The Silent Hunter that never was, part I ? A real periscope

[elanaiba]

Something I wanted to do in a long time was to have a more open communication with the community regarding potential game features. This is hard to do in a company where marketing guys have their plans - they probably know a thing or two, sure. It's hard when you don't have time for it, too.

Also, it's easy to shoot ideas and then not be able to implement them, to the disappointment of many... and in the end, you do want to come up with some (good) surprises.

I might just throw some stuff here, for no real reason. There's no hidden interest behind it. It's not a poll on what feature I should build next. Its just a glimpse into what we would have liked to do as the "ultimate" Silent Hunter.

One of my pet ideas and an experiment we did fairly early with SH5 was to have a functional, rotating 3D periscope, with the outside world visible through the lens and the conning tower (or command room) moving in the background. It was just a rough prototype and would have taken more time to do properly. Also would have taken a lot of effort in order to make it useful gameplay wise, not just a resource hog.

But in the end, it was interesting that we couldn't all agree whether its cool to have the periscope like that or not? Some people thought its nice and brings something new and immersive to the genre. Others thought - and with good reason - that a real periscope image should be black all around, as the captain would close the other eye.

What do people here think?