Hiding the UBoat on the Chart...

[Dantenoc]

I have figured out that modifying the UnitSub file in the data\menu\gui\units folder is the way to erase the circle (or dot depending on your mod) that represents your ship when not soomed in too much, but I can't get rid of the tail (defeating the whole pourpose of it all)

I'm currently using Grey Wolves, and now I could switch back to other previous mods that do away with the tails, but I don't want to change whole mods just to nick a freakin tail, anybody know what file you need to tweak?

[Dantenoc]

Forget about the method I just mentioned, this appears to be better (although I haven't played it that much yet)

Open the program files\silenthunteriii\data\menu\cfg directory and edit the maps.cfg file. Change the settings on the navigation map to:

[Map0]
MapID=Navigation_map
Position=0,0
Resolution=1024,656
MajorSqrs=4,2.4
MinorSqrs=5,5
PixPerUnit=50
ZoomLevels=1,2,5,10,20,50,100,200,500,1000,2000,40 00,7000,10000,20000,40000; meters per pixel
InitialZoom=20000;originalmente 500
SymbolZoom=20000;units are drawn as symbols from this zoom up originalmente 10
GroupsZoom=40000;units are drawn in groups from this zoom up originalmente 100
CityZoom=10000;city names are displayed from this zoom down
KriegZoom=2000;krieg labels are separated displayed from this zoom up
HarborZoom=50;harbors will be displayed from this zoom up

Having done so, open the program files\ubisoft\silenthunteriii\data\submarine folder, then choose the folder of your favorite sub, and edit the NSS_UboatXX_shp.TGA file, making it into something invisible (that's to say, just make the whole picture a transparent blank).

There you go, the only way to see your sub is to zoom way way out, wich won't help you much for the finer details of navigation, forcing you to rely on alternate methods.

Now, about faking the sextant, any time you deem that a decent navigator could calculate your exact position, press and hold the ctrl button while clicking with the mouse on a certain point on the nav-map, you'll notice that the nav-map will shift... your boat (even though you can't see it) is right there, under your mouse cursor, so mark that spot for later reference!

As I said before, I need to play with this for a while to see what type of unfortunate side effects this has... I'll report any findings later.

[Venatore]

mate this is an aswome idea.:hmm:

[don1reed]

Great find, Dan...

...if weather permits, to simulate a good sextant fix, placing the cursor in center of map and simul-pressing cntl/left mouse gives you your position, right? If so...neat. (have not tried it yet...about to.)

[kylania]

Or never press F5

[Notewire]

Wow, talk about challenging, I am totally adding this to my self imposed realism rules. Awesome.

Maybe someone on GW could add a "Real Life Navigation" mod option, that would be perfect.

Highest Regards,
Yarre

[Jager]

Originally Posted by Notewire

Wow, talk about challenging, I am totally adding this to my self imposed realism rules. Awesome.

Maybe someone on GW could add a "Real Life Navigation" mod option, that would be perfect.

Highest Regards,
Yarre

Not to forget a tutorial or something to show us how to do it. What would also be cool is if we had the grid squares broken down even more (for example, AM52-69 instead of simply (AM52). Still, a real life navigation mod will do just nicely

[Dantenoc]

Originally Posted by kylania

Or never press F5

wouldn't that be a kick in the head:rotfl:
Hardcore hahaha

No... that realy isn't feasible... better people have tried, and they have found that the SHIII world and celestial dome are way to flawed to be actualy used for real navigation methods. Besides, we don't want to kill the navigator, we just want to limit his incredible God-like precision

[Myxale]

Lo fellow Kaleuns!

Dan, i tried this approach, and i feel naked without it! But it so rules! And makes things extremly difficult!

Can you tell mewhere to look for the sunken ships icons! I wanna try something!


Anything new there?!

[panthercules]

Originally Posted by Dantenoc

Now, about faking the sextant, any time you deem that a decent navigator could calculate your exact position, press and hold the ctrl button while clicking with the mouse on a certain point on the nav-map, you'll notice that the nav-map will shift... your boat (even though you can't see it) is right there, under your mouse cursor, so mark that spot for later reference!

This really sounds cool - I'm looking forward to trying this out. Only two minor problems:

1. I never have really gotten the hang of doing transparent things - it took me the longest time to get my personal sub emblem to work right. So, any chance someone can mke a transparent sub file available for download to use with this idea?

2. This points out yet another time where it would be practically essential to be able to make some notes on the nav map (so you could note when you were at the position you're marking on the map when you take your "sextant" reading) - I guess you'll just have to keep track of it on a separate scratch pad, but it sure would be nice to be able to note it right on the map - anybody succeed in modding this capability into the game yet?

[panthercules]

Originally Posted by Dantenoc

There you go, the only way to see your sub is to zoom way way out, wich won't help you much for the finer details of navigation, forcing you to rely on alternate methods.

Hmm - maybe it's just me, but after playing around with this for just a bit I'm beginning to think there's something a little backwards about the logical/theoretical basis for this approach. I like the concept a lot, but it feels like it's been implemented backwards. Consider this...

The "navigational uncertainty" that it appeared we were trying to simulate with this seems to me to be essentially that we shouldn't know exactly where we are in relation to the "world", i.e., the things we see on the map at the lowest zoom levels (zoomed furthest out from our sub), yet the way this is implemented we lose sight/track of our sub at the highest zoom levels (zoomed furthest in on our sub).

This has the effect of making it virtually impossible to plot and track contacts during the approach/attack phase (when zoomed in pretty close to our sub), when in reality regardless of how far off we may be from our expected position in the "world", we actually should have a really good idea of exactly where we are in relation to the enemy ships that are within detection range of our sub. If I spot an enemy ship bearing (say) 60 degrees at a range of 7,500m, then I know exactly (within reasonable spotting error ranges) where my sub is in relation to that ship (and vice versa), and I should be able to easily plot both of those positions on my nav map. Yet, with this mod/approach, I can't see my sub when zoomed in to these levels, and I've lost the bearing circle, so drawing a line from my sub out 60 degrees to the target becomes practically impossible.

It seems to me that if this could be flipped around so that you could see your sub on your map when zoomed in close but you could not see where your sub is on the map when you are zoomed fairly far out (at the levels where you would be plotting your major course settings and intercept plots for targets/convoys reported many km away, where the uncertainty as to where you are in the "world" would be most relevant), this would be a much more useful/realistic addition to game play.

Could this be flipped around like that, or will it only work the way it does now?

[Dantenoc]

It can be very easily flipped around, then what you would need to do is get rid of the tail and sub circle icon, and change the nav-maps config file so that it goes into icon mode for every zoom but the highest zoom-in levels... It would work perfectly, except for two unimportant side effects: a) you would probably have to eliminate the tail from ALL the contacts. b) other sub contacts would also be invisible.

I would advise against it though... I think it's OK if you can look at your boat when zoomed realy realy far away. In my game I have it so that the sub appears on the map only when the zoom is so far out that the map is almost worldwide... I think this is good, because even the most incompetent of navigators can give you a rough guess of where you are (i.e.: "somewhere north of spain"). Even if you mark your position on the map when in such a large scale, when you zoom back in you'll find that your mark has a margin of error that can easily be a couple hundred kilometers... which is exactly the effect were looking for.

On the other hand, when you zoom in on the map, that's when the scale becomes more precise and meaningfull, and seing your sub at such scales would allow you to get a fix on your sub without any meaningfull margin of error (hence we make it invisible).

As to not seeing your boat in relation to the enemy boats when zoomed in... What enemy boats? The God's eye view should be turned off when you play hardcore !!!

It's not such a big deal... you don't realy have to know where in the map your boat is, because the enemy's position is never given in relation to the map, but rather, it is always given to you in values relative to your subs position... It's vector mathematics: translations and rotations of your axis of reference have no impact on the firing solution. If your sub is stationary, just pick any random point in the map and mark it as your sub's position and the plot the enemy's position relative to that. If your sub is mobile... well, it get's a bit tricky, but you still don't need to know your exact position to figure out a firing solution.

If I have the time I'll post more about this later.

[don1reed]

These unique nav problems were not unknown to any navigator operating before the advent of GPS. Wx permitting, three celestial sightings were taken per day, dawn twilght, noon, and evening twilight...giving them a "RUNNING FIX". http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/dod...m/r/00949.html The "circle of doubt" aka assumed position aka estimated position, was always there--and still are today if you don't use GPS.

...also, to note--ships would make a degaussing run (demagnetize) when leaving the harbor and also run a known nautical mile--in this way, with stopwatch, they would time their track over the known course at a certain speed to determine their true speed and how much drag the undergrowth caused.

As was suggested earlier, wx permitting, do a noon sight (cntl/mouse click), place an "X" at the cursor...do a noon sight the following day aka ETMAL, place an "X". Now, measure the distance between "X's"...giving you your distance made good and course made good and S=D/T aka SOG (speed over ground).

Observing that when running free-lance (without using the waypoint tool) Wx, set, and drift will come into play causing you to drift off course and increase and/or decrease speed due to wind and current...welcome to a little piece of reality

edit: remember in the movie, "DAS BOOT", where the Navigator tosses his pencil at the chart in disgust when the Kapitän asks for a position? During that storm sequence, they were without a celestial sighting for over a week...that "circle of doubt" was growing larger by the day.

[panthercules]

Originally Posted by Dantenoc

As to not seeing your boat in relation to the enemy boats when zoomed in... What enemy boats? The God's eye view should be turned off when you play hardcore !!!

What enemy boats? The enemy boats that I have detected. I play with GW's normal settings (as far as I remember) so the enemy boats are not shown on the map (except I do still get some contact reports for convoys reported at some distance, but they don't move/update on the map) - but I do make marks on the map myself when I spot the enemy ships (visually or by hydrophones, although the latter are obviously just my best guess at distance based on my assessment of the strength of the screw noises so they have a large margin of error), and I like to be able to plot out the distances and such between my boat and the enemy ships I've spotted and am tracking through observations.

I realize that I can just pick any random spot on the map, pretend (for plotting purposes) that my boat is heading due north, and use the bearing circle pull down tool that always points "0" to the north to plot some relative bearings and distances (actually, it's the first time I've found a use for that bearing pull-down, which is kinda cool). In fact, I tried that last night when I stumbled onto a task force with an escort carrier (my first carrier sighting since day 1). I think it worked pretty well too, better than I expected, but I didn't get a chance to put it to a real test as I got detected by one of the destroyers and chased under before I could get into a good firing position (I went ahead and tried a long shot with a couple of T3s but to no apparent avail).

I think this is a pretty cool way of turning SH3 into a "navigator simulator" and not just a "captain simulator", and I think that's a pretty cool addition to the game play. I liked playing around as navigator during my course setting phases, having to make a decision about whether to risk surfacing for a position check at noon and risk being spotted by aircraft (which raised a question - could they do a position check through the periscope or did they have to surface?), and seeing how far off course I was from my estimated position when it came time to surface after dark to charge batteries, etc. And I found myself actually looking forward to a run of several days in a row of stormy weather to see what that would do to my course/position plotting. And I think it would be a good challenge to see if I could intercept a convoy spotted in a certain position on the map a grid or two away when I wasn't really sure where my own boat was.

I'm just not sure if I'm up for trying to be the navigator during the last phase of the attack approach when I need to focus most of my attention on being the captain, so I was thinking I might like it better if this could be flipped so that the navigator could take over and keep track of where we were at those high-zoom levels (simulated by my sub appearing on the map at those close-in levels) while masking my sub's appearance in the further-put zoom levels where I would be plotting intercept course on distant contact reports or setting course to my patrol zones, etc. If I have enough self-discipline to keep from using ctrl+click to locate my boat when I'm not "supposed to" using this method (and I do), I think I'd have enough self-discipline to avoid using my boat's appearance on the zoomed-in map levels to defeat the purpose of it not being visible on the zoomed-out levels.

I may give a try to flipping this around and see if I can make it work - thanks for the info and the inspiration - this is a really neat concept - it amazes me that folks are still coming up with such cool new stuff so long after the game's debut. Keep up the good work

[don1reed]

Forgive my "novice-graphics" but here is a rendering of nav/target problem:



Own course: 050T
Own speed: 13kn.

draw circle with compass with arrow pointing to 050T with length @ 13 to represent speed. (Use moveable protractor to locate course.)

Lookout spots target BR 315 (BR = bearing relative) range 9.1km, 315 + 050 = 005T. Use moveable protractor and ruler tool, mark with "X".

3:15 min later...

targert BR 295 range 7.4km, 295 + 050 = 345T, measure and mark with "X".

Use compass tool to layoff target's RELATIVE heading and RELATIVE distance travelled in 3:15. (distance between "X's".)

Pull the center of the small circle to the tip of own course arrow. (see drawing above)

Use ruler tool to measure from own location to tip of target's arrow. This is his TRUE course and speed, i.e., 060T 10.9kn.

This method is using the chart as a Maneuvering Board.