What have I missed ??
 

Hi all, been away fro a "while", so what have I missed out on ?

Any new patches etc :rotfl2:

What was the state of the sim when you left?

hmm, probably at 1.04 i think. No mods to speak of.

Ouch. LWAMI was around by then. :oops:
At that time, LWAMI was about using database and doctrine fixes to get DW to work the way it should because there were so many bugs and so many things that the database was meant to do that were never implemented for DW (at least not the commercial version). After 1.04, LWAMI has focused on database expansion, and we've probably doubled the number of platforms available.

Hyperlobby and Gamespy more or less died. Dangerouswaters.pl helped revive gamespy a bit. The Seawolves had a "civil war" and what was the SSN division seceded and became "Global Naval Strike Force." The Seawolves Surface Division was expanded to include the former SSN division and renamed the Seawolves Virtual Navy. Another group left the SVN to form the Silent Sharks, who have made a few memorable appearances in these forums.

Italian modders came out with Alpha Tau, a LWAMI based mod that featured new playables with stock interfaces

Russian modders came out with Reinforce-Alert, a mod featuring new playables with new interfaces. After some time they appropriated the name "DWX" since the SCX team wasn't using it.

Sometime after RA came out, SCS made a statement to the effect of giving tacit approval to the new-playables mods, although they have not officially reversed their stand on the issue. Frying Tiger makes rare appearances here, giving us some (probably false) hope that SCS will once again return to the commercial sim business, but for now that's not happening.

I'm still lurking around, still have no news. (sigh) We did have a nice chat with the SubSim Meet guys when they came through Sonalysts, I was happy to have a chance to talk to them. We're still trying to figure out how to fund more commercial sim work.

Good to see you back Ramius (never forget you got my Seawolf with that damn English (Spearfish?)torp).

And good to see you Tiger.

I'm willing to fork a hundred bucks for a much better version of DW. It must however be better in everything including graphics. I don't believe I'm alone though I must admit the majority may not be willing. Heck I might still buy it if it was tagged at 200 bucks just that I wouldn't be happy about it unless it's worth the money. Few games last very long on my harddrive and now I mostly buy games which last that long.

@Ramius, God you have not been around for long. I was Roh_Kudus back in 2001 not very active though.

Must give the latest DWX 1.2 a try
http://www.ra-dwx.narod.ru/download.htm

Made some missions for it too check subsim DW download page

At least try it to get a feel for it. To me it's just incredible. At least until we got our hands on DW successor though Sonalysts figured it may not worth getting into commercial PC game anymore.

I think a solid, complete tactical sim is worth $100+, so I'm with you. And like you, I'd be more demanding for that kind of scratch, although my main demand would be a dynamic campaign engine instead of graphics. :cool:

Hey Tiger, give your home forums a lurk too. I'm going to guess it hasn't seen visit by a mod/admin in about 2 weeks...

Not to say I wouldn't want a dynamic campaign but to me a far more powerful [-]Jedi[/-] I mean mission editor is more important.

A much nicer graphics would be a welcome but not a necessity.

Realism as far as can be allowed and possible must be given and implemented too in game such as realistic torpedo multiple homing sensor, battery capacity(don't tell me Kilo has a shorter underwater endurance than WWII submarine), etc.

Ah but this is nothing but daydreaming. . .because most people would rather play Call of duty XXIX

Thanks, the spambots are winning the battle over there. Gotta see if I can get management to give me an assist, I'm overmatched! (grin)

Perhaps you could elaborate what you think about the proposal, which is raised here from time to time that the price tag for a DW successor would be considerable higher and to have a similar 'business model' like other sims (Steel Beasts Pro/Harpoon as an example). That is the commercial version is just a spin-off the current government version minus classified stuff and missing some features like connectors to other simulations etc.

I think such and similar questions regularly pop up here in the forum, hence it would be nice if you/Sonalysts could just give your comments/thinking on this from time to time. So just more a bit of a dialog between you and the lurking guys here ;).

What do you think?

The non-commercial versions of DW are mostly one-offs, customized for a particular purpose. There's relatively little of value for a commercial customer in most of these, and a sizable percentage of these versions are proprietary, i.e. the customer paid to create it so they don't want Sonalysts re-purposing any of it for other customers. So they can't really form a logical upgrade path for a commercial sim.

If you're going to charge a premium price for a sim, you have to have a roadmap to follow so the customer gets some value for their purchase. This requires production resources to be dedicated to the roadmap tasks. That costs money! So you have to estimate how much revenue you'll get vs. how much time the programmers/artists can spend working on upgrades and improvements. If you miss, you lose money, or the updates don't come as frequently as promised, and you get annoyed customers. (well, more annoyed than usual customers...) (grin)

Because of DW's poor retail showing, it's an uphill battle to convince the partnership to spend more money on it or anything like it. Plus it's so old now it needs a major overhaul. At this point a new game looks more cost-effective.

All that said, what you mention is one of the possible ways we could make a business case for a new version/new game. This is why we haven't given up completely.

Hope that helped some. I have to be circumspect because I can't promise anything. I'm personally very interested in new sims, but I'm not high enough on the food chain to do much about it!

Hey, FT, it was good to meet you there!:woot::salute:

Thanks Roger for your insights/comments. I was not aware of that you do mainly customer developments with the non-commercial version of DW.

Let's hope that there will be an opportunity to develop a new engine, which could serve both use-cases.

There is a guy called Dr Sid who is developing his own sim with more realistic sub handling and acoustics.

Maybe give him a shout...