:har: that'll solve the problem!

Wow thanks for finding that Steve - a keymapper is great. With all the mods silent hunter 4 is probably better than silent hunter 5!:D

That's what we say about SH3! SH4 came along just two years after SH3, and SH3 modding was well underway, and SH4 kind of got ignored. There are great mods for SH4 in the Pacific, but the u-boat side is still suffering. Operation Monsun is a great supermod, but it still lacks a lot and it's looking more and more like poor SH4, which is the better game, will never get the attention it deserves. So I play SH3 and SH4, the former for the career experience and cool visual mods, the latter for the great graphics and crew management. I wish I could drop all for the sake of one, but I can't.

But then I still sometimes still play Aces Of The Deep, which came out in 1994 and still has the best AI routines and overall gameplay.

so I am curious...what is it that you feel is lacking about Operation Monsun and why do you feel that SH4 won't get the attention it deserves.

As for me I am glad for silent hunter 3 and 4 because 5 won't run on my laptop.

Julie, that is a difficult question to answer unless you are into SH3 in detail. True, the graphics are better in SH4, but the game play is far superior in SH3. And with the choices of great superior mods and the plethora of great mods being developed now, SH4 seems stagnant.

What has not been done to OM? I'll start with OM itself.

1. Originally all your junior officers held the rank of Kapitanleutnant, which meant they outranked you, their captain, at least until you got promoted. I pointed that out, and now they are all Leutnants. This is nice, but they are still rank 12, the highest they can get. They shouldn't be more than 10, which allows for promotion to Oberleutnant.

2. The Type II has 44 crew, where the real one had a crew of 25-28. These are minor things, but they make a difference, at least to someone who loves the history as I do. I've been playing subsims since 1986, and I long ago got over the thrill of just sinking things. I play for the chance to recreate the history rather than just play a game, and for me the little things become big.

Now to my real complaints, which are not related to OM, but to what hasn't been done for SH4. This is mainly graphics stuff, but it can make a difference, especially for someone like me.

1. The harbors. Places like Kiel and Wilhelmshaven are hopelessly wrong in SH3 and SH4. There have been many mods which improve them to varying degrees. Starting with Rubini's Harbor Traffic mod back in 2005 there have been so many new and interesting things added to SH3. You see ships coming and going, floating drydocks, ships under construction, bouys, wrecks, new buildings and people. GWX, LSH3 and WAC all make amazing changes to the feel of the harbors. Originally there was no Kiel Canal in SH3. Now there is not only the canal, but there are locks at each entrance. Another more recent mod adds working gates, so you have to wait until the green flag goes up and the gates open. There are proper bridges over the canal, including LSH3's working model of the Rendsburg swing bridge, which...swings open. There are locks at Wilhelmshaven and St. Nazaire, which also now have working gates. None of this has been done for SH4.

2. IABL's Merchant Fleet Mod. Over 50 new classes of merchant ship. The fact that my computer won't run them is irrelevant. A couple of them are in OM, but only a couple.

3. SH3 Commander. This is a program that, besides giving you one-click control over several of the game's functions, also adds features like millions of possible crew names (1.7 billion, to be specific), realistic crew transfers, and most importantly for me adds names, cargo listings and crew numbers to each ship you sink. That alone makes any game without it second-rate. I don't just sink a medium merchant - I sink SS Lucretia Borgia, carrying a cargo of Rice, 43 crew, 16 of whom died.

4. That last also prompted me to spend several years collecting the data for my Ship Names Mod, which makes sure that the names SH3C gives are historically accurate and are applied to the proper ship class. If this function was in SH4 I could also make the names apply to the proper country, since SH4 is far better than SH3 in the way it makes the merchant ships work.

I'm sure there is more, but that should give an idea of what SH4 still lacks for me.