Why not a Super-Sim
 

Before I start my rant just want you to know I love SH3 (GWX) and play it and SH4 (RFB & RSRD) regularly. This rant will have 3 sections HATE, SOLUTION and EXAMPLE OF SOLUTION.

First the HATE:x! I hate it how the the developers are always out to make a buck, they get a great simulator and ruin it by trying to sell it like a g,ame. Example: SH4 just had to have better graphics, which resulated in a ton of bugs and slow up the game:down:, so all those arcade players could have something good to look at while they press one button, sit back and watch 10 ships disapper:nope:. I will addmit for realism purposses graphics need to be a creatain level, that of SH3, but once at that level it becomes all about detail. For realism and detailed surface is more than a smooth surface! The sad thing is, and I'm not referring to individual people but developers on a whole, developers just want to make money:yep:; well the GWX team put out a free expansion that was 10x better then the stock version and all that recieved in return for this monumental feat was some lously donations and our undieing gratatude:rock:.

Other two sections still to come, off to play SH3 (GWX).

Yep I agree Ubi should release the code so that the game/sim can be fixed properly

I dont buy any games new or off the shelf now! Most are bugged and unstable

Luckly I scored SH3 out of the bargain bin!

Also lucky for U-boat fans theres a skilled modding community out there providing some thing thats playable and getting real close to AOD type style of play

Ubi cant even make a save game option that works with out glitches and crashes

:rotfl:

The BAttle of the Atlantic centred on a large part about wolfpacks where are they Ubi?

:rotfl:

I don't know what UBI's problem is. Look at how successful games like the original Half Life is because they released their source code. They even included the software they used to design the game right on the freakin CD it came on !!

People are STILL playing Team Fortess now and Counter Strike would Never have happened if they hadn't released the source code. I mean.. how old is that game and people are still having a blast playing it and modding it ?

I wish UBI would look at that example and follow it !

I wish the game would be open, so that we could make new games entirely from it - such as controllable surface ships and campaigns with these. :D Ubisoft didn't do to SH4 what they should have - it's something most of us agree on. :)

It's their job, mate, it's how they make a living.

There is a world of difference between editing some files and *programming* a subsimulation from scratch. Even when done on such a massive and successfull scale as the supermods do, there is still no comparison. The mod teams did a bang job, but do you think they would have released a SHIII in 2005 if the devs hadn't?
Also, keep in mind that the hardware in 2005 was less powerfull than now. Had they released a sim in 2005 with as much content as say, GWX2.0, and wanted money for it, the 15min+ load times and possibly performance of the game would have caused an outrage.
Also, as a matter of fact I only ever got corrupted savegames when using a big ass mod which heavily modified or trippled the contents of the campaign layer files and what not. Stock SH3 I can save whenever I want to, submerged or not, and nothing bad happens. Might be for some they got corrupted save games here as well, but my experience is I didn't, ever. Makes sense to me, really: The long load times (even in stock compared to other games) and some of the bugs that can occur on reload would indicate that this is the bottleneck of the game and a sensitive area. Now triple or quadruple the amount of (possibly unexpected) data the game has to process through that bottleneck and it might just CTD (in SHIV, it is interesting to note that a bug was introduced by a mod that let savegame files become 1 or more GIGABYTES in size. As was found out, the modification to blame was however only some smallish realism change on a player sub model! Now go figure that out!)

In fact, SHIII stock was and still is an excellent subsimulation. Yes, unfortunately there were deficencies in realism in points like damage model, and having no wolfpacks is a sin, but at the same time SHIII introduced features that any hardcore subsimmer has always dreamed about, and combined them with all the other bells and whistles: No God's eye view on the map! And the first subsim after 1996' SHI to have a dynamic campaign! And manual TDC was retained! And you could *actually* listen to the contacts on the sonar station, etc etc.

SHII was a sad joke, so when SHIII came out it was the first decent WWII subsim since 1996, and in many ways it was the actually the bomb. Thus some of the critizism towards the dev team which always seems to occur with some people when praising a mod seems wholly unjustified to me.

[quote=heartc]Totally agree... I've been playing SHIII stock without any mod or even a patch, and I have nothing to complain about, sure, some of the features contained in GWX would have been great on the stock version, but hey! Let Microsoft sell games that come in two DVD's and are unplayable on the hardware side. Cheers to de romanian dev team, and cheers to the GWX team as well for completing an extremely well done job.
As far as stability, I've never had a single CTD with SHIII, the only problem I remember was once, when exiting the game, after I was already on the desktop, I got a Windows vista error window saying: "Silent Hunter III stopped working blah blah blah..." Geez, maybe it has something to do with the fact I clicked "EXIT":88)
Anyways, I'll get GWX soon, but my gratitude to the romanian guys will remain intact!

Excellent point. Without the devs accomplishing what they did in the limited time they were given, there would be no game to mod. Also don't forget that the mods leading to GW/GWX/GWX2 have been in constant development for almost three years. If the devs had the luxury to create a perfect game, we might never actually see it, since the technology itself improves every year and what has been done before quickly becomes obsolete.

Just look at the long development history of PT Boats.

Absoulutly good points however its still like buying a house thats half finished.

AOD had none of the graphics or mod community as there was no internet yet how come that game from 1990 captured the main points of the Battle of the Atlantic and at the end of the day way more accurate imo escort behaviour depth charged to the bottom encounters than and instant death screen...

I mean this kinda thing is what U-boats are about - Hunt to survival

Ubi had an idea got a 1/3 of the way through but didnt include wolfpacks? But gave you a crew that runs outta puff in 1hr simple dials that didnt work a boring captains log, silly repair times no moon chart ? Simple stuff for an outta the box game about U-boats of WWII regardless of time or money.

Outta the box it simply lacked. Graphics aside but for me its about game play. How hard can it be with all the info avaliable to include where what was and where in say a dynamic campagn that Ubi coundnt figure out ?

Others here have free of charge!

:o

Damn good job to to all u modders out there!

:up:

Part 2 & 3
 

Well first rebutal. I think some may missed my point about the dev's. I understand it is how they make thier living but thats what sad about it. Because sales of this game is how they make their money, so they believe they need changing the to keep people interested, and thats what sucks:down: (not the dev's). We finally have SH3 tweaked out and running the smoothest possible but instead of using that tried platform; instead the dev's think that to keep people interested they need to put out new and flash games, well this has resulted in the reliance on modders to tweak the game all over again:damn:. The reason why GWX put out better matirial than the dev's, is that they're not makeing there livelyhood from this game, they've done all their work because they want to see the game improved not because they want/need to make money from it:rock:.

Now for the Solution. I think the solution would have been to take the tweaked out SH3 and expand on it. As I've already said I think SH3 graphics are up to the standard required. So why not just take the other improvements of SH4; like the differn't mission types, the increased radio useage, and a mape that rotated with the boats movement. And install them into a tried and proven platform:yep:. There is no need for a new engine:down: and it was the new engine that brought about most of the bugs. Why, at the same time as bringing the above features of SH4, why not add new subs and playable countries like USA. Then later add a British and Jap campaine.

You need an Example? Well the best example of a Super-Sim is that of the IL2 series:rock:. IL2 put out a core game called Forgotten Battles, which only focused on the Eastern Front air war with only Germany and Russia playable, then they put out fully compatible expasions and sequals, Pacific Fighters was a full game in its own right yet it was still completely compatible with FB, witch by the end of the series resulted in the air war covering the Eastern Front, Western Europe, the Mediterainium and the Pacific. It allowed the player to fly over 100 differen't planes for over 20 countries:o. It ecompassed the entire air war of WWII. The engine didn't change (the graphics were great for there time in 1998) but through minor changes in each addon the graphics keep improveing and were able to keep up with more mdern sims. After a decade of IL2 Oleg Maddox:rock: (creator of IL2) has decided to redesign the engine and build another Super-Sim like IL2, the series is to be called Storm Of War and the first installment is alled Battle Of Britain. Through the IL2 series players never lost interest in fact the community grew.

So all I'm not trying to bag the dev's, I just thought I would suggest it becase SH3 has the ability of becomeing a Super-Sim. For now I play SH3 (GWX) while I wait for SH4 to be tweaked to SH3's level. I have a long wait:nope:.

You made some very good points here and I agree. Maybe the solution is to sign the petition to get Ubi to release the source and SDK so that people smarter than me can make SH3 even better. I don't think its realistic to expect Ubi to start redeveloping SH3. I think their approach to the new graphics model of SH4 was a wasted financial effort. It seems to me that Ubi could have released the US Pacific capaign as an expansion to SH3 - instead they have concentrated on the (bigger?) US market and I guess will try to sell back an SH4 U-boat Atlantic/European expansion aimed at existing SH3 users. Trouble is I don't like the new SH4 graphics (detail isn't everything) and I'm not sure the SH4 game engine has the soul of SH3 - so I'm not sure I'd want it anyway :-?

To me it proves that graphics don't make a game. Gameplay will.

Maybe it's just me but SHIII (even without ANY mod) just has more soul than SHIV.

Then again, SHIII took a while to get to it's current status. SHIV just takes a bit more time to get to the point where it may equal SHIII.

No ranting meant here...

I certainly do not disagree with everything you've said, but I do on the graphics. Now I still play SHIII/GWX2 and love it, but the graphics in SH4 are just night-vs-day in comparison. The water alone in SH4 is an amazingly more realistic portrayal then that in SHIII, and with mods like ROW, it is truly stunning. IMO, it is SHIII that looks more like the cartoon game, not SH4. Some of the screenies from SH4 are remarkably realistic - sea foam, wave action and such.

Of course, it takes some pretty hefty graphics power to render SH4 in all it's true graphic splendor - more graphics umph then was available with any card available at the time of SHIII's release.

I'd also just say that from a marketing perspective, I think you have to keep in mind that sims like our beloved sub sims are a small niche market. There simply is not the market size, and hence potential profits, to pour unlimited resources into development. I'd not be surprised if Bungie made more money on the opening day of sales of Halo3 then UbiSoft made in total to-date sales of the entire Silent Hunter series. And money and market share drive game development.

[quote=seafarer]The transparency effect is amazing also :yep:


RDP

I believed they recognized what IL2 has done hence the add-on on uboats to SH4. Add-on's stoke the fires and keeps the interests up. Personally, I think IL2 and SH3 graphics are dated. I do not play either anymore. Not that these two games were and are awesome, just getting a bit bored with them. We can rest assured, that the devs will not be messing with SH3 again but they will be working on SH4! Also, you will not be waiting as long as you think for tweaking SH4 to SH3 level. The lessons have been learned with SH3 and are applied to SH4. The basic files are the same. You never really know what is coming out of Romania!!!!:D

Its not that I'm requesting that SH3 be taken up by the Dev's again; I think SH3 would be a better platform at this point in time for a Super-Sim, I agree all work should be on SH4 (which it needs) I'm just pointing out that I think the dev's missed there chance and I don't want them to miss the chance with SH4.

The good thing for my relationship with SH4 is that I'm going away for a year (station hand in the Kimberleys) and hopefully in 12 months time SH4 will be tweaked, to the standard of SH3, and it will have a proper super-mod addon.

See ya in a year.