This Game needs TWO clocks

[Deep Six]

Okay here's the deal.....My first mission is to insert an agent just off Tokyo bay...Shessh go figure...
Anyways I travel to Midway and top up on fuel...Then its ahead standard trying to time my egress into the bay during midnight hours or early morning...This got kinda fubar'd as I approached my way-point into entering the bay I picked up a radar contact (Yeah on SD!!) so I had to do a detour, this put me behind my schedule of hitting the bay very early morning....So I ordered Flank and made my sprint in medium fog....The time was 0830 and still NO sunrise...Thinking a bug I continued on the surface right into Tokyo Bay...0930 Still No sunrise (WTF?) Okay I now get to my insertion point and let the spy get into his raft...Time 1015 and NOW I'm starting to see the sun rise above the sea. Surely this not correct?

The watch on boat is obviously set to whatever time zone at Hawaii and remains in that time zone for the whole duration.....What we also need is a "Local Time" watch that will let us know real time where we are at...

Remember boys that travelling from Hawaii you cross the international date line and Japan is also 5 hours back (I think from the top of my head)

This is possibly way the clock seems not to be in sync with sunrise/sunset?

Maybe an altogether different approach is the one they used in Silent Hunter 1 a CALENDER showing sunrise and sunset plus moon phases....Or maybe just one clock that can be adjusted to match the timezone your in....

Deep Six

[Jmack]

if someone would figure a way to remove the international time line this could also fix the vanishing torpedos and green path line on the attack map.

[Bane]

Yup, local time and base time clocks would be cool. Since we don't have a local time clock I just make a note of when sunrise/sunset occurs according to base time.

[U-Bones]

Originally Posted by Deep Six

Okay here's the deal.....My first mission is to insert an agent just off Tokyo bay...Shessh go figure...
Anyways I travel to Midway and top up on fuel...Then its ahead standard trying to time my egress into the bay during midnight hours or early morning...This got kinda fubar'd as I approached my way-point into entering the bay I picked up a radar contact (Yeah on SD!!) so I had to do a detour, this put me behind my schedule of hitting the bay very early morning....So I ordered Flank and made my sprint in medium fog....The time was 0830 and still NO sunrise...Thinking a bug I continued on the surface right into Tokyo Bay...0930 Still No sunrise (WTF?) Okay I now get to my insertion point and let the spy get into his raft...Time 1015 and NOW I'm starting to see the sun rise above the sea. Surely this not correct?

The watch on boat is obviously set to whatever time zone at Hawaii and remains in that time zone for the whole duration.....What we also need is a "Local Time" watch that will let us know real time where we are at...

Remember boys that travelling from Hawaii you cross the international date line and Japan is also 5 hours back (I think from the top of my head)

This is possibly way the clock seems not to be in sync with sunrise/sunset?

Maybe an altogether different approach is the one they used in Silent Hunter 1 a CALENDER showing sunrise and sunset plus moon phases....Or maybe just one clock that can be adjusted to match the timezone your in....

Deep Six

The watch should have payed attention to sunup/sundown times the previous day. Wonder what other trivial routine events will catch this crew by suprise ?

[panthercules]

I've never actually gotten my sub out of the Manila time zone, so I haven't experienced this in person - are you saying that, even though SH3 had a "base time" and a "local time" display, that SH4 doesn't have any way of showing "local time" ?? If they based SH4 on SH3, how could they lose that function?? Surely there can't be anything hard about coding this to work - after all, the game is continually aware of and updating your boat's position on the nav map so how hard could it be to figure out what time zone you're in and display the local time?

[haegemon]

May they did it on purpose.

[panthercules]

Originally Posted by haegemon

May they did it on purpose.

Huh? what possible purpose could be served by not showing us what the local time would be? I didn't see what either of those links had to do with this question, but the patrol logs I've read so far often talk about when they changed their clocks as they sailed east-to-west and back (see, e.g., Batfish logs here: http://www.ussbatfish.com/batfish-main.html ), so why would they purposefully leave that local time aspect out of the game? Did they put in an ability to manually change the one clock we do have, as an undocumented feature or something?

[leovampire]

They based this game on the SH3 files to start and SH3 wasn't set up for this side of the World we are playing in now and they didn't seem to bother trying to do it properly and or just create a whole new game from scratch.

Maybe in additional Patches this will be added or fixed like the other things we need LOL!

[panthercules]

Originally Posted by leovampire

They based this game on the SH3 files to start and SH3 wasn't set up for this side of the World we are playing in now ...

Well, now I'm gonna have to fire up SH3 again and take a Monsun boat to Penang, and see whether the local time feature in SH3 does or doesn't work in the Pacific (or maybe one of our veteran Kaleuns who have done that already can tell us whether it does or not) - sure would be strange if it did work in the PTO in SH3 and they don't have it in SH4. Stange even if it doesn't work in SH3 - how could they not get that in here? surely it's one of your simpler calculations to code given that the tough variable (your sub's position) is always known already anyway for other game purposes :hmm:

[U-Bones]

Of all the things to fixate on, and of all times...

[don1reed]

What I've observed:

SH3: Gives time in Local and in GMT aka UTC.

SH4: Gives local time only.

What I've done as a work-around is to (free) DL Star Calc http://www.relex.ru/~zalex/main.htm

It allows me to figure GMT anywhere in the world and provides all the Celestial ephemeris during any time past, present, or future.

It was one of the first things I discovered about these newest subsims is that you cannot use Celestial Navigation to find your way around the oceans in these games. They're a close approximation and eye candy, but that's about it.

Edit: Also see here: http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/world_tzones.html

[panthercules]

Originally Posted by don1reed

What I've observed:

SH3: Gives time in Local and in GMT aka UTC.

SH4: Gives local time only.

Well, from the way it's displayed in game, it seems that SH4 actually gives you neither local time nor GMT - it seems SH4 gives you the local time for the base you left from, even if you're several time zones away, so what you get is some completely irrelevant time that's local to somewhere other than where you are, which just seems to be a very weird programming choice to make. For a subsim, where things like local time and sun/moon rising and setting conditions should be very important for setting up your approaches and attack runs, this just seems like a very oddly neglected area and one in which we seem to be seeing a distinct regression in capability as the SH franchise progresses from version to version. We lost the sun/moon almanac in SH3, and instead of giving it back SH4 takes the local clock away - very strange :hmm:

[don1reed]

You've got a valid point, Panthercule. I've not sailed in anything other than an "S-18" since purchase, so most/all of my patrols are/have been in one time zone H-Hotel (+8).

[Farinhir]

The devs need to not only provide a local time clock, but a sunrise/sunset indicator for the local clock. I think this is important because I prefer to be at least starting to submerge before the sun starts to rise (and the watch crew would at least know when that would be even if the captain didn't... lol). I prefer to do that when I am near Japan and do not know if a plane might decide to come my way. I am getting tired of planes smashing into my deck when I shoot them down. This is the only way I seem to lose. The last time it happened I was actually on the phone with a friend of mine who is from Japan. She thought it was hilarious.

well... Cheers
~F~

[WernerSobe]

Originally Posted by leovampire

They based this game on the SH3 files to start and SH3 wasn't set up for this side of the World we are playing in now and they didn't seem to bother trying to do it properly and or just create a whole new game from scratch.

Maybe in additional Patches this will be added or fixed like the other things we need LOL!

hm i dont see any problem there. You just take the GMT time (sh3) and add some hours (whatever the difference is) and you have pacific time.

My guess is it was broken by something else and they noticed to late so they worked around it somehow.