just delete all the Date folders in between the "start" and "stop" dates for that skin. However there are some things already in the Date folders that come with Commander that you would lose, like the alternate .tga files for the campaign loading screen which show varying maps of German-held territory as the war progresses and the various versions of the sound file that it adds to your Gramophone folder depending on the date you're playing. If those things don't matter to you, you can delete whatever Date files you don't want and just use or add the ones you actually need. None of the Date folders in Commander are necessary, nor are any of the files that are already in there when you install it. I've deleted all the Sound subfolders because I just want music in my Gram folder, not date-specific radio broadcasts. And I've added many Date folders in order to have Commander load date-specific stuff that wasn't originally included.

Keep in mind, though, that if you use the Date folders to add u-boat skins, it will load your skins only by date with no regard for the type of boat you're actually playing. If you put VIIB skins in there but decide to play a VIIC for some reason, it's not going to know *not* to load a VIIB skin because you selected a different type of u-boat.