PB, In Your Considered Opinion

There are not a whole lot of differences between, first of all, a Silent Hunter 4 v1.4 (for FotRS v2) and an SH4 v1.5 (for FotRS v1.3) mission file - or, for that matter, Roster "calls". There are some differences, but not many. It is enough though, to stymie a mission file from running efficiently, properly, or sometimes even, at all... One mis-placed letter in a name, elimination of a ship, wrong texture pointer, map location, etc. being incorrect, whatever, and the file will not run. This is why in the earlier beta versions of FotRS Ultimate - I think - there were such "dead" zones in the Campaign at certain times, since neither the Merchants nor the Task Forces were running for the most part. All you could find were DD vessels and airplanes, along with the Runaway Spawns...

That said, it's actually pretty close. I'll see if I can find the video I made of most of the Campaign files for 1941 / 1942 running from December 1st,1941 through March 24, 1942 (it actually "stops" at February 28th, but the RGGs run until finished in March). The way to look at that is to open the Mission Editor, "Merge" all the files for a given time frame, don't "Mark merged data as saveable", unless you want to run it again, and then "Play" the combined files in the ME. rather enlightening, especially when you zoom in on specific areas. The only thing missing when doing that is being able to see the actual units that are spawned, while you're running the files... that would make this "Runaway Spawn" issue a LOT easier to track...

Anyway, in answer to #1, I don't think there's an issue there. The Campaign folders are basically OK, though it does look like someone may have been in a hurry on several of them when they were editing them for FotRS, with things half-baked, such as the Random Generated Groups that don't have 100% spawned "Leaders". What it looks like is that the AOTD group was using actual multi-player files, such as are found in the MultiMissions folder. I had found a site (the AOTD site??) where there were more of those, and some of those looked rather complex. From what I can tell, just a little more tweaking and we should have the Campaign running reliably. It mostly boils down to getting all the ships and airplanes set in their respective rosters, and then making certain there are correct calls for them in all the MIS files. Hopefully, having the ships and planes all converted to dds, all "calls" for resources at 100% correct, and reduce the RGG amount - again, hopefully - we'll have close to an elimination of the "Runaway Spawn" Issue... maybe.

On to #2, a "GENERIC" ship call is one that has no "Class=" in the MIS file (you also can't "Name=xxx" those ships). If you're using the ME, it's easy. Once you decide to do a "Random Generated Group" (RGG), and you zoom in on the map, right-click on the map and choose "Add Random Generated Group" with a left-click, you Name it, and decide what type of group it is, whether Naval, Air or Land. You then get the "Define Group Contents" dialog (even though it's not even "named" on it's Window Bar - but that's another story). In that dialog is a "Unit Class" drop-down box, and there are all sorts of "GENERIC xxx" ship classes in there, such as "GENERIC Battleship" or "GENERIC Tanker", etc. That "GENERIC" is the way it's displayed in their ME catalog, so it's apparently a "key" word. If you decide to look at one of those MIS files in a text editor, or just use the text editor to "build" the RGG with hand edits, the "call" would be like this:

For a group definition. There would also be an assignment of the "Leader" in there, but I can't remember how that goes... anyway, The GENERIC ships would be:

Whereas a "regular" ship call would be like:

So, all you leave out is the "Class=xxx" stuff, and you've got a "GENERIC" ship. The "Type=xx" tells the ME what kind of ship to grab.

Now, I have run into more problems with my little computer, poor thing. I had just gotten everything squared away with it the other day (Monday), and had the Museum running every ship just fine except the "Fast Old Merchant" would crash the Museum, and the IJN Sub Tender didn't have a flag... Then, as I'm editing the Campaign files through that computer, going to my server computer on the network, the local power company decides that I don't need electricity at 9:30am Eastern, and cuts the juice... So, now it's all boogered-up again, and most of my ships and airplanes don't have skins again... Wonderful Windows 7 and it's "recovery" to a "known-good previous state", even though I'd turned that stuff off last week - Windows update will turn it back on to "protect" me... So a snap shot of the computer from last week was "helpfully" called to the fore by MS, in all their wisdom, and my tweaking Sun, Mon & yesterday is all gone... sob. sigh. etc... oh well. Just another little push towards Linux...