Well, I agree that the dreaded "accellerated development schedule" reared its ugly head here. But let's not be too negative about it.

Again, I stress - while there are people who will be too frustrated and dissatisfied with the game to have to wait. And there are many - I dare say most - who should be able to carry on with it no problem.

As for me, despite having a very meagre system, I just sunk 15 hours on this game and I'm NOT sorry. The next few weeks are going to be pretty ugly - I'm going to have to juggle a serious work overload with constant SHIV craving :p

:oops:

(inside joke)

MM

I agree that a sanity check is in order.

I actually have a very high tolerance for bugs and such, I'm patient, and I believe in being polite and respectful in the way that you get your point across. In other words, I'm an adult.

I expect certain problems on release day. But some of the problems being reported for SH4 are quite possibly "by design" and not "bugs" at all. This implies that they may very well never be fixed.

Since SH4 was my highest anticipation for 2007...these last two days have left me more dissapointed than I can remember being in a long time. Still, it is just a game and life goes on for crying out loud.

Now I need something to fill the void! Any recommendations anyone?

Gah, why must everyone again be so negative, even in this thread?

I sometimes even wonder if we all just got the same game. I guess it's the old "glass half empty/glass half full" issue. :shifty:

This argument is old, VERY old, and i knew somebody would bring it up. PC games are NOT car's. Car industries creation of auto's is standardized of an assembely line, PC game are not, and probably cannot ever be. To understand why you have to look at how they're created.

Creating a PC game is NOT like whipping out a SDI app out of visual studio wizard. There is no standardized buiding blocks (such as MFC) to work with. Any reusable code is proprietary, and was invented from scractch. In short, creating a PC game delves more into the realm of the artistic due to the ground up creativty involved. On top of that, your desigiing something to run on umpteen thousand different combinations of computers.

I will wait until all the patches are applied and then make a judgement .

Which reminds me of a sea story John :p

It was late 1967 and the USS Ethan Allen SSBN 608 was just coming out of overhaul in the Newport News shipyard. I was sonarman 3rd class in those days and this was my first nuc boat.

We took her out for a few sea trials and did our training drills, but we would come back in everyday to fix something. One day we were out on shake down and the CO said, "Lets test dropping the anchor" which was a real custom beauty that fit flush with the bottom of the hull and lots and lots of big thick anchor chain.

We surfaced and manned the manuvering watch and the CO said, "Let her go" ...

The COB turns the big custom wrench in the socket and the anchor takes off for the bottom of the ocean (perhaps 1,600') straight down. :o

That's where the anchor still rest today, because she kept on going with all of the anchor chain and everything ... :yep:

You see someone in the shipyard just loaded it into the boat and forgot to link the end of the chain to anything that could stop it. :rotfl:

Took us two more weeks and they said it was worth $25,000 in 1960's dollars. You can imagine what it worth with today's inflation.

This sub sim's problems are nothing compared to the real thing.

Well stated! I love the analogy! SHIV "Shakedown" Period...So having it released with a few bugs is actually quite realistic!! :up:

You have got to be kidding me.

No, it should be perfect right out of the box. If one thing is not perfect, then it's crap, and we should not only get our money back but should be reimbursed for our emotional distress.:dead:

Yes, argument is very old, unfortunatly. Because those who could make this to change, do not act.

Even being a programmer myself, I don't care about to look a how they're created. If they can do it for console games, they can do it for PC games. Period.

Now, if you belong to the category who accept this situation, it is your right, like it is mine to not join you in this.

Today software is everywhere. Not only in PC game. You have software in almost all consumer electronics (TV set, DVD recorder, etc...), in your wash machine, in your car, etc... Fortunately, they are not all like SH3 first version.

ACS

I beg to differ - when's the last time we've seen a sub sim on a dishwasher - or even a console?

The decline of simulation games has been largely due to the overwhelming complexity of the software vs. the relatively niche market. It's not right to compare Silent Hunter IV to other games, because other games don't do their thing at nearly the same complexity as SHIV. I'd love to be proven wrong, but my impression is that console games, especially those of a more arcade orientation, are both mechanically-simpler and better-financed by their mass-market appeal that SHIV can really only dream of.

Further, it's worth pointing out that SHIV does things that no other subsim does. Only modded SH3 slightly deflates that argument - but it's not a commercial development. Feature for feature, SHIV has more than any other offering you can compare it to. Consoles or washing machines don't count!

The problem always resides in the over-hype of upcoming games. The bigger the pre-release hype is, the bigger the disappointment will be for some people and the more complaints you will read in forums. This has increased over the years since the dev times for games also tend to be bigger than back in the old times, and word about the upcoming game gets around earlier and faster, which results in longer waiting times where the hype has time to build up into unseen heights and sometimes you wonder - in SH's case - if people are aware this is still software or if they expect an actual WWII sub delivered in front of their yard.
Add to that that we have some folks here who I think are not interested in the presented scenario at all (American subs in the Pacific) and are only buying the game expecting a plethory of technical improvements beyond reason and can hardly wait for mods to transform it back into yet another Hitler-steel-tube sim, either because it is "more cool" to play for Darth Vader or because they generally would like to pretend rewriting history. I'm not surprised at their disappointement.

I myself am happy that after ELEVEN years we are finally back in the beautifull Pacific, being able to sail in S-Classes, GATOs, etc. The game has bugs? Yeah, that's bad, but tell me something new.
I'm actually one of those who tends to get nostalgic with older games, complaining about today's industry, but with the SH series this is not valid since at least SHIII. In my opinion the dev team achieved putting immersion and atmosphere back into simulations, and it seems SHIV is even better in that respect. And had people been able to actually LISTEN to sonar contacts, have actual waves, weather, physics model, manual targetting as standard, no god's eye maps etc. etc. in 1994/1996, they would have said it's the shiznits or not believed it. Some people on this board simply come off as spoiled children in my view.

There is a MAJOR difference between programming buisness relelated applications, and programming a game. The two are entirely different. Ive delved into programming long enough to realize this. Or in other terms, CIS is not CS.

On a releated note, when you standardize PC games you stifle creativity. An example of this? All you have to do, is look at the EA lineup of products. How many battlefields? How many madden games? I'd go as far to say that people calling for PC games to be like car's are one reason why you see less innovation, and more regurgitation.

I beg to differ too.

You would be astonished of the complexity of firmware/software you might find, for example, in a modern high end TV set. I am paid to know it.

ACS