Playing in Real Time

[MADLOU]

Does anyone play this, or any other subsim, in real time? A couple years ago, I played SH3 and SH4 to death (couldnt get into SH5). I've been away from all sims for over a year and am now coming back to SH4 now that my cheap laptop has the hardware to play it very well. However, I now play it in real time. I use another laptop for my other things. I let it play 24/7 while I do life's chores and other things. I glance at it from time to time and when I have a spare moment or two I might actually sit down and reallly play it for a couple minutes. If I run into some action, I will either immediately deal with it or pause it til I have time to. I save my progress before going to sleep or leaving my house in the event I wake up or return home and discover I have been sunk or damaged. If that happens I just reload the game. The ocean sounds actually help me sleep. Crazy, ain't it?

[Armistead]

Nah, I have no desire to run the game or my PC real time. I play with cams off, so often battles or evading I have to play in real time, that's enough for me.

[Sailor Steve]

No, because letting it run while you do something else isn't "playing the game in real time", it's doing something else. I see no difference between that and using time compression. Besides, what do you do while you're at work? At the store? Visiting a friend?

No, the only way to actually play in real time is to sit in front of the computer the whole time, and nobody does that.

[IonicRipper]

^ Maybe some do... But obviously they can't post on the forums :haha:

[fireftr18]

Actually, in real life, if they are not at their stations or training, then they go about normal daily chores or sleeping, reading, or studying.
Now to do the game in real time, then you need to do a realistic length career and it will still take about a year. Or it'll take 4 years to complete. Doing the game in real time is really impractical because the most of the time, there is nothing going on. That's why time compression goes so high, and it automatically goes down on a contact.

[jcope]

I've sometimes been tempted to try it. By compressing time, you condense the game down to mostly just the encounters with the enemy. You can take them more for granted. If it has been a few days since your last encounter and it might be several more before the next, you'll cherish your time spent with the enemy much more.

Spotting land will become a bit of an event.

You'll also have time to put into other aspects of the game such as crew management. I don't know how much value there is in optimising your crew, but on the voyage out from Pearl Harbor, that's about all you'll have to do.

The drawbacks would be needeing to monitor the game all the time while on station because the sonar operators are nearly useless, and then dealing with lost sleep because the freighter showed up at 3am. Unless you don't think pausing the game doesn't disqualify your real-time approach. Computer and game crashes and power outages will be costly.

Getting sunk after two actual years is going to sting.

[Cybermat47]

If you do play in real time, without interruptions, how are you supposed to get the 24-inch thick glasses you're gonna need? :06:

[TorpX]

Does anyone play this, or any other subsim, in real time?
Someone did a patrol in RT once. I really can't see doing that. It would just be too arduous. I played a patrol using celestial navigation once, and that nearly made me stop playing. Playing in RT, I think, would be worse. I can see playing with a TC limit of 32x or 64x, but not 1x.

I think Sailor makes a good point. Staring at a computer monitor and playing a game, for hours on end is not the same as being on a submarine at war, for hours on end. In the end you would have to do other things anyway.

I agree the high TC, warping from target to target, makes for an unrealistic game, but this can be better handled by using RSRDC and not ambushing targets, and limiting TC to a reasonable level, not using map contacts, and things of this sort.

Really, if you do a RT patrol, there wouldn't be much to do, in between contacts. You could move around the crew, but this only amounts to rearranging cardboard cut-outs to combat boredom. There is little practical benefit to it.


^ Maybe some do... But obviously they can't post on the forums :haha:

Yeah, you never know. :O:

[Hinrich Schwab]

I responded in a similar thread about my experiences.

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=199341

I would not recommend that others do what I did. For me, it was an experiment of sorts. Time compression is your friend.

[Sailor Steve]

I've sometimes been tempted to try it. By compressing time, you condense the game down to mostly just the encounters with the enemy. You can take them more for granted. If it has been a few days since your last encounter and it might be several more before the next, you'll cherish your time spent with the enemy much more.
When running u-boats in SH3 or SH4 I hand-write a situation and weather report every day, then put it in my log when the patrol is done. Coming to real time for a few minutes each game day is more than enough for me. Unfortunately that is less likely with fleet boats because the US Submarine Service insisted on radio silence except for absolute emergencies.

Spotting land will become a bit of an event.
One of the complaints in a modded SH3 was the surplus of radio messages dragging the player back to real time every couple of minutes. When a regular member did a 1x patrol awhile ago he reported back that the radio messages became a welcome break from the monotony, coming as they now did every few hours, or even days.

Getting sunk after two actual years is going to sting.
Oh yeah. :yep:

[TwoGamers]

is there a mod that gives you less accurate navigation. Something that puts you of course or doesn't let you see were you are in big storms? That would make the game interesting

[TorpX]

There is a way to get less accurate (and more realistic) navigation, but it is not for the faint of heart. It involves using a outside Astronomy program for celestial navigation, some kind of Java software (so it knows where your game sub is), a mod that eliminates your sub marker on the charts, and various tables and procedures, for calculating your position.

Search the forum for Celestial Navigation and you can read the thread. IMO, the game is just not adapted to this. It is a lot of work to do constant celestial calculations and dead reckoning calculations. Calculating a firing solution algebraically might seem hard to some, but you need only do this once a week or so; the navigation business requires multiple calculations every day (unless you don't move). I would still like a practical way to do this in the game, but every means I know of, falls short, for one reason or another.