A Whale of a tale...
 

It started long ago, A teenage boy buys a cartridge for his NES. A neat little submarine game called Silent Service. he spend many hours,weeks and months sailing the Pacific in search of Japanese Shipping. He learns all the ins and outs of the game and the cartridge is one of the most heavily used games in his collection. Little does he know where it all will lead.

A few years later he buys his first computer, an Atari XE Game System. Its an Atari computer with a cartridge slot added to compete in the home gaming system market (It failed miserably!). Then he stumbles onto another Submarine game, GATO. The addiction starts all over again and the Japs once again pay the price for Pearl Harbor!

Then came the first real computer, a whopping 66mhz processor with a 250 mb hard drive! Along comes Silent Hunter. WOW! Those Graphics are amazing! Its the most detailed sub game yet, wait, scratch that, its a Sub Sim! He learns all the games tricks and even buys these new expansion disks. Its heaven! Once again he is up until dawn hunting Japs and sailing the pacific in amazing 256 color glory!

Another Computer and he reads on the world wide web about plans for Silent Hunter 2! He can't wait, it seems like an eternity before it is released. He buys it at the mall and rushes home to install this new gem.

WTH??? Wheres the Fleetboats? Wheres the campaign that lets him roam the seas? Whats up with all the Bugs?

Disgusted, he shelves the game and spends more and more time in his other gaming love, flight simulators. He hears about Silent Hunter 3, does his homework this time and loses interest once he learns its a U-Boat sim once again.

MANY years later, bored one night and looking for a new game he sees that Direct2Drive has Silent Hunter 3 for ten dollars. Why not? So he tries it, its not too bad. Graphics are nice, Campaign is pretty decent and the game runs pretty well. It becomes an interesting distraction for a couple weeks.

Another trip to Direct2Drive and he finds what he has been looking for all these years, Silent Hunter 4, a Pacific Submaine Simulator. He buys it and the U-boat missions addon as a package deal and trys it. He gets very little sleep over the next few weeks. The joy is back, almost.

He encounters bugs, big mean nasty ones. Wait, didn't he hear something about a subsim website when he was active in the flight sim community? A quick google search and he finds this community and discovers a universe of mods for Silent Hunter 3 & 4. He decides to focus on Silent Hunter 4 (like there was ever a choice LOL!) and tries several of the mods.

The Mods are very well done, he is impressed with the skill of the modding community. However, He likes parts of several mods that are not designed to work together. He decides to try to make the parts he likes work together and the nightmare begins...

Weeks turn to Months. After several disasters and having to restart his project over again and again he starts to figure out how this game works and how the file system interacts. Many late nights are spent searching the forums for the little nugget of information that will make mod X work with mod Y. Parts are taken from alot of mods and many hours are lost to testing and setbacks. He still has not completed a single Silent Hunter 4 Campaign!

He keeps saying, OK No more modding until i play through this Campaign, yet time after time something else stands out that needs fixed. Its an endless cycle and His Girlfriend complains about "That Damn Sub Game" eating up all his time. Finally tonight he thinks he has added the final touch and he comes to Subsim to write a long winded post to Thank the many Modders who make up the Community whos work has made it possible to build the Subsim of his Dreams!

THANK YOU ALL!!! :salute:

Now i'm off to start a new career and hopefully complete a Campaign this time! :har:

:DL
Yep, been there, done that.
I've suffered from a serious case of mod fever for about 2 years now.
The furthest I've got is to the end of 1942, before I've ended up restarting with a different mod combo.
I keep telling myself that this time it will be different.
This time I have the perfect combination.
No more re installs because I have FUBARED my game from throwing too many mods at it.
And then something new turns up. And I just have to try it. And get it to work with my existing mod set.
You are not alone WarlordATF.
The first step in dealing with a problem is admitting you have one :03:

eak gads man... i have the same thing! but with me i dont know squat about making mods just slight edits here and there. right now im the farthest i've ever played: dec 1942 with the Narwhale.
my problem is i cant decide which boat i like the most, S-boats or the fleet boats. :o

Got to learn to juggle both brother! :03: My story sounds much the same. And yes...my wife called it the 'damn submarine game'. I learned to juggle both. :up:

Did an "Obsessed" stint with a Combat Flight Sim, ( Falcon 4.0 ), for a number of years.
When it got to where I was Beta-Testing, and spent more than a couple of hours each evening "Flying" with other Testers on-line.....
The Wife began to describe it as " He's with his Gay Flying Buddies !"
( Got some strange looks !!! )

Had to make a change !
While now I still Sim quite regularly, I dont Obsess ....( as musch as I used to...), and actually Enjoy my Sim time now.
Seems it had all most become "Work" while beta testing.

Anywyas.....
If You read this, well you've been there too my friend..... or will be...Lol !
:D

@AVGWarhawk, Oh yeah, I know all about juggling, I've got almost 13 years in with this girl. Ya just throw em up in the air and be gone by the time they land! :haha:

@Budds, Yeah i was into Falcon 4 for a long time. It was one of my favorite sims. Then Lead Pursuit came out with F4 Allied Force and tried to stop modding. They failed, but it slowed things down for quite awhile. Now Frugals is gone so i moved over to CombatAce and started playing Wings Over Europe/Wings Over Vietnam/First Eagles. They are nowhere near as realistic but they are fun and have tons of mods available. I also fly IL2 1946 alot these days. I would love to see another flight sim with the level of detail of Falcon 4.0, IMO its still the most well rounded combat flight sim out there. :rock: