You can customize SH3 to fit your gameplay too!

[Clyde00]

With all the new mods and programs coming out in the past few months floating around, there has been a flood of topics and posts in the forums about how someone likes "xx" in this mod, but "xx" in this mod is better and so forth.
Although SH3 is a good game out of the box, and better with all the mods out there, sadly it will never be a full blown sub simulation game. The devs teased us with mouseable interiors, but never modeled them. Made us anxious with all the hype about the Enigma machine. Left us with a modeled attack periscope that we can't even see in except with a different view. To make a long story shorter, sadly SH3 was left "unfinished" to some of us. Without the source, some of the aspects of the game can never be changed or modded, but alas...there are hundreds of good mods out there that have been created for our enjoyment. To sum up what has been said in a previous topic, SH3 was not created as a simulator, it is a game.

If you have the time, (and patience) download any large or small mod you like and try it out! If you like one aspect of the mod, say the textures in the interior, but hate the rest of it. Transfer those into your own personal mod. Most mods change about the same types of files.

I know that it takes alot of time and more patience to sit down and scan through all those cfgs and dats and tgas and weed out what you don't want, but it will be worth it in the end. Most mod makers don't mind if you change their files and use them for your own PERSONAL mod. Most mods have readme's in them and the mod developer states what you can and can't do in them. That's why it's called a readme.

Don't worry if you don't have 3dstudiomax or photoshop or paintshoppro or whatever. There are alot of FREE programs out there that can be Googled for. If you don't like the command room view, open up one of the interior files and paint it orange and red and then load your mod, fire up SH3 and see what it changed. You will have a good idea what you need to do from there.

Nobody will ever be happy with one mod. They will like the graphics in one, realistic ai in another. You the user can mod SH3 the way you use it. Download AOTD, FF, RuB, IuB, NYGM, any mod and then open each one up in a seperate Explorer window and see what is changed there. If you compare your favorite mod and others (plus the stock SH3) you can get a fairly good idea of what is changed and how to change it. Most items in cfg's have what they do or what they are for listed in them.

Download some of the best tools (most all are free) from subsim and uboatrealism. There are some very good programs to change almost everything that we can inside SH3 to be had. Most programs have excellent instructions on how to use them and there are numerous post in forums on the way people have changed them.

SH3 Commander gives us the ability to add various random "elements" into our game. TimeTraveller's tweaker helps to change those dat files. DatTexExtract gets those hard to get tga's out of the sub dat files. Notepad and Wordpad can help us change alot of things in the cfgs and so forth...

Finally lets not belittle or just write "This mod sucks!". For a modder who has spent both his time and effort to make a mod that he\she thinks will be better for the community and post it, this is a real slap in the face for them. Think of your boss or teacher coming in and saying that the job you did sucks and you will get the picture. There are many "OK' games that have been released (Falcon 4.0, MSFS, IL2, to name a few) that were playable out of the box. What made these into great games was the modding community and the ability to make changes within those games. Modding took those games from "ok" status to "better".

To wrap things up, I know that I am a newbie here in this forum and I haven't posted any of the things that I have changed here, but I have customized SH3 to the way I like it. If I could, I would mod the waves slapping me in the face and the smelll of mold and mildew. I learned alot from the MSFS series before SH1 came out. I am 34 so I have seen cool looking polygons (well cool at the time) with no texturing for cities. Ship models that looked like cereal box cutouts and the like. I searched the forums here and on the net, found out as much about what a file does and what you can change, etc... I'm not a programmer, I can only do basic modeling and skinning, but I feel comfortable changing things in a game now to suit me.

If you create backups as you go, you won't have to worry about messing up the game and those CTD's as much.
Also many ( a thousand thousand) thanks to all modders out there!!! Whether they made a simple graphics change, or rewrote the exe, thank you for your time, effort and patience with all of us in the community. Also releasing it for free for us. Sometimes it seems that we expect miracles ( and sometimes you do them), but your effort is appreciated.