You can customize SH3 to fit your gameplay too!
 

With all the new mods and programs coming out in the past few months floating around, there has been a flood of topics and posts in the forums about how someone likes "xx" in this mod, but "xx" in this mod is better and so forth.
Although SH3 is a good game out of the box, and better with all the mods out there, sadly it will never be a full blown sub simulation game. The devs teased us with mouseable interiors, but never modeled them. Made us anxious with all the hype about the Enigma machine. Left us with a modeled attack periscope that we can't even see in except with a different view. To make a long story shorter, sadly SH3 was left "unfinished" to some of us. Without the source, some of the aspects of the game can never be changed or modded, but alas...there are hundreds of good mods out there that have been created for our enjoyment. To sum up what has been said in a previous topic, SH3 was not created as a simulator, it is a game.

If you have the time, (and patience) download any large or small mod you like and try it out! If you like one aspect of the mod, say the textures in the interior, but hate the rest of it. Transfer those into your own personal mod. Most mods change about the same types of files.

I know that it takes alot of time and more patience to sit down and scan through all those cfgs and dats and tgas and weed out what you don't want, but it will be worth it in the end. Most mod makers don't mind if you change their files and use them for your own PERSONAL mod. Most mods have readme's in them and the mod developer states what you can and can't do in them. That's why it's called a readme.

Don't worry if you don't have 3dstudiomax or photoshop or paintshoppro or whatever. There are alot of FREE programs out there that can be Googled for. If you don't like the command room view, open up one of the interior files and paint it orange and red and then load your mod, fire up SH3 and see what it changed. You will have a good idea what you need to do from there.

Nobody will ever be happy with one mod. They will like the graphics in one, realistic ai in another. You the user can mod SH3 the way you use it. Download AOTD, FF, RuB, IuB, NYGM, any mod and then open each one up in a seperate Explorer window and see what is changed there. If you compare your favorite mod and others (plus the stock SH3) you can get a fairly good idea of what is changed and how to change it. Most items in cfg's have what they do or what they are for listed in them.

Download some of the best tools (most all are free) from subsim and uboatrealism. There are some very good programs to change almost everything that we can inside SH3 to be had. Most programs have excellent instructions on how to use them and there are numerous post in forums on the way people have changed them.

SH3 Commander gives us the ability to add various random "elements" into our game. TimeTraveller's tweaker helps to change those dat files. DatTexExtract gets those hard to get tga's out of the sub dat files. Notepad and Wordpad can help us change alot of things in the cfgs and so forth...

Finally lets not belittle or just write "This mod sucks!". For a modder who has spent both his time and effort to make a mod that he\she thinks will be better for the community and post it, this is a real slap in the face for them. Think of your boss or teacher coming in and saying that the job you did sucks and you will get the picture. There are many "OK' games that have been released (Falcon 4.0, MSFS, IL2, to name a few) that were playable out of the box. What made these into great games was the modding community and the ability to make changes within those games. Modding took those games from "ok" status to "better".

To wrap things up, I know that I am a newbie here in this forum and I haven't posted any of the things that I have changed here, but I have customized SH3 to the way I like it. If I could, I would mod the waves slapping me in the face and the smelll of mold and mildew. I learned alot from the MSFS series before SH1 came out. I am 34 so I have seen cool looking polygons (well cool at the time) with no texturing for cities. Ship models that looked like cereal box cutouts and the like. I searched the forums here and on the net, found out as much about what a file does and what you can change, etc... I'm not a programmer, I can only do basic modeling and skinning, but I feel comfortable changing things in a game now to suit me.

If you create backups as you go, you won't have to worry about messing up the game and those CTD's as much.
Also many ( a thousand thousand) thanks to all modders out there!!! Whether they made a simple graphics change, or rewrote the exe, thank you for your time, effort and patience with all of us in the community. Also releasing it for free for us. Sometimes it seems that we expect miracles ( and sometimes you do them), but your effort is appreciated. :D

yeah, SH3 is a fun game but very unfinished game however it is a very sub-par sim. I really believe this is due to the rushed product though.

They were in the process of doing tons and it had to potential to be the best ever made but ubisuck rushed them and sales werent as great as they could have been so they stopped patching it.


I really hope SH4 is finished when it's released and doesn't leave out all of the details SH3 did. I really like uboats so much better but I'll have to make due in the pacific. It's been a while since I've played pacific so maybe it'll be something new.

Yes indeed. I spent most of my last free weekend time making the "U-Schultz Supermod" combining the best of all the various mods.

For some reason I find this mod combining to be very enjoyable and informative. Do I need to get a life? :yep:

lol i do that almost as much as i play the game...especially with the sound mods.

Well, the game can be modded easily. Plus, there are many aspects in the original game that demanded an upgrade, or some play, or some change. Depending on tastes, there are maaany mods... in my case, I`m currently working on combining all menu changing mods that I prefer into one, as basically one excludes succesful use of the other...

I have tried to do a little cheat in the control room and I was trying to photoshop in a picture of the radio room in the closed radio room hatch. I was also trying to do the same in the interior aft hatch, but after trying every .tga I could find in the data directory, I never could change the color of the hatch. I was hoping to have a nice effect that would take a little less imagination in actually seeing through the hatches. Does anybody know where the .tga for the control room forward and aft hatches are located?

You wouldn't have some sort of list containing the mods, or parts from them, you included in your personal mods, would you?

I'm very interested in the subject of 'building' a personal 'best off' mod which I can then also pass on to two of my friends who love playing SHIII too but are not that handy with PC's in general.

So if you could let me know what you included I'd be most grateful.

At a guess, that is likely embedded in a .DAT file within the individual subs folder inside the data/interior folder. You'll need the SH3 Unpacker tool to extract tga's from the .DAT file. You can download that from U-BoatRealsimulation.

Another useful tool is a tga thumbnail viewer. Windows as we know does not support .tga files in thumbnail view. I discovered this little program called 'Thumb Plug tga' which resolves that issue. It saves you from having to browse through endless files and opening them one at a time with an image editor. Nice. You can download it from this page;
http://greggman.com/pages/thumbplug_tga.htm

Hope that helps.

And the sales weren't great because a lot of people heard how bugged to hell it was. Well done Ubi :up:

I got very tired of tinkering with the game, frustrated that I have to do SO much. I guess when you have a lot of free time on your hands it's possible, otherwise - forget it...

BTW, there's somethign definately wrong with SH3 that you end up spending so much time modding it and not much time actually playing it.... It's like with tuning cars I suppose.

That's only if you're a modder. ;) I just add the mods and play all the time. :know:

Yep. It's gotten to the point where I haven't had a career in about 1 year! :o The modding's almost like a compulsion, instead of being something enjoyable...

This is so true. My crew has been sitting at the dock in Brest for about a month. Just listening to the band waiting for my return. It never fails once you get underway, somebody on this site comes out with another great mod. DOH!:damn:

Well Said Clyde.

For Sh3 Ive changed around the sound mods and have a personal pack for my own use but Ive never gone any further than that. I cannot see why i shouldn't as i have the right tools to mod but i dont mod SH3 :roll: Only modding i do is create my own mods for the Neverwinternights RPG game - you can get lost for days in the NWN Toolset, create maps, add in sounds, make movie intros or cut scenes using the Rad tools, create plot after plot, Ive redesigned over 100 creatures so far for my '8' map mod & typed 100's of lines after line of conversation dialogue, 5 months in the making and not even half way there. Oh plus its very easy to use. :smug: If it dont stress me out then i'll mod it. :arrgh!: