Commercial Ships Import

[kevinkins]

I would like to be able to do this like we can with airfields. Is a file/DB available to do this? I know it would be an abstraction, if not unrealistic. But it would help a designer get started and save a bit of time. I suppose it could be divided into regions of the sea. I think this may have come up in the context of commercial flights too.

Kevin

[mikmykWS]

Time saving was the objective of the design of this feature[:)]The import files work this way for any unit type and you can find it explained in detail of your manual. If you have any questions please do ask though.

If you look in your imports you'll see some examples in one called various ship groups you can also find a number of these files on Baloogan's site.

Thanks!

Mike

[kevinkins]

Thanks Mike . I saw that group. I was thinking in terms of 2017 commercial sea lanes near N. Korea. It's about embedding sea and air traffic into the military operational situation. I tried to do this with "Container Wars". It was fun to design and I was lucky enough to get positive feedback. But I am now interested in expanding the idea and FOW resulting from a lot of commercial "clutter" on the player's screen within the context of a precision strike that delivers a strategic message. To be able to import "commercial clutter" would be great. But I would like those imports to be part of the sim and not ask players to go find them elsewhere.

Kevin

[mikmykWS]

Sure Kevin.

Your best bet may be to try leveraging a public AIS API and then either converting to an import or populating a lua script to generate the units.

Mike

[kevinkins]

Ok Mike. Wanted to make sure if I started down a road like that I was not missing available resources. But can't a designer place a hundred or so commercial ships on an otherwise blank map and export that set-up so others can benefit from the research the designer put into the placement of those ships? AKA how we handle AFs now. Maybe the issue is related to the subsequent movement of the ships not the placement per se. Movement paths can't be imported I guess.

Kevin

[Rory Noonan]

Hi kevinkin,

There's nothing to stop anyone doing that as you described.

However it is a lot of work to get real names and routes. One of the hurdles is that even though a lot of the information is available online for free, transcoding it into game terms is a tedious manual process. Even using Excel functions to build Lua tables out of this data, I would expect to spend a solid 40 hour work week on it.

In some of my scenarios I have compromised and got names of ships and then assigned them randomly with commercial and civilian types. Have a look at Civ_Surface_Traffic script in Seven Days in October. The routes are then generated randomly with a few simple rules to keep things sane. Come to think of it the Civ_Air_Traffic script might be useful for you to look at as well.

Feel free to take that or any other code from my work and run with it. It is certainly achievable

[kevinkins]

I suppose this project could be done in stages starting say in the South China sector. Thanks for the advice and I will check out the scripts too. I remember when MS Flight sim first had AI traffic folks added the timetables per airline. It was a simple text file the was compiled. The text just needed the departure and arrival airport codes the takeoff time if I recall. This is a lot more work.

Kevin

[Rory Noonan]

Indeed it is but there's no reason why that model wouldn't work with Lua scripts.

If you go ahead with this I'd be happy to help out with the framework etc

[Peter66]

What I have done is used Support missions as the shipping lanes. Then using import .inst files to import ships in to these shipping lanes. The downside is that all ships must start at "the start" thus requires some sim time to get smooth traffic flow. Not been an issue for me but may be for your scenario(s). Just a thought that's worth sharing.

[mikmykWS]

Yeah if you don't care about pulling in real time data or anything and just want to model traffic just build a lua script that fires periodically to add ships, then adds them to mission and then another script that deletes them when they reach an area.

Mike

[Sybaris]

https://www.marinetraffic.com/

[kevinkins]

Thanks for the link to alert those who may not be aware of that great resource.

[Grazyn]

See if those .kml files for marine traffic trackers are still working, then you can convert them to .inst files and import

https://www.marinevesseltraffic.com/p/g ... g-ins.html

[tiag]

...then you can convert them to .inst files and import

How do one does that? is there a tool to convert kml in inst format?

EDIT: Yes, I found it.....very interesting.
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.a ... l&#3471768