Quote:
Originally Posted by Greystone
From what I gather, a lot of you have run into out-of-whack temporal disturbances, as I have, like the sun rising at 1am, setting at noon, etc...
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Mod-related bugs aside, I can assure you that there is nothing wrong. I, too, have read many posts and threads related to the sun rising and setting at 1 am, and the difficulties involved with celestial navigation in the game. Some of these are written by people who know what they're talking about, but most are not.
I proved everything was fine (at least to myself) because I was able to navigate by the stars from Pearl Harbor to Midway over the course of a three-day voyage (and later, all the way to Japan) without any mods or outside software other than an Excel spreadsheet which I wrote to do the tedious mathematical calculations for me. It was so accurate that I found Midway right off my bow on the first attempt. I couldn't have done that if there had been anything wrong.
One thing I've noticed is that most of the discussion centers around sunrise and sunset times. There are a lot of reasons why people have difficulty with this, and they chase their tails trying to figure it out. There's a lot of effort that goes into calculating "real local time" for the sub's present "time zone" when time zones have nothing to do with what time the sun rises. Instead, there is Sun Time. Every point on the surface of the earth has its own unique schedule when it comes to Sun Time, it is, therefore, quite meaningless and useless for our purposes. Tracking the sun is an exercise in futility, as well. In the game, it's so big that it's difficult to tell exactly where it is. The same goes for the moon. I can tell you, however, that the sun and moon are not 180 degrees from where they need to be, nor 90 degrees, 50, 40, not even 10. Just accept it, SH4 is astronomically correct.
Pearl Harbor base time is UTC -11 hours. Perth base time is UTC +8. Setting a constant base time makes more sense than anything else. If you see something that doesn't make sense to you, first make an effort to understand why it may be RIGHT!
I could go on and on about the nonsensical things I've read in some of these posts and threads, but just for example, I'll use a recent one: "Base Time 2018" by FrontRunner, propbeanie, et al. They think they found a problem with sunset times caused by the accelerated frame rates of newer computers, and to try to prove it, they used a timing experiment with a moving platform (sailing north at 15kts). Because Sun Time is different on every different point on the surface of the earth, the moving platform tainted their results. It's worse because they chose a date close to the Winter Solstice, when sunrise and sunset times vary with latitude the most. After all that, their conclusion about frame rates isn't consistent with the effect they were looking at. If the game were designed for 24fps and accelerating that caused the "sky to turn" at the wrong rate, 30fps would cause a solar day to take 19 hours and 12 minutes in the game. They didn't find anything like that.
Your question about whether the AI can see you at night is a more complex but less important one. As a general rule, do not be on the surface when a ship is any closer than the point at which you can just barely see it. "If you can see them, they can see you." Real submarines in WWII used to track ships by the smoke above their stacks, and not even by visual contact with the ships, themselves. Night surface attacks were common, but so were sunken U-boats.