Messages

Hi, yes, at present 'other ships' just follow pre-planned tracks, and will not vary from these tracks if you attempt to tow or push them.

I understand that this would be a useful feature, it's certainly something that can be considered for the future. One issue would be how to control the other vessels that are being pushed/towed, particularly if they have engines active. It would be simpler if they were just 'dumb' vessels (like a barge or any vessel with its engines off), would that still be useful?

Hi, I'm not familiar with that joystick specifically, but I wonder if moving the throttles is also triggering a 'button' press which is controlling the view.

It looks like thrustmaster have a program to change the joystick mappings, or you could try testing with something like https://greggman.github.io/html5-gamepad-test/ to see what is shown when you move the throttles.

In Bridge Command's settings, you can set the button mapping to 0 for all the joystick_button... settings, which will disable them (if this is the problem).

Hi, yes, FPS is frames per second. I will add an option to show or hide this, as it's probably not relevant for most people.

ARPA trial manoeuvres is one of the few things that were in the old 4.7 version of Bridge Command, which haven't yet been implemented in the 5.x version. I'll look into adding these in the next few months.

Hi, Bridge Command outputs simulated GPS and other NMEA data, which can be used with a chart plotter.

You can use OpenCPN, or any other plotter (as long as it will accept NMEA data).

You can use a serial connection, but it's probably easiest to use NMEA over UDP. By default Bridge Command will send NMEA data to localhost port 10110, these settings can be changed in the main settings editor (NMEA tab).

I've just updated the tags and GitHub releases with the 5.10.1 and 5.10.3 releases.

Hello, I'm still at a very early stage with the GMRT_OSM_Importer, and it currently generates an extremely simple texture image. You could replace this texture with an image downloaded from https://browser.dataspace.copernicus.eu/ or one of the other sources of satellite photography. Later I will try to automate this in the script.

The blender GIS plug-in looks very interesting, especially generating building models automatically.

I'm currently working on importing navigation light information from OpenStreetMap data, which is looking very promising.

That's not currently possible, but would be a good idea. Would you want to be able to change/turn off the day shapes during a scenario?

Hi, I've added the option to control other ship light sequences in the code (see https://github.com/bridgecommand/bc/pull/83).

If you want to try this and have a GitHub account, you could download the automatically built (not code signed) installer from the artifacts section at https://github.com/bridgecommand/bc/actions/runs/16900762076

Alternatively, this will be in the next release.

Hi, this won't work at the moment, but is a good suggestion, and probably quite easy to add to the program.

I'll have a look next week and let you know.

Hi Pat,
I think the best way to use a 3d model as the terrain will be to use a 'dummy' height map image and settings in terrain.ini, to set the overall parameters (the image can be black, with SeaMaxDepth set to be at least as deep as your maximum depth).

You would then load the terrain model as a 'Land Object'. You will need to make sure you know where the model origin is, and set this as the land object position.

You will need to make sure the Radar, Collision and Absolute settings are all '1'.

Details of the parameters are in https://www.bridgecommand.co.uk/Doc/Current/WorldFileSpec.html

Let me know how this works!

Hello, apologies for the delay!

Is this an elevation map that you are trying to import? If so, the best way is generally to use a heightmap and texture (See https://www.bridgecommand.co.uk/Doc/WorldFileSpec.php) This should avoid problems with the texture not being loaded.

If you do want a 3d model, the 3ds format as used in Bridge Command should support textures. I'm afraid I'm not familiar enough with blender to know what set of options are needed. Quite a lot of other formats are also supported, including .obj (see the full list at https://irrlicht.sourceforge.io/?page_id=45#supportedformats), so it might be worth trying a few different options. Although a lot of the models used in Bridge Command are .x format, I don't think there's a lot of support in modern tools for exporting to this format any more.

Please let me know how you get on, and I may be able to provide more advice depending on exactly what you are trying to do.

Hello, for an existing ship, you can change or add the files BWave.wav for the wave sound, Horn.wav, Alarm.wav and Engine.wav within the own ship's folder (e.g. Models\Ownship\Protis\Engine.wav). If any of these are not present, Bridge Command will use the files in the Sounds folder in the installation directory.

If you want to change for an existing ship, you can either change the existing files, or copy the whole ship model into the local user directory (on windows this is "%appdata%\Bridge Command\5.9\Models\Ownship"), and change the files there.

Bridge Command uses Libsndfile to read the sound files, so most formats should be supported, please see http://libsndfile.github.io/libsndfile/formats.html.

However, note that all of the sound files must have the same number of channels (stereo or mono), and the same sample rate. We currently assume that the files have a .wav extension. If this is a problem, it's probably quite easy to recognise other extensions.

Hi, I don't have a copy of huckleberry's code, it might be best if you try sending a PM? If this doesn't work, let me know, but it is quite a while since I have worked on version 4.7!

Thanks, I've just added them.

Hi, the discussion above was related to an earlier version of Bridge Command that used UDP networking directly. The current version still uses UDP, but via the enet networking library, so you will need a python wrapper to this. I think pyenet may be what you need.

Depending on what you want to do, you can see the networking parts of Bridge Command in https://github.com/bridgecommand/bc/blob/main/src/NetworkPrimary.cpp, and for the map controller in https://github.com/bridgecommand/bc/blob/main/src/controller/Network.cpp.

Alternatively, it might be easier to modify OwnShip.cpp, either to do what you want directly, or to add an interface to your code.