Think of the game somewhat as an old, pre-SMPTE movie, like a silent movie with the music sound track on paper for a human player to play. It's supposed to play at 30fps, like the old movies played at 24 fps on the Big Screen (which is a frame rate that makes wagon wheels appear to spin backwards). If you then make the "movie projector" (the computer in this case) play the movie faster, but don't cue the human player of the piano to speed up the sound track, then the film is way ahead, and the audio track lags. My guess is that the video of the game is separate from the celestial tracking. No one cued the piano player... :salute:

SH4 is as astronomically accurate as you could ask for.
 

Mod-related bugs aside, I can assure you that there is nothing wrong. I, too, have read many posts and threads related to the sun rising and setting at 1 am, and the difficulties involved with celestial navigation in the game. Some of these are written by people who know what they're talking about, but most are not.

I proved everything was fine (at least to myself) because I was able to navigate by the stars from Pearl Harbor to Midway over the course of a three-day voyage (and later, all the way to Japan) without any mods or outside software other than an Excel spreadsheet which I wrote to do the tedious mathematical calculations for me. It was so accurate that I found Midway right off my bow on the first attempt. I couldn't have done that if there had been anything wrong.

One thing I've noticed is that most of the discussion centers around sunrise and sunset times. There are a lot of reasons why people have difficulty with this, and they chase their tails trying to figure it out. There's a lot of effort that goes into calculating "real local time" for the sub's present "time zone" when time zones have nothing to do with what time the sun rises. Instead, there is Sun Time. Every point on the surface of the earth has its own unique schedule when it comes to Sun Time, it is, therefore, quite meaningless and useless for our purposes. Tracking the sun is an exercise in futility, as well. In the game, it's so big that it's difficult to tell exactly where it is. The same goes for the moon. I can tell you, however, that the sun and moon are not 180 degrees from where they need to be, nor 90 degrees, 50, 40, not even 10. Just accept it, SH4 is astronomically correct.

Pearl Harbor base time is UTC -11 hours. Perth base time is UTC +8. Setting a constant base time makes more sense than anything else. If you see something that doesn't make sense to you, first make an effort to understand why it may be RIGHT!

I could go on and on about the nonsensical things I've read in some of these posts and threads, but just for example, I'll use a recent one: "Base Time 2018" by FrontRunner, propbeanie, et al. They think they found a problem with sunset times caused by the accelerated frame rates of newer computers, and to try to prove it, they used a timing experiment with a moving platform (sailing north at 15kts). Because Sun Time is different on every different point on the surface of the earth, the moving platform tainted their results. It's worse because they chose a date close to the Winter Solstice, when sunrise and sunset times vary with latitude the most. After all that, their conclusion about frame rates isn't consistent with the effect they were looking at. If the game were designed for 24fps and accelerating that caused the "sky to turn" at the wrong rate, 30fps would cause a solar day to take 19 hours and 12 minutes in the game. They didn't find anything like that.

Your question about whether the AI can see you at night is a more complex but less important one. As a general rule, do not be on the surface when a ship is any closer than the point at which you can just barely see it. "If you can see them, they can see you." Real submarines in WWII used to track ships by the smoke above their stacks, and not even by visual contact with the ships, themselves. Night surface attacks were common, but so were sunken U-boats.

Really?... :hmmm: - I'll have to remember that one. "Don't be on the surface when a ship is any closer than the point at which you can just barely see it."... got it.

I'm glad you were able to find Midway, and Japan too, more power to you and your "real" navigation on a cylinder. We are NOT talking about that in the "Base Time 2018" thread. Read the thread

I didn't say you were talking about celestial navigation in "Base Time 2018," so maybe you're the one who needs to learn how to read.

Yes, the world is modeled as a cylinder in SH4. So what? The game still displays the sky as it appeared at the time, latitude, and longitude of your sub. This is why I can apply real-world navigation techniques to the game.

I guess you're still playing at beginner levels if you stay on the surface so much. If you want to crank it up to realistic, you're going to have to learn some new tactics. Would you like some more pointers?

OK, another attempt at 'spaining it Lucy... The game was written circa 2005 during the Windows XP days. As such, it uses DirectX v9.0c (which has a "timer"). The game uses multiple "timers" to run the game. The "timers" have to be co-ordinated, or synced with each other. A computer has no knowledge of plus (+) or minus (-) Meridian, degrees of latitude and longitude, or anything like that. It counts zeroes and ones. On and Off. The human "interprets" it. Front Runner, in the aforementioned thread found that running the game higher than 30fps resulted in a game that would go "out of sync" with itself after he played days of the game at 1x, or at real time. If he used mid-levels of TC and the 1x real time, the game did not "drift" out of sync with itself as much. In other words, his "base time" shifted the more he played at 1x real time. Once he restricted the game to 30 fps, there was no longer any "drift" in the clocks, hence a more accurate rendition of the night / day sky, making it possible to predict the moon cycles more accurately. This does not have anything to do with my ignorance of this, that, or the other. If you restrict the game to 30 fps, which is what it was written to, you will then end up with more accurate SH4-world time... Once again, I attempt to explain that the cylinder land and sea has a clock. The sun and moon seem to have a separate clock. 30 fps, tied to the video card, keeps them together.