+1

Wolfpacks will only encompass a very small percentage of your game time if they are implemented in the game. Navigation will encompass every second you are at sea, wolfpacks or not. Getting it right this time is far more important, and certainly more important than having the cook ask me to try the soup!

I'm afraid we are all barking up the wrong tree trying to convince Ubisoft putting in a spherical world. Ubisofft didn't make this game for hardcore players. It's targeted for (average) Joe Gamer, who doesn't even know how to plot targets manually. Plotting an intercept course is something he has yet to learn. Let alone how to deal with different map projections. Mostlikely he will ditch the game before he has to do that. I just hope they simulate this spherical world better, by rendering ships lower on the horizon, or reduce fuelconsumption (along longitude only) nearer to the poles. That's alot more simple and actually helps immersion. Eventhough the latter suggestion only solves the historical endurance issue. A trip around the polar circles still takes as long as along the equator. Propper point-to-point distances also requires a serious modification to the physics engine. No way they'll get that done including testing before Q1/Q2 2010. It will remain wishfull thinking.

"You don't know what you're missing."

You don't have to modify the physics engine to have a spherical world, silly. The ocean in SH3 is only some 30km circle of flat water around the submarine. A merchant 100nm away isn't bobbing up and down in water and listing side to side, it's a few numbers for position, speed, course, and ship class.

In fact motion of ships in spherical coordinates is cake mathematically. The course has a N-S component and an E-W component. The ships can easily travel straight lines since they don't have to deal with chart projections at all.

The only, only slightly goofy or tricky part is rendering the paper nav map on the player's UI. I figure straight lines work ok for short ranges. After a cuttoff range the lines would have to curve according to the projection like for long course tool lines.

average joe settings can be implemented.

if a player wants point and shoot targeting and point and click navigation... there are and should be options for that.

If another player wants hard core navigation or targeting... there are options for that.

ubi has been wonderful about gameplay adaptability in the past.

what on earth do game options have to do with whether or not the "earth" in the game is round or flat?

FWIW tank sims usually have an option to consider or ignore "real world curvature" when targetting, for the "point-and-shoot" crowd.

Can't see why a sub sim should be any different.

Sure they can model it in a subgame. DrSid did it in his ComSubSim, in a matter of days if I remember. (community subsim: http://www.commanders-academy.com/co...itle=Main_Page ) But he wrote his simulator from the ground up. Coordinate systems and their equations are a core part of such games/simulators. If Ubisoft decides to use a different kind of coordinate system, they would also need to change the AI and how it responds to situations near the poles. My guess is that they are reluctant to pursue that. But I'd love to be proven wrong. :salute:

The Earth is Flat FLAT I tell you ! FLAT !!!

(Wanders off muttering)

http://i259.photobucket.com/albums/h...lat_earth1.jpg

The earth wasn't flat for SH2
 

SH2, with a very simple navigation map/chart and very bad tools, used a spherical earth.
It also had an implement lost on SH3 and SH4: when you come to a point out of your ship, you could get distance and cap to go there.

I realised that earth was spherical running a single mission in the American coast: the cap and the distance to return to Brest was the orthodromic solution, and in the way back, you had to correct the cap every 6 or 8 hours to reach yout base.

When I switched to SH3 I couldn,t believe this step back (many other things were far better), and I keep missing this capability with SH4

really? Well good, I hope it won't be that hard to put back in.

Actually, the map in SH2 blew the later versions in high water. Remember the layers for "navy grids"/"geographic grids"? Or the calendar with sun/moon rise/set times? :up:

Oh I want this so bad!!Real navigation!Round world this is a must!!
80% of the time in the game i spend on the nav map so this is
one of the most important things for a simulation ,where navigation is
crucial.I hope Ubi is reading this and will try to come up with a solution
for at last better navigation than in SH3/4.

I think SH3 and SH4 have original German map...
But in fact real distance on subpolar region should be different to terrestrial equator...
Map is ok, but the real speed on east-west direction should be corrected to the real distance...

for me, to implement a knob for getting position and mark on map (WO, take the sextant and give me position) sounds easy to implement for the devs. of course, they have to implement a second one in the realism menu: turn of the gps on map.

that would be nice. the quality of the position could depend on the weather, the skills of the WO, day or night, etc.)


same with the plotting by crew: add a knob like this to the maps view: Note on map, distnace is ..., bearing is...!

easy to implement and a great immersion factor, me thinks.


Jaeger out

What about The World projected as a chubby diamond.
Fat at The Equator, and pointed at The Poles.
Would this not solve The Artificial Distance problems?