[REL] Imperial Range Correction

[CapnScurvy]

As anyone who had purchased the SH4 game knows, the range finding for the manual targeting system is terrible. I admit the calculations for range and distance is spot-on when playing the game in "arcade" mode. But, for both metric and imperial unit of measurement, with manual targeting system "enabled", this game couldn't hit a bull in the butt with a base fiddle. A good while back I was looking at the ship dimensions and calculating the metric to imperial conversions of feet and yards and came up empty handed. I couldn't find anything wrong but I couldn't find much right either.

The game couldn't have been released at a worse time with the advent of spring approaching. Too many jobs to do, too little time. I had thought of a proper test to run to see how far off things really were, but to do it on 50-plus ships was going to take time. Slowly, I have completed my testing and corrected the dimensions, not to any historical document but to whatever wacked formulation the dev. boys had put into the game. I admit my corrected figures are a "back door" approach to an ingrained problem but hey, it works!

To test the various ranges, I used the "mission editor" to pre-measure stationary ships with the sub in the center of a circle. Once I had a group of ships "docked", I ran the mission using the "arcade" mode of zero realism. I set the ships at 1500 yards (1371m) from the sub with my goal of 10 yards off plus or minus for accuracy. Then I locked onto each ship and recorded the range to target. The range finding is quite accurate with the computer doing the work. The target ranges with the computer in control is unaffected by whatever changes in the config files are made. That tells me the computer uses coordinates of latitude/longitude to find range to target distances, not ship dimensions.

Once I had the game computer range to target figures, I left the mission and switched game play options to "manual targeting system enabled" and WOW! what a dramatic difference. Only ONE ship was accurate, the MAYA CA, most others were shown in too short a distance to target, a few were too far.

An example: The HIRYU CV was 1507 yards from the sub with the computer finding the range. Using the stadimeter through mast height the range to target was 736 yards! The medium old composite (AKITA) was calculated at 1052 yards at a true distance of 1504. The CHITOSE Sea Plane Tender was 682 yards at a true distance of 1507 yards. Only a handful of ships were 50 yards distance difference or less. 50 yards difference within 1500 yards is too much to be accurate....that's the length of many of the ships.

To correct the problem I changed the mast height using the SWAG method. The "Scientific Wild-Ass Guessing" method with truthfully, just a "smidge" of science. If the distance was too short I added more to the ship config file mast height. If too long, I subtracted, each time going back into the mission to check the new result. Then back to the .cfg file to tweak some more.

One curious finding was at about the third or fourth time of using the stadimeter on the same ship, the range would move 15 or 20 yards from its previous reading, giving a true high & low range to the distance. On every ship a range of 15-20 yards difference could be found. I suspect this was designed into the game to give some unpredictability to your range findings. So, centering the mast height on this range became my goal. Since this would put the range of distance within the before-mentioned goal of 10 yards +/- in 1500 yards I used this as a mark to hit. With the 53 ships I have tested and changed, the goal has been achieved.

A change I made to the game instructions is: Where do you place the staimeter's second image on the ship? Some mast tops are hard to see at a distance so I made the following changes:
The Fuso BB
ISE BB
ISE(2) BB
All aircraft carriers
Furutaka CA
have prominent flag placements, so use the "top of the flag" to set the second image water line over them. ALL other Jap Warships use the "top of the tallest mast" to determine ranges.

For the Merchant Class use the "top of the smokestack(s)" to find range. This includes ALL merchants, cargo, freighter, tanker, passenger liners (troop carriers).

I did not elect to change allied warship dimensions, the German & Italian ships or the smaller vessels like fishing trawlers, tugboats, sampans. So if you feel inclined to fire at one of your own battleships, feel free to do so at the same blind-eyed accuracy our boys from Romania originally gave us.

The file's name is "Imperial_Ship_Fix-1.1" which will change over 50 ship mast heights. This change is only for the Imperial (U.S.) unit of measurement. The file is in WinRaR format and is compatible with the JSGME Generic Mod Enabler.

The latest files as of June 8, '07 can be downloaded from:

http://hosted.filefront.com/Capnscurvy/

Or try:

http://www.mediafire.com/?cbztdntw2xi

[supposedtobeworking]

Hey, nice little mod. aprreciate it. Let me get this straight. You no longer put the bottom of the mirror image in the stad to the top of the highest mast? so, instead you put the mirror image in different places depending on the ship type...thats what your instructions indicated....just making sure i understand so I don't wonder why the mod isn't working when I try to use the stad...the "correct" way. Thanks again.

[Bando]

This is good news.

I read in one of the earier threads that the conversion meter - yard went wrong and when using imperial you had to put the stadimeters ghost image waterline about 10% lower than the masttop.
In fact it's hard to do. I mean 10% in a combat situation is guestimating at best and firing torpedoes on a guestimated solution is the result. I don't know how others did this, I figured that if I tried over and over again I will eventually get the hang of it. Indeed I've tried over and over again, and being real close gave me a lot of hits, but it wasn't all that succesfull at ranges of more than say 1000 yds.

I certainly will try this mod with the instructions you provided so maybe I'll get a torpedoe hit at 1500 yds or more.

Thanks for sharing all this work. Must have been some hours.....

Regards,

Bando

[vindex]

I don't know what's the deal with the mediafire site, it's not letting me download.

[CapnScurvy]

To answer the question of Stadimeter placement, I decided to change the spot since many times the top of the masts are hard to see at a distance. If you're going to use Manual Targeting you need all the distance to target you can get. I thought about exclusively using the top of the ships flag but for many ships the flag placement is too low or hidden behind a structure.

The Merchant class of ships now will have the "top of the smokestack(s) as the point of reference. They are easy to see, all merchant ships have them, and it makes for a large target to use with the Stadimeter's second image. This includes all Merchant class ships from the Huge European Passenger Liner, down to the Sub Tender regardless of ship ownership ( Jap, American, etc.).

The Jap warships will continue to use the "top of the tallest mast" as their point of reference. This includes the small and med Gunboats, Sub Chaser, Mine Layer's, DDs, CLs, and all but one CA. The BB Kongo and the BB Yamato have tall masts, with the flag placement low, so use the mast on them as well. The exceptions are the Aircraft Carriers, the Fuso BB, the Ise's BB, and the Furutaka CA. They all have good flag placements, so use the top of the flag.

Bando, I agree there has been a lot of nashing of teeth over where is the correct placement of the Stadimeter image to find the accurate range. The inaccuracy is not in the placement but in the game config files and what math formula the game uses to convert meters to yards or back again. A modder can choose any part of the ship he likes as a reference point, as long as that spot is calibrated correctly to the distance the ship is actually positioned. Using the mission editor gave me stationary targets with stable known distance's. I just reworked the numbers until the correct range was met. I guess it's like Thomas Edison who had an idea about a light bulb. Hundreds of attempts later did he finally get it right. Trial and error is sometimes the best method. I'm no Edison, but I do have the patience to get it right.

[Hitman]

Amazing piece of work Huge THANKS

Am I right thinking that for doing a metric version it would be enough to convert feet to meters and edit the proper files?:hmm:

[CapnScurvy]

Hitman, I don't know. My attention has been on the Imperial unit of measurement. But, since I still have my missions setup on the computer, I can change the option's to Metric and see if it give's the same range. It's 11:00 am here, so I'll get back to you on this.

[CapnScurvy]

Hitman, your right in thinking that by editing the .cfg files, a correction to the accuracy of metric play would result. However, this is what I learned by using the same .cfg mast heights I used for my fix, within the same mission editor test, but using the game option of the Metric unit of measurement.

First a little background on what I know about the game. The .cfg files within the game are all metric. Mast heights, ship lengths, displacements etc., all metric. The game converts those measurements to Imperial units using the conversion 3.280x meters=feet, or 1.0936xmeters=yards. At least thats the formulation it should use, but those devs could be using anything! The Recognition Manual will show feet for ship dimensions if options are set to Imperial. I assume the game uses the above formula to achieve this conversion, where in the Metric option the game need not convert the measurements.

When I used the Metric option for my test, with zero realism set. The computer accurately reported the range on the position keeper at 1371 +/- a few meters. (I assumed it was meters since the preset distance to target was 1371 or there abouts when I made the mission). I had several targets, and all were as expected. I next enabled the manual targeting option and found the ranges at 1500 +/- a few YARDS. Yes yards, the position keeper was reporting the same distances that I had for those ships when I did my Imperial tests! I know the position keeper does not show either yards or meters as a setting but, the exact numbers as my other tests show they are reading in yards not meters.

So what does this tell you, besides the game is wacked!!! Well, it suggests that in metric mode the game will take a perfectly good meter range-to-target and needlessly convert it to yards! I don't think the game can be fixed with doing a few backward math conversions on the .cfg files to correct itself. Good old seat of the pants trial and error may be the solution for us modders. Like I did with the Imperial measurement tests. A good old engine rebuild may be needed by the Romanians. It doesn't matter what we call the unit of distance; inches, furlongs, fathoms, light years. It still has to be calibrated within two points in the game and go through whatever math conversion the devs left for us to stumble upon.

Cheers

[Hitman]

Many thanks for the tests

I was using metric until the game's measuring units got fixed (Thus the question), but thanks to your work I will return to Imperial anyway. I live in a metric-system country, but since my first sim where I did manual targeting was SH1, I got used to imperial, so no problem there, and much more realism (Plus I don't need now to make conversions to use my MK3 IS-WAS, as it is in yards )

P.S. the shift of the measuring point from mast to stack is a GREAT idea, and it was also used in RL (ONI208J gave heigth of various points, including masts and funnels), but since graphics resolution is a limitation when playing, funnel as reference is simply perfect. Only thing I need to do now is recalculate my Aspect Ratio list, but that's a matter of some minutes.

[R48]

Thank you!

[GT182]

CapnScurvy, MediFire isn't working. Can you, or someone that has the imperial fix, post it to another site for downloading? Thanks in advance.

[CapnScurvy]

I guess you get what you pay for!!! Mediafire has worked for me before, but today their off line.

Try this link:


http://hosted.filefront.com/Capnscurvy/

[tater]

Nice. I have been wishing I had a real recognition manual cause it'd be easier to measure vs the crosstrees, but the stack is also good.

tater

[Bando]

CaptScurvy

I've tried this mod for several hours, it suits me just fine. At larger distances it's more accurate than the vanilla means of range finding, I'm happy to report I've made some hits at 2500 yds.

I'm keeping this mod in the list and printed your instructions.

Thanks alot

Bando

[CapnScurvy]

I have tweaked the original numbers a bit to give greater accuracy and have renamed the file "Imperial_Ship_Fix-1.1". The download sites are in the base thread as before.

Cheers