[Rockin Robbins]

SH4 is the best submarine simulator in the world right now, warts and all. And I'll agree with some of your warts, the interface not being one of my agreement points, or the crew management either. Frankly if you want a good submarine simulator there is no choice, except for SH3, which shares all the same defects.

Let me educate you on how software versions work. It is a myth that the same people are involved in successive versions. Often, even different companies are publishing the different versions, forget about having the same people there. So Version 1 gets done. It was in development for as long as it took to get it right. The company publishes it and it does well. But games have a fatal defect. They produce one big slurg of money and nothing after that.

What do you do? Version 2! Maybe the game company was eaten in corporate Pac Man, maybe the programmers of version 1 are busy working on some FPS game that week, doesn't matter, programmers have no unique skills worth noticing--they just do as they are told. A new team is assigned to version 2.

They don't know how version 1 worked. They take a look at it and think they can use a module here or there, but they don't know how the modules work, can't modify them, so they use them as in, slamming square pegs into round holes just to save some work. This transfers some of the defects from v1 directly into v2. Then they add more defects by the mismatch between the requirements for the new game engine and the output of the v1 modules. Then the programmers introduce their own creative bugs in the software they write themselves. Oh yeah, there's a few improvements to give them something to advertise. Shove it out there! What, It's not ready yet? Too bad! We don't expect to sell as many units as v1 anyway, gotta limit expenses. It's only a drink coaster, whaddya want? It produces another not quite as big a slurg of money as v1.

Repeat for v3, v4 and v5, each version keeping the accumulated bugs and idiocies of the previous version, introducing a passel of their own and introducing some inconsequential improvement over the previous version.

Software, even business software, tends to devolve with successive releases. In the newspaper I worked at we used the Collier-Jackson newspaper software. It was an excellent package in 1988. But as it got passed from company to company, programming group to programming group, with a new release every couple of years, by 2000 it was a smelly rotten hulk, just a shell really of mostly nonfunctioning parts. Everything was a workaround of some sort and none of the elegance of the original software was retained at all.

Similarly, the Silent Hunter series has changed hands and programming crews several times. SH3 was actually a shining exception to the rule, as it was a brand new concept and all programming done from scratch with as much time as necessary taken by the Romanian programming crew that revolutionized submarine simulation. The SH4 crew contained a couple of the members of the SH3 programmers, so it mostly maintained the standard while introducing some notable improvements over SH3. Even it suffered from some devolving due to the mechanism above.

Take it or leave it. SH4 is the best we're going to get with the business model of putting out drink coasters that produce a single slurg of money to the game companies. They are too focused on limiting expenses to produce excellence. As a matter of fact, they need a dictionary to recall what "excellence" means. They are all about minimizing expenses.

All the same, SH4 is a darned good submarine simulator, the best ever made and it has been undisputed champion, along with SH3 for four years. That's not bad performance from a drink coaster. I look forward to your better simulator that you are undoubtedly preparing and let me know if you need a beta tester.