A newcomer's question thread (with screenshots)

[Hanzo]

Captain Hanzo reporting for duty!

I'm one of the proud (and now bankrupt) owners of the SH4 Deluxe Box, signing up to let some fish fly

My beauty, the S-35:



What a trusty sub she is! If only her torp capacity were greater ... And she does seem a little old... Ah well, I need to earn some renown, and get myself one of those neat looking Gatos. I've been patrolling the Philippines and I've had some successes using the manual TDC. Quite a few ships sunk already! Hurray!

My First Kill

My manual, calculated torps actually hit! Cheers for that video Neal! Then a bit of nice deck gun action ...

Anyway, the point of this post is that I'm a newcomer to the game - I've been lurking here quite a lot recently, and I've picked up some great tips. There are some weird things that I've yet to find an answer for ... :hmm:

Bizarre Convoys

Every convoy I stumble on has behaved a bit strange to say the least ... For starters, once my first torp hit one of the ships in the above screenshot, everyone else just stopped and sat still, dead in the water. The warships will look around and signal with their lights, but they'll do this for HOURS. Lucky for them I was out of torps, but it didn't seem like a very intelligent tactic to me!

An hour or two later, all my torps were ready to go for it, so I return to the original position and they were still all there, moving around a bit and generally chilling out.
I was bemused. I'm playing the campaign on the Normal difficulty - Is this normal behaviour? Doesn't seem very realistic. Also, sometimes I find convoys that are moving at around 2 knots ... very very slow. Again, after the attack they seemed completely dumbfounded with the warships going in the opposite direction and the ships stopping or moving around at about ~1 knot. What happen! If somebody could give me the lowdown on those, I'd really appreciate it.

Strange Crewmen

My second query concerns crewman lighting. Inside the sub, the men look aren't lit by the dynamic lighting at all. They're simply exempt from the lighting routines, making me not want to use the bridge as it's .. ugly!



On the surface however, all is fine:



Thanks to Ubi for a great game, and hopefully the random niggles I've noticed here and there will be ironed out in that hotly anticipated 1.2 patch.. If anyone could give me some insight into the troubles i've been experiencing above, that would be amazing - and I'm sorry for the massive first post!

Good hunting!

- Captain Hanzo

[Onkel Neal]

That "ships clustered and stopped" is a bug, I have reported it. Hopefully there is something coming in the 1.2 patch that will stop that. Good report

[Hanzo]

Many thanks for the response Neal! Are all convoys bugged like this?

Also, does anyone have any idea about the 'ugly' bridge bug? The character models look atrocious without bump mapping The only info I could find was in the FAQ, which mentioned that it might be part of some kind of FADE-like, anti-piracy measure?
I'm using a fully legal copy, straight out of the delicious deluxe tin.

All my drivers are up-to-date (the bug is present from the ATI Catalyst 6.2 - 7.3 drivers. I actually tested all of them I really want to enjoy the bridge!). I'm running a P4 2.6 Ghz, an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro and I have 1.5 gigs of DDR Ram. Messing with all the graphical options doesn't help at all.

I can run the game very acceptably at 1280x1024 with all options turned on except for Environmental Effects and the Post Processing Filter, which is surprisingly good for my old machine! Hopefully I can fix this! I have a feeling Patch 1.2 will be a while yet I'm hoping to be proven wrong.

*salute*

Captain Hanzo out.

[Bilge_Rat]

welcome aboard captain,

There is definitely something wrong with your inside shot, maybe another ATI owner could pipe in, but the 9800 is abit long in the tooth, that could be part of the problem, the outside shot however looks like what I see with my card (7900 GTX).

Do you have other shots of the inside? it looks like most of the command room is missing.

Maybe something happened on the install? did you try reinstalling the game?

[FAdmiral]

Yes, the 9800 card is a bit old for this game. I think an upgrade in that
department will fix most of your graphics problems....

JIM

[Avatar]

Nice screen shots and good job with your torpedo hits. TDC is an artform for sure.
I also play on normal.
However, when I play my 100% realism campaign, my torpedo mates dont reload the tubes. I had them at Gen. Quarters for awhile and this may have had something to do with it. But wouldnt the ship have stopped dead in the water, with all the crew asleep? That's happened! I've stopped using battlestations until I'm sure to go in for the sinking of tonnage. anyway, on my other campaigns, I've used the fast reload cheat.
Hey, how do you get the S class? I started with 5000 renown points, so maybe that had something to do with it. Tonight I'll play an s-boat in the asiatic area. Thats some south pacific subsim action!
see you out there on the seas, remember we loose a day when we pass the international date line!

[Sailor Steve]

Welcome aboard Hanzo!

I would like to point out that, with the predeliction of players to take the S-boats, I'll bet the devs and UBI are glad they decided to listen and put them in!