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Author Topic: Damage to ships using guns  (Read 22503 times)

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Pursuivant

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Re: Damage to ships using guns
« Reply #24 on: August 05, 2011, 07:42:33 AM »

Just trying to get a bit more immersion and unpredictability into the game, at the moment the stopping of the firing of the guns is a giveaway that the ship is sinking.

There's also the problem that ships, especially big ships, sink way too fast. There's no way that an aircraft carrier or battleship is going to sink in just a couple minutes. Unless the ship blows up, like the HMS Hood, it's going to take at least 10-20 minutes to go down. For example, the cruiser USS Indianapolis took 12 minutes to sink, and, while the order to abandon ship was given quite late on the IJN Yamamoto, by that time she had already been sinking for about 20 minutes.

On the other hand, a large mortally wounded ship can take hours or days to sink and can take ridiculous amounts of damage before doing so. For example, the USS Hornet, was mortally wounded and under tow when she took another torpedo hit which made her captain give the order to abandon ship. The order was then given to sink her. Despite having already taking numerous bomb and torpedo hits, she then absorbed over 400 5 inch rounds fired by her escort destroyers, before finally being finished off with a salvo of 4 torpedoes from attacking Japanese cruisers.

Also, sometimes a ship might be mortally damaged due to damage which doesn't breach the hull. In that case, the ship is just as "dead" as if it had sunk. Also, in some cases, fires will get out of control with no way to fight the fire and the serious risk that the ship will explode. In those cases, the crew will also abandon ship, possibly scuttling the ship before they leave. Examples include the USS Hornet, described above, as well as ships such as the USS Princeton and KMS Kororan.

In the game, though, I can see why the designers made the choices they did regarding ship sinking behavior. It's more fun if you immediately get credited with the kill and if the ship sinks fast, so you can see it going down. Realistically, though, killing a big ship using WW2 era aircraft requires squadrons of aircraft. While one pilot or crew might get credit for the sinking, it's actually the entire squadron or fleet which should get credit for the sinking.
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Murray

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Re: Damage to ships using guns
« Reply #25 on: August 05, 2011, 03:06:47 PM »

Some ships did sink right away. Especially the smaller ships. Only the ones where torpedoes blew holes in the hull took a while to sink (depending on the quality of their water tight hatches?)

Most of the time those torpedoes blow up and do something catastrophic. The smaller the ship the more likely they'll hit a vital area (boiler room, magazine, whatever). There are 2 sides to the story. It only took seconds to see HMS Hood completely gone. Some took days, some took seconds. Some just didn't sink at all.

Considering the overly simple way IL2 models ship AI and ship damage, it would make ships seem like they are invulnerable to model the "days" approach. Nobody will be flying the same map for days to see those results. On the other hand, you put enough into a ship and it blows up, regardless of bombs or torpedoes.

I would say it is a much better gameplay balance to allow ships to fully sink inside the time frame of an attack. Something that (as you say) can be enjoyed by the player. Perhaps that means having more than a "normal" required amount of explosive hit the target. Maybe that is why IL2 requires so many torpedoes to sink ships -- perhaps they came up with some simplified version of what I describe here.
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slipper

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Re: Damage to ships using guns
« Reply #26 on: August 05, 2011, 04:14:41 PM »

Thanks all for all the discussions. Some very good points made.

What i was really after is some way to simulate a real situation. In reality an enemy flying a plane would not know that a ship was sunk until he saw it sink.

At the moment in the game a player knows a ship is sunk the minute the guns stop firing and the moment the AI give up attacking it, wether the ship looks intact or not. This is giving the player information he would not have about an enemy ship.

I was therefore looking for some way for the guns to keep firing until the ship sinks (ok probably not realistic either,but preferable to what we have) and/or someway for the AI to not realise a ship is destroyed until it is actually sinking.

cheers all

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Pursuivant

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Re: Damage to ships using guns
« Reply #27 on: August 05, 2011, 06:35:19 PM »

Some ships did sink right away. Especially the smaller ships. Only the ones where torpedoes blew holes in the hull took a while to sink (depending on the quality of their water tight hatches?)

Actually, the ones that took a really long time to sink were the ships with uncontrollable fires due to bombs or artillery shells, but intact hulls. As torpedo plane pilots liked to say, "If you want to put a hole in a ship, use a bomb. If you want to sink her, use a torpedo."

If a ship had an intact hull, but fires raging out of control, the fire would burn until it reached the magazine of a warship, then the ship would blow up. If the magazines had been flooded, or the ship had no magazines, the fire might burn for days before it burnt out, leaving behind a useless floating hulk. In such cases, the remains of the ship are towed to port so the hull can be scrapped or repaired, or the ship is sunk by some means.

Most of the time those torpedoes blow up and do something catastrophic. The smaller the ship the more likely they'll hit a vital area (boiler room, magazine, whatever). There are 2 sides to the story. It only took seconds to see HMS Hood completely gone. Some took days, some took seconds. Some just didn't sink at all.

I think we're basically in agreement here, but I also think that you're missing the difference between damage required to effectively put the ship out of action - hits to vital systems, uncontrollable fires - and damage required to sink the ship. You can effectively "destroy" a ship without sinking her - e.g., USS Yorktown, Hornet, Franklin (in the last case, the only reason that the crew didn't abandon ship is that the communicators were so badly damaged that the order couldn't be sent). Also, I think that we're both looking for extreme cases to support our views, when we should actually be trying to model average behavior for a sinking ship.

To get realistic ship damage and sinking behavior like we're looking for, you'd need to model internal ship systems, like those in planes are modeled, and set up some chance of a critical hit to a particular internal system, along with a minimum weapon strength needed to get that effect, plus some sort of hull breach factor which determines if the ship sinks or lists and how fast it goes down. Also, you'd need to be able to disable or cripple ship sub-systems, like guns or carried aircraft.

For extra realism, you could model compartments of the ship and have some sort of model which determines how fast they fill up with water, which in turn would determine how the ship lists, settles or sinks. In extreme cases, you could also have end cap textures and breaking parts for sections of the ship, so the the ship might possibly break apart due to damage, or break apart as it sinks.

Then, once you've got all that modeled, you can have a realism setting which allows "dead" ships to sink quickly, regardless of how fast they'd actually sink.

For aircraft AI, you just set a delay on the time it takes for aircraft to recognize that the ship is "dead." I think that this might be easy to do, since there's probably a timed sinking routine. Just set the recognition time to something like half the time needed for the ship to sink.

I'd also love to see invisible fire, explosion and smoke trigger options which could be added to any object in the game, to simulate the presence of highly flammable or explosive materials. For example, if you want to simulate a building/truck/ship filled with TNT, you just add the "10,000 lb. bomb" trigger to your object. When the object the trigger is attached to takes a certain amount of damage, BANG! Likewise, if you want to simulate a target filled with diesel fuel (flammable, but not particularly explosive), you combine the "really big fire" and "huge black smoke cloud" triggers, to create impressive fires. For extra fun, you could add secondary smoke, fire or explosion triggers which only are activated sometime after the main trigger is activated. This would represent fire spreading or setting off explosions.
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western0221

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Re: Damage to ships using guns
« Reply #28 on: August 05, 2011, 07:08:11 PM »

I can't agree to slikk.
I think default IL-2 1946 ships' guns TOO WEAK!!

I usually test my/our ship MODs how durability they have, under enemy shots or enemy bombs.
Then their guns are always broken too easy.

If I gave a chance to change parameters of gun's strength in ships.ini,
I make them more tough.

slikk's parameters are in his dream.
NOT REAL.
I wish no one use slikk's parameter.
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Slikk

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Re: Damage to ships using guns
« Reply #29 on: August 06, 2011, 03:22:36 AM »

@ western0221

At first I didn’t know what you were talking about, but after taking another look at this I see now that I have released the wrong set of parameters by mistake. The // Gun Durability section doesn’t even have anything to do with this mod at all. It’s a wonder that any of you got any results with those parameters. The // Hull Durability parameters are the correct ones I should have posted.

So those of you that have already changed your // Gun Durability text, put your original text back in the // Gun Durability section and put the text below into the // Hull Durability section and it should work as intended. Sorry about that guys. I guess that’s what happens when you try and do too many things at one time. Anyway, here are the correct parameters...

[strength_HullMedium]
MinShotCaliber    0.0127 //0.037
NumShots          680 //106
MinHitExplTNT     13.8 //10
NumHitExpl        13.8 //11.2
MinNearExplTNT    20 //49
NumNearExpl       5 //16

[strength_HullLarge]
MinShotCaliber    0.0127 //0.05
NumShots          1000 //118
MinHitExplTNT     16 //10
NumHitExpl        16 //18
MinNearExplTNT    30 //70
NumNearExpl       8 //18

@ Joberg

Now I see why it didn’t work for you, but if you try it again with these parameters you should be good to go.

Slikk
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Joberg

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Re: Damage to ships using guns
« Reply #30 on: August 07, 2011, 11:30:31 AM »

Thanks, I was able to set several ships on fire with cannons this time! This is great!

Incidentally, I installed this in my 4.10+DBW copy of the game but forgot to back up my ships file before I added those earlier changes. I still have my 4.09+UP as a separate copy.Would that section of the ships.ini the same as the original 4.10 one for me to copy/paste it and fix the gun durability section back to normal?
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Alien_12

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Re: Damage to ships using guns
« Reply #31 on: August 11, 2011, 09:06:52 AM »

Could anyone post entire file for me? I have UP3RC4 stock installed.
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Wildchild

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Re: Damage to ships using guns
« Reply #32 on: August 18, 2011, 10:57:12 PM »

Any way we can get this installed for UP3 slikk? I play online and this would be a huge advantage to all of us. But if it's just 1 player it's cheating :/
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Slikk

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Re: Damage to ships using guns
« Reply #33 on: August 19, 2011, 12:06:43 AM »

It would probably be best to make a post on this over at the ultrapack site. If there's enough interest it just might get added.

Slikk
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Wildchild

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Re: Damage to ships using guns
« Reply #34 on: August 19, 2011, 10:00:48 AM »

Any chamce you could do that? :P
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slipper

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Re: Damage to ships using guns
« Reply #35 on: September 18, 2011, 05:06:28 PM »

Hi all

Was just wondering if there are still any plans to complete and release a combined ship damage mod please? There is a bit of information available around the different forums, but its a bit fragmented and confusing.

cheers 

slipper
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