Ideas for Silent Hunter IV, Shipwrecks, Plane Wrecks, littered with wrecks.
 

The Japanese were losing their vital ships to American submarines and aircraft during the war. The submarines were inflicting terrible losses on Japan's cargo vessels and sea lanes. The Japanese suffered horrendous losses of cargo and ships sunk to Allied submarines and their shipping lanes which carried vital cargoes to Japan, were disrupted by these attacks.

The game Silent Hunter IV replicates these attacks on Japanese ships. The thing that I don't like about Silent Hunter 4, is that you are the only submarine in the entire war sinking enemy ships and there are no other Allied submarines sinking Japanese ships. You are the only one in the whole vast Pacific Ocean. There is no way to coordinate with other submarines and attack enemy vessels. The aircraft attacks in SH4 are ineffectual and inflict no damage on Japanese ships. The planes are easily shot down and destroyed by super-accurate AA fire.

They only show a minimum amount of airplanes attacking the ships. They do not show the hundreds of planes used in such raids against the Yamato for example or the Musashi.

The Japanese ships are deadly accurate when you fight them on the surface, which is why you have to take them on under water with your torpedoes. Your primary weapon is the torpedo and if you are playing the game in the early years of the war, then most of the torpedoes will be duds that will fail to explode when they hit the ships.

Why can't you coordinate with Royal Navy submarines to sink Japanese ships? It would be nice if there were more Allied submarines out there sinking Japanese warships. Why can't there be Dutch submarines? In the war, there were Dutch and British submarines operating against the Japanese during the war. Why aren't they depicted?

I am critical of Silent Hunter IV. At least in multiplayer you can sink other ships with other submarines. Why can't single player allow you to do a lot more?

That's what bothers me about Silent Hunter IV.

I think that Subsim.com could do a better job in my opinion with this. There needs to be more submarines and more sinkings of Japanese ships and Japanese ships lying at the bottom of the sea wherever they were sunk by Allied submarines or aircraft. I do not like how the sea is all nice and neat with no shipwrecks. That bothers me. Why can't there be shipwrecks all across the Pacific, instead of just as Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor looks like it had been freshly attacked IN 1943!

I think that instead of separate Dutch and British campaigns, why not merge them together in one collective mod for Silent Hunter IV? All the Allies, including the Australians, will participate in them.

The Atlantic Ocean is also suspiciously bare of shipwrecks and airplane wrecks. The Pacific Ocean has no planes that have ditched in the sea and have sunk to the bottom of the Pacific. I remember that whole thing as well.

Could we have all the mods merged? Thank you.

I was thinking about having shipwrecks for sunken Allied and Japanese ships all across the Atlantic Ocean and Pacific Ocean.

Could that ever happen? Why is the ocean bottom rather neat? In your next patrol, why aren't the same ships that you sank on a previous patrol no longer visible on the bottom of the ocean?

It's like they were never sunk in the first place. It's really weird that you do not see Allied planes attacking Japanese patrol planes that attack your submarine. There are no other Allied planes in the game.

I just pray that one day that the game developers will come up with a PC game with a PC with greater computing and graphics power that will have hundreds of thousands of airplanes, millions of soldiers, millions of weapons, hundreds of thousands of artillery pieces, mortars, grenades, bazookas, and a more immersive World War II experience. I am looking for a game that simulates the real war.

I am looking for a game that will be like America's Army, where if you die, you can't come back to fight again and again.

I am looking for a multiplayer game that can host millions of people on a single server. However, given how the internet works, that just isn't possible.

You could have millions of AI bots fighting the war for you. You just aren't seeing millions of troops attacking millions of enemy troops. The computing power has not advanced enough for this to be possible.

When will it be possible?

Patchman123.

Wow! What do I say? Let me cherry pick some things and reply to them:

You have to keep in mind that this is a submarine simulation. Almost all of the time submarines acted alone with no sighting of other submarines for the entire cruise. Even when they hunted in wolfpacks, they mostly just divided up territory so they could avoid sinking each other. They didn't talk back and forth much on the radio for security reasons. And they never would be in continuous conversation with another submarine during the execution of an attack. Mostly, submarine operations were a pretty solitary activity.
How, in a submarine, would you really ever be in position to watch aircraft attacks on Yamato or the Battle of Midway? The real ones sure weren't! Encounters in stock SH4 are random. Encounters in in RSRDC are canned with emphasis on what affects your submarine. Airplanes attacking enemy ships are really just window dressing and if you see it you're probably doing something wrong. One shot from that ship's pop guns and you go glug, glug, glug. I don't think subs lolly-gagged on the surface watching air attacks....
Is that a complaint or an observation not part of your dissatisfaction? The real submariners complained about that a lot. Yes. One hit from any surface ship's guns and you're probably going down involuntarily. Yes, they can hit you from six miles away, just like in real life. Yes, you have to hit them a hundred times to hurt them very much at all, just like in real life. Your torpedoes are crap until the middle of 1943 just like in real life. Welcome to the war, son. We didn't promise it would be fair.
I can't find a single instance of Royal Navy or Dutch subs coordinating with American subs to have a baseball game, much less sinking Japanese warships. Dutch, British and other allied subs were a non-factor in the sinking of Japanese shipping and had almost no impact on the war at all. They aren't depicted because they weren't effective and never interacted with American subs.
We're getting weird now. The Pacific is 62 million square miles of water, mostly several miles deep. When you sink a ship you never see it again. And the several hundred sinkings are so widely separated that locating them is very difficult, even with the space age technology we have seventy years later. In all the war reports of submarines during the war I have read I haven't seen five reports of enemy sunken shipping being encountered. Why should we scatter thousands of shipwrecks all across the Pacific in water five miles deep and how would you see them in a submarine that can't dive to a fifth of a mile? We could grind an eight core machine with 16 GB of RAM to a halt for objects that you would NEVER be able to see.
Sure! Get to work and let us know when it's ready. Mods are written by volunteers who make no income by working on the mod. They are individual pursuits for the pleasure of the modder, who makes his work available for others to try.

Subsim isn't in the business of commanding modders to combine all the available mods. Most of them are mutually exclusive anyway because of the individual vision of the modders involved. Most of the modders have gone on to do other things and are no longer available to modify their work.

In the real war you didn't have a GPS navigation system to go visit the site of previous sinkings. If you tried you probably would waste a week and still not find them and Admiral Lockwood would fire you on return to Pearl for not prosecuting the war with "great vigor."
During most of the war, submarine operations were conducted in the Pacific Ocean, which translated means "Japanese Lake." There WERE no allied planes to attack those Japanese planes. The Allied planes didn't know where you were, didn't have the range to get there even if they could locate which of the 64 million square miles you were in. Subs acted alone, without any air or surface support, just about 100% of the time. Sub skippers didn't like the either and it was tough toenails.
As I've shown, that's not the real war--it's a bad movie. Real war is 99% insufferable boredom, punctuated by short bursts of absolute terror and panic.

Well that's how Silent Hunter 4 is! Unless you want the game to reformat your hard drive when you die so you have real life consequences for failure. I can't believe that if you die in America's Army you can never play the game again. That makes no sense. Nobody would buy that game.

Even if it were possible, millions of troops never attacked millions of troops in any action in the war. Most actions were isolated actions of a few thousand against a few thousand.

Before we could have a "whole war" simulation, we would have to agree on some ground rules that don't have any satisfying real world answers:

What is the nature of reality? Do we put the enemy in a box, wind 'em up and let them do move for move exactly what they did in Version 1 back in 1939-1945? Is that real? Or is it laughably unreal? I would contend for the latter.

Are the weapons going to be exactly what was available in the war, developed at exactly the same time, la la la? Is that real? Or anti-real? People will complain at you with great vigor however you go and you can't do both.

In short, we have fundamental disagreement about what constitutes a simulation, even in our limited encounters presently in the game. We are hard against the capabilities of today's computers with 2017 supermods. You say they are too limited. We're paring back usage of system resources every day to make more possible in mods you find completely inadequate. FOTRSU is a 3.7 GB mod for a game a third the size. According to you, that is way too limited. We need thousands of sunken ships littering the bottom of a five mile deep ocean, which the player could never see or even detect by any means.

No. We don't. Just no.:salute:

Interesting thoughts. I am including some of the elements you talk about in my WWI mod:

-Large air raids

-Planes that are difficult to shoot down (hitboxes for fuel tank & engines will be realistic)

-AI submarines, friendly and enemy, sinking surface ships (or each other)

-Limited cooperation with surface units (nothing fancy, but it will be there!) such as merchant raiders

-Crashed planes that you can encounter

-Derelict, burned-out ships with flotsam & survivors, that have been adrift (plus "non-survivors"...creepy.) :03:

-Much more friendly, enemy, and neutral traffic, to dispel the feeling that you are alone

-Shipwrecks on the coast, representing areas with heavy U-Boat losses in WWI (or simply areas where a ship accidentally wrecked)

Most of these things have already been implemented....SH3 has had various shipwrecks modded in , for example. One supermod had drifting, wrecked ships. And one modder (Kendras?) has figured out how to simulate huge airplane raids using simplified 3d models at high altitude. Someone did create a utility to remove sunken battleships from the campaign layer in SH4 (unfortunately I don't know where the link is.)

I try to take care not to promise what can't be done....although I want my mod Wolves of the Kaiser to be innovative, it is definitely not pie in the sky....just about all of my objectives have already been completed for other mods.

Personally I have no plans to mod the Pacific WWII theatre anytime soon, although I am happy to share knowledge with others. Once I finish WOTK I plan to resume modding the WWII Atlantic theatre.

As for millions of soldiers fighting in a future game, I imagine the best thing to do would be to have real time fights with, say, 5,000-10,000 3d units and extrapolate the results to represent hundreds of thousands killed or captured (for example, 1,000 men dead in a 10,000 man realtime battle = 10,000 dead in the simulated 100,000 man army.) The Total War series can easily handle battles of 10,000 men right now, so this is not too far fetched.

Patchman, as others have already stated, you are placing too much emphasis on details that are irrelevent for a WWII fleet boat simulator. Especially the "shipwrecks" part. You sink a ship in the middle of the ocean and it is never seen by anyone again. To expect to see shipwrecks floating all over the place or, as you said, "at the bottom of the ocean" is ridiculous.

Subs were only extremely rarely - if ever at all - in a position to see air formations in action. Submarines acted alone in isolation. The overwheming vast majority of their time on patrol was spent cruising along looking out at an empty ocean. This could go on for weeks at a time. Sometimes for more than a month. There were some US boats that didn't engage or even spot a single target for an entire patrol, and sometimes in successive patrols as well. This potential eventuality is reflected in the sim.

Other than the Dutch sub crew that was rescued by a US boat (don't remember which) no US, British, or Dutch subs coordinated with each other. Each boat in each respective navy acted independently.

99.999...% of the time a submarine would only see another friendly sub when it returned to base after a patrol - the other boats parked next to the tender.

Finally, producing mods for the sim is no quick-and-easy task. It is not a financially profitable endeavor. Modders spend a tremendous amount of time, trial-and error, and frustration producing their work. They do it for free, and on their own time. They have lives, too. To blithely suggest that "a better job can be done" is thoughless.

Your passion for the sim is appreciated but very badly misdirected.

In fairness, I honestly don't mind "bending" history in simulators. If you're a guy like Patchman and want more encounters, more wrecks, more cooperation between units, & such I can sympathize.

Moreover, I am sure that, for example, even high-realism players of SH3 and SH4 see much more action than a typical U-Boat crew would, and sink many more ships. That's perfectly fine with me. A 100% realistic U-Boat simulator would involve vast amounts of boredom, then sudden death out of the blue - especially come 1943, when the Allies get their act together.
I was reviewing stats recently on uboat.net, and the number of young Kriegsmarine men who died with no successes (or maybe just 1 ship sunk) is STAGGERING.

Similarly, a 100% realistic SH4 would involve, by 1945, combing Japanese waters for small ships - by then as you know, Japan's merchant navy was decimated, and America's new submarines were a bit "underemployed".


I'm sure a few SH3 players love "Black May 1943" and beyond, but it seems like most guys on subsim prefer 1939-1941 (or in the case of SH4, the post torpedo scandal years). Times when you have a fighting chance to sink, say, 3-4 ships per patrol.

Just my rambling $0.02. I used to be a realism die hard who took pride in "boring" patrols; now, I think a "pinch" of Hollywoodizing is ok. So long as there is the option to turn it off (which we do, thanks to the campaign layers and modding tools). Interesting thoughts on both sides, guys, and I hope nobody takes offense.

None taken.

I'm fine with that as well as a "pinch" of Hollywood, but not 5-gallon buckets full of it! :haha:

I can't get beyond the "thousands of shipwrecks" in an ocean miles deep where no sensor can even penetrate. And even if thousands of shipwrecks were littering a 64 million square mile ocean that was only 100' deep the chances of seeing one of them would be low. I can't see wasting the effort to make that happen. The Pacific is a big place.

The only way it would be possible to properly implement the true scale of the Pacific war woulb be with a super computer. With 800gb of RAM, 500 NVidia cards, and liquid nitrogen cooling, based in Antarctica. I have trouble seeing that kind of virtual war even in 50 years.

Hovever some things patchman123 has mentionned can be currently implemented, like ship wrecks. Not at the bottom of the sea, but beached or in shallow waters. GWX has them, and it would be nice to see them in SH4 in japanese ports.


You can always merge RSRD with stock if you want more encounters. :ping:

Actually, that's a great project for Elon Musk. We need a gaming supercomputer server embedded in the ice caps of Mars, beaming data to Earth at 100GB/S. Failing that, there are craters near the north and south poles of the Moon with permanent ice on the bottom to which the Sun never penetrates.

If it were big enough, Musk could have the Gaming Supercomputer for the World. It would drive Flat Earthers and Moon Hoax Hoaxers totally crazy. That alone makes it worth doing. I was alarmed last week to learn that they don't believe in gravity.