Those two things would add so much to the game experience. :yeah:

I'm not really talking about in depth conversations here... I'm talking about personalities.

For example, what made, say, Das Boot great was the tension in the characters. Add being able to actually experience that would be awesome.

Like I said, though - to each his own.

Well, I do not know how one could achieve that type of tension in a game. Well, at least not in today's games. Perhaps down the road. :up:

Anyone who's played Left 4 Dead can appreciate what can be done with a bit of clever scripting. Each character has certain things they'll say in certain situations (the best, in my opinion, from the character Frank who hates everything, and whose lines are all along the lines of "I hate vans" or "I hate Ayn Rand," all in response to the things around him. IMO it's hysterical)

Then again, I think, given the subject matter, that it would be quite a bit of work for a relatively small gain in gameplay.

RR--I love the idea of player-controlled ballast! I'd love to have an opportunity to work as the dive officer during an ash can attack. I think that trying to keep the boat stable in those conditions would be a lot of fun.

Nooooooooooooo!:eek: No hokey "Das Boot Experience" in fleet boats. I can't stand Mr Sniveler, whose function is to suffer ignobly throughout the movie, while being useless for anything aboard the boat. I can't stand that they are so focused on showing the crushing of spirits during a depth charge attack, they don't bother to do any evasive maneuvering.

I can't stand the phony procedure just so they can stupidly stick a periscope out of the water in the face of a charging DD for cinematic effect! Idiots! You don't raise the scope until the sonar man tells you everything happening around you. You would already know the bearing of the DD and the fact that he was charging quickly. Frankly you would be evading and not mucking with the useless periscope. The fake surprise bit turns my stomach.

There's some neat footage in Das Boot. The sub looks great. The bar scene is a lot of fun. The people are just a travesty. It's better than Hollywood. That and a dollar will make a down payment on a cup of coffee. Time is overdue for someone to make a good submarine movie. That ain't it.

You can't read the book without wondering what could have been.

I don't need a lot of crew interaction, but would like to have a bigger selection to chose from. Would like to have one XO and COB.

Be nice if we could blow up ground targets.

Like to have a third view of my character.

Better more detailed missions.

I can think of a few things that would have been nice.
:roll:
Okay, make that a lot of things... whale of a thread ahead.


1: Separate buttons for Hold Fire and Fire At Will. It is annoying when a burning tanker is going to burn itself to the bottom and clicking the existing button just causes it to flash and stay at 'fire at will'. Also, separate buttons for Short, Medium and Long ranges... (like SH3)

2: Unless I have somehow missed it this whole time, I cannot find/interact with an actual TDC station. Toss in an actual option to go from Manual to Automatic aiming in a patrol would also be nice.

3: Both radar screens used for surface search radar doesn't seem right. :damn: One should be for air search radar, the other should be for surface search and have a switch to select between A-Scope and PPI modes when the later becomes available. That's how it was setup in good old SH1.
Half the fun in SH1 was watching the SD radar to see if the peaks would still be going a steady speed and require a dive, or if the peaks hold steady or beginning to get farther away, indicating the plane is just passing by in the area and not heading in the general direction of the sub.

4: Basic crew interaction elements, nothing major, just like in SH3 where it was possible to click on a crew member at a station to get the options/commands for their station.

5: Option to allow the crew to tamper with torpedoes, and horribly break their broken warheads so the are unbroken and actually work a little more often. Time period could affect the effectiveness of such changes, as farther into the war with the torpedo problems being more obvious and more 'ignored' by the higher ups, the more crews became aware of the problem and took efforts to remedy such problems themselves.
A Skipper could go by the book or throw the book overboard and have the crew rehabilitate a few fish into better wartime condition. In such a way, there could be a new passive skill that allows the person with said skill to halve the chance of a dud or premature detonation of any torpedo fired from the torpedo room they are stationed in, and another 'triggered' ability that allows for a single torpedo to be fired with no chance of failure (2 hour 'cool down' time be to much?)

6: More areas in the sub. I miss SH1 at times, one could go to the captain's quarters, with access to a calender showing sun up and sun down times, log book ship ID book, important radio reports (mission and such iirc). Makes me want to dig out SH3 again.

7: Most of the stuff in SH3 that for some reason was never put into SH4.

8: Better/more defined realism options.

9: 50. caliber MGs for AA, if it was realistic for some subs to carry them for AA weapons. I think I recall a pair of .50 calibers on a rack in the conning tower of a Purpoise class.

9B: When AA is manned and aircraft are near, seeing a few crew on the bridge with weapons. (I recall in SH3 of what looks like small MGs/large SMGs in the conning tower of one sub, and of the above thing of seeing MGs in the conning tower of an earlier US sub). If caught flat footed on the surface, might as well toss out as much lead and steel as possible before the crew has to scramble below deck, or worse, in a situation where diving might not be possible (shallow water, sub damaged and barely floating as it is, etc)

10: Smaller stuff on the water bottom, more sub types, props turning the right way, ships not having absurd acceleration rates, raising the radar antenna/radar depth, and tons of other stuff that had to be done by modders or that existed all the way back in SH1... there should be no need for such mods, as the game should have had/done such things in the first place. :doh:
It is sad when a sub sim over a decade old has a few more details about US sub operations than SH4 does... :-?
Also sad that people who mod in their free time get more done than a room full of professionals... although, modders don't have clueless reps from publishers insisting a game be messed up horribly because of their own misguided and money influenced ideas of how (and by when) things should be done...

11: More intelligent air traffic. I don't like avoiding an estimated 12-24 planes per hour... A sub should not encounter more aircraft in half a day than US subs encountered during intire patrols of WWII... I am sure the Japanese had planes on patrol, but NOT sending them every 15 minutes to just happen to fly on a course that gives them a 90% chance of flying exceptionally close to the sub...

12: Better ship traffic data... Annoying they mainly report stuff so far away it isn't possible, yet not stuff that happens to be close enough to have a chance to intercept.

13: Other subs. stumbling across a convoy in chaos and realizing there is anothe US sub fishing with high explosives, or stumbling across a Japanese Sub. I recall running into enemy subs in earlier SH games... seems odd that I'm the only sub in SH4... :shifty:
(at least as far as I can tell... I have yet to see any signs of other subs in SH4)
With #12, a very close convoy report could also indicate the presence of a nearby friendly sub. Hit a few merchants in the convoy, dive deep, get reports of torpedoes in the water and/or of explosions as the escorts hunting for you suddenly get really confused and panicked as one of them gets blown out of the water or as a few fleeing merchants also get torpedoed.
Would be freaky, hearing a DD above, followed by the feint sound of a fish and the DD going high RPMs, quickly followed by an explosion (or a loud thud and distant muffled sound of someone yelling profanities in English, maybe with an Australian accent, depending on location of patrol...)

14: As said before, the ability to roam the boat would be nice, wander the command area, or move around on the bridge... toss in a "Patton At Sea Mode", skipper pulls out a hand gun and shoots at any aircraft trying to strafe the sub... :88)

15: More freaking support (and official patches) for the game... I paid good money for SH4 Gold, I expect it to work, not to have to loose campaigns because my inability to play for days strait without sleep or alt-tabbing means I have to rely on a save system that will likely crash SH4 faster than ASW heavy task force ruins the day of an unlucky skipper...

16+: Some of the stuff already mentioned that makes sense, better missions, etc... and some stuff Rockin Robbins mentioned (with options for switching some things off or to a more basic mode for us less capable or more casual sub skippers)

Okay, I'm done venting like a sub that had a crew living off of beans for a week...

There's the kind of excrement we can do without. If you love SH1 go play it. In the meantime we have the two best submarine simulations in the history of man, not by a little way but by a very, very long way.

Modders do not get more done than a room full of professionals. Without the professionals there would be no modders. As a matter of fact the professionals can do quite nicely without modders, thank you very much, and will if people insist in absurd inanities such as the above.

We have no "clueless reps." We have devs who choose to spend time in our forum who happen to care deeply about their game and share what they can with us. The business of game companies is to sell games at a profit. Without business and without profit you would be typing on a clay tablet and live to about the age of 35 before you died of old age. EVERY good thing in your life has come from business, money and profit.

Here we are looking for specific ideas to make a next generation game and you think the best way to accomplish it is to insult the makers. It's just like the stategy of defending wage earners by attacking all the wage payers. Not too bright. Let's portray those who produce our quality of life as a bunch of evil monsters! Let's act on it and insult them, penalize them if we can! Then let's wonder why the next game ignored our input. And why it's not even moddable.

My intention is not to insult game makers.

When I say 'rep', I mean those from a publisher that say how much time and money the devs have to make a game, and who say what is or is not allowed, of what must or must not be put into the game.

Sure, business is needed to bring us great games, but at the same time, said business can ruin games or limit their potential, especially when it sometimes seems the goal of selling a game is to make money, and making a good game is a secondary concern.

The only thing devs can be accused of is being only human, and being unable to achieve sometimes impossible goals and deadlines set by whoever is marketing the game, or of being unable to do certain things simply because they are not allowed to.

At least SH4 has made it to v1.5 and actually has people that still care about making it work.

And at least SH4 has Ubisoft involved, and not EA...

This whole thing reminds me of Simcity Societies, the devs want to make more patches, but EA has denied them permission...
Or UFO Afterlight, where one person (who I think it was one of the original programers) that worked on the game after support was mostly dropped, they managed to create a patch, they submitted it, and it was cleared for public release.
Or of some hospital 'sim' where the game was stable at least... as for support, last I checked, there wasn't any (making half the game next to unplayable past a certain point)

Beyond that, even after a reinstall, SH4 is still corrupting saves (even previously working ones), so I am not in much of a good mood at the moment, so my overall tone of the previous post was likely mistaken for what it was not meant to be.

I don't agree with you there RR. I've just finished the TV long series and I was very impressed by how accurate they were in prezenting those DC runs. All of the maneuvers and decisions by the captain were correct and the tension was almost the same as I got a few times while being Hedgehogged by three DDs. To set things straight this was my final view on the movie....

Das Boot is, by a SH3 player's point of view, maybe the most boring movie ever made, akin to a very poor patrol. That's why we all love it. The long waits, the sickening rough weather, the rotting food, the annoying crew members (some of them) and only 3(or maybe 4, not sure yet) ships sunk. Hell you've just described my last patrol. But I do want those details in a subsim. Am I crazy? In one patrol in Sh4 i spent 30 minutes or more at 1x time copression just walking on the outer decks, pretending to climb the ladders, checking all the dials in the command room and admiring the waves.

rditto48801, You're right there. I personally know a few members of the Game Testing team of SH4. They all said the same thing. That game was only half done when Ubisoft pushed the release date. They published an unfinished game. Considering what that romanian team achieved with SH3, I really feel sorry for them. You can actually see how broken the game was by trying to fire manually in the UM expansion :down:. I wonder if for SH5 they'll give them the chance to put all their passion(and ours:arrgh!:) into a finished game.

Movies do human breakdowns. Action games, adventure games do too for the characters you play with (as they tell a story).
Simulations do data and condition breakdowns, and in certain cases, can tell you about History (not a story). You don't see the military simulators simulate human reactions, because hardcore simulation is not about that... is about replicating a visual environment, the nature physics, and the machine you're working with, but not the people that man them.
"The Sims" already emulates interaction and emotions, but that's an Arcade, some sort of a Big Brother simulator.

Besides, such a complicated aspect for development it represents, I'd prefer more "eye-candy" rather than an "ego" simulator. The crew we see in our boats is just a mere representation for the sake of interactivity, not to feel the boat alone and empty, and even let you give them orders and have them reply, but other than that... people already argue that more interior compartments modelled would be pointless, imagine how pointless would be modelling emotions and ability to speak to the crew, and not have those much more inmersive interiors done.

Cheers

In the world of business money always comes first. They're not worried about releasing a game unfinished, because the fact is it doesn't hurt sells. They leave it to patching, modders, ect. When they feel the game has reached far as it can go, they stop support. Not long after that they tease us with another release.....and we will buy it. I think series games are dangerous, because they often leave out some stuff so they can place it somewhere else down the road. My sister who is a game designer says that many times they have completed work that could be added to a game, but is put on the shelf for the next one in the series.

That's just because that's what the scope of the simulation is.

All I'm saying is that I'd like to see the scope of the simulation expanded. It's not a question of right or wrong.

And yes, you do see REAL military simulators simulate human reactions.That's why I would like both.