Ship Silhouettes questions

[DanielCoffey]

When creating a useful silhouette for a ship in the Recognition Manual, I would appreciate some help with the following questions...

1. When switching to the Ahead+Angled view, what is the preferred AoB for the image on the right that shows the ship at a slant?

2. What is the convention for deciding whether to use the funnel or mast for the Stadimeter range estimate? I see some Merchants with red marks on the funnel and others with none.

3. What is the preferred brightness for the pictures in the Recognition Manual? I see some that are brightly lit models form the game. Others are almost dark silhouettes. Some have the textures simplified to almost show the model without the texture applied.

4. Are all the objects that can appear on Merchantmen (such as castle deck guns, cargo and life rafts) always visible or are they selected from a pool for variety? The reason I ask is that the in-game model for the Akita Maru shows fore and aft guns but the silhouette does not.

Many thanks!

[DanielCoffey]

A quick update and a thank you to all the folks that have helped me with the editor and models today. I have crawled my way through the first ship silhouette and got Blender more or less set up the way I need it. Hopefully the next ones will go a bit faster now I am not fighting the tools all the time!

Here is what I have come up with for the Shinshu Maru Troop ship...




I have worked out that the angled view is 045 degrees, that all three views are Orthogonal and that the scale is correct when compared to several other vanilla silhouettes.

The brightness seems about right but may want darkening a little. I would appreciate feedback.

The only issue I still have is knowing where to put the red stadometer guide marks since I don't know the convention there.

[DanielCoffey]

Another question... How do I find which specific model is intended for things like deck and AA guns on ships? I have found the guns.dat file but there does not appear to be an easily identifiable link between the ship model and the accessories it comes with.


For example the APD_Manley boat has some AA guns and a fore and aft castle with ASW weapons. There are text labels on an empty node in the ship model saying "ASW Weapon 1 (KGun, YGun, Hhog, DCRack)" which I assume lists the weapons that may appear at that node but I can't find any reference to which file they occur in.


I am not concerned with the small stuff like AA guns, lights and cargo but if the existing silhouette shows a deck gun, I'd like to do so as well to indicate the vessel may probably be armed.

[propbeanie]

The "link" is usually done in the ShipName.eqp file. You find something like

[Equipment 6]
NodeName=M03
LinkName=3InchSingle_base_Jp
StartDate=19421231
EndDate=19451231

You then use that LinkName to find the gun. Anything that can search inside the dat files in the Library folder will do, but I use Notepad++, which is easy enough and can "Find all". You will sometimes find that a given named gun - "3InchSingle_base_Jp" in this case - might be named several times. The game usually chooses the first one it encounters in such cases... You are a brave person taking this on... you now can see why this is not done very often... Good luck.

[DanielCoffey]

AH, that makes sense, thanks. I will reflect the bigger guns (non-aa) only on the armed merchantmen and patrol boats but will put more on the warships when I get to them.


If the existing recognition manual shows a smooth-decked merchant I have been copying that but if there is a gun shown then it gets it. The 37mm Daihatsu made me laugh!


It is VERY slow going as I am sure you can understand so I will probably issue it as a standalone mod, releasing blocks of ships over time until it is largely complete and then the FotRSU team can scrutinise it for inclusion.


I am currently keeping myself sane by plotting a horrible demise to the person who modelled the NKLSS Hansa Maru Freighter. All those pipes!


While I am thinking about it and before I go too far, I am considering upping the texture size of the Recognition Manual ship texture from 512x256 to 1024x516. It makes for a much crisper image for the user and even allows rigging to be identified where it is present (although part of that is down to Photoshop tricks to highlight it). Any reasons or constraints why I shouldn't? I have no idea how tight the texture constraints are in RotFSU.

[propbeanie]

What you will run into is the various screen resolutions different players use. Part of the reason the RM is so small on a 1920x1080 screen is mostly due to the laptop users with the 1200x900 or whatever resolutions, where the RM will then sit right on top of the menu bar, so you really have to be careful for that... setting your computer to various resolutions (and then the game, and then exit the game and re-enter the game so it will take - lather rinse repeat ad infinitum adnauseum as you make edits... ) for testing is about the only way to "judge" what you end up doing, and where you would then place the RecMan on the screen - and even then, ~someone~ won't like it (too bad - it's your mod!... ).

[DanielCoffey]

As far as I can tell, the pictures in the RM are not at a fixed resolution - they are scaled down to fit on the model of the RM on the screen. Going from 512x256 to 1024x512 does not double the size of the RM, fortunately.


What the larger texture does do, however, is allow the specific page to scale down rather than up. This means it has a better chance of staying crisp. Whenever you up-sample a texture it always goes a bit blurry.


One important question before I go too much further - what is the convention for marking the RM for the Stadimeter guides?


In addition, are all ships simply scaled to a good fit on their respective page or are they all at a fixed height for their class to give an idea of relative ship sizes? If that is the case, some of the small inshore craft will be tiny on their pages and not usefully recognizable.

[propbeanie]

I misunderstood you, and thought you were referring to the size of the book itself - which I always thought was on the "small" side, until I load the 1024x768 screen resolution to play the game for testing purposes, and then it is entirely too big... lol

If you look at some of the stock images, they actually have a defined scale on some of the ships. However, in FotRSU, all of that was removed and just the lines left, since all of the images are "sized to fit the windows" of the RecMan, so yes, you'll see a NLCVA basically scaled to "Feet", with the Yamato scaled to "yards", but no "labels" of such. No attempt was made though, as far as I understand, to have the lines actually mean anything, other than proportion. Also, some of the ships have images that are "close", but not actual images of the 3D model, as you have seen. It has been years since anyone attempted to do sil images of ships in SH4. What you are attempting could be used, with minimal edits, in just about any mod or stock... There was a fellow on the SH3 side that actually had written a script that would run through and pull the assets for his sil images, but the script seems to be lost in the space / time un-continuum... If I remember it correctly, it would make line-artwork of the ships... someone else might remember it better than I do.

[DanielCoffey]

I will get to it then and make it as simple and consistent as possible.


I will of course make it open to all modders and release any PSD assets for folks to use too.


It will be slow going and probably be released in chunks along with a "How To" guide to my process once I get the kinks taken out. The biggest time sink is exporting Objects from S3D and losing their offsets relative to the origin so I have to manually build every ship like an Airfix kit rather than just reimporting it all.