[Deamon]

@CB..

Woaaahhh

I don't even know what to say. I had to rub my eyes and read your post 2 times. Here are some thoughts..

Originally Posted by CB..

cheers all
the unique aspect of the game is the fashion in which it creates it's missions..
the fact that you can type VISUAL BASIC code (or as i say something very much like it) STRIAGHT into the mission file itself...opens the game up so wide you can do literaly anything you want with it....as long as you have the know how to write the code ..
it's hard to think of any comparison any where else...but the best i can come up with is that each individual mission file allows you to redisign the entire game virtualy from scratch ...

it's really rather incredible..

Hmm, this would be more than i would have expected :hmm:

I surely noticed the huge ammount of cfg and script files what told me that the game is extremely and propably totally modable. Basically an SDK. But back then its cryptical appearence and total lack of comments scared me away and i was to busy with my own project anyway.

However i noticed empirically in the game that it is more or less a sleeping giant. I do not play it that often and sometimes i get really bored by the lack of dynamic but when i get into a new situation i always get extremely excited and addicted. I suddenly do not want to expand my ordnance as soon as possible and get back home. I suddenly want to see very curiously what will happen next.

Gunning ships in SH always made me crank up the time compression. To some reason, I never do this in SOF, i actually like it to watch it in real time. In thous addicting moments i notice how many ambitions were behind this game. But the low budget nature of this game spoiled its potential. It's up to the moders now how much of it can be still saved. And SOF lacks realism options. The auto TDC and stealth meter kinda takes away the point of the game for me.

But it's interesting that you tell me this now. I never looked that close to SOF, i just noticed that it seems to expose pretty much everything to text files. This is propably the most open game around. It's a moders dream actually!

Deamon your involved in writing game code for your project...so you must have a head for code work..( to say the least i should imagnine?)

Sure, although there is still a lot of room for improvement for me.

what SOF allows you to do is write game creation code stright into the mission scripts.....

because of this i can't actualy see any limitations to what the game can do ...
it's only limitations are down to how familiar you are with writting the code..

This would be the most amazing feature, and let me look on it like this ->

This would be what moders always dreamed about!

the game has it's draw backs...

I see to many drawbacks in SOF for me to get really interested in it. I am very demanding and never get sadisfied unless i have the full control and no limits in creating new things. So i started my own thing.

I guess i gathered to much knowledge about the subject to get ever really excited about all the current sims. I am way to demanding.

Also, sometimes games appear with really good features but on the other hand blatantly neglect some other most crucial areas. And since it is hardcoded you can't do a damn thing about it. I am completely feed up with this. I see no option for an own project. I just want to change all thous little things that always nagged me.

I want some real SIMULATOR. So realism wise I go a radically different way in IUF. Expect it to be a realism shock. When i get it finished some day, forget what you have seen in all the other subsims. You will have to learn from scratch again!

It will be very different in just any regards. Despite its infancy the early prototype shows this tendecy pretty clearly.

the lack of any genuine danger for the player is another thing...dive every time you see a destroyer and that's it threat over..it really needs late war hydrohones..

Oh really ? you mean also no waterbombs in the second half of the war ? ( I am still at the beginning )

but that's where the code comes in...i may not be able to write the code for hydrophones at the moment...but it's seems perfectly obviuos that it is possible to script DD's equiped with hydrophones into the missions...using the same logic that other sims use to simulate hyrdophones and other sensors..

once you grasp that possibility you begin to see that what we have here is in fact SUBMARINE SIMULATOR GAME CREATION SOFTWARE..

This is fantastic actually and somewhat ironically, cause not only do SOF deals with WWI u-boats like IUF but it also seems to follows the same design philosophy.

And the development even seem to have started not far apart from my.

Actually this is exactly what i do with my own sim. I want to expose almost all of the engines internals to cfg files and scripts. Back in the days i even intended to release it as a pure SDK, without any real game content and leave the rest up to the moders but later decided that i should try to do a full game, that also should serve as an example to moders.

Just a while ago i came to the idea to make the engine programmable via scripts where you can do math operations, call hardcoded functions and access any variable in the game and use it for triggering. This would make it possible to create completally new stuff.

and soft ware that could given time and practice (as with any game creation software) do anything required of it anything at all..
which is not bad going for a much derided and deliberately ignored (IMO) new sub sim on the market

Actually, because of a lack of time and maybe lack of interest in SOF i didn't wanted to be the one who will discover its potential so I am glad you did

I was wondering how long it will take someone to drive his teeth deep into its flesh.

take a look at it see if you can help me out with some of the code..(i am NO expert far from it)

Hmm, what do you need ? And what do you already know ?

an example would be here that if some -one was to attempt to convert the game to a WW2 subsim..they could with enough experience code the proper AI DD
tactics for convoy escorts,,by that i mean all the correct maneuvers such as "pineapple" and so on...you can very accurately control what each individual vessel does and why it does it....and you can co-ordinate the vessels to act in unison or individualy and again when why and for how long..with endlessly complex dynamic response to the changing circumstances they encounter....

Stop teasing me like this

This all makes me want to develop my own sim just faster. I have so many great things on my todo list. I just added cfg file support and soon scripts.

this is just something that is utterly and completely beyond the capacity for modification in SH3/4 etc.....

Yes and this is the best move the SOF devs have made. This could dramatically improve its popularity once some serious moders will put their hands on it. And i think you did the first step in this process. If you can sheed more light on its power, moders might be drawn in soon.

Modability is an extreme success factor today. But this message still do not seem to have penetrated to all the devs. Imagine SHII wouldn't have been so modable. It would have never played it.

The devs need to take modability more serious. It is after all just a question of policy. Technically it is not a big deal at all to expose the engine to text files.

this would involve a lot of complex code BUT once written i believe it can be stored in a "Template" and called from the mission file when the behaviuor is required..ie triggered by time ..detection of the player...location ...anything really...

Yes, you could write general functions and store them in files and call them later from scripts to do some thing. That is essentially a library.

once again you grasp the fact that you can do this sort of thing you can see that with expert code work you can build a library of AI behaviuor and other effects and call them in a similar fashion to those behaviuors now currently stored in the "StateEnginetemplates.txt"

Yes, that would be the way to go. Just study the out of the box files to draw conclusions about its functionality.

there is a function also for calling an external script which is triggered by the player reaching an objective....indeed there is a slightly obscure function that has an external script actual AS the objective...tho i'm at a loss as to what that actualy means right now..

I am not sure what you mean.

so once you start thinking of the mission scripts as giving you genuine access to the games core code and the ability to modify it adapt it and add to it on the fly you can see that this is no ordinary run of the mill game engine...FAR FAR FROM IT
it without even trying makes the SH3/4 game engine look pretty bl**dy silly by comparison..which is why it's so ironic that so few have gotten their heads out of their arses long enough to see beyond their own ego trips! it is almost as if the game devs have given the subsim community absolutely everything they could have ever dreamed of....but no one was interested because it involved too much "work"

Hell, yes!

But the game fails to communicate its power, it appears like a budget game

quite WHY the DEVS didn't take a couple of hours one afternoon to write some decent complex code into the campaign to show what the game was capable of is a mystery to me...if they HAD.. no one would have any doubts about just how good this game can be:hmm: too busy worrying about the box art no doubt...strange prioritys...bizaare

Well, on the devs side they have one million things to deal with and when the deadline was reached, before the targeted minimum was implemented it will just get out as sore as it is. If you can remember the early adverticing, then you will notice how high the ambitions were and how much they had to be cutted back at the end. So a dynamic campaign was adverticed, a detailed interiour life. But at the end, no detailed interiour and no dynamic campaign. Instead a somehow low budget appearing game.

remember that there is NO definitive "periscope depth" in the game...go deeper...and you will find you can get within ramming range if your carefull..remember that you have maybe 5 or 6 seconds grace before the ship spots the scope so you can pop it up to get your bearings then quickly lower the scope again and creep closer....get down to about 9 metres depth and be prepared to constantly adjust the height of the scope to compensate for the waves and watch the detection metre to gauge your visability..as i say the contact stays active even after you lower the scope for a considerable time..so even using the stock weather/water animation set up you can get right up along side the ships..it's probably one of most complex and best simulated scope depth scope visability factors seen so far in a subsim..AFAIK

This is interesting actually. Back then my scope was detected on some occassions, being miles away from a ship. However i would like to check this again whether this has not something to do with how far and how long i let the periscope up. If so then this would be actually most realistic.

I guess we are so used to the lack of realism(and believe they lack it so much) in the other sims that we might tend to scream "bug" when a new sim covers new areas of realism that is much against our false expectations about realism.

But more well approximated realism gives so much more tactical depth to a sim. Even few small additional details can be a big difference!

You made me really curious with all this talks, CB... I guess i will take a second closer look on it