So I tried SH4 again an still like SH3 better.
 

I was piddling around this evening after spending another unsuccessful day working on my van and not having much success. I decided to give SH4 another day in court. I have the gold pack with the uboat missions. So Im trying to figure out the control scheme, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why they did not give the watchman a range to target button. The GUI befuddled me so badly that I had to sink that merchant with the rear firing deck gun (I have a grato class sub). The next morning as Im approaching the coast of Japan, I have around six different airborne patrols swarming over me at different times. I downed three of them quickly before they could bomb my ship. I was hit on the third attack and tried to track quickly with the ack ack, only to find that the point of view from the flack cannon places you behind the wall of the outer hull when you try to make a mid level sweep with said gun. What gives eh?
I started looking in the downloads for a fix for that and a few other things here, and should have those issues patched up easily enough.
I personaly think that the GUI for SHIII is much better than the SH4 GUI. I don't know how in depth the new GWX mod is going to be for SH4, but I feel I wouldn't be doing any justice to SH3 without mentioning that it would be nice to take that type of straight forward interface and place it within the realm of eye candy that the SH4 engine can offer. I understand that the few shortcomings of SH3 are very well the brick and mortar of the engine itself, I cannot help but think about how much fun SH4 could have been if the interface wasn't totally alien.
Ok, thats my rant for the evening... back to SH3.

GWX for SHIV was canceled:nope:

Yes SHIV is two steps forward and one step back.

Try the Game fixes only mod 1.1 and Run Silent Run Deep campaign overwrite to fix it to historical levels.

The GUI is horrible and I really miss SHIII's two bar system with one bar on the left and one on the bottom.

Still after all the fixes I play SHIII 75% of the time. SHIV is just too Hollywood blockbuster cartooned for my taste. They threw the realism aside a bit for the special effects and it cost in substance. It failed when compared to its predecessor.

Mod guru's do fix things up nicely though and now it is much better!:up:

Just isn't SHIII GWX good:arrgh!:

As someone who's spent an ungodly amount of time tinkering under SH4's hood to try and get more out of it, i personally think the single biggest problem with SH4, is that it was rushed. It was released far too early then it should have been. (blame the suits at ubi)

Some aspects of the game, are, i think, quick fix solutions by ubi. The GUI being one of them. I think ubi ran into problems with the SH3 interface due to today's screen resolutions and aspect ratios. When SH3 was made, this wasn't really an issue. So a quick fix, was the ordersbar GUI as it exists today.

SH4 is loaded with legacy files that are no longer being used, and legacy functionality that either weren't being used at release, or simply didn't work anymore. Some of this functionatliy was made accessible/added back by mods. Mod wise, SH4 is acutally doing pretty good. Better mod tools were made specificaly for sh4 (S3D). Not to mention some of the modders in SH4, actually came from the SH3 modding community, so there has been an ongoing working knowledge base. A few have been around long before GWX was thought up, so the talent and know how is there and the game is improving. But there is no denying, the game was rushed, and it will always reflect that.

I share the feelings of the OP.

I am not a fan of the GUI on SH4. It just does not "feel" right to me (my opinion of course)

I keep coming back to SH3. With all the mods efforts a lot of good improvements have been made.

I keep going back to SH4 just to give it one more try, but it does not feel like home to me.

Me either. I'm a whore to keyboard shortcuts.

Yeah, i've thought a bit about that topic.
http://forum.kickinbak.com/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=1325

GUIs
 

I think it's fair to say that the SHIV mod community have salvaged the game from it's original poor showing (I wholeheartedly agree it was a rushed and flawed product. They still haven't fixed the simple collision sound glitch with the Marines' rubber raft for crying out loud!). It has slowly grown on me, regardless, particularly with the addition of SH4 Speech (no GUI probs, just state your command and the crew responds). SH4 Speech is not perfect but IMHO it added so much more immersion to the game.

That being said, SHIII still rules the roost for overall immersion. It's just "grittier" if you get my drift, slightly dated graphics notwithstanding. If SH5 does not use the SHIII/GWX concept as a starting block then I'm sure the game will be stillborn. Of course, SH6 will be, yet again, the next improvement for the Pacific Theatre and round and round she goes.......:up:

There's one thing we can say about the subsim community; we're suckers for punishment.:O:

Rgr that....some more than they might realise.

Thank heaven for the efforts of the modding community......without whom neither release would have maintained the following/interest they currently enjoy.

I'm still trying to give SH4 a fair shake, but I just haven't had any "WOW!" moments like I have had in SH3. Still plugging away though.

Hats off to the modders though.:salute: I skipped stock SH4 and installed TMO 1.7, RSRD, and a couple of little mods right off the bat and gave it a try. Now I'm running RFB 1.52/RSRD for comparison to see what I like better. The jury is still out though. Both are excellent mods.

I'm missing the cold, grey Atlantic though.

:)

Yes, but that was one feature of SH3 that drove me nuts. Once one of those endless storms set in it was the same cold, grey monotonous Atlantic everywhere---the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of Guinea, the South Atlantic. At least that problem was fixed in SH4.

I agree with the ongoing problems with SH4, but I keep switching back and forth. The reason? Those selfsame storms. With SH3 and GWX and SH3Cmdr I get awesome experiences, but I'm tired of never being able to fight due to my entire patrol being in stormy weather.

With SH4 and OM I get much better weather changes, much better graphics (even on a machine so old that I can only run it with no SFX enabled at all), better time compression and better map grids, but I have to agree about the feel of the thing. The funky crew names are a part of it, and the GUI is, as was said, much less involving.

@ Ducimus: Your 'soul' article is spot-on. Good job!

SH4 has a lot of short comings. At least you gave it a chance. :yeah: For me, I just like fleetboats. Plus, I was playing SH3 so much my kids were talking German. NO sh!t. In all reality, I just think SH4 is leap years ahead in most areas over SH3. I do not find the graphic chartoon like at all. Each has their own eye for things though. For those who like the German side, OM is a fantastic mod. It is growing as well. :03:

The sad thing is, all of SH4's perks are sort of under the hood. The end user doesn't really see what is possible with SH4, other then load times being faster, and pretty transparent water. From a modding perspective, or more specifically, from a campaign scripting perspective, SH4 could arguably blow SH3 clean out of the water. Now I don't know what Lurkers done in RSRD, but having looked closely at the game itself, I think that the full breadth of what is possible to script hasn't fully been exploited and the full potential realized. Sh4 really does have alot of potential in this regard.

Ironically, doing campaign work is my least favorite thing to do. I'd rather chew aluminum foil or gargle on gasoline then do campaign work. So bloody tedious.

The US submarines interface in SH4 is in my opinion a very good one, easy to use and clear. It also adds a HUGE advantage for manual shooting when compared to SH3: It allows you directly input masthead heigth in the stadimeter, instead of following the stupid and long process of having to identify a ship before that. It is beyond my understanding why they put back that absurd interface in SH4 when they added the U-Boats, but probably due to lack of time I suspect. Without the newer interface and GUI mods for SH3, I probably wouldn't also play the game, and hence I do not play the Uboats part of SH4. But now there is finally a mod that provides an intuitive and easy to use interface, as I like it: http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=152590 :yeah:

See this is what I was talking about, the eye candy is there but game lacks the feel that it takes to bring it to a classic level.
I understand now that the GWX mod is canceled, but it really is too bad that no one is trying to repack the goodies that are in GWX3 and make them work in SH4. I could only imagine that amount of detail with the functional GUI that were all familiar with, being combined with the ability to play both German and American subs (while were "bench" modding (bench moddin is similar to "bench" racing" for those that dont know) we could make some of the Japanese boats playable too) would be the most amazing experience any of us could hope for. For those who would compare this dream mod to the release of SH5... I just want to point out how few war sims actually get it right (feel, graphics and GUI) right out of the box.

3 v 4
 

Personally I prefer (a well-tweaked) 3 over 4 any day of the week.


The GUI with SHa4 is actually utter rubbish when you compare it with any of the amazing GUI mods available for SH3.

I know the weather thing annoys a lot of people but there are fixes for that available. So for me 3 wins hands down every time.

GUI is one of the most important features of any sim, and SH4 never even got off the ground where that's concerned. Run SH3 with GWX and OLC's GUI for a day or two and I swear you'll only look at SH4 again once in a blue moon