AI is good. Destroyers will track the torpedo wake back to the sub...so dive dive dive after you have fired. Fortunately, the japanese poor ASW is your friend :)). Destroyers will attack in pairs. One listening, the other one charging. They call aerial support if you are close to land, so beware. Do not try to torpedo a destroyer if you are more than 3-400 meters away. They see the torpedo and avoid it. This is just an example. AI is not crap at all...beware and do not underestimate the japs. Pilots are skillful, you won;t get away by making sudden turns at flank speed. Your gunners are poorer than in sh3. Add to this...a rusty S class bucket which dives safe only to 50 meters.....and you;re in big trouble.

Since I don't have the game I can't prove it. We just have the word of a dev. I could give you the link to the interview but that wouldn't help you or do you speak German?;)

Perhaps the view distance limitation has to do with balancing multiplay??

sorry excuse my maths so how many metres in a mile then i thought it was 1000?
ive read a book called iron coffins written by a uboat commander who said that smoke stacks could be spotted up to 20 miles out on a good day.

i mean really, how hard can it be to implement and the argument about affectin game performance doesnt cut it. id be happy to just to see black lines to simulate smoke at that distance or even just a darker patch of sky to simulate it.

we wont know for sure until more people have the game for sure i guess. i really hope this 8km range isnt so

There accounts of smoke stacks being seen over 20 miles or so but you've got to keep in mind that they were really hard to see. I guess it's impossible to see this on a screen and that could be a reason why the devs did not bother to include it.

No, just a BS limitation inherited from original SH3. It was modable tho, but at performance cost.

Im really thinking about cancelling my pre-order right now. Seems the game is shipping in poor shape.

1000m = 1 km
1 mi = 1.61 km = 1,610 m
1 nm = 1.852 km = 1,852 m = 1.15 mi

The visibility fix for SHIII works for SHIV.

Unlike SHIII doubling the visibility from 8000 to 16,000 metres does not bring with it a large performance hit. In fact it is almost non existent. On medium quality with the SHIV 8000 metre world I get at 1024 x 768 (windowed) 27 frames per second, with the 16,000 metre world I get 25 frames per second!

When I put the horizon out to 24,000 metres my frame rate hit was 20%, i.e. from 25 to 20 frames with the medium graphic settings as per the options menu.

My computer is a P4 2.6, 1Gb memory with a ATI 9800 Pro 256Mb video card running 2 x 21” monitors. So it is far from flash or even meeting recommended requirements.

The formula for visual distance to the horizon based on the height of eye is: Distance (nm) = 1.14 x sqrt(height of eye in feet)

This formula can be found here with an accompanying table of visual distances based on height of eye: http://www.eagleoiltankers.co.uk/def...seahorizon.htm

In the real world, based on clear day under normal conditions, a person standing on the conning tower deck at an assumed height of 30 feet would have the horizon appear at a distance of 11,000 metres or 6.3 nautical miles.

At a distance fractionally less than the horizon, we can expect to see all the ship down to the water line. Just it will be really really tiny…

For a ship which is over the horizon, say the Large Modern Composite Freighter with a mast height of 100 feet, we could theoretically expect to see the top of the masts when the ship is 24,000 metres (13.1 nautical miles) away. Of course realistically this would probably be closer to 20,000 metres (10.7 nautical miles).

For 16K change the ZMax value from 1000 to 2000
For 24K change the ZMax value from 1000 to 3000

Note that this is just a player visual tweak and does not make the AI see any further than it currently does. For the AI it will require the sensors.dat and the ai_sensors.dat along with the releveant cfg files to be adjusted.


Credit for the SHIII 16k world in alphabetical order is Kpt. Lehmann, Manuel Ortega, Marhkimov, Redwine, Rulle34, Seeadler and others I may have forgotten.

I was finding contacts discovered in the permafog at about 7.5, whether thats miles or KM I don't know.

The perma fog was a real dissapointment...

Heck no! I can see the moon, the sub, and lots of stars ;)

:up: Good to know.

Hmm, a 8km vis cap is a bit disappointing. I was really hoping to get a thoroughly developed game and not just a prettier re-make of SHIII. When targets begin getting thin late in the war, long range detection will be the only way to make contact at times.

So often I read of subs catching the thin, whispy glimpse of smoke on the horizon with no idea what it was, then spending half the day chasing the smoke down to determine what it is and kill it.

What amazes me is that they coul dset up accurate target solutions from just smoke. They could determine speed, track, range, etc...from just smoke! Granted it took time and periodic data input to get it eventually.

Sounds good. At least that is one less worry about the game. So you can change this yourself by just editing a file? Which one? I don't have the game but someone else might want to fix it themselves.

I hear the grumblings of a new mod. ;)

They have been touting a 20km (or 20 miles) vis range for sh4 on the forums for some time now, for it to be released with an existing 8km range and metric without imperial is a disgusting display of corporate arogance from UBi. Especially when its rather easy to make it 16km as shown by the mod for sh3.

They should have delayed the game atleast to provide the things they have prommised.

"^#%$ the user, we are UBi$soft!"

Im disapointed in Ubi they really dont seem to care about reputation.

I have a feeling that SH4 recycled most of SH3, except for the new graphics. We'll see soon enough.

yeah i preordered 2 weeks ago after buyin into to all the hype but ive just cancelled it. i think the last post really sums it up well. SH3 out the box started borin me after just 2 or 3 days, it wasnt until NYGM and grey wolves came along that i got back into it. why oh why couldnt the devs have looked at the what the mod dudes have done and try to incorporate some of the ideas ito SH4 for example this 8km visibility nonsense.

SH4 sounds more of a "game for for casual player" than a "sim for sub fans".
why cant it be both? it seems the selling points are the "hollywood style graphics" and the ability to take part in sea battles. sorry to say but if i wanted that i would just buy battlestations midway or pacific storm or whatever. nowhere in any of the dev videos was any improvements in the AI mentioned. disapointing.

no doubt il get this "game" eventually, il just see what the mod gods come up with first.

so smoke bein modelled over the horizon is so hard to do in 2007, yeah right. maybe if they had spent less time modellin sailors uniforms and facial features (who really cares about that stuff apart from maybe some 10 year olds) it couldve been

Laffertytig,
It is Ubisoft's management that are to be held accountable for setting and sticking to a ridiculous development schedule and have, without regard for the customer, yet again delivered an unfinished product.

I have the utmost respect and admiration for the developement team of SHIV, especially for how hard they have worked to deliver as much as possible in the rediculous time frame that the Ubisoft management set. They have worked tirelessly to get as much done in the time that they were given.

I have to add, when will publisher's learn that they will continue to loose customers in droves if they continue to deliver games that are still alpha/beta and/or shallow content.

The way I see it is that the PC game market is not hemorrhaging into the console market, I see the PC game market just hemorrhaging into the gutter and being lost.

It is time for the publishers to start being a customer service industry again instead of a stock holder focused entity.

Yep, publishers like that are a rare breed. Battlefront is one of the few publishers of war games out there that takes quality and customer service seriously. Just look how long they've held back the release of Theatre of War, adding in new features and correcting mistakes and bugs! As such, they have a large and loyal fan base.

If publishers like Ubi are to regain the trust of their customers, they should start by looking at the way Battlefront conducts their business.

Roger that DTB! And welcome back!