[PlaneEater]

UPDATE: Check at the bottom for edits and a very *interesting* screenshot

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?

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?

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."

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.

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.

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.

EDIT 2: I've gotten a hands-on look at the original Lexington model for the game. I have found some interesting things.

1. I can confirm that currently multi-gun turrets are only firing from one barrel. There is only one ShellStart object per turret.
2. Apparently, at some point, Oleg added 8-bit transparency and never bothered to tell most of the artists. The Lexington (and I'm assuming the other carriers) make use of 8-bit alpha to blend the main skin texture with a tiled wood texture to create the finished deck shader. It's done with two layers of polys, which is major old-fashioned, but it does work, and more importantly, THE SIM CAN USE 8 BIT TRANSPARENCY. THAT'S FRIGGIN' AWESOME! You can make some VERY gorgeous models, even without SM3.0 effects, as long as you have 8 bit transparency.

3. I bet most of you have never seen this view from the Lexington before:




Now isn't THAT interesting.

[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

[KG64_Cnopicilin]

Well, at least you can destroy the guns from the aircraft carriers one at the time, they will burst in flames when shot long enough.

[asheshouse]

The point about each turret only having a single ShellStart is correct for all ships. This results in an imbalance between ships with numerous single barrel turrets and those with twin or triple barrel turrets.

At present each turret can only have a single zone of fire which is ok for bow and stern turrets but mid ship turrets need two zones of fire to be defined which is currently not possible. This can be seen on Marat where only one of the two central turrets can fire to each side.

For FPS reasons it is still not practical to represent a realistic rate of AA fire from a group of ships. The fire rate needs to be reduced to maintain a good FPS. HSFX have addressed this in part by adopting "effective" ranges so that the smaller guns only join in at close range.

The largest game engine omission at the moment, in my view, is the lack of any sort of AI for ships. If we approach this from the pilots point of view, it is unrealistic that your target ship takes no evasive action to avoid bombs or even torpedoes. Creating an AI for ships should be top priority for any ship related coding work.

Ashe

[PlaneEater]

The point about each turret only having a single ShellStart is correct for all ships. This results in an imbalance between ships with numerous single barrel turrets and those with twin or triple barrel turrets.

At present each turret can only have a single zone of fire which is ok for bow and stern turrets but mid ship turrets need two zones of fire to be defined which is currently not possible. This can be seen on Marat where only one of the two central turrets can fire to each side.

For FPS reasons it is still not practical to represent a realistic rate of AA fire from a group of ships. The fire rate needs to be reduced to maintain a good FPS. HSFX have addressed this in part by adopting "effective" ranges so that the smaller guns only join in at close range.

The largest game engine omission at the moment, in my view, is the lack of any sort of AI for ships. If we approach this from the pilots point of view, it is unrealistic that your target ship takes no evasive action to avoid bombs or even torpedoes. Creating an AI for ships should be top priority for any ship related coding work.

Ashe

I thought of both those factors, intended to mention them, aaaand... oops. Good catch, asheshouse . I did a test last night that involved putting a battle line of KGV generics within spitting distance of two Tirpitz, and scattered around a few Fletchers and Z class DDs. The Tirptizes won. My hunch is that it has to do with the KGV effectively having only three guns.

Other AI objects have turrets that fire from both barrels - the Sturmovik and Stuka rear gunners, and the B-29 fires from all four barrels with each of its turrets. My hunch is that correcting the multi-barrel turret issue is feasible. I couldn't say for certain about the restricted fire arcs. Worst case, we can very nicely ask Team Daidalos to include a quick code-based fix in their next patch.

As far as AI, yes, ships need to maneuver, dodge, and evade properly, especially against air attack. That's going to involve heavy AI scripting and pathfinding, both of which I know practically nothing about other than I know I don't know it. Any AI routines added into that will also have to be aware of any new features that are added such as more complex damage modeling. That's all a coding job, so it's beyond my role as an artist. That is where I will need to link arms with some of the skilled coders in the IL-2 mod communities to make that element happen.


For naval AAA fire, I think with a hard look at optimizing effects and making careful compromises, I bet we can come close. As an artist, I can help work on cutting down the visual load of effects to a bare minimum while maintaining the necessary elements of realism. Some aggressive culling of smoke / flak effects and tuning draw distances will probably help. Full AAA activity online is probably going to remain impossible for a while, and that will probably require more compromises.

[Murph]

Another thing to consider when talking about ship AI is gunner accuracy. Different navies used different systems, with a wide range of accuracy.
This was seen during the naval battle between IJN battleships and cruisers versus USN destroyers and destroyer escorts off the Philippines, for example. The IJN vessels used dye markers to help their various gun stations to correct their aim. This meant having to expend rounds just to get close to target. The USN ships used computerized fire-control systems, and thus hit what they were aiming at nearly every time. The USN suffered bad losses, but they fought a much stronger IJN task force to a draw.
As long as we're talking about improving Naval gunnery AI we ought to consider having it vary by navy.

[Plantoid 1]

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.

Fireskull:
I'm in the midst of trying to make accurate skins for the CVLs involved in Operation Hailstone - the attack on Truk Lagoon Februrary 17-18, 1943. I figured to put the skins in a folder and activate the folder before the missions start.

The problem I have is that when I get the skins to work in PhotoShop by going through the ViewIMF tga converter, I get a change in file size from 1026 to 1025 and then the game won't read this file and reverts to the file deeper in the game. I've converted the skin1o.tgb into a tga file by the simple expediant of changing the 'b' at the end of the file extension to an 'a' and then going through ViewIMF and PhotoShop. When this file is saved subsequently the file size drops from 4099 to 4097 but the game still reads it successfully. Any idea what I'm doing wrong and/or can you point me in the right direction?

Thanks all for any help.

Great days all.

[Murph]

BTW, nice below-decks view. Is this from the original modeling plan for Pacific Fighters?

[David603]

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.

Fireskull:
I'm in the midst of trying to make accurate skins for the CVLs involved in Operation Hailstone - the attack on Truk Lagoon Februrary 17-18, 1943. I figured to put the skins in a folder and activate the folder before the missions start.

The problem I have is that when I get the skins to work in PhotoShop by going through the ViewIMF tga converter, I get a change in file size from 1026 to 1025 and then the game won't read this file and reverts to the file deeper in the game. I've converted the skin1o.tgb into a tga file by the simple expediant of changing the 'b' at the end of the file extension to an 'a' and then going through ViewIMF and PhotoShop. When this file is saved subsequently the file size drops from 4099 to 4097 but the game still reads it successfully. Any idea what I'm doing wrong and/or can you point me in the right direction?

Thanks all for any help.

Great days all.

Can't PhotoShop use and save .tga files anyway? If it can't I would recommend getting Gimp. You could save your skins in Photoshop as a PSD file, then open them up in Gimp and resave as a .tga. I have used Gimp myself to make ship skins, and it works very well. To import .tgas to PhotoShop you would reverse the process.

[Plantoid 1]

David603:

Oh yes, PhotoShop can save tga files and, in most cases, can open them as well. However, Il2's tgas are some kind of proprietary type and need converting first. Subsequent saves through PS will normally work but, again, the file size is what has me stumped.

Can Gimp read the tga files right out of Il2 without converting first?

Great days all.

[PlaneEater]

BTW, nice below-decks view. Is this from the original modeling plan for Pacific Fighters?

The original plan was to model hangars for the carriers and to have working elevators. It wasn't completed and I don't believe all the existing CV models as they are in the game feature hangars in their models (they were stripped out to save textures and polycount).

That's one of several reasons I'm revisiting all of this... 8)

[KG64_Cnopicilin]

BTW, nice below-decks view. Is this from the original modeling plan for Pacific Fighters?

The original plan was to model hangars for the carriers and to have working elevators. It wasn't completed and I don't believe all the existing CV models as they are in the game feature hangars in their models (they were stripped out to save textures and polycount).

That's one of several reasons I'm revisiting all of this... 8)

That would have been so cool.

[Fireskull]

Good day, guys


I was mostly away from the website for a couple days, so pardon the delay.



PlaneEater,

Poly count is very important in IL-2. As you already realize, these are the most important things to remember: Typically, the modders are creating ships with the lowest number of polygons for IL-2 and depending on textures for the visual effect of more detail. Of course, this keeps FPS high while shifting the demand to the more artistic side which is texture and paint.



Plantoid,

I use GIMP for aircraft skinning. The ship skin technique is something that I have not done, but read a bit about it. I have read that GIMP has been used for ships, so that is in fact a viable option. GIMP is great.


As for a long discussion about understanding the whole technical process of creating and importing ships or ship skins into IL-2, I don't feel that Plane Eater want this topic to go there - at least not yet. He has more general questions that need to be answered first.


Please open a topic for your own questions. People will notice the title if you make a descriptive one, you'll get more help, and it will come faster.



David603,

Thanks for pointing Plantoid in the right general direction. You can help him in his own topic.



Fireskull

[PlaneEater]

Yup, I'm aware of the polycount concerns and IL-2 original limits. I argued with Oleg about them more than once. And now that he's not the one with final say about my models... :wink:

Since I don't want to redo ALL of this work a few short years from now for the Storm of War engine, I'm building these ships at higher detail than the original IL2 ships (which were not that impressive, to be honest). I'll chop down the LOD models very aggressively to maintain performance and framerate, and make sure that the hangar models crunch down first so they're not being shown unless you're in them, but I'm not going to stay within the ridiculous 20k limit Oleg imposed. I'm expecting more along the lines of 30-35k, possibly 40 for more complex ships (Iowas, Yamato, Kongo, etc).

Trust me that I can make these work at higher detail and keep them performant - I'm a trained professional. 8)

[David603]

PlaneEater,

Perhaps you could build an unused LOD based on SOW specs (I'm sure Oleg would be happy to give you these since you used to work for him), and use the second LOD as the Il2 LOD0? Then when SOW rolls around you would be able use your high detail model as the LOD0 and the Il2 LOD0 as the LOD1 and so on.

Regards