[Rockin Robbins]

Yes, when you actually start working toward it as a goal, "reality" becomes a very slippery concept.

Then you come to the Achilles Heel of my idea of swappable plugins into a fairly generic over-mod. Both Ducimus and the RFB Team ran up against hardwired game restraints that made what you see NOT what you get. Interactions between settings that should have no relation to each other lead to some comical results at times.

We had targets in the fog that we could plainly see but the periscope wouldn't stay locked on them for more than five seconds. Initially calling that a feature, the process became so tedious in practice that the outcry made for a major RFB reconfiguration. In order for depth charges to have historical results, they had to be made so harmless that they could drop onto your deck, explode and you were almost perfectly safe. They had to be strengthened again.

It seems like the hardwiring of the game is specifically for enforcing the law of unintended consequences: for every consequence you purposely achieve there are at least two unintended consequences. One of them is bad.

A perfect example was Ducimus' struggle with environmental mods. Not happy with stock environment, he experimented with every environmental mod out there. But those environmental mods influenced the way sub sensors and enemy AI interplayed--badly! Finally, he nerfed one of the major environmental mods and tweaked it enough that he was happy with the balance between sub sensors and enemy AI.

But the first thing people tend to do, to this day, is say "the TMO environment sucks. I don't like the sky color. The waves are wrong and the wrong color. Yada yada." And they have a point. But what you see is not what the game mechanism sees. There is a reason TMO's environment looks the way it does and that is the result of hundreds of hours of testing every combination of environmental mods out there.

It's a shame that what the environment looks like influences enemy AI and sub sensors at all, but that's hard-wired. It's just like when you put three torpedoes into a merchie, take the camera and look. There's not a hole in it! But the merchie fills with water and sinks or just explodes in a ball of fire anyway. What you see is not what the game mechanism sees.

Ducimus called it eye candy. And his guiding principle was that gameplay must trump eye candy every time. Eye candy was tolerable only if it had no effect on gameplay. I agree with his conclusion.

If you're fighting the sub you're detecting a plane and diving. You aren't looking whether that's a Zero Sen with a torpedo (bad! bad!). You don't care if it's a weaponized seagull, you're under water and not looking at it anyway. It's a plane and planes are mostly dangerous. That's all that matters. Destroyers have hard-coded indestructible bows. IRL you send a torpedo at an oncoming DD, hit him in the nose and the front half of the ship is blown off. In SH4 the mostly undamaged DD runs over you and drops Christmas presents on you. There hasn't been a fix for that.

So reality is a slippery concept. I can't say Lurker's version of sub sensor/enemy AI is better or worse than Ducimus' or the RFB Team's or the stock game. I can say it's different and it should be clear to the casual player that when he loads up RSRDC he's no longer playing TMO or RFB or stock. It's truth in advertising. Nothing more and nothing less. Players deserve to know. And I believe they should have as much control as we can give them.