A Whale of a tale...

[WarlordATF]

It started long ago, A teenage boy buys a cartridge for his NES. A neat little submarine game called Silent Service. he spend many hours,weeks and months sailing the Pacific in search of Japanese Shipping. He learns all the ins and outs of the game and the cartridge is one of the most heavily used games in his collection. Little does he know where it all will lead.

A few years later he buys his first computer, an Atari XE Game System. Its an Atari computer with a cartridge slot added to compete in the home gaming system market (It failed miserably!). Then he stumbles onto another Submarine game, GATO. The addiction starts all over again and the Japs once again pay the price for Pearl Harbor!

Then came the first real computer, a whopping 66mhz processor with a 250 mb hard drive! Along comes Silent Hunter. WOW! Those Graphics are amazing! Its the most detailed sub game yet, wait, scratch that, its a Sub Sim! He learns all the games tricks and even buys these new expansion disks. Its heaven! Once again he is up until dawn hunting Japs and sailing the pacific in amazing 256 color glory!

Another Computer and he reads on the world wide web about plans for Silent Hunter 2! He can't wait, it seems like an eternity before it is released. He buys it at the mall and rushes home to install this new gem.

WTH??? Wheres the Fleetboats? Wheres the campaign that lets him roam the seas? Whats up with all the Bugs?

Disgusted, he shelves the game and spends more and more time in his other gaming love, flight simulators. He hears about Silent Hunter 3, does his homework this time and loses interest once he learns its a U-Boat sim once again.

MANY years later, bored one night and looking for a new game he sees that Direct2Drive has Silent Hunter 3 for ten dollars. Why not? So he tries it, its not too bad. Graphics are nice, Campaign is pretty decent and the game runs pretty well. It becomes an interesting distraction for a couple weeks.

Another trip to Direct2Drive and he finds what he has been looking for all these years, Silent Hunter 4, a Pacific Submaine Simulator. He buys it and the U-boat missions addon as a package deal and trys it. He gets very little sleep over the next few weeks. The joy is back, almost.

He encounters bugs, big mean nasty ones. Wait, didn't he hear something about a subsim website when he was active in the flight sim community? A quick google search and he finds this community and discovers a universe of mods for Silent Hunter 3 & 4. He decides to focus on Silent Hunter 4 (like there was ever a choice LOL!) and tries several of the mods.

The Mods are very well done, he is impressed with the skill of the modding community. However, He likes parts of several mods that are not designed to work together. He decides to try to make the parts he likes work together and the nightmare begins...

Weeks turn to Months. After several disasters and having to restart his project over again and again he starts to figure out how this game works and how the file system interacts. Many late nights are spent searching the forums for the little nugget of information that will make mod X work with mod Y. Parts are taken from alot of mods and many hours are lost to testing and setbacks. He still has not completed a single Silent Hunter 4 Campaign!

He keeps saying, OK No more modding until i play through this Campaign, yet time after time something else stands out that needs fixed. Its an endless cycle and His Girlfriend complains about "That Damn Sub Game" eating up all his time. Finally tonight he thinks he has added the final touch and he comes to Subsim to write a long winded post to Thank the many Modders who make up the Community whos work has made it possible to build the Subsim of his Dreams!

THANK YOU ALL!!!

Now i'm off to start a new career and hopefully complete a Campaign this time!