[WIP] Accurate Deck Gun and AA Gun MOD (WWII SPECS)

[tater]

I found, in my empirical research using kv29's deck gun mod (on the one gun able to be destabilized), that the ROF was at least as much dominated by the sea state and stability of the boat as anythign else. I set the ROF fast, and tried to shoot accurately. With any kind of rolling (stock, BTW, not ROW or any sea improvements) I was lucky to shoot more than 6 RPM, even with the gun ROF set to 4 second reloads.

Destabilizing the gun is intimately tied to combat ROF, IMO.

[castorp345]

Originally Posted by tater

Destabilizing the gun is intimately tied to combat ROF, IMO.

bingo!
as usual, tater's right on the money.


KV29's mod solution was excellent and went a long way (imho) towards squaring things with rof (at least for the 4"/50.
his solution was (from the Real_Deck_Gun_1.0 readme):

***

"In Deck_Gun_4_50.cam
Modified: Elevation Speed from 5 to 0.1
Modified: Traverse speed from 35 to 25 (the gun was turning a little too fast for me)

In Cameras.dat
(Added missing parameter in minitweaker file "Cameras_dat.txt")
Added line in "DeckGunZoom" category: absolute,single,5398,lookathorizon
Modified: set value to 0

This mod is not presently working with other guns because there seems to be some problems related to the gun elevation and the cameras. Im still working on it, and I hope it will be fixed in future releases.

Since the 4" is available for all subs and all campaign years, I´ve deleted the 3" and 5" gun files until I find a fix.

I provided two sets regarding ROF: "unreal 4s" stock and tweaked 25s reloading times."

***

unfortunately, that seems to be where things were left with the real_gun mod, so it sure would be nice if someone were to take-up where kv29 appears to have left off and get into addressing the gyro-stabilization "issue".

cheers
hc

[tater]

He hit a wall, it wasn't him giving up.

[castorp345]

Originally Posted by tater

He hit a wall, it wasn't him giving up.

certainly didn't mean to imply that!
rather just that it's a problem still waiting to be cracked...
no slight against kv29 intended at all.

cheers
hc

[Torps]

Originally Posted by tater

I found, in my empirical research using kv29's deck gun mod (on the one gun able to be destabilized), that the ROF was at least as much dominated by the sea state and stability of the boat as anythign else. I set the ROF fast, and tried to shoot accurately. With any kind of rolling (stock, BTW, not ROW or any sea improvements) I was lucky to shoot more than 6 RPM, even with the gun ROF set to 4 second reloads.

Destabilizing the gun is intimately tied to combat ROF, IMO.

I agree with you ROF should be determined by the weather conditions.

[tater]

Not just weather, the speed of the sub made a huge difference relative to the waves. Firing the deck gun at flank speed was interesting. You really need to try kv's mod with the 4" 50.

Use the fast ROF.

Try shooting at various ranges at various speeds and sea states. You have to wait for the roll to come level to shoot. If you get messed up, you need to wait for the next roll. The periodicity of the rolling is one of the boundary values on ROF. If the roll period is 15 seconds, you cannot possibly exceed 4 RPM, period. That's entirely realistic.

Note that if you are right along side an unarmed merchant to finish her off, you can fire very much faster as long as you don't care where the hits are.

A definitive DG solution requires destabilized guns, IMO.

It also requires some attention to what you are doing right now. Good numbers for the speed of the gun crews on actual sub decks, not test firing out behind the gun factory, or even the sub someplace as calm as a mill pond.

My gut is that with the destabilized gun, the reload speed can approach (or even equal) the stated ROF for the gun. So 4 seconds might be fine for a destabilized gun since under many combat conditions it will be considerably slower. My gut feeling (and some experimenting) makes me think that 6-7 seconds is fine with a destabilized gun. With the gyro-stabilized wonder weapon in stock, I think it needs to be very much slower.

tater

[NonWonderDog]

Originally Posted by castorp345

bingo!
as usual, tater's right on the money.


KV29's mod solution was excellent and went a long way (imho) towards squaring things with rof (at least for the 4"/50.
his solution was (from the Real_Deck_Gun_1.0 readme):

***

"In Deck_Gun_4_50.cam
Modified: Elevation Speed from 5 to 0.1
Modified: Traverse speed from 35 to 25 (the gun was turning a little too fast for me)

In Cameras.dat
(Added missing parameter in minitweaker file "Cameras_dat.txt")
Added line in "DeckGunZoom" category: absolute,single,5398,lookathorizon
Modified: set value to 0

This mod is not presently working with other guns because there seems to be some problems related to the gun elevation and the cameras. Im still working on it, and I hope it will be fixed in future releases.

Since the 4" is available for all subs and all campaign years, I´ve deleted the 3" and 5" gun files until I find a fix.

I provided two sets regarding ROF: "unreal 4s" stock and tweaked 25s reloading times."

***

unfortunately, that seems to be where things were left with the real_gun mod, so it sure would be nice if someone were to take-up where kv29 appears to have left off and get into addressing the gyro-stabilization "issue".

cheers
hc

So, if I'm reading this right, the main thing that destabilized the deck gun camera was setting "lookathorizon=0"? And this only worked for the 4" gun?

I'm going to take a wild guess and say that setting "lookathorizon=0" for the other guns caused the zoomed-in view to pitch with the gun, rather than with the ship, right?


It sounds like the problem might not be too hard to solve. It seems to me that the 4" gun has the viewport attached to the telescope, while the other guns have the viewport attached to the gun itself. All you might have to do to fix this is switch some node inheritances around.


I did do some digging through the .dat files in order to change the elevation angles of the deck guns, but I'm still not sure how the viewpoint is defined. (It's not enough to change elevation in the sim file, you have to edit the animation keyframes as well).

Actually, what does "ochitor" mean? This might not mean anything, but while "Dmy_cam_Ochitor_4_50" is a child of "4_50_Ochitor", "Dmy_3_50_Cam_Ochitor" is instead a child of "3_50_Body". If "ochitor" means something like "telescope," all you probably have to do is shuffle a couple things around in the .dat file.

EDIT: According to an online translator, "ochitor" means something like "eye" in Romanian. I think I might take a stab at this sometime tonight.


EDIT2: Yep, now the sight looks to the horizon like it should. There's a bit of hitching, though, when the gun hits min elevation. For some reason, min and max elevation are defined relative to the horizon, not relative to the sub.

The elevation animation still seems to be inaccessible to S3D, but I was able to increase the 5"/25 elevation to the proper 40 degrees by telling it to use the other (legacy?) animation in the .dat file. This doesn't work for the other guns, because -- and I hadn't noticed this before -- it disables the sight animation. This doesn't mean much for the 5"/25, but it locks the sight to the gun barrel for the others. In case you were wondering, this has absolutely no effect on stabilization. I'm not so sure about effect on AI.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Torps

I agree with you ROF should be determined by the weather conditions.

Which was my real point. I've spent 20 years in libraries, researching all parameters of ships from the 1890s on, and I also own a copy of Campbell's Naval Weapons of World War Two, as well as his Jutland: an Analysis of the Fighting, and a large number of the Warship Quarterly series, which inludes 'British Naval Guns: 1880-1945', also by Campbell.

There is plenty of evidence for the firing/loading rates of every shipboard gun ever built, including the sailing guns of the 1700s. What everyone seems to ignore whenever discussions of firing rates come up is the in-action rates, including sea-state. "The gun could fire X rounds per minute!" is always mentioned by the poster making the claim; "They actually got Y rounds per minute" never is.

@ Tater: does the destabilization affect AI, or only player-firing. I assume the latter. My problem is that, as captain, I like to let the gunners do the gunning. That creates a different problem, at least in my observation: the gunners fire at the set rate, no matter the conditions, but they tend to miss a lot rather than wait for the roll. Better if they could be made to slow down and aim as well.

[tater]

I was testing as player. Not sure, good question.

[Torps]

UPDATE:
I regret I must throw in the towel for this mod. My hard drive along with the backs up I had went with my computer a few days ago. At this point I am to busy trying to recover documents, pics, music files etc. All my mod work for ROW, ROWS SOUNDS, this mod, etc has been lost, luckily I have some backs up on filefront. It will take me awhile to find what I am looking for. It is somewere among the recovered folders and files (over 1,000,000 files, in 6000 folders). Regardless if I streamline my process or not I will be out of action for awhile. I really do not have the patience for this, previous experience told me to get a ext backup but I was to lazy. Well I sure hell have learned my lesson. This ******** S****!

I hope one of you benefit from my misfortune and learned something, SWDW has some of my work so hopefully he will fix it up and release it with RFB and as a stand alone.

[Sailor Steve]

I was going to say "I hate when that happens", but that sounds too much like a joke.

Best of luck on the recovery. I was going to upgrade my memory soon, but I might go for an external HD instead.

[swdw]

That sucks torps.

I still have the files you sent me if you need them. Working on the 1.5 RFB is taking up my time right now.

To answer some of your questions NWD, kv29 did a lot more than set look at horizon to zero. I think I may still have the original file he sent me.

Although RR likes the mod I was working on, I hit a wall because of the gun coding.

Destabilzing the gun is very easy- the mod for SH3 gets the same results I had back in November before trying to combine kv29's method and what I was trying. Also, the scope is not locked to the barrel on any of the guns in stock.

The problem is destabilizing the gun in both the zoomed AND unzoomed view, and still being able to follow the historic method of aiming which tater explained very well to me.

The gunners would get the range and then wait until the crosshairs crossed the horizon to fire. So you had a predictable way to shoot, but geting the timing down was the issue.

The interaction of gun barrel elevation between the zoomed and unzoomed view causes the problem. You can get the zoomed view to work somewhat correctly, but when start playing with the unzoomed view, the interaction causes problems with the zoomed view.

Although it seemed pretty close as long as the boat was rolling and you would switch between the zoomed and unzoomed views, in calm waters you couldn't hit anything after 3-4 shots.

This mod affected all 3 guns. and it DOES affect the AI too.

NWD, if you want to see what kv29 did and my changes, I can post the file for you. and will be willing to let ypou know what I did. There's always the chance you may have a new approach that will work.

[Torps]

Originally Posted by swdw

That sucks torps.

I still have the files you sent me if you need them. Working on the 1.5 RFB is taking up my time right now.

To answer some of your questions NWD, kv29 did a lot more than set look at horizon to zero. I think I may still have the original file he sent me.

Although RR likes the mod I was working on, I hit a wall because of the gun coding.

Destabilzing the gun is very easy- the mod for SH3 gets the same results I had back in November before trying to combine kv29's method and what I was trying. Also, the scope is not locked to the barrel on any of the guns in stock.

The problem is destabilizing the gun in both the zoomed AND unzoomed view, and still being able to follow the historic method of aiming which tater explained very well to me.

The gunners would get the range and then wait until the crosshairs crossed the horizon to fire. So you had a predictable way to shoot, but geting the timing down was the issue.

The interaction of gun barrel elevation between the zoomed and unzoomed view causes the problem. You can get the zoomed view to work somewhat correctly, but when start playing with the unzoomed view, the interaction causes problems with the zoomed view.

Although it seemed pretty close as long as the boat was rolling and you would switch between the zoomed and unzoomed views, in calm waters you couldn't hit anything after 3-4 shots.

This mod affected all 3 guns. and it DOES affect the AI too.

NWD, if you want to see what kv29 did and my changes, I can post the file for you. and will be willing to let ypou know what I did. There's always the chance you may have a new approach that will work.

Thanks, at this point it will be atleast 2 weeks till I can do anything with SH4 when it comes to modding. Did you keep the ranges and rates of fire?

Seriously I am bummed out, I lost things I can never replace. Anyways it always can be worse, one thing for sure I would trade my 9800gx2 to get my files back any day, I can buy a graphics card almost anytime but I cant buy the stuff back I lost.

[DrBeast]

Oh man..."that sucks" is too poor an expression for this. You might make the hard disk work long enough to recover some files if you put it in a freezer for a few hours. But it's a one-shot deal, and it may or may not work.

[Ducimus]

I was wondering what had happened. Im sorry to hear your computer took a nose dive Torps. Involuntarily losing data like that just sucks. Aint no other word for it.