Frankly, the fuzzy graphics, and insanely long load times have made me never to want to play SH3 ever again. It's not like i'm missing much, the gameplay for SH3, sh4 and sh5, is exactly the same. All that really changes is number of tubes you have and minor details on psuedo representations of a TDC. Everything else plays out the same regardless of game or theater. Find, chase, sink, evade. Repeat, ad nauseum for a few years, with all three games, and you end up making posts like this one.

Because I am a badass member of the grammar police!
My naughty was not to him but to the post above.:down:
I have no shame!!!:D
The Devil made me do it!:wah:

:har::yeah:

Best one I ever heard was back in '92, when San Francisco had an earthquake strong enough to knock down a couple of freeway bridges. A newswoman was describing the facts of her and those with her being cut off from the surrounding world. "We are...efforting to make contact with emergency services."

I can understand that she was a bit rattled, but "efforting"?

It sails well here, but on the other two it'd be like a declaration of war.

Time for a change? :hmmm:

He has changed, now his game is to be the only person on this forum that berates SH3, SH4, and SH5. :o




:O:

@ Ducimus
The reason I asked this question was not to stir the pot, or vituperate SH4 and SH5 but to learn why so many people still prefer SH3 to them.
Clearly, both SH4 and SH5 have better graphics and, in some ways, better game play (in the use of radar, for example).
I admire your work and use it when I play SH4 as it has made an unplayable game playable.
If I offended you, I apologize.

Ah, I missed that part. Of course I can only speak for myself. The main reason I prefer SH3 to SH4 is the modding that has been done for SH3, while SH4 has none of the cool things GWX, LSH3 and WAC bring to the table. Also there is nothing comparable to SH3 Commander.

SH4 looks better and works better, and loads faster, and I play it as well, but until it has all the attention SH3 has recieved it still won't stand up.

SH5? Of course everyone knows I've sworn not to touch it until the DRM is completely gone, but I've seen and heard enough to know that while it has a great many improvements over its predecessors it still lacks things like Type II and IX u-boats, which for me are very important. Also things that were new to SH5 are not necessarily things I wanted in a u-boat sim in the first place. It doesn't really improve my experience to talk to crewmembers about personal things, especially when you can only talk to a select few and then only talk about one or two things. When I can talk to all 50 men about anything and everything under the sun, maybe it will make a difference. Also having every single compartment is cool, but having crew members who do nothing but stand around no matter what the situation doesn't really make me feel more like I'm there. Once the DRM is gone and I buy it I'm sure I will think it's cool, but I'm also sure my negative observations won't change.

But your initial question was about why so many people read and post in this particular forum. The SH5 drones (and I don't mean everyone who prefers that game, only the ones who talk down to everyone who feels differently) will talk about SH3 players living in the past or irrational passion, but most of us have things we like that just haven't been addressed by the later versions. Me, I read most of the forums, including all the SH threads and 'Classic Subsims', as I still play AOD from time to time. We like what we like, and we can't always explain why.

Urge to make blacksheep pun.....rising.

Must... resist... temptations...

You've got lots of company in that boat... :yep:

Just got mine running in DOSBox, great to take the old gal out for a spin! :up:

Those were the days, eh? I played AOTD too when I was about 16 years old or so. What a game. Archaic for today's standars, but still.... it had some interviews wich Erich Topp, Kretschmer and others, which were still alive by then.

I agree that math of getting torpedos to collide with ships is much the same in any SH game. I would say the historical context and geography makes the theaters different though. If I did not read much about WWII, I doubt that I would be very interested in any Silent Hunter game; certainly not enough to fret about which version of RFB/TMO/GWX/Whatever to install.

I don't understand why SH3 is so much more popular than SH4. I would have thought that being on the winning side and having a fair chance of living till the end of the war is more appealing than being a U-boat Capt. and getting killed in '43 for a lost cause. Do SH3 fans consider the gameplay superior?

The thing that bugs me about the SH series is that a serious player is forced to sort through and test a hurricane of mods to put the game into a fairly realistic level, when Ubisoft could have done it much better, if only they had taken the time.

When you begin to master anything don't you seek a greater challenge? The u-boats had their 'happy times' early but as the war dragged on they soon were lucky to survive a patrol let alone rack up high scores. The US boats had their hardships early, but as the war went on things got easier and by the end they were struggling to find targets worth destroying.

I have not played SH4 yet, but I did enjoy SHI. Still, for me, there is a desperate excitement to SH3 that I just don't think the Pacific Campaign can quite match.

Quote:

The thing that bugs me about the SH series is that a serious player is forced to sort through and test a hurricane of mods to put the game into a fairly realistic level, when Ubisoft could have done it much better, if only they had taken the time.

True enough! Having said that, how many games get released in almost unplayable states? I like to think we as a community of subsim fanatics are 'bleeping' lucky that we have such a vast treasure of outstanding mods(and :salute:to you gods of modding) to enhance what was still a great game out of the box.

If I remember correctly, Kretschmer was not just interviewed but also affected the design of the game. Absolutely a great game and I can't understand how you can make a DOS game that good. I never got past 1942 too, every time a convoy with an escort carrier came up, the game crashed - maybe because my version was CAOTD. But now with SH3 I get a chance to continue my career past 1942 :arrgh!:

WAAAAAAAANT!!!! :wah:

Are these interviews that aren't available anywhere else? If so, can you still buy this thing? Can you access the videos without setting up a DOS emulator? I've got DOSBox and had it working on the old rig to run my Discworld game, but I don't know that I want to fool with it again. Although that would give a me a reason to reinstall Discworld. :hmmm:

Dosbox alone is a bit slow and somewhat awkward to use, all that typing and remembering what command does what. I use a front-end program called D-fend to run Dosbox. I only need to type the necessary info once and afterwards I can just click a shortcut in D-fend to start the program I want to run. D-fend is discontinued, but there is a new version in

http://dfendreloaded.sourceforge.net/

I haven't used the new version, so I can't say how well that works.

SH3 forum popularity
 

The SH3 forum remains popular for several reasons. It's been around much longer, giving more people a chance to find a home here. Various reasons for not migrating to the other games in the series are described above. I still play SH3 because it's paid for, and because Ubisoft apparently hasn't fixed the bugs that plague all versions of this game (most notably weather and saved games). Better graphics isn't enough motivation to spend $$. If SH5 magically becomes the least buggy, I'll reconsider.

I had D-Fend on my old rig, but when I used it for Discworld - which was the only reason I needed it - I could not get the game to run fullscreen no matter what I tried. With DOSbox alone I had no problems with that. So as clunky as it was, it worked better for me.

Damn, I think I´ll go and try running Panzer General WITHOUT D-Fend now :O:

On second thought it may not have been an issue with fullscreen but with getting the game to run windowed at a higher resolution than its native one.

IIRC in DOSbox I had a config file set up that started up everything necessary to load the game and run it at the resolution I wanted, all I had to do was click on it.

With D-Fend when I ran the game it was either fullscreen, or windowed in its original res which was a teeny tiny window on my newer setup. I think that there was supposed to be a way to alter the resolution and still run windowed with D-fend, maybe by importing the desired DOSbox config file or something, but for the life of me I could never get it to work. Besides which, once I had things set up in DOSbox it all came down to just one click and it wasn't like I was having to set stuff up for a bunch of different games.

I never used it with anything other than DW so I don't know if it was a general issue with D-Fend or not.