Why is This?

[irish1958]

How come the SH3 forums (actually it should be "fora") are still so popular, with the number of viewers consistently out performing those for SH4 and SH5.

[Gerald]

Perhaps because the SH3, paved the way for them.

[Herr-Berbunch]

I don't know why, sorry.

But I do know that because of the current illiterati making the word forums common language it is now correct to use it in place of fora. Many other words have gone the same way.

Recently I complained to the BBC about a newscaster using 'stadiums' (:nope:) and they pointed me in the new, correct way as featured in the latest edition of the OED.

It's only going to get worse. :wah:

Still, you can't help but lol







:nope:Sorry.

[Jimbuna]

How come the SH3 forums (actually it should be "fora") are still so popular, with the number of viewers consistently out performing those for SH4 and SH5.

I don't know for sure but I could hazard a guess....better if I didn't though :timeout:

[Osmium Steele]

Because more people choose to play SH3 than the other incarnations, for myriad reasons.

[Sailor Steve]

Why is this even worth mentioning? Sounds like stirring the pot to me.

[irish1958]

Why is this even worth mentioning? Sounds like stirring the pot to me.
You're right, of course; my bad.
I just like this game better, I guess..

[Fish In The Water]

How come the SH3 forums (actually it should be "fora") are still so popular, with the number of viewers consistently out performing those for SH4 and SH5.

Freedom of choice in action. :sunny:

[sublynx]

My reasons to prefer SH3:

1. SH5's reliance on a working internet connection. I don't want to have an internet connection while playing. A connection makes my system more unstable and eats up resources. I want to be able to play with my laptop and I am sometimes in places with no internet connection or a very bad internet connection, that might cut off now and then.
2. Tradition and culture. I used to play Aces of the Deep in the good old days and got used to thinking about the Atlantic battle and the European theatre of war. SH4's Pacific environment seems alien to me. As a European, it seems easier to me to relate to the game, when the map shows cities I have actually visited, sea areas and islands I've seen, and the measurements in SH3 are in kilometers and meters, which are something that I am accustomed to.

If somebody made a subsim with SH3+GWX's tactical environment and single sub action combined with the more strategical wolfpacks of Aces of the Deep, possibly with dynamic and historically oriented orders from BDU, I'd be ready to change the game and even pay a hefty amount for the game - I see no point in all the new games being priced the same. If I want a Ferrari, I should be ready to pay for the extra quality. As it is, SH3 with it's variety giving mods is more than enough for me.

[Howard313]

well i talk here because all i have is sh3, I opted to get sh3 over 4 and 5 because it'd be easier on my pc. In fact I was originally planning on getting 2, until I heard about it's lack of re-playability, so with 3 it is and with 3 I'll stay :salute:

[FIREWALL]

I think it has alot to do with...

[Sailor Steve]

On the other hand...on the subject of "forums" vs "fora", this has always been the way of language. I like to complain that "impact" is not a verb; you don't "impact" something. Then I found out that two hundred years ago Benjamin Franklin complained to Noah Webster about the same thing. His pet peeves were the use of "advocate" and "progress" as verbs.
http://founders-blog.blogspot.com/2009/12/benjamin-franklin-to-noah-webster-jr.html

And then I realized that I've always done it with other words. I "access" the internet all the time.

Of course nouns should never be used as verbs, especially proper nouns. If you disagree, I'm sure you can google any facts you need, and xerox me a copy while you're at it.

[Herr-Berbunch]

Of course nouns should never be used as verbs, especially proper nouns. If you disagree, I'm sure you can google any facts you need, and xerox me a copy while you're at it.

:har:

[Snestorm]

Because SH3 is the best.

[Herr-Berbunch]

Because SH3 is the best.

Well we are in the SH3 side of things, was the same question asked in the other two?

Actually I think I've remembered why, the people in 4/5 side 'appear' to be a little less forgiving and friendly for people who don't RTFM, or read the myriad thread already existing on a particular subject. Personally I have all three, I love SH3 (GWX obviously, other supermods are available), don't think great of 4, and have only done the basic nav tutorial in 5 - that's not to say I don't like it, it did seem great and that can only be improved when I get round to adding mods, I just don't seem to find the gaming time to play at the moment (any spare goes on BF:BC2, and I make time on a Wed/Thurs evening for Arclight's DCS Flight Nights). :o

[irish1958]

On the other hand...on the subject of "forums" vs "fora", this has always been the way of language. I like to complain that "impact" is not a verb; you don't "impact" something. Then I found out that two hundred years ago Benjamin Franklin complained to Noah Webster about the same thing. His pet peeves were the use of "advocate" and "progress" as verbs.
http://founders-blog.blogspot.com/2009/12/benjamin-franklin-to-noah-webster-jr.html

And then I realized that I've always done it with other words. I "access" the internet all the time.

Of course nouns should never be used as verbs, especially proper nouns. If you disagree, I'm sure you can google any facts you need, and xerox me a copy while you're at it.

My pet peeve is the use of the past tense in place of the past perfect tense. It grates upon my ears and raises my blood pressure.
I tend to give the misuse of nouns a free pass, except for the misuse of proper nouns.

[Howard313]

Rename this thread: "Nouns and Verbs 101"

[Herr-Berbunch]

Rename this thread: "Nouns and Verbs 101"

Hang on, by naming this thread you are nouning. :doh:

[irish1958]

Hang on, by naming this thread you are nouning. :doh:
:D naughty, naughty, naughty!:know:

[Sailor Steve]

Why are you naughtying him?

[Ducimus]

Frankly, the fuzzy graphics, and insanely long load times have made me never to want to play SH3 ever again. It's not like i'm missing much, the gameplay for SH3, sh4 and sh5, is exactly the same. All that really changes is number of tubes you have and minor details on psuedo representations of a TDC. Everything else plays out the same regardless of game or theater. Find, chase, sink, evade. Repeat, ad nauseum for a few years, with all three games, and you end up making posts like this one.

[irish1958]

Why are you naughtying him?
Because I am a badass member of the grammar police!
My naughty was not to him but to the post above.:down:
I have no shame!!!:D
The Devil made me do it!:wah:

[Sailor Steve]

:har::yeah:

Best one I ever heard was back in '92, when San Francisco had an earthquake strong enough to knock down a couple of freeway bridges. A newswoman was describing the facts of her and those with her being cut off from the surrounding world. "We are...efforting to make contact with emergency services."

I can understand that she was a bit rattled, but "efforting"?

[Snestorm]

Well we are in the SH3 side of things, was the same question asked in the other two?

It sails well here, but on the other two it'd be like a declaration of war.

[Fish In The Water]

Everything else plays out the same regardless of game or theater. Find, chase, sink, evade. Repeat, ad nauseum for a few years, with all three games, and you end up making posts like this one.

Time for a change? :hmmm:

[Herr-Berbunch]

Time for a change? :hmmm:

He has changed, now his game is to be the only person on this forum that berates SH3, SH4, and SH5. :o




:O:

[irish1958]

@ Ducimus
The reason I asked this question was not to stir the pot, or vituperate SH4 and SH5 but to learn why so many people still prefer SH3 to them.
Clearly, both SH4 and SH5 have better graphics and, in some ways, better game play (in the use of radar, for example).
I admire your work and use it when I play SH4 as it has made an unplayable game playable.
If I offended you, I apologize.

[Sailor Steve]

Ah, I missed that part. Of course I can only speak for myself. The main reason I prefer SH3 to SH4 is the modding that has been done for SH3, while SH4 has none of the cool things GWX, LSH3 and WAC bring to the table. Also there is nothing comparable to SH3 Commander.

SH4 looks better and works better, and loads faster, and I play it as well, but until it has all the attention SH3 has recieved it still won't stand up.

SH5? Of course everyone knows I've sworn not to touch it until the DRM is completely gone, but I've seen and heard enough to know that while it has a great many improvements over its predecessors it still lacks things like Type II and IX u-boats, which for me are very important. Also things that were new to SH5 are not necessarily things I wanted in a u-boat sim in the first place. It doesn't really improve my experience to talk to crewmembers about personal things, especially when you can only talk to a select few and then only talk about one or two things. When I can talk to all 50 men about anything and everything under the sun, maybe it will make a difference. Also having every single compartment is cool, but having crew members who do nothing but stand around no matter what the situation doesn't really make me feel more like I'm there. Once the DRM is gone and I buy it I'm sure I will think it's cool, but I'm also sure my negative observations won't change.

But your initial question was about why so many people read and post in this particular forum. The SH5 drones (and I don't mean everyone who prefers that game, only the ones who talk down to everyone who feels differently) will talk about SH3 players living in the past or irrational passion, but most of us have things we like that just haven't been addressed by the later versions. Me, I read most of the forums, including all the SH threads and 'Classic Subsims', as I still play AOD from time to time. We like what we like, and we can't always explain why.

[Howard313]

He has changed, now his game is to be the only person on this forum that berates SH3, SH4, and SH5. :o




:O:

Urge to make blacksheep pun.....rising.

Must... resist... temptations...

[Fish In The Water]

SH5? Of course everyone knows I've sworn not to touch it until the DRM is completely gone...

You've got lots of company in that boat... :yep:

...as I still play AOD from time to time.

Just got mine running in DOSBox, great to take the old gal out for a spin! :up:

[Daniel Prates]

My reasons to prefer SH3:
(...) I used to play Aces of the Deep in the good old days and got used to thinking about the Atlantic battle and the European theatre of war.

Those were the days, eh? I played AOTD too when I was about 16 years old or so. What a game. Archaic for today's standars, but still.... it had some interviews wich Erich Topp, Kretschmer and others, which were still alive by then.

[TorpX]

Frankly, the fuzzy graphics, and insanely long load times have made me never to want to play SH3 ever again. It's not like i'm missing much, the gameplay for SH3, sh4 and sh5, is exactly the same. All that really changes is number of tubes you have and minor details on psuedo representations of a TDC. Everything else plays out the same regardless of game or theater. Find, chase, sink, evade. Repeat, ad nauseum for a few years, with all three games, and you end up making posts like this one.

I agree that math of getting torpedos to collide with ships is much the same in any SH game. I would say the historical context and geography makes the theaters different though. If I did not read much about WWII, I doubt that I would be very interested in any Silent Hunter game; certainly not enough to fret about which version of RFB/TMO/GWX/Whatever to install.

I don't understand why SH3 is so much more popular than SH4. I would have thought that being on the winning side and having a fair chance of living till the end of the war is more appealing than being a U-boat Capt. and getting killed in '43 for a lost cause. Do SH3 fans consider the gameplay superior?

The thing that bugs me about the SH series is that a serious player is forced to sort through and test a hurricane of mods to put the game into a fairly realistic level, when Ubisoft could have done it much better, if only they had taken the time.

[Kapt Z]

I don't understand why SH3 is so much more popular than SH4. I would have thought that being on the winning side and having a fair chance of living till the end of the war is more appealing than being a U-boat Capt. and getting killed in '43 for a lost cause. Do SH3 fans consider the gameplay superior?

When you begin to master anything don't you seek a greater challenge? The u-boats had their 'happy times' early but as the war dragged on they soon were lucky to survive a patrol let alone rack up high scores. The US boats had their hardships early, but as the war went on things got easier and by the end they were struggling to find targets worth destroying.
I have not played SH4 yet, but I did enjoy SHI. Still, for me, there is a desperate excitement to SH3 that I just don't think the Pacific Campaign can quite match.


The thing that bugs me about the SH series is that a serious player is forced to sort through and test a hurricane of mods to put the game into a fairly realistic level, when Ubisoft could have done it much better, if only they had taken the time.



True enough! Having said that, how many games get released in almost unplayable states? I like to think we as a community of subsim fanatics are 'bleeping' lucky that we have such a vast treasure of outstanding mods(and :salute:to you gods of modding) to enhance what was still a great game out of the box.

[sublynx]

Those were the days, eh? I played AOTD too when I was about 16 years old or so. What a game. Archaic for today's standars, but still.... it had some interviews wich Erich Topp, Kretschmer and others, which were still alive by then.

If I remember correctly, Kretschmer was not just interviewed but also affected the design of the game. Absolutely a great game and I can't understand how you can make a DOS game that good. I never got past 1942 too, every time a convoy with an escort carrier came up, the game crashed - maybe because my version was CAOTD. But now with SH3 I get a chance to continue my career past 1942 :arrgh!:

[frau kaleun]

it had some interviews wich Erich Topp, Kretschmer and others, which were still alive by then.


WAAAAAAAANT!!!! :wah:

Are these interviews that aren't available anywhere else? If so, can you still buy this thing? Can you access the videos without setting up a DOS emulator? I've got DOSBox and had it working on the old rig to run my Discworld game, but I don't know that I want to fool with it again. Although that would give a me a reason to reinstall Discworld. :hmmm:

[sublynx]

I've got DOSBox and had it working on the old rig to run my Discworld game, but I don't know that I want to fool with it again.

Dosbox alone is a bit slow and somewhat awkward to use, all that typing and remembering what command does what. I use a front-end program called D-fend to run Dosbox. I only need to type the necessary info once and afterwards I can just click a shortcut in D-fend to start the program I want to run. D-fend is discontinued, but there is a new version in

http://dfendreloaded.sourceforge.net/

I haven't used the new version, so I can't say how well that works.

[Hondo314]

The SH3 forum remains popular for several reasons. It's been around much longer, giving more people a chance to find a home here. Various reasons for not migrating to the other games in the series are described above. I still play SH3 because it's paid for, and because Ubisoft apparently hasn't fixed the bugs that plague all versions of this game (most notably weather and saved games). Better graphics isn't enough motivation to spend $$. If SH5 magically becomes the least buggy, I'll reconsider.

[frau kaleun]

Dosbox alone is a bit slow and somewhat awkward to use, all that typing and remembering what command does what. I use a front-end program called D-fend to run Dosbox. I only need to type the necessary info once and afterwards I can just click a shortcut in D-fend to start the program I want to run. D-fend is discontinued, but there is a new version in

http://dfendreloaded.sourceforge.net/

I haven't used the new version, so I can't say how well that works.

I had D-Fend on my old rig, but when I used it for Discworld - which was the only reason I needed it - I could not get the game to run fullscreen no matter what I tried. With DOSbox alone I had no problems with that. So as clunky as it was, it worked better for me.

[sublynx]

I could not get the game to run fullscreen no matter what I tried. With DOSbox alone I had no problems with that.

Damn, I think I´ll go and try running Panzer General WITHOUT D-Fend now :O:

[frau kaleun]

Damn, I think I´ll go and try running Panzer General WITHOUT D-Fend now :O:

On second thought it may not have been an issue with fullscreen but with getting the game to run windowed at a higher resolution than its native one.

IIRC in DOSbox I had a config file set up that started up everything necessary to load the game and run it at the resolution I wanted, all I had to do was click on it.

With D-Fend when I ran the game it was either fullscreen, or windowed in its original res which was a teeny tiny window on my newer setup. I think that there was supposed to be a way to alter the resolution and still run windowed with D-fend, maybe by importing the desired DOSbox config file or something, but for the life of me I could never get it to work. Besides which, once I had things set up in DOSbox it all came down to just one click and it wasn't like I was having to set stuff up for a bunch of different games.

I never used it with anything other than DW so I don't know if it was a general issue with D-Fend or not.

[Zedi]

WAAAAAAAANT!!!! :wah:

Are these interviews that aren't available anywhere else? If so, can you still buy this thing? Can you access the videos without setting up a DOS emulator? I've got DOSBox and had it working on the old rig to run my Discworld game, but I don't know that I want to fool with it again. Although that would give a me a reason to reinstall Discworld. :hmmm:
YT FTW! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYlk0YUaxPU
There is more in the related list.

[Fish In The Water]

Dosbox alone is a bit slow and somewhat awkward to use, all that typing and remembering what command does what.

Awkward? Come on, the command line was half the fun! ;)

[frau kaleun]

Awkward? Come on, the command line was half the fun! ;)

Oh, and fooling with Norton Commander, which I don't know if that's required for all games but it was for Discworld.

I had to copy the entire CD to my hard drive and then set things up to mount the directory the CD copy was in as a separate drive like it was reading the files from the CD drive... man it was complicated. Plus the game itself had to be patched and tweaked just to run on a post-DOS operating system.

I still remember how proud I was when finally figured it all out and made that config file that I could click on and it loaded everything and then BOOM the game was up and running perfectly according to my specifications. And then I assigned an icon to it from the DW game files - The Luggage! - and put it right on my desktop, it was so awesome.

Of course I never actually played the game for more than 10 minutes, but still... :haha:

[Fish In The Water]

Of course I never actually played the game for more than 10 minutes, but still... :haha:

You mean you're actually supposed to play the game? :D

For me it was mainly the sense of accomplishment in getting it configured no matter what. DOS was highly flexible in that regard as you could reallocate memory and load devices high to free up base RAM by writing your own boot files.

It was more nuts and bolts computing... Good times! :yep:

[sublynx]

You mean you're actually supposed to play the game? :D

For me it was mainly the sense of accomplishment in getting it configured no matter what. DOS was highly flexible in that regard as you could reallocate memory and load devices high to free up base RAM by writing your own boot files.

It was more nuts and bolts computing... Good times! :yep:

I guess everything (little) I know about computers comes from trying to make some game work in a system it wasn't designed for. :)

[Ducimus]

He has changed, now his game is to be the only person on this forum that berates SH3, SH4, and SH5. :o
:O:

Yup!
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=182479





@ Ducimus
The reason I asked this question was not to stir the pot, or vituperate SH4 and SH5 but to learn why so many people still prefer SH3 to them.
Clearly, both SH4 and SH5 have better graphics and, in some ways, better game play (in the use of radar, for example).
I admire your work and use it when I play SH4 as it has made an unplayable game playable.
If I offended you, I apologize.

Ummm. I'm not offended. If i was earlier when i posted, i don't remember. I'm past the point of giving a crap about any title, and if i do give a crap, it won't be for very long. Yeah i've worked my ass off for SH4, and I obviously have my preference of theater/subs, but im just at a point where i just dont care about all the BS anymore. For me the games over. I only post on subsim now, because I have no other forum community I care to hang my hat in. Ordinarly, i only post on a board that caters to an active interest. When my interest in that game dies off, i usually just quit posting, and move on to something else. These days i spend more time in general games and general topics then any SH subforum.