No nerve, just making it clear that GWX can never be realistic. Neither can any of the mods in SH4 which also has conceptual defects not moddable. That does not prevent both games from being the two best I've ever played.
Look, our computers are too primitive to allow for greater realms of graphic honesty and also accommodate greater gameplay realism too. Compromises have to be made everywhere and each compromise is the acceptance of something not strictly realistic in the name of a playable game.
Maybe you've seen Tomi's torpedo room and engine room in the Atlantic Mods Forum. Wonder what that'll do to our primitive software and hardware environment? My guess is that it's too good for now. And one of the criticisms of GWX is that it's so big it takes forever to load. It's not the software's fault. GWX is just fine. The hardware is falling behind the curve.
Finally, after several years of hardware being ahead of software, we're back to the early nineties, where Windows was too advanced to run properly on most computers that people could control.
We had 40 mb hard drives and Windows plus Microsoft Office took 30. 40 mb hd? $350. 4 mb RAM? $450. Cut and paste between applications? Don't make me laugh! The software knew how to do it, Microsoft said, but none of us could prove it in practice because it froze our computers for ten or fifteen minutes. And our wallets were frozen by the cost of advancement too.
We've already had to ratchet back some of the environmental mods that were impacting framerates too severely. We're at a balance point where we see if hardware will take the next several steps forward without breaking the bank. The software guys are ready to take it to the next level.
The day is coming in the next five years when SH3 and SH4 look pretty poor. Hope they get the gameplay right. We'll definitely have the eyecandy. Of course whatever happens, we'll find new things to complain about.
