So....what DOES make the rain go away?

[EAF274 Johan]

Could be a coincidence, but I noticed the exact same thing yesterday. 15m/s winds, heavy rain... until I entered St.Nazaire. Then the weather got a lot calmer (6m/s winds, no rain, overcast).

[Nopileo]

Originally Posted by panthercules

Actually, it's quite possible to "hack" the message file (just make the changes to the file "...\SilentHunterIII\data\Menu\de_menu.txt" (or the corresponding English language version) - I've done that before to fix the incorrect speed messages so they correspond with the engine telegraph settings.

In line 4128 of that file (the German one), you could replace "nebel" (fog) with "Sichtbehinderung" (visibility impairment/obstruction).

I haven't had a chance to test this, but it seems like it should work - I'll go give it a whirl and see what happens.

[edit] just tried it - works great
.

Thanks for the tip! I'll try that. Right now I'm having one of my 'need to play other games for a while'-cases, but I should be back in business when I get tired of Stronghold 2... :P

Anyway, the messages would have to be 'reversed' as well, so the entries


4120=None
4121=Medium
4122=Heavy

4128=Clouds %s, Precipitations %s, Fog %s|Wind Speed %d meters per second, direction %3d.


Should be changed to


4120=Unlimited
4121=Medium
4122=Poor

4128=Clouds %s, Precipitations %s, Visibility %s|Wind Speed %d meters per second, direction %3d.


..or something similar, for those who'd like to try.

Any suggestions for German replacements for the visibility factors?

Thanks again for the tip!

Regards,

Nopileo

[kholemann]

A Mod a day.... ?

[panthercules]

Originally Posted by Nopileo

Anyway, the messages would have to be 'reversed' as well, so the entries


4120=None
4121=Medium
4122=Heavy

4128=Clouds %s, Precipitations %s, Fog %s|Wind Speed %d meters per second, direction %3d.


Should be changed to


4120=Unlimited
4121=Medium
4122=Poor

4128=Clouds %s, Precipitations %s, Visibility %s|Wind Speed %d meters per second, direction %3d.

Actually, I went down that path the first time I tried this, BUT I thought that this wasn't going to work because I thought that the same modifiers were probably used for the RAIN as for the Fog, in whifch case reversing them for plain "visibility" would screw up the rain report. That's why I substituted a German word for "visibility impairment", rather than plain "visibility", so you could keep the modifiers the same (thinking they needed to stay the same so they would still work with the rain) and still get the right result.

I didn't actually test this conclusion though, and now I can see that there's another set of modifiers (lines 4120-4122 in the German file) that might be being used for the rain separate from the ones used for the fog (been a while since I saw any rain, so I couldn't remember what modifers it was using for rain) - if so, then reversing the fog-related ones would let you use plain "visibility" and more suitable modifiers as you suggest - I'll have to go test that out in a bit.

[edit] Sure enough - the rain report is using the other set of modifiers, so reversing the ones for "fog" works fine with just plain "visibility". I have settled on the following German text changes for now - there seem to be several ways of saying these same things (some of which are probably more correct, since my German is rather rusty, so I welcome input/corrections from any of our real German speakers on how to improve this):

replace "nebel" with "Sichtbarkeitsbereich" in line 4128 and use the following revised modifiers:

4100=Unbegrenzter
4101=mittlerer
4102=kurzer
4103=Äußerst kurzer

Good luck, and good hunting!

[Nopileo]

Thanks.

I'm at work now, so I don't have the files as reference, but are these referring to rain or fog? I see that you are using 4 modifiers and the lines are different, so I assume this is for changing the rain messages? As far as I can remember, fog only has three 'levels' in game.

But I haven't tried it in game myself yet, so I'm not sure.

Anyway I think the rain message is good enough, but the fog message seemed out of place since there is never 'real' fog when it's raining. That's why I would like to change the fog message to visibility instead.

[panthercules]

Originally Posted by Nopileo

Thanks.

I'm at work now, so I don't have the files as reference, but are these referring to rain or fog? I see that you are using 4 modifiers and the lines are different, so I assume this is for changing the rain messages? As far as I can remember, fog only has three 'levels' in game.

Based on the tests I've run in game since messing with this, these (the ones in lines 4100-4103 as I noted in my post above) are the fog references/modifiers, and there are 4 of them (I believe that there are only 3 rain modifiers, and they are at lines 4120-4122), at least in the German language version - I haven't tested any of this with the English version since I don't play with English text, but I would assume that they would have used the same 4-part modifiers structure for the fog since the line numbers are the same in both English and German language file versions.

I just noticed that your earlier post mentioned reversing the modifers in lines 4120-4122 to deal with the fog/visibility issue, but based on my tests it appears that the lines you refer to are actually the rain modifiers so I believe you would want to leave them alone and change the ones in lines 4100-4103 instead, as noted in my earlier post.

Good luck and good hunting!

[monkee]

Originally Posted by PukingDog

Has anyone else noticed when the weather is bad, if you sneak into a harbor it always seems to greatly improve the weather when you return to open seas? Several times now I have been on a long patrol with relentless 15kn winds and heavy fog, but if I snuck into a harbor, within a few hours the sun is shining and the seas are like glass. Is that a bug? The protected harbor definitely makes the seas calmer, and it seems to fool the program into ending the storm. Of course, I could be off base here, as I only have a few isolated data points to make that conclusion.

I sneaked Halifax and it was during a storm. Sunk a tanker there.

[Nopileo]

Originally Posted by panthercules

I just noticed that your earlier post mentioned reversing the modifers in lines 4120-4122 to deal with the fog/visibility issue, but based on my tests it appears that the lines you refer to are actually the rain modifiers so I believe you would want to leave them alone and change the ones in lines 4100-4103 instead, as noted in my earlier post.

Good luck and good hunting!

Thanks for the correction, panthercules. I'm going to try it out later this weekend.

Fette beute!