:sign_yeah:

Was perhaps a bit stoopid from me to compare DCS:BS and SH5, BTW. Apples and oranges, b/c those Ka-50 jockeys really are one-man-bands IRL too...

No, what I want is that kind of depth of simulation. Depth affecting your speed and chance of cavitating, hydrophones infuenced by thermal layers and surface noise, soundwaves bouncing off the seabed and mirror flat surface. Those are the things I want.

To be honest, manning stations like hydrophones or deckgun yourself, as a captain, is ridiculous; that's not your job. However, Silent Hunter has a bit of 'action-game' in it after all, and I find it fun to do. It doesn't bother me, but I would happily trade it for better AI and more realism.

The BEST OPTION IMHO is that the game should have had an "ARCADE" and "SIMULATION" option in the settings menu.

The former would give us everything the game shipped with and the latter could give the Sub Simmers more features that were in the previous titles in the way of playability and UI including an interactive TDC Computer.

Anyone who has played: Eagle Dynamics Combat Heli Sim, DCS: Black Shark, can understand exactly what I'm talking about.

Well one of you needs to win the Lottery so you can start a Hard Core SIMULATIONS only software company, because thats what we need, and not run by corporate and happy to make enough to pay the bills and salaries and put out a decent product, with Profit not playing the major factor. If the company stays in business and everyone gets paid and doesnt run in the red, then mission accomplished.

You see that's the problem...nobody does anything for the sake of doing it anymore (except modders of course). It has to be about making money (lots of it) or it's just not going to happen. The technology exists to make incredibly realistic simulations but the cost of using said technology to produce the sim results in a product too expensive for the average simmer. This is the sad irony of the times.

This is why I keep saying we need a new business model for the simulation market. The sim needs to be defined and priced out before anything is done to produce it. People are informed of what it will cost and they will either sign on or reject it. If there is enough of a market pool to make it worth while then the project goes forward.

Of course this all depends on coming up with a way for a very large number of people to sign on and actually commit money to the project. That's a very big hurdle.

Yep you are correct, makes you sad doesn't it. How did the Ultima series start, how did apple/windows start, now its all about the money. Unfortunately it is now the key thing that factors into everything nowadays.

A subsim with the level of realism evident in Blackshark would be incredible. I doubt, however, I will see that in my lifetime! Blackshark was developed (afaik) off of the back of the developer's real military simulators. This is why it is so realistic, the flight dynamics and KA-50 modelling were paid for by the military. The game itself, to the best of my knowledge, is basically a sideline for the devs. This is the reason why, for example, the AI is poor to non-existant and the current graphics engine is borrowed from the original Lock-on. They just couldn't afford the gamble of doing it all at once.

For a much larger company like UBI the economics of producing a niche market game like SH5 mean that the budget just isn't there to produce a true sim which would appeal to a very limited number of people.

My only real issue with SH5 aside from bugs and DRM is that I would have preferred that UBI allocated more resources to improve the realism rather than adding in RPG elements.