Well, right now I'm stuck doing what I was doing in SH3 - manually editing the saved game log file in notepad between game sessions. I still love looking at it in my log book in game, especially since I figured out how to enlarge the clipboard so you can read the log entries in game better, but I'm frustrated by a couple of things ATM:
(1) SH4 seems to be less tolerant of long entries than SH3 was, so you have to keep each entry pretty short or it doesn't work (which I solve just by making more short entries instead of fewer long ones, but it does make the log-file editing more fiddly); and
(2) I have no usable programming skills (I used to know how to write things in BASIC, but that was a long time ago in a galaxy far far away) so I don't have any way to either (a) come up with something you could alt-tab to and edit/make log entries while in game (and I'm not sure the game would recognize them anyway so that's not a big deal unless it could be made so you could really make real-time entries - that would be awesome), or (b) take the edited saved-log file and turn it into nice-looking, cleaned up log reports like SH3 Commander would do - it doesn't seem like that would be that hard, but it's way beyond me. I hope that function will make it into SH4-Skipper, but since that seems to be taking a while to come out, I wish someone with some skills would whip up a little something just to do this. The way it is now, once I finish a patrol I don't really have any way to view the log again other than to wade through the saved log file with all its formatting commands, etc.
What would really be nice is some simple little applet that would let you just type the date, time, and text log entry info into fields and then automatically put that info into the syntax form that the game's saved-log files need (and renumber all the other log entries as necessary), so that those entries would show up in the game's clipboard display.
Hmmm - if I could find my old database program I used to play around with, I might even be able to write something that would automate the data entry like that - trouble is, even if I could figure that part out, it would only work for people who had that same database program (basically, just for me), so it wouldn't be nearly as good a solution than if someone who knows how to write simple stuff like this could just whip something up for all us sub skippers. Any takers?
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