When playing as a ship question?

[Col7777]

As some of you know I like to play as a ship sometimes, I play in ready made missions and it works good most of the time.
On some missions though when I start I'm submerged because the mission is scripted for a submarine, pressing the 'surface' command does nothing and changing the depth on the meter also does nothing.

I'm suspecting the only way round this is to edit the mission but I'm not yet fully conversant with that and I'm not sure what I should be looking at to do it.

Or is there a simpler way besides not playing that mission lol?

Col.

[Moonlight]

As an example have a look in the submarineschool SS03 Torpedo Attack mission and you'll see this below,

[Unit 1]
Name=Player
Class=SSPorpoise
Type=200
Origin=American
Side=1
Commander=1
CargoExt=-1
CargoInt=-1
CfgDate=19430101
DeleteOnLastWaypoint=false
DockedShip=false
GameEntryDate=19430101
GameEntryTime=0
GameExitDate=19451115
GameExitTime=0
EvolveFromEntryDate=false
Long=18511970.000000
Lat=984850.000000
Height=-15.000000
Heading=8.873600
Speed=0.000000
CrewRating=3
DelayMin=0
ReportPosMin=-1
ReportPosProbability=100
SecondsUntilReport=-2.462462
HighPrioContact=false
RandStartRadius=0.000000
TacticalUnit=false
AvailStartDate=19430101
AvailEndDate=19451231
NextWP=0

Notice the height for the submarine, yep, you're at periscope depth, change the height in your mission to what the [Unit 2] Name=_JP CA Mogami#1 is and it'll put you on the surface.
As a side note you may have to make some other changes to your mission file as well, name of your ship, its class and maybe in the objective and the trigger section if there are any as well.

[Objective 1]
ObjName=SS03_Objective01
Obj=0
ObjType=0
RenownAwarded=0
ClassName=CAMogami
No=1

[Col7777]

Ah, thanks Moonlight that has helped a lot.
Also sometimes I ignore the mission objective and go off hunting for anything I can find.
I watch the map for enemy shipping, if it is reachable I head for it/them also the odd habour raid too.
Playing as ship doing a harbour raid is fairly safe because I can fire a long range and don't need to get too close.


The mission I'm on at the moment I changed the nationality of the KM Raider to American, then I was placed in the Mariana Islands, lots of enemy shipping popping up.
So I avoid if possible the big task forces and pick on un-escorted cargo ships, I'm making my way to the friendly base at the Soloman Islands then hopefully to Australia, so choosing my route can be a challenge lol.

Col.

[XenonSurf]

I too I'm playing with ships sometimes, I have made a NCA Kent with torpedos able to play in a campaign (but its results are far too good against enemies).

I have taken all single missions where submarine depth started underwater and changed it to 0 in the player unit section:


Height=-0.0000


However, some single missions will crash the game at some point, despite the change above, reason unknown, I guess that too many units present in a active aggressive state together with airplanes (for which I have changed the appearance frequency in airstrike.cfg) will make the game unstable, although I couldn't see that during campaign where I didn't have any crash.


XS

[Col7777]

Hi XS, I saw your post about the side firing torpedoes, that was accurate for ships, not sure why they were too good though, I would love them lol.

I have had a crash too when playing as a ship and as you say kind of unknown when everything was going great, because of that I started to save more often then I could go back and change the odd thing or two that I thought caused the crash.

I had someone post on one of my comments about why the camera goes haywire all of a sudden and they said it was an overload of events in battle situations, this made sense and it could be possible to the crashes too.
The reason I say this is because when I play as a ship I go beyond the mission completion, I stay in it and go hunting further and/or ignore the mission and do my own thing adding to the amount of incidents I encounter during the voyage.

Like you I've played as a Battleship or a Cruiser and had great fun, some ships fire the torpedoes OK some crash when I try it, why I don't know I'm not that well up on a lot of the files and what they do yet.

Some say it is a Submarine sim not a Ship sim but people have made some ships 'human playable' so I took advantage of their great work and I like it, I'm not harming them that don't like it as its on my PC and not their's, I'm having fun and and in my mind expanding the sim.

I seem to remember in SH2 you could attach a unit to the player sub, so in effect that unit could be a long way off or near by and as you travelled it made its way to join you, then when you encountered the enemy it aided you and in some cases took a lot of the flak off you and also got sunk but it was good fun, I would love to have that now in SH4.

Col.

[Col7777]

I tried to edit a mission where the sub was at periscope depth, changed it to 0 and saved it.
When I went in the mission it was still a periscope depth, I must be doing something wrong.

Col.

[Moonlight]

Post the mission that you've edited and lets have a look at what you've changed, before the edit and after would be great.

[Col7777]

Well all I did was go to the mission editor, selected where the sub was at periscope depth then in the properties changed it to 0 then saved it as.
Got the message saying do I want to replace it, I selected Yes then that was it.

So is there somewhere else I should be looking in the mission editor?

Col.

[Moonlight]

Ahhhh the mysteries of the mission editor strikes again, you'd be better off changing small edits like that by hand instead of using the editor.

I'm not too certain as to how that editor thing works but I would assume that you would Save it as a Normal mission or as a Scripted one, have a look in the
SH4 Mission Designers' Forum for some hints and tips.