The old time enigma

[KaleunMarco]

Originally Posted by Front Runner

Where are you based out of for a Carribean patrol?

Brest.
yes, that's a long way for a Type 7. i have to keep tabs on the milchcows unless i want to spend the rest of the war in the Caribbean. Wait a minute...hold the phone...what's wrong with that idea?
why didn't the Ubi's program that possibility into SH4?

[Greystone]

Front Runnner; you requested in an earlier post: "Let us know the results of starting a new patrol when making the recommended Vertical Sync changes while in career. Theoretically, your next patrol should start the BT Clock anew.
Keep in mind that there will still be a Time Zone difference between your “Base” and your “Patrol Area”. For example Pearl Harbor Base Time would be different than the observed Base Time in Empire Waters."



Here's how it went down:

Finished last (1st) patrol & headed back to Pearl.
When I finished loading torps, etc., I started my 2nd patrol (reconnaissance Tokyo Bay)

Patrol started on FEB. 2nd, '42, at 0500; stars out, full moon.

FEB. 2, heading west, TC (time compression) x64 until sunrise at 0614. Looks like going into home port and starting next patrol brought the time into a realistic frame.

TCx1 to 0632, saved game, went to DT (desktop).

Reloaded, continued at TCx1 to 0813, saved, back to DT.

Reloaded, combination TCx64 & TCx1 to sunrise at 0740, FEB. 3; one timezone west of Pearl. Time at Pearl is shown as the same as local time in the game.

FEB. 4: TC to sunrise at 0800, 2 timezones west of Pearl.

FEB. 5: Lost info for this date.

FEB. 6: Sunrise at 0855, time shown for Pearl the same.

FEB. 7: Sunrise at 0924, Pearl the same (Pearl time, in my game anyway, is always shown as the same for local time all the way through the patrol; will not make reference to Pearl's time for the remaining dates).

FEB. 8: Sunrise at 1000, sunset at 2200. (Combo TCx64 & TCx1)

FEB. 9: Sunrise 1055, sunset 2134. (Combo TCx64 & TCx1)

FEB. 10: (TC @ 256) Sunrise 1055, sunset at 2150.

FEB. 11: (TC @ 256 every following entry) Sunrise 1110, set at 2208.

FEB. 12 Sunrise at 1127, set at 2226.

FEB. 13 Sunrise at 1145, set at 2244.

FEB. 14 Sunrise at 1202; didn't bother waiting to record sunset... got enough info anyway.
(6 time zones west of Pearl, where sun first rose at 0614 after leaving Pearl. (Regarding the recorded times above, allowance may be in order, but not by much, since, with 256 TC, a minute or more may have been gained allowing for the time it took me to hit the pause button).

My head hurts trying to figure this out; the local time and home port's time is always shown as the same, in my game anyway. I've got to start somewhere, so I'm going to assume that the home port's time is the one that reflects reality; to get real LOCAL time, since the boat's 6 time zones west of Pearl, one has to subract 1 hour for every time zone west of Pearl; 6 time zones, so 1202 (sunrise on FEB. 14) minus 6 hours is 0602 for the real local time. So apparently the nVidia tinkering corrected the slipping and sliding time thing, within reason (?), but the game refuses to show the real local time, leaving it to the player to check out the time zone difference, relative to their home port, and calculate the adjustment to get the real local time. Are we having fun yet? Let me know if this makes any sense to you.

[Front Runner]

Originally Posted by Greystone

Front Runnner; you requested in an earlier post: "Let us know the results of starting a new patrol when making the recommended Vertical Sync changes while in career. Theoretically, your next patrol should start the BT Clock anew.
Keep in mind that there will still be a Time Zone difference between your “Base” and your “Patrol Area”. For example Pearl Harbor Base Time would be different than the observed Base Time in Empire Waters."

Here's how it went down:

My head hurts trying to figure this out; the local time and home port's time is always shown as the same, in my game anyway. I've got to start somewhere, so I'm going to assume that the home port's time is the one that reflects reality; to get real LOCAL time, since the boat's 6 time zones west of Pearl, one has to subract 1 hour for every time zone west of Pearl; 6 time zones, so 1202 (sunrise on FEB. 14) minus 6 hours is 0602 for the real local time. So apparently the nVidia tinkering corrected the slipping and sliding time thing, within reason (?), but the game refuses to show the real local time, leaving it to the player to check out the time zone difference, relative to their home port, and calculate the adjustment to get the real local time. Are we having fun yet? Let me know if this makes any sense to you.

Thanks. Yes, it makes ones head hurt......or, spin!
It appears you have done this correctly and it sounds as if the recommended settings are working out OK for you.

Base Time should ALWAYS be the time AT your BASE HOME PORT (thus Base Time). You have to subtract or add hours depending on how many time zones you have traveled east-west from your BASE in order to determine your subs' local time. I've heard that some save games can alter this although I have not personally witnessed that anomaly.

Most sub simmers play at a reasonable combination of Time Compression and 1X, so the accumulated error should be minimal.

I'm well into the fourth day underway at 1x and my 4th sunset was late 30 minutes, and that's after about 80 hours of gameplay at 1x. My first sunset was actually 1 minute early. I'm using 1/2 refresh rate, adaptive sync, and getting 30fps from my nVidia Inspector settings.

Now wait until Headquarters reassigns your BASE (say from Pearl to Brisbane) during a patrol. That really screws up your clocks!

I'm wondering how many of us actually play the game at 1x as I sometimes do when I'm completing household chores while the game is running, listening to Fred's Radio Stations playing music and radio dramas, or, binge watching Netflix or Prime, while keeping one eye () on my subs' progress, interacting every so often when I hear...
"Radar Contact - Long Range", (Clear the Bridge!!!)

I don't ALWAYS play for long periods at 1x. I also play a typical mix of time compression and 1x as most players likely do.

I am curious as to why fps affects the timing of the celestial sphere. Maybe someone will be able to figure it out. It must be hardcoded in the SH4.exe


Carry on!

[Greystone]

Front Runner; thanks for the confirmation that I appear to be blundering down the right path(does cartwheels)... which never would've happened without insights contributed by yourself, propbeanie & others.


Now, in the interest of girding my loins for future confusion, what, in general terms, should I expect with the time thing when I get reassigned to, say, Australia? Just a general idea..
Thanks..

[Front Runner]

Originally Posted by Greystone

Front Runner; thanks for the confirmation that I appear to be blundering down the right path(does cartwheels)... which never would've happened without insights contributed by yourself, propbeanie & others.


Now, in the interest of girding my loins for future confusion, what, in general terms, should I expect with the time thing when I get reassigned to, say, Australia? Just a general idea..
Thanks..

If you’re assigned to Brisbane then Brisbane is your Base Time. You’ll only have to subtract 2 hours instead of 6 if you’re near Hong Kong.

[propbeanie]

I am curious as to why fps affects the timing of the celestial sphere.

Think of the game somewhat as an old, pre-SMPTE movie, like a silent movie with the music sound track on paper for a human player to play. It's supposed to play at 30fps, like the old movies played at 24 fps on the Big Screen (which is a frame rate that makes wagon wheels appear to spin backwards). If you then make the "movie projector" (the computer in this case) play the movie faster, but don't cue the human player of the piano to speed up the sound track, then the film is way ahead, and the audio track lags. My guess is that the video of the game is separate from the celestial tracking. No one cued the piano player...

[hyperbolicsphere]

Originally Posted by Greystone

From what I gather, a lot of you have run into out-of-whack temporal disturbances, as I have, like the sun rising at 1am, setting at noon, etc...

Mod-related bugs aside, I can assure you that there is nothing wrong. I, too, have read many posts and threads related to the sun rising and setting at 1 am, and the difficulties involved with celestial navigation in the game. Some of these are written by people who know what they're talking about, but most are not.

I proved everything was fine (at least to myself) because I was able to navigate by the stars from Pearl Harbor to Midway over the course of a three-day voyage (and later, all the way to Japan) without any mods or outside software other than an Excel spreadsheet which I wrote to do the tedious mathematical calculations for me. It was so accurate that I found Midway right off my bow on the first attempt. I couldn't have done that if there had been anything wrong.

One thing I've noticed is that most of the discussion centers around sunrise and sunset times. There are a lot of reasons why people have difficulty with this, and they chase their tails trying to figure it out. There's a lot of effort that goes into calculating "real local time" for the sub's present "time zone" when time zones have nothing to do with what time the sun rises. Instead, there is Sun Time. Every point on the surface of the earth has its own unique schedule when it comes to Sun Time, it is, therefore, quite meaningless and useless for our purposes. Tracking the sun is an exercise in futility, as well. In the game, it's so big that it's difficult to tell exactly where it is. The same goes for the moon. I can tell you, however, that the sun and moon are not 180 degrees from where they need to be, nor 90 degrees, 50, 40, not even 10. Just accept it, SH4 is astronomically correct.

Pearl Harbor base time is UTC -11 hours. Perth base time is UTC +8. Setting a constant base time makes more sense than anything else. If you see something that doesn't make sense to you, first make an effort to understand why it may be RIGHT!

I could go on and on about the nonsensical things I've read in some of these posts and threads, but just for example, I'll use a recent one: "Base Time 2018" by FrontRunner, propbeanie, et al. They think they found a problem with sunset times caused by the accelerated frame rates of newer computers, and to try to prove it, they used a timing experiment with a moving platform (sailing north at 15kts). Because Sun Time is different on every different point on the surface of the earth, the moving platform tainted their results. It's worse because they chose a date close to the Winter Solstice, when sunrise and sunset times vary with latitude the most. After all that, their conclusion about frame rates isn't consistent with the effect they were looking at. If the game were designed for 24fps and accelerating that caused the "sky to turn" at the wrong rate, 30fps would cause a solar day to take 19 hours and 12 minutes in the game. They didn't find anything like that.

Your question about whether the AI can see you at night is a more complex but less important one. As a general rule, do not be on the surface when a ship is any closer than the point at which you can just barely see it. "If you can see them, they can see you." Real submarines in WWII used to track ships by the smoke above their stacks, and not even by visual contact with the ships, themselves. Night surface attacks were common, but so were sunken U-boats.

[propbeanie]

Really?... - I'll have to remember that one. "Don't be on the surface when a ship is any closer than the point at which you can just barely see it."... got it.

I'm glad you were able to find Midway, and Japan too, more power to you and your "real" navigation on a cylinder. We are NOT talking about that in the "Base Time 2018" thread. Read the thread

[hyperbolicsphere]

I didn't say you were talking about celestial navigation in "Base Time 2018," so maybe you're the one who needs to learn how to read.

Yes, the world is modeled as a cylinder in SH4. So what? The game still displays the sky as it appeared at the time, latitude, and longitude of your sub. This is why I can apply real-world navigation techniques to the game.

I guess you're still playing at beginner levels if you stay on the surface so much. If you want to crank it up to realistic, you're going to have to learn some new tactics. Would you like some more pointers?

[propbeanie]

OK, another attempt at 'spaining it Lucy... The game was written circa 2005 during the Windows XP days. As such, it uses DirectX v9.0c (which has a "timer"). The game uses multiple "timers" to run the game. The "timers" have to be co-ordinated, or synced with each other. A computer has no knowledge of plus (+) or minus (-) Meridian, degrees of latitude and longitude, or anything like that. It counts zeroes and ones. On and Off. The human "interprets" it. Front Runner, in the aforementioned thread found that running the game higher than 30fps resulted in a game that would go "out of sync" with itself after he played days of the game at 1x, or at real time. If he used mid-levels of TC and the 1x real time, the game did not "drift" out of sync with itself as much. In other words, his "base time" shifted the more he played at 1x real time. Once he restricted the game to 30 fps, there was no longer any "drift" in the clocks, hence a more accurate rendition of the night / day sky, making it possible to predict the moon cycles more accurately. This does not have anything to do with my ignorance of this, that, or the other. If you restrict the game to 30 fps, which is what it was written to, you will then end up with more accurate SH4-world time... Once again, I attempt to explain that the cylinder land and sea has a clock. The sun and moon seem to have a separate clock. 30 fps, tied to the video card, keeps them together.