Nearest visual contact range and enemy recognition

[radcapricorn]

Fellow Kaleuns, I recently came back to playing SH5 and after combining many awesome mods still have some mod questions, among which is:

1) I was wondering if there is any mod that introduces inaccuracy for the watch officer range estimation? I understand that for SH3, h.sie was able to do this via code injection. Can't similar thing be done for SH5 via scripting?
Why I ask is that I feel kind of cheating when I'm able to plot a target when it's 10-18 km away.

2) Can I somehow make the game not to give away that that ship on the horizon is indeed of enemy nation? Currently, when ship is sighted, if it's an enemy, the game would immediately turn on battle music and the crew will start whispering, even if that ship is 15+km away. For me it certainly ruins immersion. Surely I can turn off music entirely, but crew behavior would remain.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

[vlad29]

Originally Posted by radcapricorn

Fellow Kaleuns, I recently came back to playing SH5 and after combining many awesome mods still have some mod questions, among which is:

1) I was wondering if there is any mod that introduces inaccuracy for the watch officer range estimation? I understand that for SH3, h.sie was able to do this via code injection. Can't similar thing be done for SH5 via scripting?
Why I ask is that I feel kind of cheating when I'm able to plot a target when it's 10-18 km away.

2) Can I somehow make the game not to give away that that ship on the horizon is indeed of enemy nation? Currently, when ship is sighted, if it's an enemy, the game would immediately turn on battle music and the crew will start whispering, even if that ship is 15+km away. For me it certainly ruins immersion. Surely I can turn off music entirely, but crew behavior would remain.

3) How to reduce range of spotting planes and ships by my WO?
By now (with no any changes) he had wonderfull ability to predict the plane or ship appearence on the horison in five minutes before I can personally observe it on my monitor (even when using USO)

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Hi radcapricorn, its a good item You've pointed and worth to be discussed as it concerns game's realism aspect. I can also add question #3 if You don't mind (in yellow)

[dcb]

Originally Posted by radcapricorn

2) Can I somehow make the game not to give away that that ship on the horizon is indeed of enemy nation? Currently, when ship is sighted, if it's an enemy, the game would immediately turn on battle music and the crew will start whispering, even if that ship is 15+km away. For me it certainly ruins immersion. Surely I can turn off music entirely, but crew behavior would remain.

Yes, there is a simple solution I apply in each of my installs. Just replace the whispering voices of the crew with the normal ones. There is a tradeoff, but I can live with it: you lose entirely the "hush-hush" state of crew voices.
To enable it, this is what you can do: The data\sound\speech folder contains the subfolders of the Bosun, ChiefEngineer... etc. Each of these has several states: Normal, NormalDepressed etc. The whispering voices are... well, in the Whisper subfolder. Just replace them with those of the Normal subfolder, and you're good to go. You'll never hear them whispering again in your game.

[radcapricorn]

Originally Posted by dcb

Just replace the whispering voices of the crew with the normal ones.

Yeah, I thought about that. A perfectly valid technique, but just a little... extreme? I was hoping there might be another solution.

Originally Posted by vlad29

3) How to reduce range of spotting planes and ships by my WO?

AFAIK, crew detection range (by WO, hydrophone, etc.) is determined by sensors setup in files from Data\Objects\Sensors (should be editable with Silent 3ditor), while visual 'player' detection range is defined by Data\Cfg\Sensors.cfg (text file). Many mods (IRAI, UHS, etc...) tweak these files, but I can tell you for sure that it is very difficult to nail it so that both you and crew can detect a ship at the same time, especially when you use a lot of mods that change environment (fog, clouds, ...). While mods struggle to increase realism for crew detection (i.e. stock game, IIRC, defines WO detection range as 15km, while UHS, for example, makes it 20), the same is harder to do for player detection, because many factors come into play, such as display resolution, brightness, as well as what weather's around and how it is rendered. At least, that is my understanding of how it works.

[vlad29]

Originally Posted by dcb

Yes, there is a simple solution I apply in each of my installs. Just replace the whispering voices of the crew with the normal ones. There is a tradeoff, but I can live with it: you lose entirely the "hush-hush" state of crew voices.
To enable it, this is what you can do: The data\sound\speech folder contains the subfolders of the Bosun, ChiefEngineer... etc. Each of these has several states: Normal, NormalDepressed etc. The whispering voices are... well, in the Whisper subfolder. Just replace them with those of the Normal subfolder, and you're good to go. You'll never hear them whispering again in your game.

The other side of this solution is that You'll never hear the whisper even if the enemy ship is in 200 m of the boat in the fog, and loud voices (as if nothing had happened) will report about the contact. That is not good for game immersion also I think

[vlad29]

Originally Posted by radcapricorn

Yeah, I thought about that. A perfectly valid technique, but just a little... extreme? I was hoping there might be another solution.



AFAIK, crew detection range (by WO, hydrophone, etc.) is determined by sensors setup in files from Data\Objects\Sensors (should be editable with Silent 3ditor), while visual 'player' detection range is defined by Data\Cfg\Sensors.cfg (text file). Many mods (IRAI, UHS, etc...) tweak these files, but I can tell you for sure that it is very difficult to nail it so that both you and crew can detect a ship at the same time, especially when you use a lot of mods that change environment (fog, clouds, ...). While mods struggle to increase realism for crew detection (i.e. stock game, IIRC, defines WO detection range as 15km, while UHS, for example, makes it 20), the same is harder to do for player detection, because many factors come into play, such as display resolution, brightness, as well as what weather's around and how it is rendered. At least, that is my understanding of how it works.

Ok, thanks for the explanation. I thought wheather conditions are accounted
in the WO visibility factor