Thinking about it, it wouldn't be that difficult to create a cold war era add on/ expansion pack based on SHV:

If it is based on a Soviet career, mid to late 50s :
- same map
- few additional ships to include,
- Foxtrots, Romeos, Juliets, Whiskeys and Novembers can be generally based on Type XXI which will be included in SHV
- few new missions to include
- sub vs sub warfare, modern ASW and missiles would be only challenging part to implement

I have a dream! ... I think I will post it in SHV forum

Maybe not completely out of this world. Thinking of SH4, German Uboats in the Indian Ocean have always seemed fairly obscure to me, but they still made an expansion (which is a feat in itself :)).
If SHV is as successful as the last two instalments, why not be optimistic? :DL

Red storm was a amazing game, and only in a floppy disk. I think that the campaign was the best thing of the game

I remember very well the campaign and i found a lot of times unexpected contacts, sometimes a diesel sub, very difficult because you are traveling at 15-30 knts and the distance of the engagament is very close.
Or groups of unknow contacts, ships, subs, mixed groups, and all in the context of a big campaign , where you have to resupply in base after you expend all torpedoes and missiles or in case of damage.

it involves important decisions for example go to repair to port or not

And finally you can play 10 times and always is different.

I think that the only hope of a modern submarine game is in the hands of sonalyst and Ubisoft
sonalist have modeled all ASW tech but lacks in campaign and graphics, and ubi the opposite , very good campaign , great graphics , but not ASW and sonars.

Unbeliavable to think that all that was was possible to do with a floppy disk

I remember it was so funny to single-handly sink the entire Soviet navy, plus they always kept comming, no matter how bad you beat them. Or getting the "news" about soviet tanks rolling through Germany, Spetnaz in iceland or a carrier sunk by Tu-22s

As per new modern sub simulators.. my guess is that Ubisoft is going completely into another direction with SHV (more role playing, crew "abilities", awesome graphs) to better appeal to console gamers, I see little chance there

And regarding Sonalyst, they haven't changed their software engine since 688(i)/ SC/ DW, therefore they are definitively out of the "console"/ "general population market...
so who knows, they might focus into our niche market with a extended/ improved version of DW? it won't be that expensive to revamp the existing platform

I agree with your assessment, but unfortunately I dislike every single point you've mentioned. Especially the role playing thing pisses me off immensely. What I dislike the most is the "stoy-telling" thing that has infected almost all game genres since the mid 2000s. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but most porn movies probably have a better plot :shifty:
I'd just like to have a decent simulator again - by which I mean an environment that is simulated with a reasonable degree of realism but doesn't confine me to some goofy plot.

Another possibility would be if Sonalyst decides to lease their engine, something like Paradox Interactive did with their old Europa engine (the one used for Hearts of Iron2, Europa Universalis, Victoria, etc.)

So, someone interested in improving DW and making money in the process might get interested, I think this niche market might be small, but big enough for an independent developer

As I said in another thread, Sonalysts would do well by licensing or selling off DW to another developer who can build a new engine. I think this is really the only solution considering the defense contract is so important to them that they strangle DW almost to abandonware by it.

Not necessarily required. Any other developer could develop their own modern submarine simulation without having to buy DW license at all. Especially if they intend to develop their sub sim around their own new engine one which is far superior than what the current DW has to offer :)

We are too fixated on DW and sonalysts.

No more excuses. Take a look at Silent Hunter III. If it can be done with a WWII sub sim it can be done with modern sub sim:O:

I agree. DW has been the last bit of life that could be squeezed out of the old engine. :dead:
It would also be interesting to see a different approach to the subject. DW's background as a trainig tool is palpable - every station is a bit a simulator of its own, but they are somewhat loosely connected. It would be nice if some company would make a game with a more coherent feel to it.

You forgot one thing. One of the key selling points was that DW is the retail version of an official Navy simulator. Some of us gravitated to Sonalysts' games as gamers, but some naval enthusiasts bought them with this in mind.

I fully welcome new modern naval sims, but DW, as a brand, does carry more weight than starting anew. Had every edition of SH had entirely different names, there would be sales, but perhaps less than if prefaced by "Silent Hunter:". Maybe the price Sonalyst would for ask would be prohibitive, but carrying the name on a new sim would draw attention from some who just wouldn't look at "WW3: Naval Terror!" or somesuch.

I fail to see what is so good about Sonalysts' 'games'. The entire gameplay seems to be built around watching the same waterfall station 99.9% of the time, and coupled with crap autocrew who cannot actually do anything properly and then to top it off max 64x time compression in a game that has you drifting around at about 5 knots all the time?

Whoever came up with that last idea needs to have his wiring checked.

It doesn't help either that everything that 688i/SC/DW does has been tried and done better before in Fast Attack. Not to mention Red Storm Rising did the whole campaign/atmosphere/immersion thing WAY better despite having no real station modelling.

If hi-fi station/sensor modelling is so good, then how come SCS games have never sold well?

Maybe because when I as a gamer approach a naval game, I want to be in command making decisions and battling the enemy. I don't need nor want sensors and stations rendered in every last microscopic detail that pretty much require actual military training to operate. I'm supposed to have a crew who does all that stuff for me so I can concentrate on making tactical decisions. If I have to go around micromanaging everything then it just becomes tedious and what's the fun in that?

As I said, I have no idea why people here insist on holding Sonalysts sims in such high regard when it's so obviously clear they've bombed every single time.

If you make a sim for people who think games are low brow entertainment and no fun, then you probably end up with a Sonalysts game.

I unfortunately don't know the older games you're talking about.

I am not sure you would like it to command only, even if the autocrew was excellent.

It makes no sense to command without being in direct and close contact with all the stations, as they often have guesses only, the AI can't guess.

If you are hunting and get one or two frequencies only on NB sonar, you have to closely monitor the contact to extrapolate informations, and those are likely to affect your decisions as commander continuously until the engagement.

I would not call it "micromanagement" in SC and DW, the word I would use is "allowance for great immersion".

You ask what is so good about Sonalysts sims: to me it is certainly the quality of the details and the quality of the information flow. As said before, you get raw data and it's usually up to you and your experience to interpretate them correctly. That makes out who wins and who loses. Luck plays almost no role at all here !

The impression from the posts of people who are very involved in DW leads me to think that this is extremely unlikely to happen until Sonalysts steps out from the US military market.

The impression is that the engine and the database is so detailed that it might contain classified info as well.

For those reasons too, I think that Ubisoft can be scared by the idea to launch something in the modern era of subs. It would probably require an enormous effort for them to even only reach such a level of quality...

Don't forget that part of the people at Sonalysts are real Navy Officers...

Since when does the captain himself have to go sit at the sonar station to track/indentify contacts. One would assume he has competent crew to do this for him. Guesswork can easily be abstracted down to just a % of solution credibility, like RSR does. In fast attack, your sonar crew calls out the contacts for you, and you assign trackers and tell your men to classify those. RSR auto-classifies but also has an acoustic signature that gets clearer over time that you can compare against a database to classify the contacts yourself. Much smoother and less tedious than DW.

Yes, that's why we have a map so my crew can plot the contacts for me. I don't see why I have to personally work the sonar station to get things done. I want to command the sub, and not operate the sub. My crew should do that for me.

What kind of immersion? Most of the time I try to play DW I don't even find the damned enemy, and I end up turning the game off in frustration of not being able to move things along owing to the totally inadequate time compression. For some reason things happen much faster in Fast Attack or RSR. Maybe it's because they've been designed as games rather than military training tools.

I think the games are dry, sterile and not much fun at all.