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.

YT FTW! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYlk0YUaxPU
There is more in the related list.

Awkward? Come on, the command line was half the fun! ;)

Oh, and fooling with Norton Commander, which I don't know if that's required for all games but it was for Discworld.

I had to copy the entire CD to my hard drive and then set things up to mount the directory the CD copy was in as a separate drive like it was reading the files from the CD drive... man it was complicated. Plus the game itself had to be patched and tweaked just to run on a post-DOS operating system.

I still remember how proud I was when finally figured it all out and made that config file that I could click on and it loaded everything and then BOOM the game was up and running perfectly according to my specifications. And then I assigned an icon to it from the DW game files - The Luggage! - and put it right on my desktop, it was so awesome.

Of course I never actually played the game for more than 10 minutes, but still... :haha:

You mean you're actually supposed to play the game? :D

For me it was mainly the sense of accomplishment in getting it configured no matter what. DOS was highly flexible in that regard as you could reallocate memory and load devices high to free up base RAM by writing your own boot files.

It was more nuts and bolts computing... Good times! :yep:

I guess everything (little) I know about computers comes from trying to make some game work in a system it wasn't designed for. :)