@GT182: Thanks for your posting. There seem to be 3 groups ouf people. Some like the current sh3 weather. Others don't like the sh3 weather, and some (like me) don't even know if they should like it or not.

Until now only the 1st group was pleased.

These mods from Stiebler and me are for the second group. The people from the first group don't have to use the mods.

So the advantage is diversity - more people have the chance to have a sim that fits their personal taste.

One option would be to make SH3 Commander to apply a weather mod at mission start. It could implement at random:

1) the standard weather settings defined the devs, so that you can have a long and awful rotten weather as in das boot.

2) any other weather mod made. If 5 or 6 weather mods exist, SH3 Commander would pick up 1 of out of a total of 6 or 7 weather patterns/mods. Furthermore, it could implement the probability to have one type of weather mod depending on the season and/or location.

I tried these weather mods. I found they change positively the u boot experience. :arrgh!:

So is this feasible with SH3 Commander?

Thank you to the modders for their effort to make SH3 a more enjoyable experience.:up:

@Victor_S: Yes, that could work in principle. Why don't you try it out? The question is: Is it really necessary?

Greetings, h.sie

I agree to a degree, what annoys me is when the weather changes to heavy rain and fog with poor visibility it seems to get stuck there for a week or more, during this time it is virtually impossible to sink anything, certainly the deck gun is out and trying to use the scope to see your target is out, if you get close enough to see the target you are then too close to fire a torpedo, it will just bounce off the hull! You can fire using the hydrophone but you can't identify the ship and is rather unrealistic!:doh: I actually set the maximum fog level down to be visible up to 600m this is a lot better but would much prefer the duration of storms to be halved, I've had a few that lasted around 2 weeks had a few days fine weather then back to storms!:damn: too much!:doh:

How did you do this?

Open Scene.dat with S3D, then in the left pane select the nodes:
Sky/EnvSim/ then select EnvSim, in the right pane select:
FogDistances [4] this opens to show the 4 fog states 0 to 3.
just do a comparison between the 4 to get an idea or to cheat just change state 3 to reflect 2, then you will have no heavy fog!, it has been a while since I have done work here so I don't recall the lines that actually change the viewable distance but if you study the data of the 4 states you should be able to work it out easy enough.:yep:
BTW, sensors/visability react accordingly, if you can see them they can see you, in other words it works fine!:up:
Hope this helps.

Reese, remember back when the first weather mods were coming out they did help quite a bit. But there were still times that severe weather lasted for days and up to a week. Some of this I believe was due to the time of year. The North Atlantic is a hell hole during the winter months. I can't remember all of went on seeing I took a hiatus from SHII just after the GWX 2.0 mod came out.

I do remember that even with the severe storms that if you were lucky enough, you could still come across a convoy. I was lucky enough a couple of times to do this and had good success on sinking quite a few merchants and a few warships. That severe weather was a very good friend and helped my U-boat slip away. And even return on one occasion to sink a few more, and still slip away.

Constantly diving and checking Hydrophone I could come across convoys and plot a course then intercept but with stock fog visibility during this storm period you would not be able to see the ships to identify, you wouldn't be able to see them sink unless you use the external camera, certainly as you say you can escape more easily! this is why I adjusted the fog distance so that I could "just" see them, it does make it a far better experience imo.:yep:
One of the biggest thrills I got was due to fog and poor visibility, I was heading for my patrol grid when a destroyer came out of the fog, my crew reacted and the DD opened fire, (scared the daylights out of me) what a panic to crash dive, repair damage, after a time of cat and mouse I made a decision to blow ballast timing it when he passed over to drop DC,s to break the surface a distance from the destroyer and disappear at full speed in the fog changing direction just after surfacing, it worked!!:oops::up:

Imagine tracking that convoy and intercepting it to find 250 meters visibilty :hmmm:. Too close to ID and shoot. Now imagine you stick with those contacts for 4 hours until visibility increases to 600 meters ;)! now you can start to attack! During attack visibility goes to 1000 meters and now you can see several ships :rock:! Hurry because vis may drop again! :arrgh!:

We need variable fog visibility like in AOD. Remember that visibility circle getting bigger and smaller in 1 meter resolution? The "fixed" fog levels are a real buzz kill. :dead:

That is rare! more likely to catch a convoy and fog too thick so you stick with them just out of range till conditions improve, 2 days later no change, 4 days later no change, give up in disgust!!:doh:

@Lanzfeld: Weather does not change often and the change itself is relatively quick, so the chance that weather changes while you do an attack is very low. I fear I cannot program continuous visibility instead of these 4 visibility steps.

@ALL: I hope I could fix (workaround) another weather bug of lower priority: Until now the weather counter is reset to 0 everytime you start a game or reload a savegame, because the weather counter is not stored in the savegame. This means you always have to wait a full weather time interval (20-40 hours) to see the first weather change. In my fix I'll initialize the counter with a randomly chosen value between 0 and 95% of the full weather time interval, so that there is a good chance to sometimes see a weather change short time after (re)loading a game. So weather behaves more random, not determined

First beta version hopefully this weekend.

Very good news, h.sie !!! :up::up::up:

I´m looking forward to the beta....:yeah:

Best regards,
Magic:salute:

There is a slight hope that it could be made possible by modding the scene.dat and adding many more fog states. But I don't have much time for testing that, so you need to be patient.

As Magic1111 said very good news!:rock:

@Hitman, Stiebler: In SH3.exe there are 4 possible states for visibility, coded in integer format (numbers 0 to 3). That can be found at [ESI+2bc] (assuming the right pointer context). So internally, sh3 doesn't handle visibility continuously but in discrete steps. I think these 4 states are mapped to the 4 states in scene.dat. Changing this into continuous behaviour means to re-write the most irritating part of the weather algorithm I didn't understand until now. And one would have to consider all the side-effects this deep change could have.

But there is a little chance left: Currently the visibility changes very fast between two of these states because of FogChangeInterval=1 in scene.dat. I'll test the effect of setting this value to 0,001 instead, that means: very slow change of fog. With a little luck visibility during this change also changes continuously and not abrupt.