WhiteBoySamurai

Taking off for CAP over the big battle group. The naval formations are really quite nice in this game. It's hard to tell from this altitude, but every ship in this pic other than the carrier was built by me. Feels good, man.

Thanks, those areas needed some attention. How's this? Bridge: I considered cutting out glass (.tga) windows like I did with the Burke and Kongou, but I think I'll save that for when I have more free time. Harpoon canisters: I do all the artificial shadows and stuff by hand because I do not grok baking. I remember trying to follow a tutorial on ambient occlusion, and the damn thing output 100+ maps, one for every component of the model. So then I'm expected to meticulously re-scale and position all those onto the main texture and merge down with just the right degree of transparency? If that's what it takes to be a professional, maybe I'll just try knitting or origami instead. But, if someone could point me to a guide showing an easier and faster way to do it, I would be most grateful.

I'm doing some visual updates for many of my ships, starting with the Ticonderoga, which I'll be releasing in an all-in-one superpack of every single variant and refit. I added detail to the forward hull, made a new anchor, tweaked the masts a bit, installed some SRBOC launchers, and retextured a few other areas. Later variants are also well on their way. Here's the "last" Ticonderoga, CG-73 Port Royal. Notice the new Bushmaster cannons on the stern deck. With all the new details, the ship is about 48000 polygons close in (still roughly 10k max distance). The Leahy and Bainbridge are getting a lot of work. I've already rebuilt the hull from scratch and will focus on making them look nicer overall. The Arleigh Burke, Kongo, and Freedom will also get some polishing along with new improved close-in weapon performance. New ships are still coming as promised, but I can only ask for your patience.

It's not just you. Even with your updated data, which I think is about as good as it's going to get, CIWS on those ships (and even stock ships sometimes) will just randomly fail for me, on average once in every 5-10 runs of the simulation. It seems to happen most often when there are multiple ASMs coming in at roughly the same time. If there's a stream of them, the gunner will pick one off at a time with a reasonably high degree of success. But if they reach CIWS range at roughly the same time, I think the gunner gets confused and doesn't know which one to attack. For some good news, I made a few minor tweaks to the 57mm gun on the LCS (TimedFuse=False) and now it's a surprisingly effective weapon against ASMs. It has somewhat similar specs to the Soviet 57mm gun Fubar mentioned, so fast medium caliber guns may occupy some sort of sweet spot. The ship's other guns are next to useless against fast sea skimmers, though, and the main gun and RAM can get saturated quickly. I'm sure critics of the LCS would be happy to say "I told you so." >_> Yes, sir, we'll get it working or die get really frustrated trying. For the record, I have much respect for Fubar and the amount of time he's put in with this community, and I value any insight he can share with us.

I had experimented with two different methods, one which tied the same pivot to two gunners (which resulted in the jitters that you mentioned), and the other was to create new dummy launch nodes attached to the existing Kashtan nodes within the model hierarchy. It's an inelegant solution, true, but it's vastly more effective than before. In my testing so far, the main gunner and virtual gunner will always point in the same direction once they've acquired a target, so the missiles still appear to be launching properly as with a single gunner. But anyway, of course I've set ShowMissile to FALSE on the SA-N-11s. They're concealed in canisters. No sense forcing the game to render a dozen objects that the player can't see at all. Thank you once again. There is a noticeable improvement in their performance now. It does seem that lowering the GunRange seems to be the key, all other things being equal. Counter-intuitive, but hey, whatever works. The sub-caliber rounds seem to help too. I'm still puzzled why the stock ships left out GunStabilization and GunRadarTracking on their weapons. Leaving them in or taking them out seems to have no visible effect on my end, anyway.

Thanks for posting up the test mission, KJakker. I've had that problem with third party ship CIWS, even the ones I've built. On some days, they'll be on their game, and take out just about everything thrown at them. But a lot of times, they fire one burst and then duh herp derp how do I shot gun. With the gun reliability set at at least 100, I can't imagine that jamming is the cause. I get the same result with the stock "20mm_mk15" gun data anyway. If the gunners are not "seeing" the targets for some reason, it could be a ViewportPosition issue. Still, both my ships and the stock ones use viewports positioned near each individual gun, a short distance above the barrel. Not sure what else it could be. On the bright side, I was able to solve the Kashtan Konfusion issue on the Kirov, and it will be included with the next update. The solution came to me in a dream; all I had to do was to create a gunner within a gunner. (This involves creating new nodes on the model, so unfortunately I won't be able to apply this fix to the Udaloy II or other ships that use the Kashtan.)

Just put them in the PilotData folder. Should be able to select them from the pilot screen in game after that.

A big thank you to those of you who have given votes, requests, and constructive comments. So far, it looks like the Kuznetsov, Sovremenny, and Ka-25 will be my next big projects. These will take quite a bit of time, and I can't promise that I'll get to the rest of the requests in a timely fashion, but I'll see what I can do. EDIT: Looks like there might already be a Kuznetsov nearing completion, so I'll hold off on that. I haven't gotten the hang of specular mapping yet (how many 3rd party aircraft even have it?), but all of my updated ships have bump mapping. If for any reason you don't feel it's worth the frame rate hit, just find the "_____bump.jpg" and yank it out of the ship's folder. Should save you at least 3MB of video memory. Anyway, finding a balance between performance and detail is difficult, especially since users have wildly different machines, and often wildly different preferences and/or standards. I just hope that any new or potential model makers out there don't get discouraged by lofty expectations. You mean this? http://en.wikipedia....ass_patrol_boat I could make those, but only if they are really sexships. :3 I'm sure many of us frequently find ourselves less than 100m behind a MiG while lining up for a gun kill, so there's reason to appreciate a little detail. Also, we can throw in a cockpit and fly them if we wish. Obviously they have to be made to a different standard compared to ground objects.

I'll be updating the Burkes and the CG-52 (actually the entire Ticonderoga class, even flights that I haven't released yet) with the new data, plus a few new goodies, so please bear with me. I'll keep an eye out for your CIWS thread, thanks.

To be fair, the A-Team's Long Beach was actually updated recently, with all three missile launchers working and an improved mesh and skin. I totally understand about wanting a model with no usage restrictions, but I'd prefer to work on ships that no one's done yet. (I make exception for the Charles de Gaulle, because the existing one is basically unusable as it is.) By the way, I'm working on a neat little system that may get retrofitted onto many of my ships if it works well enough. Yep, ship-board countermeasures.

Thanks for the replies so far! I think I'll make this my official shipyard thread for my future releases. I think the A-Team has a straight-decked Essex, though it's based on a different model? Not sure. But yeah, I can do one if you need it. I was actually thinking of doing a Russian Alligator class or Ropucha class lander, but good pictures are hard to come by. I'm starting to think that the entire Soviet Union itself was grainy and black-and-white up until the mid 80s, not just the photography. I'm working on an update for the Leahy and Bainbridge now; those were indeed made in a rush. I've reshaped the hull and parts of the superstructure, and will add a bit more detail. If there are other ships you feel need visual upgrades, let me know.

File Name: Modern French frigate update pack File Submitter: WhiteBoySamurai File Submitted: 27 April 2012 File Category: SF2 Series Add On Objects This package includes the FREMM class frigate, La Fayette class frigate, and the Kang Ding class frigate (a La Fayette derivative built for Taiwan) updated to SF2:NA standards. These include updated weapon and data entries, ship names and numbers, collision meshes, radars, and very minor texture tweaks. Thanks to: Winterhunter for the FREMM Aleks1 for the La Fayette Click here to download this file

French vessels aren't my specialty, but I can try. In particular, I'd like to do a Horizon class someday. (Stealthy designs = fewer polygons = less work for me! )

Glad you like it! Unfortunately I'll only be able to do this sort of thing for my own ships, not the Type 23 or other peoples' VLS ships. It requires a pivot node within the model for the gunner to use. Yes, that's pretty much exactly what I did. Specifically, I made one fake launcher per 32-cell VLS, so the DDGs have 3, and Tico refit will have four of them.

File Name: Kirov class battlecruiser (1988 and 1998) File Submitter: WhiteBoySamurai File Submitted: 22 April 2012 File Category: Cruisers This package contains the third and fourth ships of the Kirov class battlecruisers: Admiral Nakhimov (ex-Kalinin) in commission since 1988, and Pyotr Velikiy (ex-Yury Andropov), in commission since 1998. The Kirov class are currently the world's only nuclear powered surface combatants and the most heavily armed warships in service today. With layered air defense systems, four different SAM types, and six twin gatling CIWS, these vessels are fearsome opponents. Be warned that once installed, these vessels will begin appearing in Soviet battlegroups and significantly increase the challenge level. Note that the Shipwreck anti-ship missiles are not yet functional due to game engine limitations. Each ship has two different hull numbers and decal sets representing their service before and after the fall of the Soviet Union, including authentic Russian language name stencils. As a bonus, additional materials are included to create a modern "friendly" Russian military if you have not done so already. These ships are also equipped with a functional helicopter deck, but no fake arresting wires are included, so fly with care. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, or constructive criticisms regarding this model, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you! Click here to download this file

I'm seeing both the randomly ineffectual IRM warheads and radar-guided missiles that snap around and fly backwards after a miss quite a lot. Perhaps related to problem 2, I've noticed that sometimes a missile (be it a SAM or AAM) will miss me, and the missile lock tone will stop... and then the exact same missile will hit me moments later. And these aren't necessarily modded crazy-high-off-boresight ones either. Maybe missiles can indeed make a second pass now...? Try these values for JDAMs and similar GPS-guided weapons: LockonChance=100 LaunchReliability=100 ArmingTime=4.000000 SeekerFOV=30.000000 SeekerGimbleLimit=180.000000 SeekerTrackRate=30.000000 SeekerRange=30000.000000 I used to get that same problem, but with this they'll always at least attempt to go after your target. My rationale is that GPS doesn't need to "lock on" to anything. It just drops toward where it's been programmed. I upped the CEP a bit though, for balance.

Yes, I'm aware of that, but just musing over adding the weapon if/when we implement some submarines into the game. Regardless, though, in game it would probably end up being a gimmicky-but-conventional anti-ship missile.