Putting things into perspective.

[smangs]

I am always amazed how passionate people get over silly stuff like a game. DRM or not, I will always buy it if I support the genre, especially a niche market like combat simulators.

After playing SH5 for like 20 minutes, I decided to shelf it for a while because there were just too many bugs and I did not like the interface but do I regret buying it? No, because there are just too few companies out there that are dedicated enough to even release a game like that. Also, SH5 has huge potential when the bugs get fixed and the modders get their hands on it. I hope that the GWX team will get together and get working on SH5 right away .

I really like Steel Beasts Pro's approach with using a dongle to play the simulator but of course I shelled out a lot more money for that one. However, they had long discussions with the community before they picked their copy protection method but I am sure that even hardware copy protection can easily be hacked. If you want publisher to continue to create high quality simulators then the only approach that works is to buy their games and introduce others combat simulators. Otherwise, you will end of with games like Gears of War 1/2 or Call of Duty: MW 2 that get great sales and awesome reviews but I find are more like watching a movie and leave very little room when it comes to being innovative in tackling problems.

I, for one, find it amazing that games basically cost the same now than they did when I still had my Commodore 64 (I still do own that one) and only cost very little to produce. You still had to use your imagination to even believe that those dots on the screen were enemy airplanes or tanks. If I look at SH5, I almost feel like too much effort/money is being put into making the sim look great and much is being lost on quality control or the playability factor. How about that 200-300 page manual that used to be normal for a decent simulator??? Spend more money on that than the role playing aspect of Silent Hunter 5. Today, developing a game costs almost as much as making a movie and you still only pay $50 or $60 for sometimes years of entertainment. Falcon4 has given me a whole decade of enjoyment so far and I spend more money now going out to dinner or to the movies with my family.

If you don't like SH5 in its current form then wait before buying or become involved in the modding community. I don't have time to become involved and anyone with children at home will probably understand that there are much more important things to do than playing games. However, I am immensely grateful for the dedication and the hard work that is being done by both the game developer and the modding community.

I probably get some stupid response from some immature kid out there for this post but my days of caring or getting worked up about things like that are long over.

BTW, sorry for this first post rant .

[JamesT73J]

Well, here's an interesting thing for you nostalgia fans. AOD and SH1 had more features than anything that followed. It's weird, isn't it?

AOD had wolfpacks, Milch Cows and all the allied tech like FIDO. SH1 was utterly brilliant.

The reason is abstraction. Greater computing power has allowed more scope for realising these things actually on-screen, but it is VERY hard to do right. We now have the full interior of a u-boat - great - but many other things that don't quite work properly. But, if you were to look at development time I'll bet the graphical engine was the lion's share, because once you walk away from abstraction it is a long road.

Likewise I support the products. Ultimately, it's many hours of entertainment for the same cost of a night down the pub.

[smangs]

Wow,

I completely forgot about AOD and it was released only in 1994, not that long ago compared to some of the other games I enjoyed when I was a kid.

My favorite non-sim game was Wing Commander (released 1990) on the Amiga. Talking about spending countless hours in front of the computer. I wondering if growing up is the cause for not enjoying games as much anymore or if the demise of small dedicated developers has ruined the industry. For some reason, I keep installing all those legacy games in emulators and still have tons of fun.

[scrapser]

I am also a gamer who witnessed the history of electronic gaming firsthand. I agree that in today's offerings there's a real problem with how much should be left to the imagination because it's risky trying to simulate an experience. I think this is something that game developers need to study and practise much as a director and actors must ply their craft in making a movie.

A simulation needs to strike a balance and I think if you look at what was done back in the 80's and early 90's and compare it with what we have today there's clearly a point where a line has been crossed. But that line is erratic and shifts depending on what is being simulated and the context within which the simulation takes place.

A submarine is a unique platform because while submerged, the captain and crew are experiencing much of what is happening above them "in their imagination" just like we are doing while sitting in front of the computer. No other sim has this subtle relationship as far as I know. I think the developers should pay careful attention to just how much they try to include. In short find the balance and take care to preserve it even as the technology and power to simulate grows ever greater.

When surfaced there is much more visual and audio input available but again a balance needs to be maintained. First person shooters are successful because they make the monitor your "eyes" through which you see the world being simulated. It's a formula that works well. The same can be said for flight simulation in much the same way.

But trying to do all this on a limited budget of time and money makes for a very choppy experience and I think this is where things are at right now. Time will tell if things improve or not.

[scrapser]

Originally Posted by smangs

Wow,

I completely forgot about AOD and it was released only in 1994, not that long ago compared to some of the other games I enjoyed when I was a kid.

My favorite non-sim game was Wing Commander (released 1990) on the Amiga. Talking about spending countless hours in front of the computer. I wondering if growing up is the cause for not enjoying games as much anymore or if the demise of small dedicated developers has ruined the industry. For some reason, I keep installing all those legacy games in emulators and still have tons of fun.

I have an emulator for the Commodore 64 and the Amiga plus all the original games for both. I still play them to this day. I really miss my Amiga 500!

[Tronics]

There exists a good foundation that will only be improved (probably vastly) by the modding community, personally I like the game but it feels very much like ubisoft deliberately half-assed it for lack of a better term, when the development expenditures started cutting into the 'predicted' net sales amount.

Any developer that loves what he does would flip at this, and I'm sure that some of them did, but you have to understand that they are mostly powerless as to the demands of the monkeys with loudspeakers that call themselves 'management'. unfortunately companies have the business mentality of 'we're in it to win it' which isn't necessarily bad, except when they define 'win' as net profit + being the one and only force driving their business.

Ubisoft's management has made some very poor decisions, but they have a good core group of various studio talents that can manage to produce good and decent games despite the concessions that management demands in order to hit the magical 'net sales market projections'.

Unfortunately this means that a lot of games that could of been 'great' (the later Ghost Recon/Rainbow Six/Splinter Cell/SHV/etc ) have been sidelined to decent or mediocre due to a few key decisions that saved a little time at the expense of further development of things like story/plot/character development/features/background/immersion/etc...since management is more interested in the formula of More Title Volumes = Projected Net Sales +, and is the semi-garuenteed slow road to ubi's continued existence...which seems to be their main focus now as demonstrated by their seemingly endless Sequel grinding, then focusing their efforts on trying to make anything truly new and groundbreaking.

Anyways /rant.

I cant wait for more of our beloved modders to dig into SHV.

[smangs]

Originally Posted by scrapser

I really miss my Amiga 500!

I actually purchased an Amiga 1200 and a Commodore 64 with a 1541II floppy on eBay a couple of years ago. Man, it takes forever to load a game on that one. It's funny how it seemed so fast compared to my datasette tape drive before the floppy came around. I also owned an Amiga 500 for years and later moved to the Amiga 1200 with AGA graphics. I was a huge Commodore fan for years and still am saddened by the fact that the company went under. I grew up in Germany but it seems like the Amiga was not very popular here in the US.

[tater]

Originally Posted by JamesT73J

Well, here's an interesting thing for you nostalgia fans. AOD and SH1 had more features than anything that followed. It's weird, isn't it?

AOD had wolfpacks, Milch Cows and all the allied tech like FIDO. SH1 was utterly brilliant.

The reason is abstraction. Greater computing power has allowed more scope for realising these things actually on-screen, but it is VERY hard to do right. We now have the full interior of a u-boat - great - but many other things that don't quite work properly. But, if you were to look at development time I'll bet the graphical engine was the lion's share, because once you walk away from abstraction it is a long road.

Likewise I support the products. Ultimately, it's many hours of entertainment for the same cost of a night down the pub.

Great post.

The thing is that many things can STILL be abstracted, but modern designers seem incapable of absorbing this. In WW2OL, there is a player who has as a day job modeling the effects of high explosives for the US military. He has for ages suggested a statistical approach—since that's what the pros use. Many players, and devs too, have the idea of tracking shrapnel through the air and checking to see where it hits you, etc, as the holy grail of modeling when "rolling a die" apparently does far better at predicting real world outcomes.

Damage models are a case in point. Instead of all these complex damage and flooding boxes, the DM would in fact be more accurate done like any number of old miniatures games. Harpoon (the miniatures game) has progressive fires, good critical hits, damage control, etc. Damage is a prime place for forgetting (or at least stopping at the current level) more complex "3D" Dms in favor of a DM that is easier to tweak to really match RL.

Some stuff is still better done as SH has it now, but certainly not everything.

[scrapser]

Originally Posted by smangs

I actually purchased an Amiga 1200 and a Commodore 64 with a 1541II floppy on eBay a couple of years ago. Man, it takes forever to load a game on that one. It's funny how it seemed so fast compared to my datasette tape drive before the floppy came around. I also owned an Amiga 500 for years and later moved to the Amiga 1200 with AGA graphics. I was a huge Commodore fan for years and still am saddened by the fact that the company went under. I grew up in Germany but it seems like the Amiga was not very popular here in the US.

At the time when the Amiga was at its peak popularity in Europe, the IBM clones were spreading like wild fire in the United States. The Amiga was killed by the owner of the company who made very bad business decisions trying to dominate the market and overextended the company's finances. It was never due to the computer's reputation. The Amiga was a good 5 to 10 years ahead of the times.

[smangs]

Originally Posted by tater

Great post.

The thing is that many things can STILL be abstracted, but modern designers seem incapable of absorbing this. In WW2OL, there is a player who has as a day job modeling the effects of high explosives for the US military. He has for ages suggested a statistical approach—since that's what the pros use. Many players, and devs too, have the idea of tracking shrapnel through the air and checking to see where it hits you, etc, as the holy grail of modeling when "rolling a die" apparently does far better at predicting real world outcomes.

That makes a lot of sense, why bother wasting tons of development time and computing resources in creating a damage model that is not really more accurate than a statistical approach.

I am not pretending to be a game programmer or to know much about game development but my idea of a perfect simulator would be an open model, where developers and modders work together. The developers should create a basic simulation that would appeal to a larger audience. For example, instead of developing a submarine simulation, they should develop a martime warfare simulator with basic functionality for most platforms available in the sim. A working destroyer, sub, airplanes, and even merchant shipping. The modders then would use a released SDK and open programming hooks into the sim (LUA ???) to develop much more technical accurate models that are more interesting to the hard core sim gamer.

This approach would lead to lower development costs and larger community participation. Well, it's not like this model is anything new and it might not even work because most gamers expect a finished and polished product, which is quite obvious in reading the forms here.

[smangs]

Originally Posted by scrapser

The Amiga was killed by the owner of the company who made very bad business decisions trying to dominate the market and overextended the company's finances. It was never due to the computer's reputation. The Amiga was a good 5 to 10 years ahead of the times.

So true, I was very surprised by the use of custom floppy drives (DD's of all types) and it took them forever to support hard drives on a larger scale. Most games released could not even be installed on a hard drive and made use of custom boot loaders. What a pity because the Amiga OS was years ahead of anything else, even Mac in my opinion, a true multitasking OS.

[Havan_IronOak]

My first sim (of any sort) was in about 1974 - Star Trek on the HP9000 mini computer. It was ASCII based. I still remember that command 2 generated a close range sensor sweep (a printout that looked like a tic tac toe board with the various Klingons and Romulans represented as <--= and +--= While the good ole enterprise appeared as 0--=

Graphics HAVE come a ways since then.

[Sailor Steve]