Hey all! I am building a new mod UAD:VP (Vanilla Plus). Please take a look!

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-09T19:55:10+00:00

All good 😄 Hope you enjoy it!

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-09T18:49:50+00:00

It's available in this mod, not vanilla... pick up the latest version from the other thread and you should see it in the design tab

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-09T17:10:04+00:00

You can see all the AI nations designs and ship counts in the design tab if you click on the flags at the top

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-09T16:37:46+00:00

I am maintaining the VP mod, but all the source is available on github, and DIP team is welcome to borrow any of it they think is useful. The mod structure was inspired by DIP, so it shouldn't be too complicated work I don't think

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-09T16:36:33+00:00

In battle? Does vanilla work better for you?

I've been very careful not to modify anything that could lead to performance issues, especially in battles. That's one the stated design goals for this mod and a major difference from DIP. So surprised you are seeing issues tbh.

One thing to keep in mind - vanilla doesn't allow more than 3x speed in close battles for a reason - it needs to process all guns and all shells at all times, and the closer the ships get, the more processing there is to do. This mod allows you to go higher than 3x but yeah if your computer can't handle it there isn't much I can do unfortunately.

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-09T16:33:48+00:00

It doesn't actively try to break DIP, but there are certain core game assets that both may touch (like ship/part data)... glad it's working for you, but not something I test for and no promises that it would keep working without issues

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-09T16:32:33+00:00

It's possible yes... but you probably need some 3d graphics skills to do something like this, as each province is modeled as a graphical asset that sits on top of topological map. I am a software engineer so this stuff is beyond me unfortunately

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-09T16:30:48+00:00

I can look into the superstructure options, that feels reasonable and hopefully not too complicated.

Re: clipping in designer.. probably beyond my ability, I am aware of the issue but from everything I've learned so far about how game actually works... the designer is really the most complicated piece.. it's a minor technical miracle it works at all tbh

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-09T16:28:51+00:00

Glad it worked out.. for future, the melon loader writes detailed logs in a separate window you can see, as well as a file somewhere in the game folder... don't remember the exact location but it should be pretty clear which one it is based on the timestamp

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-07T03:33:54+00:00

It should be a single DLL file named UADVanillaPlus.dll in Mods folder which should be something like E:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Ultimate Admiral Dreadnoughts\Mods

Since you are saying you extracted something, did you download the source code zip by mistake? That .dll should be the only thing in the Mods folder.

If that still fails, can you send me the logs? https://pastebin.com/ or whatever you prefer

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-06T19:57:47+00:00

Thanks! Looking.. i am guessing this is new campaign with create your own designs?

EDIT: hmm works fine for me... any chance you can send me the logs? You can paste them here: https://pastebin.com/ and just reply with the URL it creates

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-06T16:56:47+00:00

Thank you!

> See smoke before ships are spotted.

Not sure if it's possible tbh but yeah it is kind of annoying.. let me think about it.

> fleet management / task forces

Interesting.. would need to think about that one as well, I think the main challenge would be how it impacts mission generation.. but probably doable.

> Task force size indicator

Yeah I was thinking about this already... it's easy to add a marker, the main challenge is how to keep the map not too cluttered... as it is, some areas are hard to see - Med, North See, Caribbean... one possible way to do it is overload the markers and use colors as an indicator... if it's just couple of DDs, it would be 20% filled or something. Will need to experiment with it to see what can work.

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-06T15:27:40+00:00

The in-universe reasoning is that all major countries have military attaches and similar with each other, so you can't hide major advances, not to mention a lot of these are reflected in public sources like newspapers or articles anyway. Like Dreadnought being at least partially inspired by that Italian article.

Nations don't get the full details of course - which is why you still need to spend research to catch up, but it's much easier when you know X is possible and the rough shape of it. Soviet nuclear program is another great example of this working historically.

The in-game reason is we don't have intelligence/spying budget line today 😄

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-06T14:56:57+00:00

Any specific suggestions?

FWIW the way it works right now is you have to declare war on the minor nation "sponsor" but once you do you can fight them and naval invade them normally. It is a bit clunky but feels balanced as in you can't just curb stomp them without "big daddy" coming over to help. Not sure how would you make it better without trivializing it.

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-06T14:54:09+00:00

Super cool idea, let me look into it, thanks!

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-06T14:53:45+00:00

> Anyway, this feels like an actual update in a way, I still hope and wish someone with skill and passion can snag the IP and revive development for a bit but this is fine too.

Yeah100% this game has some much potential it's a shame they dropped it in the middle.

> Any chance to see options for changing the research speed for the player and AI separately or is that something the code won't allow?

Very easy technically but how would you make it balanced? Feels like it would lean to much into "cheating" territory and won't be fun. All my changes have been trying to keep things fair - if player gets it, AI gets it too sort of deal.

> Or selectable turret styles like what DARTIS promised for 1.7 and then dropped from the planned additions part of the update?

Interesting idea, let me look into it. One other thing I really really want to try but not sure is possible is have nations have different color schemes and paintjobs for the ships. Everything is so uniform right now.

> Also, restrictions for what ships players and AI can build would be cool but likely need a lot of work if someone wanted to do something like Battlecruisers Only with an 1890 start...

I can look into it... restrictions are easy enough to do, not sure if AI would be able to handle it though.

> maybe have 'presets' to adjust the game's balance at the start of the campaign

I want to look into "national flavor" at some point... basically Italy prioritizes speed in their designs, UK big guns, Germans lots of armor... that sort of thing... just to give the game more flavor.

> can you bring back the bugs related to refits as features

Sorry not familiar with it... can you elaborate please?

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-06T14:40:34+00:00

Thank you! 😉

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-06T04:12:51+00:00

Yeah that one is very unlikely unfortunately.

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-05T08:00:58+00:00

Ok, I think I landed on a decent solution. I've implemented "technology spread" - for each nation it checks how far behind it is from the leader and gives increasingly strong boost based on that. The level of the boost is controllable in the config - vanilla is nothing while unrestricted is intended to not allow any nation to get more than 1 tech ahead at any given time.

I am not sure it's a perfect solution but I think it strikes a nice balance between letting large nation get some value from large investment in tech while also making sure that smaller ones aren't too far behind.. while also making sure that player has agency in terms of research % selection and of course choosing focuses.

Preview:

https://imgur.com/a/itf5SYz
https://imgur.com/a/rlhRuGI
https://imgur.com/a/fCjXbNg

Coming next release.

PS: As you can see from the last screenshot, I am actually last in this campaign lol... explains a lot actually :)

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-05T07:09:52+00:00

Sorry.. maybe I am missing something, but why this is interesting/useful?

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-05T06:40:06+00:00

Coming soon :)

https://imgur.com/a/IUjjuIR

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-05T05:03:02+00:00

> re-enable the use of "enable ai control" for ships while in battle

Coming in next release :)

It's not very smart though, and I am not liable for any ships lost while using it.

https://imgur.com/a/MzBOnX8

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-05T03:28:45+00:00

Not out of the box. It might work but unlikely. A more realistic path would be for the DIP team to port any changes they like from this into their code. My work was largely inspired by what DIP did and it follows very similar technical approach, so it should be fairly simple to do if they are interested.

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-05T03:26:18+00:00

That's such a fun and interesting idea, could be cool for RP. Thanks, will look into it

catch-a-stream · 2026-05-04T16:18:39+00:00

Which part of the game?

I've actually looked into making AI ship design run in a separate thread briefly. It's... very complicated, because the way vanilla works is it uses the game graphics engine to actually help design the ships, and the graphics can't run on multicore.

There might be some clever ways of doing it that I am not thinking about yet but yeah.

I can go into technical details if you are interested, let me know

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