...pokes head out from under rock....

For those hoping that UBI will release a video featuring the sim at 100% geeked-out realism settings, forget it. Doing something like that would be potential marketing suicide, as it will freak out the nubies and casual gamers into thinking the game will be too complex to learn to play. Like it or not, the users of this forum are only a tiny, tiny minority of the potential buyers of the sim. Most new buyers will be most interested in fancy graphics, the new FPS interface, and X-box type features. UBI has to give them what they want, especially in the previews, or the game will not meet the publishers sales expectations.

Its thinking like that that kills everything. Isnt the Silent Hunter series a success? Well, it must be considering the fifth title is about to hit the shelves, so why should UBI all of a sudden be "ashamed" of the core of the title? This relentless catering to the "owww-shiny-graphics-must-pirate-and-play-10-minutes-then-go-back-to-Crysis"-crowd is not productive, IMO. The series is popular because you get a taste of the life of a submariner, not because you get to win WW2 in a super sub in DirectX 15.

That is a point that has failed IMHO to be realised by I suspect, a large number of people. http://www.psionguild.org/forums/ima...ies/pirate.gif

If you've spent any time with the SH devs as I have, you would know that's not the case.

Here is a simplified cost accounting for an average game project.

http://foto.arcor-online.net/palb/al...3931633065.jpg

As to see, also with a publisher who has the biggest part of the development costs, an independent development studio must wait until enough copies are sold before they have gotten something from the profits.

So a hardcore simulation must be sold over 100.000 copies before the devs get something from the cake, easier to receive with a popular action shooter for a wider range of customers :D

I hate economics. If you wouldn't mind a small detour, let me tell you where we're heading.

I live in a country where piracy is extremely common. To put it simple, it's not a phenomenon, it's a way of thinking. People have money to buy a PC or a console but not enough money to continue to buy games (or they just buy World of Warcraft and stop there). If it weren't for piracy, the IT market would simply collapse here. Playstation 2 and 3 have not yet been cracked globally. XBOX has been cracked though and many here prefer to buy a console for 1/3 of the money they spend on a PC and then get free games and even have enough money left to buy originals like L4D, MW2 and other multiplayer games. The fun about Xbox and original games is the community and achievements and DLC's and so on, so it's still safe.

The game of the year on Gamespot is Demon's Souls, a game made exclusive for PS3. For many years now PC users have had to other wait for years to play ported games (GTA), or get very poor ports (like Force Unleashed). But right now we're seeing the beginning of the end for PC gamers. Not only is piracy much easier to keep in check but consoles also have the appeal of not having to upgrade them every year. Plus, a console can be a video player, music player, web browser and so on.

Soon, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo and Sega will decide that it's better to join forces and create fixed and portable media centers. These consoles of the future will have an unified game engine protected in compiled files. Games will be much much smaller and easier to develop across different platforms. All platforms will communicate with each other. Even more, with the advent of 3d movies, soon we'll have a new hardware codec for movies and music. But you know what? They will be as protected as drugs. Right now it's not illegal to make an MP3 because each person has the right to record themselves. DIVX's are not illegal because each person has the right to record his weddings. Those new codecs however will be SECRET and illegal to break, transfer or own. These new file systems will be forced to run on individual consoles with unique ID's. Hard media will disappear. All media will be in downloadable format. We already have Steam and iTunes but they're not mandatory because not everybody has internet. 20 years ago the internet was NOTHING. Look at it now. Soon, every phone call, all TV channels everything will be in internet form. Free internet available everywhere. No more excuses that you don't have it.

20 years from now the internet will have 3 main threads. Media download and game connection, Browsing, and file transfer for firms. Completely separate with different protocols and IP's. No more viruses.
Game development could turn into a free area where anybody can use a simple game designer and create anything. We already have XNA and it's amazing what one can do with it. But it requires time and skill. However, in the future, these game editors could be much much more powerful and easier to use. However this would require a PC or special compliers and a different free market. I highly doubt that the game industry will allow such a "mistake".

Consoles will be shipped with a special credit card. Many don't use their cards on the net because they're afraid. New credit cards will be made, a new payment protocol, universal credits and different country currency rates. If in Romania sales suck because people don't have money to spend on games, music and video, they'll just lower the currency rate so people can buy more credits with the same money.

So, you might say, what's wrong with this future? I'll tell you. Imagine a future where all games come in pieces and you pay for each. You want to play Silent Hunter? You buy the game, it gets transfered to your console. You want to play Type VII, you pay. You want to play Type IX, you pay. You want to get new torpedoes, you pay. You want to listen to a new gramophone song, you pay. Little by little by little. Regardless of how many games you play or how much music you listen to, or how many movies you see, you'll usually end up spending a lot. Commercials will be rampant and aggressive. Marketing will have free reign. Modding will be gone forever. They'll even create a fictitious way to make money, by playing. I have a friend who doesn't have a job, but plays WoW and sells money. He gets enough to make by. There will be many more ways: achievement hunting, competitions, support, game masters and so on. More and more will be stuck in a new economy which will be used as a regulator for the real economy.

Gone will be the dream of free media, of a free global knowledge database. Very bleak indeed. But don't blame piracy for it. I blame piracy for making me stand more in front of the computer, time better spent on women or drinking with friends. If it weren't for piracy, I never would've played, and eventually bought, Silent Hunter 3 and 4. I wouldn't be waiting for SH5 for which I have already saved money for the collector's edition. In simple terms, I wouldn't even be here on this forum. So don't blame piracy. Blame profit. Blame economics. Blame this devil that money is.

I may be an atheist but I say God bless Linux and modding communities. Here's the Star Trek vision come to life in the virtual world. A vision of using your potential to bring enjoyment to others. May it last forever :up:

PS: sorry about that... had it in me for a while.

In a perfect world, the Devs would develop a sim to suit the needs of a community such as this. The reality is that they work for a Publisher. These Devs have gone above and beyond in the Silent Hunter series in order to keep a reasonable degree of realism and imersion in a very modable game, while also keeping the Publisher happy.

crazy vision. but somethings in it, i feel. maybe you are right with some things...anyway. i do not want any kind of this hypermodern future. its too safe, to sterile. people who played/know the RPG Shadow Run know, what the future will look like. THE NET itself, the SOFTWARE FIRMS, SECURITY FIRMS, ENERGY FIRMS, and FOOD DEVELOPERS are the new global players, who rule the world - lead by the money frenzy.

if people say 50 years ago, they do not want automatic cashier-machines, they didnt know, what future we now are in. i recently was in a food market and payed my things to a computer. no human any more who is smiling at you, or is pissed of from his job. just a screen and beeps, which let me know, how much i had to pay. i get cold freeze, when thinking of all this. cause all this is leading us into a sterile world, where the human is finally reduced to a worker and consumer, a drugged humanoid linkin himself up in the evening or at work into the "work station".

all his energy spending to the new and final GOD: MONEY

Im kind of a neighbour to karamazovnew so i can see his point and he is pretty right.Ive never thought of this in such a detail but you can see that it is pretty logical.There are such games that include vareous and numerous download addon packages witch cost money.Ofcourse this is not just about games but it seems that they are the most obveous leads about the thing to happen.
I too have rather few games on my pc primary because of the high prices.Just an example.The new Call of duty mw2 costs 80levs (the currency here). That is 1/5 of the monthly payment i get for my job and my payment is above average.So you can imagine once you buy a pc you cant really pay much for games.Not to mention that i cant in any way save as much as 1/5 of my monthly payment.
Most of the games i buy are classics - like diablo and so on witch are considerably cheaper as time gets by.

You will be right to say that if i cannot afford one i should play one.In the end i dont steal cars just because i cant buy one.But it is my opinion that if games were cheaper the buyers would be much more numerous.

I can only hope that karamazovnew is very very wrong about this.

Is that in total number of sales? Or total amount of cash? Plus, the depression started in late 2007 and became serious only after Q2 of 2008. As my previous post showed, there can be a conflict between what we want and what the industry wants. They can bend that in any direction they wish. What I'd like to see is a breakdown of new titles by platform. Also important would be to see how many games are cross-platform and how many have been released on all platforms except PC (Eternal Sonata and FF13 come to mind).

I see what you're getting at, but you can't deny that they've made the game very very scalable in both the out of the box sense (with realism options) and made it very open to modders adding our own brand of hardcore realism options.

It's not so much the bar itself that i find distressing but the game mechanic behind it. It requires that a torpedo does "X" damage, everytime. So you can turn off the visual of the bar, great, but does the mechanic change as well? Would they really have two different game mechanics in one game?

I'm afraid that even with the bar visual "off", it will still be a hit-point system, rather than a flooding/buoyancy system.

The second "health bar" you see on that screen is a flooding bar. Give the game a chance before you condemn it.

Why are you scared about healthpoints? The presence of the flood and health bars are the best proof that SH5 will not use a fps style of hitpoints.

Any ship is kept afloat by watertight compartments divided by bulkheads. The number of bulkheads and the total amount of water that can replace the lower density material (air) depend on each ship design. Theoretically speaking, a ship with 9 bulkheads (10 compartments) has more healthpoints than one with no bulkheads (one compartment). The size of the hole that your torpedo makes is also important as the enemy crew could pump out enough water to make it to port. In effect, your torpedoes do a certain amount of damage.

So it's not wrong to approximate real physics with:
- armor rating (the thickness of the hull) which prevent big holes
- total health or number of compartments that can be flooded without resulting in a sinking
- damage over time (fire aboard a ship)
- critical damage, the treshold of unstoppable rate of flooding
- fatality (ammo or fuel compartments)
- healing over time (pumping out of water) and repairs

The best way to show these are with a health bar and a flood bar. When the health bar drops to zero, kaboom. When the flood bar fills, blrgbrlhbrglrbhlrh :dead: