Shipping Spawns Not Working In PTO

[MajorMagee]

I recently added the Coastal Spawns mod to my PTO install in the hopes of getting a few ships to go after. After hours of flying around amongst the various islands I have yet to see even one ship.

I just read through the sticky on spawns, and didn't find any clues there as to why it's not doing anything.

Looking in the mod's files it appears to be dependent on their being "ShippingLanes" designated. Could it be that PTO does not include any Shipping Lanes or am I misunderstanding something about how shipping spawns are supposed to work?

Has anyone ever gotten ship spawns to work in PTO, or do they always need to be explicitly called out in a mission file?

[rbp71854]

Shipping lanes were never created during development of PTO or Rising Sun. You will have to do shipping spans through the mission builder.

I did do some shipping lanes work with the Hawaii theater, but can't remember if they made it into the final release of RS.

[Flamingskull5000]

Slightly off topic, I was wondering today if the Coastal Shipping Spawn would work in WOTR?

[Daiwilletti]

I recently added the Coastal Spawns mod to my PTO install in the hopes of getting a few ships to go after. After hours of flying around amongst the various islands I have yet to see even one ship.

I just read through the sticky on spawns, and didn't find any clues there as to why it's not doing anything.

Looking in the mod's files it appears to be dependent on their being "ShippingLanes" designated. Could it be that PTO does not include any Shipping Lanes or am I misunderstanding something about how shipping spawns are supposed to work?

Has anyone ever gotten ship spawns to work in PTO, or do they always need to be explicitly called out in a mission file?

Hi MajorMagee,

I have a working set of shipping spawns for PTO - ship.spawns, destroy_ships, destroy_ships 1,2,3 etc. Also ground.spawns shipping too.

Remember that for spawning, "friendly" and "enemy" countries are dependent on the country.xml. This is tricky in PTO as you ideally want japan_ijn as the Axis spawn because they have more ships, and check the nationality of US ships - are there more "USA", or more "US_Navy"?

For some missions it would be preferable for say Japan_AAF to be the default Axis spawn, therefore you need to make sure there are copies of an auxiliary, destroyer, patrol and submarine and cruiser for all ship spawns and coastal spawns to work.

Having a couple of copies of the country.xml will quickly give you different default spawning nations, using a .bat file.

Also remember that facilities are defined to friendly and allied nations randomly, so you need a full set of vehicles for each nation, for the facility spawns to be properly populated. Also a flag (building) for each nation! That way you can identify which nation is involved when a facility seems absent of vehicle spawns.

[Daiwilletti]

Slightly off topic, I was wondering today if the Coastal Shipping Spawn would work in WOTR?

Hi Flamingskull, I haven't tried them in WOTR yet. Let us know how they go!

Recently I've had to undo some tweaks which stopped my coastal ships in one install - it is very easy to stuff that spawn up, seems sensitive to change.

[Daiwilletti]

Shipping lanes were never created during development of PTO or Rising Sun. You will have to do shipping spans through the mission builder.

I did do some shipping lanes work with the Hawaii theater, but can't remember if they made it into the final release of RS.

Greetings! Great to hear from you. I've always wanted to add shippinglanes to PTO and RS, but have recently got the ship spawns to work using Groundtype="direct".

Led Zeppelin used Groundtype="direct" for his ship spawns in ETO, but for some reason they didn't work for me. So it is only very recently that I've come to using this approach, apologies to Led Zeppelin for being so slow on the uptake...

[Flamingskull5000]

Well I believe there are shipping lanesin WOTR, however there are only cargo ships. No subs or war ships......

[rbp71854]

Greetings! Great to hear from you. I've always wanted to add shippinglanes to PTO and RS, but have recently got the ship spawns to work using Groundtype="direct".

Led Zeppelin used Groundtype="direct" for his ship spawns in ETO, but for some reason they didn't work for me. So it is only very recently that I've come to using this approach, apologies to Led Zeppelin for being so slow on the uptake...

Great work around. Glad you folks found a method to overcome not having shipping lanes imbedded in the addon.

[Daiwilletti]

Ooops sorry Majormagee I completely missed the point of your post. I don't know for sure why my coastal shipping spawns work. My best guess is that the coastal facility file, with the flags="IsCoastal" entry, keys in with the campaign.xml file landclass entries. PTO has a whole swathe of "coastal" cells on the map, as defined in the campaign.xml file. When you fly over these cells, the coastal ship spawns should be triggered. However, you need to have submarine, patrol, auxiliary,destroyer ALL available for the default spawning nationalities, as defined in the country.xml file. From memory, the second allied nation and the first axis nation listed in the country.xml file are the default spawning nations. It is possible that in the stock setup (mine is heavily modified so I don't know), there are not the complete range of shipping picktypes mentioned above, for the default spawning nations. For example, a lot of the pt boats in PTO are defined as "auxiliary" whereas they need to be defined as patrol, so the spawn die throw works properly.