Blind deck crew. -_-

[ALOTEF]

Hey all,
I'm playing an SH4 campaign, in a Gato and with just over 200,000 tons to my name by mid-1942. (/bragging :P )
I have 100% realism set and I've encountered a problem which has bugged me since I started playing this sim; my watch crew hardly spots anything!
Seriously; when I have the TC up to 5000 or so, I can sail straight through a convoy or even sometimes I'll randomly get attacked by aircraft. In SH3, one receives a little warning screen and a definitive warning from the watch crew as soon as they spot an aircraft.
What is going on? :06:
Thanks in advance,
Mike.

[WernherVonTrapp]

What version of SHIV are you playing? Any mods installed or are you playing the Stock version? I haven't encountered anything like that since I played the Stock version years ago.

[ALOTEF]

Ah, sorry.
Vanilla SH4, v1.5. :salute:

[gmuno]

The problem is the accelerated time. Vanilla SH4 doesn't compute the ship tracks in realtime as long as the ships are outside of a certain radius around your ship (i think it's 30 nm). The movement is calculated in series of jumps and the faster the time is accelerated the larger those jumps are. Even slow moving ships jump about 70 miles in one go, aircrafts a lot more. Just for an experiment: start a career in 1944, sail to the Japanese mainland and cruise along the coast at max. accerlation. You'll see astonishing few aricrafts.
The mega-mods enlarge the real-time radius apparently. If it's possible, download one of of them. The bridge crew is still as blind as a earthworm, but the stuttering anouncing a formation starts sooner. ... and the aircrafts get annoying;)

[john9001]

when in enemy waters i never go over 500 or 250 TC.

stuff happens too fast at "warp" speed.

:arrgh!:

[WernherVonTrapp]

Yes, that TC problem was common for me when I played the Stock version. Once I loaded up the mods, it never happened again. You have version 1.5, so you should have no problems running any of the mods. Why don't you try one of them on for size and see if it fits to your liking.:up:

[Soviet Creeper]

Heh, reminds me of that time when I appeared right infront a very large, fast moving task force. Ended up getting rammed by a destroyer, winning, and then having a crusier tear my little S 18 to shreds. That was fun.

[gmuno]

Just as fun as "Warship spotted" "Engines destroyed" "Bulkhead destroyed" and so on. Was cruising in the Java Sea when a destroyer materialized one short mile on port. 8192x accerleration is a real prankster.:D

[mobucks]

haha, Nice!
I never go above 1500tc when in enemy waters. 8096 tc?! What, do you finish a patrol in the time it takes to beat the first level of pacman?!

[Sailor Steve]

I figure that in the very old Silent Service the time compression for travelling was about 40,000x, and yet any time that sim dropped to 1x it was because the crew spotted something on the horizon, and there was never a problem. Why do these games have that problem?

[Nisgeis]

Did Silent Service have a random campaign layer, or was it scripted? If you have a random encounter, you can decide at any point to drop out of TC and place a contact at the very edge of visible range.

If you have a scripted campaign, you have to continuously check whether any of the scripted traffic is within range of your sub's sensors at any given moment. The way this is done in SH4 is to take a slice of time, advance your sub x distance and see if there is any shipping in that new area within range. If you have a very fast processor, or low TC, then you can take very small slices of time and the sub will move only a short way per time, but if you are lagging (TC become jerky) then that means that your PC is having trouble and is having to take only one sample per update, so at say 4096 x TC at 14 knots, the the boat will move however far 14 knots over 4096 seconds is - 13 miles? If the CPU isn't fast enough to break that distance up into small chunks, then it has to jump the sub from the start to the end and if you are in range of a ship, you could end up 13 miles closer to it. At very high TC and severe TC lag you could hop from a point in front of a ship to a point well beyond it and your crew never see it.

If you 'back up' to a non stuttery TC level, you shouldn't get many problems.

At least, I think that's how it works. I could be wrong though. Probably am.

[Sailor Steve]

Did Silent Service have a random campaign layer, or was it scripted?
It was primitive, is what it was. That said, I would think (well, actually I wouldn't, but let's pretend) that since a computer does thousands of things every second, and since it's in charge of running the whole game, that it would know what was going on all the time. Of course that's why I'm not a computer expert, so what I think doesn't count for much, but it seems odd to me that it can't be programmed to drop you out of TC the instant something is spotted.

[CCIP]

Silent Service (also my first subsim) technically didn't have TC in the same way as the recent Silent Hunter games do since cruising around and looking for traffic in that game was abstracted. Unlike SH4 where you have actual ships moving on actual routes, tracked at all times, SS just simulated a random chance of an encounter in given areas. You technically didn't encounter ships as they moved their way through the sea, but they would be generated when the game decided you would have an encounter, based on a virtual dice roll.

So yep, it was primitive. Pretty elegant solution for what it did with the computing resources it had, though!

[WernherVonTrapp]

If my recollection of the TC problem is correct, and mind you it's been a couple of years since I played Stock, it didn't happen all the time. In fact, it happened infrequently and sporadically, but it always seemed to happen at the most inopportune times, making high TC all the more an unattractive prospect.
It seemed to be especially inclined to aircraft encounters. http://i1045.photobucket.com/albums/b456/archangel501/Smileys/c5baae37.gif

[TorpX]

I really don't see the need for high TC. I'll use 500 or so, but no more than that, unless I'm in a safe area. I mean if you are only cruising home after a long patrol, and don't feel like taking the time, you can always save the game.

[ALOTEF]

Thanks for the replies, gents. As per my last patrol, I have followed your advice and sank 160,000 tons on a patrol into Hiroshima harbor. (Including a Fuso and Ise battleship at dock. I was lucky. :P ) Thanks again, I got the Navy Cross. :)