Community projects?

[keysersoze]

Fellow subsimmers,

(Please bear with this rambling thread...)

I’ve been thinking quite a bit recently, which is always dangerous, about what we as a community can do to continue improving SH5 and, indeed, all subsims. You see, I’m one of those wretched sim enthusiasts who has not an ounce of modding ability, but who nevertheless wants to contribute something to this awesome community, rather than just living off the virtual sweat of our more talented modding colleagues.

I first realized there might be an opportunity to participate in a small way when reading through TDW’s sh5.exe thread a few months ago. At one point in that thread, gap raised an excellent idea: what if TDW’s wolfpack hardfix used historical U-boat positions to determine which boats (if any) responded to your contact reports? “Awesome idea!” I thought. That would be a perfect way to tie TDW’s brilliant wolfpack function to the historical availability of U-boats. Plus, how cool would it be to report a contact to BdU, and then to receive a message from Günther Prien in U47 or Kretchsmer in U99 as they come racing to your aid?

Now, the data for U-boat positions is readily available, but the task of compiling all that information is simply insurmountable for a single person. The solution—the one proposed by gap in the aforementioned thread—is for the community to participate in gathering the data. Anyone can go to uboat.net, read about a particular U-boat’s patrol, and enter its coordinates in a community grid. As they say, many hands make light work. By opening a project like this up to the entire community, it provides an outlet for those who want to lend a hand but who, like me, can’t tell a .dat file from a .gr2.

I don’t mean to suggest that compiling U-boat positions is the only community project we can or should undertake, although I think it’s a great idea. The possibilities are really endless: any project that requires a bit of collaborative legwork could benefit from this approach. Things like scanning schematics and pictures for modelers, gathering historical BdU operational orders from actual radio messages issued to U-boats, researching Allied and U-boat OOBs for inclusion in historical scenarios are just a few of the possibilities that spring to mind.

Moreover, as I’ve found while researching special operations, reading patrol logs can be a lot of fun, not to mention tremendously immersive. It strikes me that others might be interested in the same kinds of projects. Of course, this sort of thing would be entirely voluntary. People could participate as little or as much as they wanted. Whether you want to commit to a long-term project or just want to spend an hour on a lazy Sunday afternoon reading about U-boats, your work could benefit the Subsim community.




Here are a few advantages of “community” projects:

• More resources for modders—they can reference reliable information quickly and draw inspiration from it
• Large tasks become much easier when many people are involved
• Information will be exposed to a larger audience
• Provides an opportunity for people without modding skills to participate
• Increases the already considerable community ethos at Subsim

This is a long-winded way of asking a few simple questions:

1. First of all, is this even a good idea? Do you think there would be any interest in community projects?
   
2. If so, what would be the best format/structure for such a project? I was thinking about posting the U-boat special operations spreadsheet as a public google doc as a kind of test run to gauge interest. That way, more people might see it and hopefully benefit from it. The google doc format also allows multiple users to simultaneously edit a single document, so that others could contribute if they wanted. Are there better formats than google docs?
   
3. Any other suggestions, either about the concept or about project ideas?

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Step-by-Step Instructions for U-boat Positions Project:

1. Access our google drive folder and download gap's generator

a. Link

b. Everything you need is in the folder titled "U-boat Coordinates Project"

i. "Completed Patrols" folder is for uploading/storing copies of the spread sheet when you are finished entering data

ii. "uboat coordinates v1" is gap's generator. Download this. You will work with the generator OFFLINE

iii. "U-boat Positions" is the master spreadsheet where you will paste the data created by the generator

2. Copy and paste information into gap's generator (do this offline) [INDENT]a. Sources:

i. uboat.net: This is our primary source. Copy and paste daily U-boat coordinates by clicking on each day of the patrol, and then clicking on the blue icon on the map.

ii. u-historia.com: If you can read Spanish and/or want to use an online translator, this site is useful for cross-referencing with uboat.net. Neither is error-free.

b. Enter general information in the lower lefthand corner, including commander's name and rank, date patrol started, duration of patrol in days, and whether the U-boat carried any mines. Gap's program will automatically use this information to create a template for you to work with

i. To get daily lat/long, click on each day of the patrol underneath the map. This will take you to another screen. Then click on the blue icon. It will display lat/long.

ii. To check to see whether the U-boat carried mines, go to the main page for that patrol and scroll to the bottom. If it was a minelaying mission, it will tell you the number and type of mines carried. Example

iii. Also on the main page for the patrol, check the "General events during this patrol" section. It will often contain useful clues for how you should set the "current activity" tab. Example, showing U-34's engine trouble:

iv. To find your commander's rank, simply click on his name and check the date of your patrol with the dates of his promotions. Be sure to check to see if he was promoted between patrols.

c. Copy and paste U-boat's lat/long for each day of the patrol in the corresponding cell of the generator. Be sure to delete the comma between the latitude and longitude

d. Select one of the drop-down options from the "current activity" tab. Most are self explanatory, but refer to this link for an in-depth description:

e. After you have entered positions and current activity for every day, simply highlight the yellow (output) cells and copy them

3. Paste the output from gap's generator into the google docs spreadsheet

a. Find the appropriate month/year tab in the lower lefthand corner of the spreadsheet

b. Find the correct type for your U-boat (VIIA, B, etc.)

c. If your U-boat is not yet listed for that month, add three rows, each labeled with your U-boat's number (these correspond to the output data you have already copied)

d. Highlight the first day of your U-boat's patrol

e. Paste the output data into that cell by pressing ctrl + v

4. For now, please keep a copy of the filled-in generator for each patrol so we can check each other's work and easily add variables later

a. Please use the following file naming format (without quotes): e.g. "U-33,2". This is shorthand for "U-33, 2nd patrol."

b. If you have a gmail account, you should be able to upload a copy to the folder titled "Completed Patrols" in our google drive account

c. If you don't have a gmail account, just hang onto the copy for now. I'm looking for a workaround that won't require an account.

5. Final considerations

a. If your U-boat's patrol spans multiple months, you will need to copy and paste information separately for each month, since the master spreadsheet is divided by month.

b. If you know that your U-boat had an unsuccessful attack on a certain day, put a zero in the "number of ships sunk or damaged" cell for that day

c. If there are coordinates missing for one of your days, gap has created a method for interpolating the missing coordinates.

i. Go to the last day with a known lat/long. Select "from this point" in the "interpolate missing coordinates" tab for that day.

ii. Go to the next day with known coordinates. Select "to this point" in the "interpolate missing coordinates" tab for that day

iii. Special Note: By careful doing this, as it will draw a straight line between the points. If the U-boat is near land, it might have it sail straight into the coast. In this case, manually adjust the coordinate to ensure it does not intersect with land. If we are missing coordinates for several days, you can fabricate coordinates based on similar patrols. Each day MUST have coordinates listed.

At first glance, this probably seems very complicated. But it is incredibly intuitive. Play around with it for ten minutes, and I guarantee that most of your questions will be answered .

[TheDarkWraith]

It's a great idea for use with my wolfpack patch. Problem is implementing it. Even though I've been programming in assembly for over 20 years it's not an easy task (I go back to days of DOS and segmented memory models and calling interrupts). I'm not saying it's not doable it will just take LOTS of time to implement

[keysersoze]

Originally Posted by TheDarkWraith

It's a great idea for use with my wolfpack patch. Problem is implementing it. Even though I've been programming in assembly for over 20 years it's not an easy task (I go back to days of DOS and segmented memory models and calling interrupts). I'm not saying it's not doable it will just take LOTS of time to implement

I could only the imagine the difficulty of implementing something like that, so I fully understand if it's not a practical thing to consider right now. Even still, I think community projects of this sort have a lot promise. I only meant the U-boat coordinates project to be an example of one kind of task that could benefit from community involvement. I can think of several others, but this approach could be used to facilitate a whole host of different projects.

[gap]

Great post Keyser

I am with you 100% on both your proposals of creating an "open" SH5 modding group (this is partly what we are doing with our "gun project", and what I hope to do with Dynamic Environment), and of keeping up the Historical U-boat positions project.

Talking about the latter, in view of the willingness showed by TDW I suggest to wait for a pool of "data collectors" to form. It wouldn't make much sense if he started working on such an hard to do feature if there wasn't any interest/cooperation by the community. I have already created a data entry spreadsheet as well as a tool for interpolating lacking position logs, and I have already started collecting the first data (for 3-4 U-boats, IIRC). I would be pleased to send them to anyone wanting to join the group, and to offer my advise if needed.

What do you think guys? Can we do it?

[Targor Avelany]

I love the idea and will be happy to join.

If nothing, we will have the information for possible use in the future projects.

Also, we might as well include all the uboats (IX, XXI, etc), since we are starting to move towards having those in the game.

[gap]

Originally Posted by Targor Avelany

I love the idea and will be happy to join.

Thank you Targor

right now we are:

gap
keysersoze
Targor Avelany

Any new volunteer? Three people won't go anywhere far

I will post here the stuff I got ready and some basic instructions as soon as possible

Originally Posted by Targor Avelany

If nothing, we will have the information for possible use in the future projects.

I agree
when I worked with Trevally on collecting historical information for OHII, I learned a lot and I got many cool ideas.

Originally Posted by Targor Avelany

Also, we might as well include all the uboats (IX, XXI, etc), since we are starting to move towards having those in the game.

yes Targor I had exactly your little jewels in mind

a cool feature could be to group position report for U-boat type, so that if historically a type IX was in our vicinity, an U-boat of the same type will spawn in game

[keysersoze]

Originally Posted by gap

Talking about the latter, in view of the willingness showed by TDW I suggest to wait for a pool of "data collectors" to form. It wouldn't make much sense if he started working on such an hard to do feature if there wasn't any interest/cooperation by the community.

I agree. We need to see if there is any interest in this kind of thing before we could even begin to think about implementing something like that.

Originally Posted by gap

I have already created a data entry spreadsheet as well as a tool for interpolating lacking position logs, and I have already started collecting the first data (for 3-4 U-boats, IIRC). I would be pleased to send them to anyone wanting to join the group, and to offer my advise if needed.

What format do you think we should use for this sort of data entry? I am familiar with google docs from doing large Arabic translation projects in groups. Each person would be assigned a portion of a story to translate and would post their section to a community document. Multiple people can edit and view the document at once, making collaboration easy. My only concern is the need to backup our files frequently, in case someone unwittingly deleted a large section of it.

What do you think?

Originally Posted by Targor Avelany

I love the idea and will be happy to join.

If nothing, we will have the information for possible use in the future projects.

Also, we might as well include all the uboats (IX, XXI, etc), since we are starting to move towards having those in the game.

Thanks for the reply and for your enthusiasm Targor. I agree about including information about other boat types. On a related note, part of the reason I suggested using google drive/google docs (or some other kind of cloud storage) is so we could gather schematics in a single location. With enough input, we could have a "one-stop shop" for modelers to use. They would only need to click on the corresponding file to instantly have access to blueprints, frame lines, pictures, etc. for whatever they want to model.

[gap]

Originally Posted by keysersoze

What format do you think we should use for this sort of data entry? I am familiar with google docs from doing large Arabic translation projects in groups. Each person would be assigned a portion of a story to translate and would post their section to a community document. Multiple people can edit and view the document at once, making collaboration easy. My only concern is the need to backup our files frequently, in case someone unwittingly deleted a large section of it.

What do you think?

I have started working in xlsx just because I am quite familiar with it and it is easily portable, but any format able to manage tables, even simple txt, should be okay.

I have never used google docs, but according to your description it fits our needs

(P.S: are you a corporate memeber of google?)

[keysersoze]

Originally Posted by gap

I have started working in xlsx just because I am quite familiar with it and it is easily portable, but any format able to manage tables, even simple txt, should be okay.

I have never used google docs, but according to your description it fits our needs

(P.S: are you a corporate memeber of google?)

Nope—it's just the only thing I could think of that would make it easy for many people to collaborate on one big project. Actually, there are some drawbacks to using it. For one, I'm having trouble formatting the cells the way I want them.

Here is a link to that special operations document. Have a look and tell me if you think it's a feasible format.

https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0B4...it?usp=sharing

P.S. You might be interested in the radio messages for U109's escort mission in November 1941.

[volodya61]

Originally Posted by gap

Any new volunteer? Three people won't go anywhere far..

count me in
but I think I could not be very helpful to collect any historical information..
but I can be helpful in any other case
I need only to solve some problems with my PC and I will able to start..

[keysersoze]

Originally Posted by volodya61

count me in
but I think I could not be very helpful to collect any historical information..
but I can be helpful in any other case
I need only to solve some problems with my PC and I will able to start..

Thanks volodya

[gap]

Originally Posted by keysersoze

Nope—it's just the only thing I could think of that would make it easy for many people to collaborate on one big project.

Just kidding Daniel,
lately the "are you by any chance working for ...?" phrase, in all its variation, has become the ubiquitous answer to someone who is proposing a good product/service here in the forum

Originally Posted by keysersoze

Actually, there are some drawbacks to using it. For one, I'm having trouble formatting the cells the way I want them.

Do you still have the file I sent you a while back? Can you redo it in google documents format?

Originally Posted by keysersoze

Here is a link to that special operations document. Have a look and tell me if you think it's a feasible format.

https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0B4...it?usp=sharing

I think so. We don't really need such a complex spreadsheet for storing those data anyway. As far as we can set a basic formatting and add new rows/columns if required, any format is good. In case we need for more advanced options, we can always copy/paste the text in a traditional spreadsheet application

Originally Posted by keysersoze

P.S. You might be interested in the radio messages for U109's escort mission in November 1941.

Good stuff
I think that escort mission is listed in my compendum for OHII. Scripting those messages would be a nice addition if Trevally will ever implement this sort of missions.

Originally Posted by volodya61

count me in

Thanks Volodya! We are four:

volodya61
Targor Avelany
keysersoze
gap

Any new volunteer? Come on guys, we need to be at least 5 times this number

Originally Posted by volodya61

but I think I could not be very helpful to collect any historical information..
but I can be helpful in any other case

Not mutch historical information to colect Volodya: we just need to copy/paste coordinates from uboat.net to a spreadsheet, and to interpolate missing coordinated, if required. Boring task, I got to admit

Recording the number of torpedoes onboard at the beginning of each patrol (depending on U-boat models and other special ammo, like mines, eventually carried), and the cumulative number of ships sunk for each date is another idea I had for determining if each boat is available for support or not, but this information is also easily accesible from the same website, or from U-historia.com for the ones who understand a bit of Spanish. That's all

Originally Posted by volodya61

I need only to solve some problems with my PC and I will able to start..

I hope you solve the problem with your PC as soon as possible: we need for it nd its human operator

[V13dweller]

I don't expect my modding skill is what is needed here but, I normally just change weapons on ships, change direction on ship nodes, like my mod that redirects the rear depth charge nodes on the Soldati destroyer so it gains depth charge racks instead of KGuns, but I'm not sure if this skill is what is needed for this community project.
I do have quite a lot of spare time I could use for research or other menial tasks like that.

[keysersoze]

Originally Posted by V13dweller

I don't expect my modding skill is what is needed here but, I normally just change weapons on ships, change direction on ship nodes, like my mod that redirects the rear depth charge nodes on the Soldati destroyer so it gains depth charge racks instead of KGuns, but I'm not sure if this skill is what is needed for this community project.
I do have quite a lot of spare time I could use for research or other menial tasks like that.

V13dweller,

This sort of project requires absolutely NO modding ability whatsoever Anyone who can navigate to uboat.net, can copy and paste, and enjoys reading and learning about U-boats can participate.

[keysersoze]

Originally Posted by gap

Just kidding Daniel,
lately the "are you by any chance working for ...?" phrase, in all its variation, has become the ubiquitous answer to someone who is proposing a good product/service here in the forum

To be honest, I wish it was true...a high paying Google job would beat being a poor student

Originally Posted by gap

Do you still have the file I sent you a while back? Can you redo it in google documents format?

Yes, I believe I still have the file. I will see if I can get it into google documents format. By the way, I am completely open to any other suggestions if you think there is an easier or better way. I thought it might be easier for you if we could all collaborate on a single document, rather than if you were forced to assemble each person's spreadsheet into a larger document.

Originally Posted by gap

I think so. We don't really need such a complex spreadsheet for storing those data anyway. As far as we can set a basic formatting and add new rows/columns if required, any format is good. In case we need for more advanced options, we can always copy/paste the text in a traditional spreadsheet application

From what I know of it, Google documents are fairly rudimentary, which is both a good thing and a bad thing for a project like this.

Originally Posted by gap

Good stuff
I think that escort mission is listed in my compendum for OHII. Scripting those messages would be a nice addition if Trevally will ever implement this sort of missions.

I'm pretty sure I saw the Silva Plana escort mission mentioned in your additional missions mod for OHII, so I was sure to include the radio messages for it. By the way, if you can get a copy of Wolfgang Hirschfield's diary, you can read an interesting account of the mission (he was the chief radio operator on U109).

I am trying to add as many historical radio messages as I can for each mission from this site:

http://www.wwiiarchives.net/servlet/action/intercepts/0

Unfortunately, the ULTRA decrypts in that database do not cover the whole war.