New Models!

[Martes]

The dear Surprise:

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[Martes]

She turned out to be difficult but very interesting ship.

In a sense I have passed all her transformations along, starting with drawings and hull draft for the original Rose, then finding the replica hull lines, and modifying accordingly, then incorporating the Rose to Surprise modifications using photos, as no plans exist that I am aware of.

The ship as she is now turns out to be a complete mix of various design features. The profile is unmistakably British, while the hull lines are much more French, and the stern also, and for some reason the transom appears to resemble rounded Chapman style. But in the end she's just so cute.

 

[Martes]

The shipyard is fitting out the breathtakingly beautiful La Virginie:

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With special thanks to @Alex Connor for his model he sent me last year. I couldn't use most of it, since it was plagued by the very persistent "no planking included" bug, but it did provide an excellent inspiration, and gave me the sheer line for painting scheme. Which, by the way, I am going to apply to Egyptienne, since it fits her remarkably, and much better than the current narrow stripe.

She makes an excellent standard 38-gunner of the Revolutionary wars (and late times of the French Royal navy). I tried to keep as much of her round Frenchness as I could - the head decorations, the roundhouse aft, the stern, only adding forecastle bulwarks according to british modification plan.

And I have to admit, I do have a certain weakness to those roundhouses on frigates. I know they are bad, contribute to leewardness, and some authors just hate them. But nevertheless.

 

[Martes]

The backbone of the British cruisers - Apollo/Euryalus class 36-gun frigate:

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And the completed La Virginie:

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I just didn't have a chance to convert her yet.

Also, Endymion got improved stern galleries in the meantime and minor fixes here and there.

 

[Martes]

Whew!

Finally got the Virginie and Euryalus sailing:

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It turned out to be a simultaneous work on 3 ships, as I found I terribly messed up with the aft part of the Endymion (mistaking the position of profiles, that resulted in much narrower and imbalanced hull), so that had to be redone.

As a bonus, though, I got another ship using a different texture on the same model, as the modified Endymion-class (Liffey, etc., and the earlier Russian Speshny's at least) share basically the same hull, and here comes the dubious the advantage of painting gunports instead of modelling them:

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All in all it leaves us with 5 models completed to the same standard, the Colossus 74, Endymion 40, Virginie 38, Euryalus 36, and the little Surprise as 26 post-ship. That leaves the 32 (12) slot to be filled at some point, and two capital ships and four frigates I already made to update, but with this set the game is quite playable already.

 

[Martes]

In the meantime, the shipyard is very proud to unveil the latest project in the works, the most beautiful, original and extravagant ship of the line there ever was.

The 80-gun Christian VII:​

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As you might have noticed, I like British ships. But here is a ship that the British were fascinated with so much, they went to a full scale war to get one. Two. Around ten. All that there are.
(And, to tell the truth, I would have too )

They even copied the lines and produced four different ship classes - a 80-gun, a 74, a 50 and a heavy frigate - all based on this design.

And, tragically, the original owners of the ship, the Danes, not only didn't even use her, keeping in storage, but disposed of her author, F.C.H. Hohlenberg, designer of those sterns, long before the British came for her. You can read the long story here. I wonder why the Admiralty did not dispatch a ship to capture him on the way to exile, huh.

Incidentally, for some time Christian VII was a flagship of Sir Edward Pellew - that of the Indefatigable.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Wow, that IS a special design!

 

[Martes]

While the Christian VII is still under construction, here is a small skinning showcase:

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You can see the Endymion, Euryalus, Colossus and Surprise in two different sets of paint, earlier Georgian (characterized by pronounced sheer and wider stripes) and later Napoleonic (flatter and narrower stripes, chequer layout for multi-decker ships). While primarily eye-candy (except the fact, that "napoleonic" Endymion modification had 2 additional gunports) this provides greater flexibility to distinguish different ships within the same scenario, underlining their age, national preference, etc. After all, they never were actually uniformly painted, neither by color nor by scheme.

 

[Martes]

A sense of scale. The camera in the game produces different views for ships of different sizes, so when trying to dock a cutter to a frigate, you can - finally - get an impression of how large it really is.

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Lately I have been experimenting with a system for scenario generation using various tables for encounters and conditions, heavily drawing from various tabletop games. Manual at this point (you sdetermine everything and then have to set up a scenario in editor). But even that way it's rather fun.

...Also, I think I have polished the Endy to a state nearing perfection considering the detail limitations and can move forward...

 

[Martes]

One of the things that did always annoy me in the original game (but thanks to which I decided to try to make new models) was excessive pitching of the ships on the sea. Of course, the sea is actually flat here, differing in weather in color and texture mostly, and that should have been representing the waves, but they really went too far.
Thankfully, the parameters for pitching and rolling (speed and limits) were left in the ini files.
So after watching Hermione under sail and tons of old paintings, I hope I got it right:

 

[Martes]

One thing I can't stop, it seems, is tinkering with the Endymion. It has something to do with being the fastest frigate of all times, I guess.
To complete the set, I made a separate model for the Pomone:

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The hulls are almost identical, except for somewhat different stern - lower transom, a roundhouse and characteristic French horseshoe form.
While the NMM archives have her drawing "as taken", I allowed a little liberty referencing this painting by Thomas Luny, which seems to be rather accurate and was probably made from life:

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The changes included prolonging the roundhouse to mizzen mast, very slightly changing the inclination of stern gallery windows and retaining Endymion's head - as she definitely did feature different configurations during service.

 

[Martes]

Found a way to correct another long-standing issue - visibility of the shrouds on large ships.

Most rigging sets for some reason had shrouds that were visible from one side only. Obviously it could be easily ignored, but this does make rigging to appear much more substantial, given the absence of a running rig at all.

I remembered, though, that when I accidentally exported a model without removing the "double-sided" flag it resulted in a file of a same size different only by single value per object. So I tracked that particular flag in the cff file and changed the objects in one of the sets (compare to images in previous post):

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[Pieter Boelen]

Found a way to correct another long-standing issue - visibility of the shrouds on large ships.

Ooh, that's quite a substantial improvement! Nice one.

 

[Martes]

Tedious manual work, but looks so much better.

 

[Martes]

Just for technical reference.

1. The double-sided flag:
Preceding each object in CFF file there is a 16 (0F) byte header. Last 4 bytes of this header usually contain the object name (limited to 4 characters), but they may be zeroes. Setting the 4th byte of this header to 01 will render the object to both sides of face normals, to 00 - only to one.
Note that this flag should be used very carefully due to effect described below, or you will see the inside of the object over itself in most of the cases.

2. Object stack:
Long ago I mentioned I had a problem with Egyptienne with deck poking through the hull. Trying to deal with that I finally made hull sides and keels with volume (and I'm very glad I did!), but that wasn't the cause. What really caused the bug was the order of the objects in the scene before conversion, i.e. if DECK LOD group is positioned after the HULL, at distance or on low camera angle the deck will poke through, and if the HULL goes after the DECK it will obscure it.
So generally the order I currently use is the following:

1. Path
2. Deck
3. Guns
4. Mast bases
5. Boats
6. Anchors
7. Figurehead
8. Stern
9. Hull

 

[Martes]

Found a half-baked solution for ship's boats.
I disabled the smoke particles for the steam ships, so classifying a small boat as steamship will now render it slowly moving anywhere without sails or additional effects.
No rowing animation at this stage (and if it will be added it will have to be constant as there is no way to make conditions to switch things here), no towing and definitely no live hoisting/lowering the boats, but you can still build scenarios that involve them to some extent. Cutting out operations, landings, even playing a visit to a flagship, all that. Not ideal and rough at places, but workable.

Of course, that leaves the steamships out, but it's only a matter of backup particles.ini to get them back.

 

[Martes]

Enlarged the spanker for frigate rigs. The one I used before was borrowed from a brig, and was the same for all frigate sizes. It was large enough and better than any other, and suited for time being... Until I discovered that see_lod utility can safely resize any given cff model.

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And many, many thanks to @kimov for his pak extraction script. Because one sail is 12 bloody model files in the game.

 

[Fausty]

Are you able to release this as a sort of mod by any chance? All these posts got me excited!

Oh, and ahoy, Mates! First post in this port.

 

[Martes]

Made a small correction to sheer lines near the stern on Endy variations (and just to show off):

Pomone, Endymion and Liffey​

Are you able to release this as a sort of mod by any chance

Sometimes I would like to complete the ship collection to have at least one model for each warship category, and have them synchronized by detail level first anyway, and as you can see I still discover things about the engine in quite chaotic manner.

As it is always with modding, there can be no promises or timelines.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Sometimes I would like to complete the ship collection to have at least one model for each warship category, and have them synchronized by detail level first anyway, and as you can see I still discover things about the engine in quite chaotic manner.

As it is always with modding, there can be no promises or timelines.

Could you use a tester? If so, perhaps @Fausty could cooperate with you on that?