jlederer
02-24-10, 06:22 PM
I've been sailing my latest career in SH3 w/GWX and SH3 Commander using the open conning tower / open hatch mod which includes FlakMonkey's crew quarters and engine room. It's great stuff.
I've got SH4 and the water is beautiful but I've never played it much. Don't really want to drive US fleet boats (didn't get the uboat missions add-on) - I just really am a fan of the Atlantic theater, have about 2 dozen books on subs but really love the uboats, been to see U505 in Chicago, etc. Typically subsim fanatic like most of you guys I think :-)
Anyway, like many of you, I have been wondering about what we're going to see with SH5 (the good and the bad). Been reading the forums every day, watching for Neal's videos, any magazine preview in any language, etc., and trying to decide whether to buy, wait and maybe buy later when price drops, or hold out until/if DRM is removed.
Finally just now while prowling my new SH3 engine room :-) a realization came over me and I decided to pre-order. The deciding factor for me (and this might help some of you on the fence which is why I share it - if I'm not just trying for catharsis :-) is that while I keep roaming my boat using freecam, ultimately, the problem is, it's lonely. It's lonely in the engine room - nobody to talk to back there. Can't get to torpedo rooms, and even if I could (my 2GB Win7 machine has 90% RAM used with all these extra textures loaded and is prone to going up to 100% and crashing if I try to move around too fast (I can see ram usage on my logitech gaming keyboard display) and too many textures have to load too fast - I have a 320MB 8800GTS video card), I know those rooms would be lonely too. I'm never going to see anybody loading tubes in sh3. Never going to see people doing damage control (not sure if that's in sh5 but hopefully it may be possible to mod it in). I've always wanted to feel like what it was like to sail these boats. And as close as it is, SH3 plus the above mods has gone as far as it can go. There will never be a "living crew" in SH3. And I realized that I really want that experience. I want to give an order and see some guy flipping switches on the electrical panels to carry it out, not just walk by the panels with nobody around which I think may be the best we'll ever see in SH3 with mods (maybe being able to click on panels to control them myself, but then I don't feel like the captain, so while it does feel like sailing in a uboat it feels like sailing it by myself). I want to be in the conning tower and have someone walk under the hatch and whisper up "Contact closing, bearing 350, Herr Kaleun".
Heck, after mods, the crew in SH5 will hopefully be fantastic in the degree of interactions possible (assuming we can mod the conversation files). That's a kind of modding I can definitely do (edit text files and create branching conversation trees) so if they open that up, I can see some real potential for community-created campaigns/missions that could be amazing.
Also, I've looked at the screenshots showing the potential increases possible in my crews skills (forget the ones like getting anechoic hull coating just by improving the morale of my sound guy or whatever, hopefully we can mod that kind of crap out) and I find that I like that idea. I can see "training my own veteran crew" over the course of some missions, perhaps "drilling" the crew on getting better at silent running or better at repairing the boat.
I also think the campaign structure they've come up with for SH5 will make the game more interesting - while the wide-open campaign in SH3 is fun (I sail wherever I want, go wherever I want) I think it will be very interesting to have "orders from high command" to do something specific that's related to helping advance the war effort.
Sorry about going on and on, but maybe this will help some of you on the fence.
Jim
P.S. I'm in the IT business and it really irks me the way software is constantly pirated. I would love to see someone come up with a DRM scheme that actually works. Maybe UBI's latest scheme will work, if so I support their right to protect their livelihood. In many parts of the world there is no respect for intellectual property rights whatsoever so if you don't have a technical solution to prevent piracy you can expect to be majorly ripped-off.
I've got SH4 and the water is beautiful but I've never played it much. Don't really want to drive US fleet boats (didn't get the uboat missions add-on) - I just really am a fan of the Atlantic theater, have about 2 dozen books on subs but really love the uboats, been to see U505 in Chicago, etc. Typically subsim fanatic like most of you guys I think :-)
Anyway, like many of you, I have been wondering about what we're going to see with SH5 (the good and the bad). Been reading the forums every day, watching for Neal's videos, any magazine preview in any language, etc., and trying to decide whether to buy, wait and maybe buy later when price drops, or hold out until/if DRM is removed.
Finally just now while prowling my new SH3 engine room :-) a realization came over me and I decided to pre-order. The deciding factor for me (and this might help some of you on the fence which is why I share it - if I'm not just trying for catharsis :-) is that while I keep roaming my boat using freecam, ultimately, the problem is, it's lonely. It's lonely in the engine room - nobody to talk to back there. Can't get to torpedo rooms, and even if I could (my 2GB Win7 machine has 90% RAM used with all these extra textures loaded and is prone to going up to 100% and crashing if I try to move around too fast (I can see ram usage on my logitech gaming keyboard display) and too many textures have to load too fast - I have a 320MB 8800GTS video card), I know those rooms would be lonely too. I'm never going to see anybody loading tubes in sh3. Never going to see people doing damage control (not sure if that's in sh5 but hopefully it may be possible to mod it in). I've always wanted to feel like what it was like to sail these boats. And as close as it is, SH3 plus the above mods has gone as far as it can go. There will never be a "living crew" in SH3. And I realized that I really want that experience. I want to give an order and see some guy flipping switches on the electrical panels to carry it out, not just walk by the panels with nobody around which I think may be the best we'll ever see in SH3 with mods (maybe being able to click on panels to control them myself, but then I don't feel like the captain, so while it does feel like sailing in a uboat it feels like sailing it by myself). I want to be in the conning tower and have someone walk under the hatch and whisper up "Contact closing, bearing 350, Herr Kaleun".
Heck, after mods, the crew in SH5 will hopefully be fantastic in the degree of interactions possible (assuming we can mod the conversation files). That's a kind of modding I can definitely do (edit text files and create branching conversation trees) so if they open that up, I can see some real potential for community-created campaigns/missions that could be amazing.
Also, I've looked at the screenshots showing the potential increases possible in my crews skills (forget the ones like getting anechoic hull coating just by improving the morale of my sound guy or whatever, hopefully we can mod that kind of crap out) and I find that I like that idea. I can see "training my own veteran crew" over the course of some missions, perhaps "drilling" the crew on getting better at silent running or better at repairing the boat.
I also think the campaign structure they've come up with for SH5 will make the game more interesting - while the wide-open campaign in SH3 is fun (I sail wherever I want, go wherever I want) I think it will be very interesting to have "orders from high command" to do something specific that's related to helping advance the war effort.
Sorry about going on and on, but maybe this will help some of you on the fence.
Jim
P.S. I'm in the IT business and it really irks me the way software is constantly pirated. I would love to see someone come up with a DRM scheme that actually works. Maybe UBI's latest scheme will work, if so I support their right to protect their livelihood. In many parts of the world there is no respect for intellectual property rights whatsoever so if you don't have a technical solution to prevent piracy you can expect to be majorly ripped-off.