Ship Wrecks!

[Worthless]

I'm sure I haven't discovered something that hasn't already been discussed, but if so, I musta missed it.

One of the shortcomings of CFS2, to me, has been that ships when damaged are only smoking or gone.

No wreckage, no oil remaining, no overturned hull, just a lot of empty water.

I know we have the static wf_shipwreck a,b,c,d and also Sully's wonderful hulks and oil slicks but it never occurred to me that these could be combined with static infrastructure. Not until today.

I placed an IJA Trooer45anchored in MB and superimposed one of the wf_shipwrecks with one of Sully's oil slicks. From the air you can hardly see anything except the IJA Trooper45anchored. Put a couple of torpedos into her and down she goes. By the time you have turned around there's nothing left but Sully's oil slick and an overturned hull.

These were all infrastructure (static) ships/objects and I had to make Sully's objects invincible so they wouldn't be destroyed and sink too. With the wf_shipwrecks it doesn't seem to matter if you make them invincible or not. Even if the game says that you have destroyed it the wf_shipwreck never sinks. After the IJA Trooper45anchored sinks you are left with a nice sim sunk wreck. Using these wrecks is a nice touch and leaves you with a harbor full of overturned ships and debris. It's no fun blowing Rabaul to the moon and not seeing any evidence that you've accomplished something.

[Shadow Wolf 07]

Try Nanni's ( http://web.tiscali.it/Nanni/CFS/ ) debris and oil slick effects. His readme tells you how to add the effect to your ship dps.

[Jagdflieger]

Interesting idea Worthless. I'll have to give it a try next time I have the MB fired up.

[skylane]

Great idea! I´ll save this post and give it a try sometime!

[Worthless]

I've enjoyed using Sully's ships and boats. No enemy base attack mission is complete with out some of his wonderful creations in them. I just never could figure out how to make his hulks and rafts and debris fields appear at the right time, after a ship goes down. Triggers and Events only seem to work for moving objects. And somehow, oil fields trekking across the open water at a six knot clip never struck me as very realistic. I tried setting the MPH at zero, but they still seemed to move. Wish I could figure a way to make them (static infrastructure) appear at a predetermined time and place. Then we could use them with moving ships when they sink.

[Jagdflieger]

I've had good luck with Nannie's volcano effect going off when a ship sinks by using triggers. That's a pretty cool effect that has been overlooked to some extent.

[Worthless]

I've had good luck with Nannie's volcano effect going off when a ship sinks by using triggers. That's a pretty cool effect that has been overlooked to some extent.

Yeah, that'll work. Still another thing that I've done to add smoke and fire is to take an existing object, say
wf_c_crates and delete the contents. Replace with the contents of inf_small_oil_rig. Pack a few of these on board an enemy ship or at strategic locations like gun emplacements on land. Fire a few rounds into one of those babies and it's Roman Candles R US.

Combine the wf_c_crates with a ship, like a tanker, and you get big explosions and lots of fire and smoke, but the ship stays on the surface and burns like crazy. Doesn't seem to affect Framerates too much unless you get real close. Then just in case you get in enough hits to sink it, just stick a wf_shipwreck in and after your tanker sinks you still have a nice wreck on the surface that's burning and letting off lots of smoke.

[Jagdflieger]

That's a good idea Worthless. I shall give that a try in the near future.

Somehow the screen shots I posted of the Volcano effect when used with a trigger didn't show. Here they are:

[Worthless]

Jag.....Your screenies came through fine, and looked great. It's a good effect and I've used it on some bombing missions with The B-24 Guy's Liberator. But what I needed was something with a lot of flame so that when I hit a tanker it would burn like it should. The oil rig DP does it like a charm. Lots of vivid orange fire and flame, plus the heavy black smoke, and it doesn't send my FRs into the tank. I tried it at first just sticking an oil rig in the water and the ship on top, but I just couldn't buy the oil rig sticking out of the top of the ship. So, I decided to try some crates. The freeboard on the ship I picked is so high not much of them shows up. What you can see doesn't look especially out of place and even if you sink the ship the ones that don't blow up just appear to be floating on the water, amid the still flaming oil and smoke. So, stack a dozen crates on top of your favorite oiler and send in an AI team and sit back and watch the show.