How about changing it to ...say.... 10?

I have an idea on how to address this, but is means eliminating single contacts from radio reports. Is this something that wouldn't bother people?

I'm not following. How is this causing problems, or how is it unrealistic? When you have no periscope up, or if you're submerged, you can't see contacts, and presumably you can't draw them on the map. As I understand it, the idea is that you put your periscope up, leave it up while you measure and mark the contacts, pull your periscope down, and keep doing that 'periscope dance' as you follow the contacts. Am I missing something?

I've had different results as far as the game remembering what I've ided. I recall losing id after some waves or after a slightly extended period in which the scope is down. I don't think it always happened, but then, I was only at 74% realism. I would argue that it is unrealistic to have the game forget what I've ided *too* quickly (obviously it should forget at some point). For example, if a wave crashes past my periscope after I've ided target A, I (as a commander) surely wouldn't have forgotten what I ided. The game should remember, just as I remember, what boat target A is.

This was happening to me before I installed RUb and playing at 74% realism. (I just installed it and haven't played yet with it aside from the academy missions, which I might remark become very hard, especially the deck gun mission.) And it wasn't a huge deal since I was only looking at one ship. So I knew what it was and could leave my recognition manual on the right page to quickly re-id when needed.

But suppose you have two targets, A and B, following one another. One is an escort. The other is a merchant. You estimate range and bearing on both. Scope down for 1 minute. (I use Wazoo's nomograph mod to get a speed estimate given two marks 1 minute apart.) Raise scope for new bearings and ranges (to get course and speed).

Here the problem actually wastes time (because there are two targets). The book will remain on the page of the last target you ided, so that will be just a quick check-mark, but now you have to back out to the list of categories, change over to merchant (or appropriate country) and find the other target in the book again. That's an unrealistic waste of time.

Surely I would remember what I had ided before. It shouldn't be necessary to scroll through the book to find the second target (or even the first for that matter). That would waste valuable time that you just wouldn't waste in real life. You'd see both targets, recognize them (it's only been a minute, after all) and make the same mast calculations as you did before. You wouldn't reach for your book to make sure that target A is (still) a C2 and target B is (still) a destroyer.

Also, just to be clear, I don't think the worry is about the ship id disappering while the scope is submerged so much as it is a failure of the ship id reappearing when the scope comes back up. The notepad is just a notepad. It represents where I would write my notes down in real life (if I bothered to keep them written down at all). And in real life, my notes wouldn't be erased from my notepad or my mind simply because I lowered the scope. I wouldn't have to jump through hoops (like scrolling through a manual) to help me recognize the very ship I was looking at 60 seconds ago.

The requirement of scrolling through the manual (even when you know exactly what you're looking at) is just an artifact of the way information is entered into the game system. It isn't realistic. If you don't know what you're looking at, you grab the book and scroll. If you do know what you're looking at, you wouldn't grab the book. You'd just say, "There's that C2 again. What's my range estimate now?".

If each of Nate's 10 ships were of a distinct type, it might be a bit unrealistic to expect the captain to remember all 10 types, mast heights, and which was which (unless he's Rain Man). But the situation in the game is something that would've affected Nate even if he had only met 3 or 4 ships, which we could easily expect him to be able to remember off the top of his head (i.e. what the ship types and mast heights were) without having to look them up again. The game should credit him with this much memory capacity by remembering (in the notebook) each ship type (at least for a few minutes).

Edit: I posted this without seeing the post above...my apologies for the redundancy.

Not sure where I am loosing you...A couple of posts in this thread explained it perfectly. I don't think its realistic if a wave hits my scope that I have to open up the ID book and re-check the identity of ship I just identified.
I thought it was common practice that when I move into my firing position, I gather all of the target info and then I dip my scope to prevent being spotted. I use the data I just collected (range/speed/etc) in conjuction with my stopwatch to get a good idea when the target will be close to my "fire" position. I then raise my scope, hit the update button and soon after an artificial reef is made.

The problem now is that extra steps are needed because I have to open up the ID book again, scroll through pages to locate the matching ship in order to re-identify it before I take the shot. It gets even worse if your the nervous type that lowers/raises the scope frequently because you'll have to repeat those steps over and over again. Rough seas also make this worse.

If realism is what we are after then think about it...if you saw a ship with your own 2 eyes and with the help of a book determined it's ID; would you have to have to refer to a book again if you took your eyes off it for a couple of min? The answer is obvious.


-Captain America

Let us not forget that the captain ain't alone on the boat. You are not alone in keepimg track of the ships.

Part of the drill is to first try to ID the ship/target (specific ship or class/type of ship) in order to be able to work out your following actions. Among other things the ship, or type/class of ship, is in your report on ships sunk together with their presumed tonnage. So I think that target ID would not be forgotten once it was estblished. On my boat it sure as "warm place" would be jotted down on the target plot.

As said, if there is only one ship it would be hard to forget what your ID for it was from peek to peek. Even a small number would not be that hard to remember all by yourself, if not with a bit of help from your crew. When I sight a convoys I try to ID as many of the merchants as I can. As captain I inform my plotting crew of nos. of columns, nos. of ship per column, and for every ship that I ID I will give its place and column.

The escort I will not give toss about making more of an ID than to stat destroyer there and corvette there. It is enough for me to know the nos. of escort and their general whereabout. I know they are naval and therefore most probably dangerous for me. As this is war I can't trust the ship info about a certain class having or not having this or that type of weapon, or how many of this and that. So losing or not losing ID of an escort does not matter — not to me that is.

Capital ships are a different story compared to escorts. I will treat them as I treat merchant, I will ID them and place them.

So my point is that once I have ID:ed a ship either I or my WE ought to pretty quickly be able to come up with a ID for it if I just give the ships relative location. However, if the columns start to break up and the ships intermingle then I ought to have at least some problem ID:ing them. Still, I ought to be able to come up with an ID pretty quickly without having to use the Rec.Manual.

Now think about the glorious prospect of having 356 different merchant ships in your Recognition Manual, the futur "sigh", then it would a mouse clicking "varm place"! In the current form of establishing ID it would be.

That will cause lost contact for ID instantly.

But I also see it it happen alot in the stock game too. :-?

I don't think you should, but in an earlier post you said the problem was caused by RUb 1.42. As far as I can tell, this problem has nothing to do with RUb. It is a difference in the way SH3 1.4 works versus how SH3 1.3 worked. 1.3 kept the previous identity 'in memory' and Sh3 1.4 doesn't (or if it does it only does it sporadically).

I agree with you. I don't like the new way SH3 works either, but I believe it's just the way the devs decided to do it. If it's an RUb problem I'll do my best to fix it, but from what I remember of the tests I did while beta testing SH3 1.4, this is a game issue, not a mod issue. Unfortunately I am having some issues at home which are preventing me from spending time analysing the mod or the game, or even keeping up properly with forum threads (which is why I wasn't following this problem properly - I'm basically doing a quick scan of threads in order to keep up in some basic way, becuse half my brain is currently tied behind my back, LOL).

I completely agree. I just don't believe this is an RUb problem. It may be, but I think I saw this problem with a clean SH3 1.4 install.

I am not trying to put the blame on the excellent RUB mod...I'm just trying to state the facts.

I believe since patch 1.3 (1.2?) the devs corrected this issue. If you look at the default 1.4 patch, before any modding, the decay time was set to 60. I have tested many different values and found some weird things:
If I set it to any value other than 60 the ID problem persists. The value of 60 is supposed to represent seconds..so in theory that would mean after 1 min I should lose the ship ID. BUT, thats not the case; It seems that putting in a value of 60 keeps the ID in memory for a very long time after that. This can be proven with time compression. The weird thing is if I set the value to any number less than 60 the ship ID will still disappear. For example, setting it to 30 you would think that means that you have 30 seconds to keep the scope down before the ID disappears...but this is not the case; the ID disappears again once the scope is down.

What I did notice was that setting the value to a decimal yielded different results: For instance when I use a value of 0.30 the ship ID remains in memory for 30 seconds before going bye bye. So it appears that decimal values relate to true "seconds" (still have to test further). I know it doesn't make sense but the results don't lie.

The reason I said RUB was the cause of the issue because it changes the default value to 0 and thats when the problem is introduced. Some of you say that you noticed this happen with the "vanilla" version of the game....I can tell you that I have not. It actually works fine until you set the value to 0.

Please, if anyone has the time you can prove this for yourself. Set the value back to 60 and load up the academy convoy mission. Take an ID of a ship and lower the scope...then wait several minutes...heck, even put on some time compression and you will see when you pop your scope back up the ID will still be there. I've tested this over and over again and the results are the same.

-Captain America

I know. All I'm trying to say is that I don't think RUb is causing the underlying problem.

All I'm saying is that I believe I noticed this problem with a standard '60' setting as well. I may be mistaken, but if my memory serves me, this was happening to me while I had an unaltered SH3 1.4 running.

But if players are using RUb, doing that won't prove that RUb is causing the problem. If vanilla SH3 1.4 is causing it, then all doing this would prove would be that RUb with a 60 value keeps the ID in memory. What we need is someone willing to test an unmodded version 1.4 of the game. That will sort it out.

Either way, I'm not convinced that it's a flaw. If it's a choice between no ID memory and an infinite ID memory, or indeed a 60 second memory, I'll choose none every time, because we can always mark the contact while the scope is up (or from our own memory, just as we had to do before when RUb had no contacts at all drawn on the map).

Probably a good idea...I forgot to mention that I use the JSGME program so I did revert back to a clean 1.4 also during my testing but then changed it back once I narrowed it down. It should be very simple for people to test my theory on a clean install if they use JSGME.

I know you have a lot on your plate so I'll mess around with it and if I find anything useful I'll let you know asap. I think the end result is I either have to get used to doing the extra steps or revert to the old way. I am going to miss those nice dash lines for sonar contacts though. :cry:

-Captain America

See here for a fix. It's not perfect and has some issues, but might be a better work around than the existing version.

http://www.subsim.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=40037

Observer definately found the solution on this one....highly recommended.