[Fireskull]

As part of some planning before I start chugging away on ship models, I wanted to pull together sort of a roundtable discussion to gather up info. I would like to build straight through most of these models and not have to revisit them frequently to make updates over and over as mods evolve. So, I'm posting here to gather some information from folks who have been coding and tinkering with the sim more recently than I have, on what features are currently available in the modded game, what can be feasibly added, and any that are known to be impossible because of hardcoding in the game. I'm also cross-posting this at SAS1946.

I did some planning with pencil and paper last night about how to best tackle what I see as the gaps in the sim's depiction of naval warfare. I'm focusing chiefly on the naval forces involved in the PTO, as my assumption is that any naval-related game features or functions needed in other theaters will also be covered in the PTO. The sim's depiction of the PTO (and as a consequence, other theaters) is missing parts. In the PTO specifically, the air war and naval war were woven together. Since this is a flight sim, my goal is to fill in gaps where the air war interacts with the naval war.

Here (in no particular order) are things I'm examining or hope to have provisions for in-game before I start building ships en masse. I'm approaching this as a 3D artist, so I'm thinking of things in terms of stuff I probably would need to tailor the model for, or include in the model itself:

A. Selectable skins / paint schemes like aircraft?
- many ships went through several paint schemes over the course of the war, and some ships (such as the dozens of destroyers) can be depicted just with texture changes. Also, making individual ship slots for each time a major capital ship got a new paint scheme isn't going to be feasible, I'm already going to have a different model for every refit and major changes. CV Enterprise alone would have more than 15 models if we did a different slot for each paint scheme. Is it possible to make different paint schemes selectable for ships, the way aircraft are?

The stock IL-2 features do not include the ability to select different skins for the same class of ship. I do not know of a mod that allows this, but the SAS Ship Pack 3 team would be the ones most likely to be working on the ability to select skins for a class of ship.

You can create a template for a ship and do the skins yourself or partner with somone to do at least some of them. A few modders allow aircraft templates to be used by anyone for skinning, a kind of Open Source. This can be done with ships, too. The extent of this kind of thing and who may do ship skins can be determined by you.

Until now, each ship had its own slot in the list and to make a ship class with different skins, the modder would have to create a new slot for each newly skinned ship, even of the same class.

I feel that the people who want the new modded ships wouldn't mind if there was a ship for every skin variant of a class.



B. Damage modeling
- From some quick tests in-game and examining some extracted model files, it looks like damage modeling for ships is pretty limited with just one level of moderate damage on some parts. Photo reference I have shows vessels on all sides with really ghastly damage and still floating, fighting - superstructures ruined, decks torn up, turrets gone, badly listing, engulfed in huge fires. Others took hits or armor-piercing aircraft bombs in powder magazines or torpedo storage and exploded. Multiple ships lost their bows to torpedoes. I can depict this sort of massive damage visually as long as I can use all three damage levels the way aircraft do (d1, d2, caps+d4). Is this possible currently? Can more damage modeling (via engine hook objects) be added to depict areas of different armor, torpedo bulges, powder / torpedo magazines, fuel storage, engines, rudder, and other vulnerable parts?

Yes, all these things are possible, but so far we have not seen much in this area. My impression is that the damage modelling of ships is very tricky.

IL-2 doesn't seem to like large animations as shown by the long pauses and stutters when modders have attempted it in the past. Compression of the animation would help but not eliminate these problems.

EDIT: B.1: On further testing, multi-barrel gun turrets don't fire from multiple guns. The KGV, Tirpitz, and any other multi-gun turret appears to just fire a single projectile. That IS a crucial fix.

Pretty much everything past this point is "would be awesome but isn't absolutely vital."

I don't know the answer to this but I assume that the single gun fire per turret is fixed in the code somewhere. Probably this is a job for a coder to mod. Remember that I am not certain about this one.

C. Non-carrier naval aircraft
- Practically every battleship and many cruisers carried catapult-launched scout planes that also assisted with directing gunfire. I'm assuming it's possible to launch them from a catapult currently (basically a very small CV deck with the Catapult mod). What about underway crane recovery? It's basically an arrestor cable in reverse that doesn't stretch. This could be very cool for a Kingfisher or Seagull scout plane once they're built.

Almost anything is possible with the modelling and code skills, but so far this has not been done to my knowledge. We have seen carrier catapult mod in the last few months, so the knowledge to add movable parts to the model is out there. Likely, this is understood by the Ship Pack 3 guys at SAS.

D. CV Deck operations
- It would be very neat to depict the hangars and elevators of the CVs, and have the option of spawning in the hangar. I'm thinking the Zveno attachment system might come in handy for that functionality, maybe? If it's possible, it would need to be added before I made the CVs, so I could build the CV models with the hangars and elevators included.
- Can we add important deck personnel to the CV decks? Just LSO, Catapult officer, other major deck crew involved in launching, recovering, or moving planes on the deck. We have the running character models and animations already, I'll provide textures for different personnel.

This would be awesome. I was just thinking about this today. All of this is possible, but the game engine of IL-2 must make animations very challenging because we have seen little of it in IL-2 from modders. Smoke animations, for example, have resulted in bad stutterin of IL-2 at times, though some modders manage to create an animation which has acceptable demand on the ordinary graphics system. Movement of large parts of a ship could be done, but obviously there is a limit to the number of them at one time which would allow smooth IL-2 operation.

E. Visual details
- Many multi-barrel turrets allowed the different barrels to be aimed at different elevations. Would be neat, not huge.
- Ship gun barrels don't recoil. Minor but annoying.


Selectable skins on ships and improved damage modeling that requires provisions in the game's model file are the big ones. Can those of you who know the game under the hood better than me lend me your insight? Once I have more info on this, it will help me make firmer plans for my process through these ship models.

In total, these are technical questions involving solutions in 3D modelling, animations, and coding. Though the SAS Ship Pack 3 team can answer much of this and provide some specific technical help to reach your goals, you will need the help of other IL-2 modders who know how to handle the code of IL-2. The complete knowledge base is spread over several IL-2 modding communities for this level of sophistication.


I am sure that people will be answering your questions, but be prepared for long conversations because of the volume of issues to cover. The goals that you have are achievable, yet require much communication and work.

The things that you want to do with ships would be much appreciated with IL-2 fans.


Fireskull