Night Skies

[NeonsStyle]

Hi,

I was wondering if someone could put some thought into fixing the horrible clear night skies. The moon has a horrible texture, as do the stars. They look like some 1980's astronomy program. Would be good if someone could add decent texture to the moon, and give the stars some life with attention to following:

1. Star colours - all white is boring and compeltely wrong, in RL the night sky is full of diffnt coloured stars to the red of betelgeuse and Rigel, the the blue white of sirius. Stars come in all colours but the trick is to be subtle.

2. Possibly add the naked eye planets. Venus, Jupiter & Mars are all clearly visible in the night sky. Would be great if they at least drifted counter to stars over diffnt nights.

3. The galactic dust of the milky way, and in particular the large n small magellan clouds.

At sea, the night sky on a clear night is very intense and stunningly beautiful.

4.On top of that, if someone could fix that horrible horizon effect, and soften the sea sky boundary so it looked more realistic.

and finaly 5. Not related but the ocean is desperately lacking in life. The odd pod of dolfphins, the odd whale (along with their sounds) and possibly the odd fish would add greatly to the realism and immersion of the game.

Oh and while I'm at laying wish lists, lol could someone give the boat some wet effects please.


Much appreciated, love all the hard work you guys do... thanks heaps

Venus
Venus

[Scurvy Dog]

Venus,
I am also missing that deep and beautiful canopy of stars arching over the Pacific Ocean on clear nights. Thankyou for your list of those important qualities needed to create a realistic night sky. I have not been able to find the location of the star data in the program. Folders related to the "Sky" deal with atmospherics, clouds etc. There are files for "Moon" and "Sunhalo" but not "Stars". This does not seam to be something that one would easily run across, otherwise environmental modders such as Kriller2 and W_clear would have tackled it. Perhaps the star database has been "hardwired" into the program and therefore cannot be accessed or manipulated. I hope someone can give us a hint or direction where to look.
SD

good lord man, do you understand what it would take to address those things? modding may look easy but some things are very very time consuming and require talent and skill.

the environnmental mods do what they can to make things look as real as they know how to. the things you talked about are on everones wish list but its just a game and it does have limits to what you can do.

of what you listed, only #4 and #5 i think are certainly doable if someone devoted the time to it.

#4 has been tried before in v1.2 i think but i dont think it was successfull. i think the problem they ran into was limitations on just how much it can be improved on.

#5 is done in sh3 where they added dolphins to the game so

[Orion2012]

Originally Posted by WEBSTER

good lord man, do you understand what it would take to address those things? modding may look easy but some things are very very time consuming and require talent and skill.

the environnmental mods do what they can to make things look as real as they know how to. the things you talked about are on everones wish list but its just a game and it does have limits to what you can do.

of what you listed, only #4 and #5 i think are certainly doable if someone devoted the time to it.

#4 has been tried before in v1.2 i think but i dont think it was successfull. i think the problem they ran into was limitations on just how much it can be improved on.

#5 is done in sh3 where they added dolphins to the game so

In regards to number 5, I think it's doable but if you wanted to actually see them it would require modeling them and good modelers are hard to come by.

You might be able to add the sounds of whales and dolphins into the hydrophone, but I'm not sure how the game handles those things. It could be that it can be added as a ambient noise, but I think then it would be constant. Most of the sounds of the hydrophone are linked to contacts obviously. Adding them that way would cause them to possibly be spotted as contacts, again which would need a model.

With a model and sounds getting them into the game would require them to be added into the mission layer and other things. I think some things are part of a random layer in the mis files but I fear adding them to that would cause them to possibly become part of convoys, or even being attacked by Aircraft.

It all sounds good but is difficult to pull off.

[vanjast]

As far as I can see the stars info, must be embedded into the code, so it looks like there's not much hope of changing their appearances. Maybe someone with a lot of time (and the right tools) might find this info.

The big problem is the lack of info (game SDK), and most of the modding stuff has been done by trial-and-error. This takes a bit of time.

Originally Posted by vanjast

As far as I can see the stars info, must be embedded into the code, so it looks like there's not much hope of changing their appearances. Maybe someone with a lot of time (and the right tools) might find this info.

The big problem is the lack of info (game SDK), and most of the modding stuff has been done by trial-and-error. This takes a bit of time.

i think the stars are fixed and hard coded (unmoddable)

but you could add objects in the sky like they do clouds and birds but you probably would need to mod every single planet and star seperately , but im not certain of that.

not sure how you could make it move at super slow motion speed but it would have to be a good mix of stars, then to make some be a different color and make others flicker or whatever.

it would take a massive amount of time to do all that seeing as how you would need to add like a hundred stars to have a good mix of fixed stars verses stuff you added.

[peabody]

Not to be a wiseguy but you have guys playing this game that go weeks and sometimes months without being able to find a Merchant Convoy of 15 ships spaced 800 meters apart. So exactly where should we put that 12 foot long dolphin that will take weeks to model and animate and then get into the game?
Peabody

[Task Force]

Isnt the ideas of this game to Hunt, sink, and stay alive? In actuality, most of the time when traveling is looking at the atteck map, not star gazeing. Even though animals and realistic stuff in space would be nice. It would go unnoticed most of the time.

[vanjast]

Originally Posted by Task Force

Isnt the ideas of this game to Hunt, sink, and stay alive? In actuality, most of the time when traveling is looking at the atteck map, not star gazeing. Even though animals and realistic stuff in space would be nice. It would go unnoticed most of the time.

You should try the Real Navigation Mod... No map icon, No waypoint/navpoint facilites...etc. All you have is your travel log, sextant and the Stars. Just like they had to at that time.
Some people managed to navigate fairly accurately :hmm:

[Admiral Von Gerlach]

One of my instructors at University at Oxford many yrs ago turned out to be the Navigation officer on a British destroyer escorting one of the Malta Convoys, they ran into heavy fog heading to Gibralter and then as most know U boats of the 29th flotilla, Lufwaffe patrols, sorties from Italy, constant bombing, loss of ships from the convoy, and when they finally docked at Valetta, he checked his plot and route markings which were done entirely by sextant and calculatoins and log (ys they used logs back then) and he was off by 2 feet. He showed me his logs and charts, it was amazing. And there were thousands of those kind of navigators back then, ...... helps to remember and respect them all, on both sides.

the idea of dolpins is nice...but as stated, re that and the stars...lots of work for someone.

[Rockin Robbins]

If you want to see what's possible just fire up Patrick Chevelley's magnificent Cartes du Ciel, a free astronomy program for the PC that plots stars, planets and a selectable assortment of deep sky objects to your choice of limiting magnitude.

Unfortunately, supplying the real dark night sky to players who have never seen a truly dark sky in their lives would not be appreciated at all. I am just happy that the sky is represented to the fidelity that it is, with the stars in their accurate positions for date and time. The developers didn't have to do that. Nobody's noticed it anyway. The moon and sun are four times their actual diameters in the sky and the moon is at the wrong phase and in the wrong position. As a result celestial navigation with the stars in the game is really not possible.

As a side effect of attempted celestial navigation, all radar and visual targets, along with your sub's position on the attack and nav plot vanish. It's difficult for me to characterize a mod that kills the maneuvering board and TDC checks against the plot as a "reality mod." Celestial navigation was never envisioned when the game was designed and there is no way to make it work without making hunting and killing nearly impossible.

It would be great to have in-game celestial navigation. It would be great to have a sky that looked more real, with differences in the magnitudes of accurately colored stars. The colors would have to change with humidity and sky clarity, as all color vanishes with humid or hazy conditions. It would be great if they twinkled appropriately with changes in meteorological conditions. The Milky Way is astoundingly bright when you're offshore, hundreds of miles from any terrestrial lighting. In addition, there are dozens of naked eye deep space objects, the Andromeda Galaxy, M33, NGC 253, the Orion Nebula, North American Nebula, tons of stuff in the Sagittarius area, a dozen or so globular clusters, all easily visible in that kind of pristine sky. And then there are the planets all the way out to Neptune that can be seen through binoculars. Warning: all you city boys wouldn't be able to find Orion or the Big Dipper in a perfect night sky. You would be totally lost.

But how much would all this add to the game? If we navigated by celestial navigation, I could make the sale!

[Admiral Von Gerlach]

I recall nights at sea, it is indeed awesome, the southern cross, and the way the stars seems so intensly bright....... you and the ship seem wrapped in a otherworldy feeling and floating between the sea and the sky...and then duty recalls one to the deck with a thump. it looks like the game developers did pretty well with what they could do.

[Rockin Robbins]

OMG, you reminded me of the Magellenic Clouds! THOSE are the most amazing things in a pristine night sky! And Omega Centauri, which is in reality the biggest, baddest globular cluster in the sky, and easy naked eye object even from the suburbs of a large city. And NGC 5128, a giant elliptical galaxy in the southern sky, never seen by those who live north of me in central Florida. All this stuff is child's play with the naked eye in the southern hemisphere and a quarter of the northern hemisphere. A sky without them is most disorienting and unfortunate.

[vanjast]

Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins

If you want to see what's possible just fire up Patrick Chevelley's magnificent Cartes du Ciel, a free astronomy program for the PC that plots stars, planets and a selectable assortment of deep sky objects to your choice of limiting magnitude.

Sounds interesting ... I'll check it out

Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins

As a result celestial navigation with the stars in the game is really not possible.

It's been done in SH3 already - One person got down to a 100m accuracy.
just methods and practice. On my first attempt I went from Kiel to Those SW islands off the UK + 1 week of overcast lousy weather coming around Scotland, and I was out by ~5km. I got a visual on the target island off to the one side

Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins

As a side effect of attempted celestial navigation, all radar and visual targets, along with your sub's position on the attack and nav plot vanish.

Well, we have to make it hard... it's great fun. Radar doesn't have to go. There are some moon mods around (no pun intended ), I haven't seen a sun mod. Will look into this.
I also find SH4's TDC a mission, but I suppose one has to use it.

Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins

But how much would all this add to the game? If we navigated by celestial navigation, I could make the sale!

I'll be getting down to tranferring SH3's Real Nav Mod to SH4 sometime soon. The great thing about SH4 are the maps Latitude and Longitude lines (SH3 didn't have these).

[NeonsStyle]

Hi,

Sorry for restarting this, I've been away n just got back...

I certainly don't think it would be easy. In fact I know little of how you guys do the awesome mods you do. So it seemed to me a reasonable request. lol Also cause I'd not seen it mentioned anywhere on the forum in the preceding months, I figured no one had thought of it.

It would be a real shame if stars are hard coded. As for life, yes there is a point, but really the only time it would pop up is if it's in visible range... one possibility is to build a model from debris... for instance popping dolphins is probably a bit much, but a basking whale might not be too much of a stretch.

Oh well, be nice if it could've been done.

Venus