AOD map had names of cities, ports, waterways and small islands as well as depth soundings, instead of different shades of blue.:rock:

Are you sure ? The map hangs above my desk and I see no depth soundings at all, Or you must be referring to those unreadable scribbles that are even smaller than the almost unreadable city names :D

I am going by memory. My wife has long since sentenced my map to the black hole that is our attic never to be seen again, but I do recall it was much more authentic looking with bathometric features and so forth.

I would love a user manual in book format for SHIV. The bigger the better!

Yes, it definately looks much more authentic than the SHIII map.

Maybe they could include a large (A2 or A3) map that one can print out at the local copy/print shop. Would be real nice to have a detailed map in poster size :up:

PDF manual is so difficult. On my rig you can't have it open at the same time as SH III due to Acrobat Reader being a huge resource hog.

I'll gladly pay $10 more for a full, comprehensive manual.

I think it usually boils down to marketing. How much time and money will they put into the game. The more they add, the more it will cost. Many of us have no problem forking out a few extra bucks, but many people won't. And they aren't going to give us anything for free you know. That's our job. :know:

But given that, I do think it's their responsibility to provide us with ALL the basic information, and then, places like this, is where people should come to find the rest of the story. :D

I think if Ubisoft are going to refer to Silent Hunter 4 as a world war 2 submarine simulation, then they should give us an impressive user manual to go with that designation.

The problem with a printed user manual is that it is out of date as of the 1.01 patch (frequently available before the actual product arrives these days) - the only way to fix that is to use a binder so that replacement pages can be printed and now we are pushing up the price and the size of the packaging (= shipping cost), particularly if we go for a standard A4 size.

Possible solution, don't supply a binder and make the pages of the manual sized to fit 2 pages to a landscape A4 page, then we can buy our own binder and print our own replacement pages (supplied on .pdf as part of any patch).

But isn't it sad how we now have come to accept today's patch system as "normal"? Today's ugly trend is that it's OK to buy an unfinished and defective program and then patch it later :nope: . It used to be that finding a bug in a game was a rare easter egg like affair, and it would cost the publishing/distributing company quite a lot of money in recals. Now they very sinicaly release defective products and then expect us to absorb part of the cost of debuging (we ourselves report the bugs) and fixing/patching it (it's our bandwith being used every time we download a patch). :damn:

This shouldn't be an issue at all. The manual should be correct from day 1 because no software publisher should release a defective or incomplete product.

Cough, printers, cough;).

Definetly. Ah, the good old days when games were finished upon release. Makes me want to plug in my old SNES again (it still works, and it's got give-or-take 8 games, all 99,999% or 100% bug-free) :cool:.

Definetly. Ah, the good old days when games were finished upon release. Makes me want to plug in my old SNES again (it still works, and it's got give-or-take 8 games, all 99,999% or 100% bug-free) :cool:.[/quote]

Should we start a thread to see if anyone can guess how many patchs will be needed by SHIV.

I wonder if they will stop patching after 3 or 4 patchs as they would rather focus on other projects, like they did for SHIII

Here's to SHIV:()1: and all who load you onto their computers! May it be smooth sailing.

Cough, don't have access to one cough, cough...:shifty:

Besides, it would be waaaaay more cost efective for them to print the manual on a profesional printer isntalation and then charge you for it, than have you print it on your printer at home. Darn toners and ink cartridges are expensive, not to mention high quality paper.

Back in the day, the game released and there was no ability to patch, the games were also a lot simpler. Then a few patches became available on the cover disks of PC magazines, some stuff became available on BBSes, then the internet took over.

If you want to wait for all software to be perfect before release, don't expect to see a lot of new software and do expect it to cost a lot more.

The worrying trend now IMO is the "3 patches and we are done" approach - no matter how many faults remain - I'd be happy to pay extra for a commitment to quality.