SUBSIM Radio Room Forums - View Single Post - Jumping to the targeted ship's recognition manual page

heartc · 05-29-07, 02:48 PM

What I don't like about the ship rec manual is that you can only access it in the scope / TBT view.
In SHI, you had this manual available in those views as well, but you could also - and now hold your breath - walk into your captin's cabin, and find it visually stored there as well. Yes, the captin's cabin in SHI actually had a purpose, other than in SHIII - in this room, you could access:

- the above mentioned ship rec manual, for study
- your logbook
- the radio logbook
- the calendar, which would show current date together with moon phase, moon- / sunrise and sea state.

All nicely and readily stored in one place.

Now, we can access all this information in SHIV (except calendar, which is sad), but only via buttons, and in different screens. I wonder what makes it so hard for todays devs (and that goes for all sim devs) to simply LOOK and COPY nice features from previous games. No thinking required even, the only initiative would be to *just take a look* at what were great features in those previous games. Well, in SHIV, we don't even have a captin's cabin anymore - it was skipped because it was totally pointless in SHIII, so they didn't deem it worth the hassle. But why was it? Who forced them to make it pointless. Really, sometimes I'm just left dumbfounded.

It's not a biggy, but imho it's those small and nice touches / details which make the difference between an OK game and a great one.
In defense of the devs though, they put in some other nice touches - the steaming coffee pot on the table in the office is one (I go get myself a coffee for real everytime I see it - better than the burning cig in some of the EAW hangar screens, where I lit a cig for real each time

), and I actually like the animated office, albeit the rendering could be better. I didn't like the one in SHIII at all, where it seemed you hung suspended from the ceiling, looking down into that pretty dark room. Also the birds when you enter the harbor are nice, the people aboard the deck of other ships, the lifeboats etc. It's just that they could have had a lot of other nice things in the game by simply leaving it the way it has been done perfectly in the past. Or in other words: If it ain't broken, don't fix it.

I see that in flightsims a lot, too.

05-29-07, 02:48 PM	#2
heartc Samurai Navy Join Date: Dec 2006 Location: Munich Posts: 562 Downloads: 71 Uploads: 0	What I don't like about the ship rec manual is that you can only access it in the scope / TBT view. In SHI, you had this manual available in those views as well, but you could also - and now hold your breath - walk into your captin's cabin, and find it visually stored there as well. Yes, the captin's cabin in SHI actually had a purpose, other than in SHIII - in this room, you could access: - the above mentioned ship rec manual, for study - your logbook - the radio logbook - the calendar, which would show current date together with moon phase, moon- / sunrise and sea state. All nicely and readily stored in one place. Now, we can access all this information in SHIV (except calendar, which is sad), but only via buttons, and in different screens. I wonder what makes it so hard for todays devs (and that goes for all sim devs) to simply LOOK and COPY nice features from previous games. No thinking required even, the only initiative would be to just take a look at what were great features in those previous games. Well, in SHIV, we don't even have a captin's cabin anymore - it was skipped because it was totally pointless in SHIII, so they didn't deem it worth the hassle. But why was it? Who forced them to make it pointless. Really, sometimes I'm just left dumbfounded. It's not a biggy, but imho it's those small and nice touches / details which make the difference between an OK game and a great one. In defense of the devs though, they put in some other nice touches - the steaming coffee pot on the table in the office is one (I go get myself a coffee for real everytime I see it - better than the burning cig in some of the EAW hangar screens, where I lit a cig for real each time ), and I actually like the animated office, albeit the rendering could be better. I didn't like the one in SHIII at all, where it seemed you hung suspended from the ceiling, looking down into that pretty dark room. Also the birds when you enter the harbor are nice, the people aboard the deck of other ships, the lifeboats etc. It's just that they could have had a lot of other nice things in the game by simply leaving it the way it has been done perfectly in the past. Or in other words: If it ain't broken, don't fix it. I see that in flightsims a lot, too.