GWX 2.0 New First Impressions

[Woof1701]

Hi there,

Was lucky enough to be able to download GWX 2.0 on Sunday evening and had a little time to test it a tiny bit yesterday eveningfor about 6 hours. Please note: these are observations I'd like to share in order to verify whether my perception is corrrect or just clouded due to the use of non-GWX mods previously used by me. I'd also appreciate any advice from the GWX team in case they have any ideas to my findings and observations.

1.
Thanks a ton for including the slideout compass. It's been one of those tools I sorely missed in the last GWX versions and thus had included myself.

2.
The damage model of the player uboat seems to have been tweaked a lot since GWX 1.03. I ran aground pretty hard yesterday in shallow water and had some real problems getting flooding under control and lost it in the end ...
After that I started over and bumped my boat on the concrete pier several times on purpose, effectively sinking my boat after a few minutes. I also was once attacked at PD by a destroyer in late 1943. One of the cans hit straight on and my boat was gone. I also once encountered a Captain class frigate on the surface in the fog. She strangely enough didn't shell me nor tried to ram me but threw depth charges at me while passing. One of which hit my foredeck and send the boat to the bottom almost instantly. Killing the deck crew first.
Flooding seems to me very fast. I didn't use any mods before to change the repair times, so the change is rather hard on me here.

3.
Loading times and game speed seems to be at least as good as with GWX 1.03. I had no significant drop in FPS. On the contrary! In harbors I previously maxed out around 16 while with GWX 2.0 I routinely come up with 18. Also in high time warp (4098x) I previously maxed out around 3 and now have 4 fps. Very good!

4.
My previous GWX 1.03 careers all SEEM to be working. I reinstalled SH3 Commander and installed GWX 2.0 from stock SH3 1.4b without deleting the old careers and just tried starting a new patrol.
- 02/1942 career based in St. Nazaire with a Typ IX B: check!
- 11/1943 carreer based in Penang with a Typ IX D2: check!
- 05/1940 patrol based in Kiel with a Typ VII B: check!
Worked out fine so far. In case I run into problems I'll keep you posted. This astonished the hell out of me, since previously it was said, that GWX 1.03 and GWX 2.0 careers would not be compatible. For those of you waiting to upgrade to 2.0 because they want to end their careers first I recommend: go back to port, backup the old careers and the GWX 1.03 installation, install GWX 2.0 fresh and try. Doesn't hurt to try. In case it doesn't work, you will only have lost a little time Just my 2 cents. In case you mess up your installation because you didn't backup correctly don't tell people I said you should do it

5.
There are also some mods I tried using which mostly consist of different textures used, like the "lite conrete mod", the "seafloor mod" or the "torpedo damage texture mod" as well as a different loading screen. As expected they all work fine.
I found out however that GWX 2.0 got rid of the complete texture folder. With some of those mods mentioned above the folder will be "resurrected".

6.
As I suspected most changes are below the surface. There's some real eye candy for sure, like the add on ships and the completely new planes, but of course the "wow" effect like with the harbor traffic mod or the Kiel canal is not there. Don't get me wrong. It doesn't have to be. GWX 2.0 isn't a completely new mod but it polishes up almost everything that was good or even great in GW 1.1 or GWX 1.03 and adds a lot of new stuff that you have to search for a little.

7.
I use a certain mixture of mods I created for personal use from several mods, including the "favorite dials mod" by Poor Sailor (in fact a mixture of FLB Sales's 6 dials mod and NYGM's TDC mod) as well as textures and changes for Church's changed OBS periscope. It seems to work very well also, however it of course will completely change the GUI during gameplay. However since the most important thing added by GWX 2.0 in that respect was the slideout compass, and since this same compass is included in the 6 dials mod, it shouldn't be a problem. As I said: experienced no problems so far.

(http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...ht=%22dials%22 Favorite Dials Mod Link)

8.
The planes look just great. I remember my last GWX 1.03 patrol in Penang when I looked at the Arado circling me and thought "ugly little bastard" but the Japanese GWX 2.0 equivalent is a real beauty. Thanks there as well.

9.
One question about all the AI submarines: in the manual it states that the Typ VII and Typ IX AI boats are not capable of firing the deck guns and only operate on the surface. IIRC in GWX 1.03 there were AI subs that attacked on the surface with deck guns and were scripted to run submerged, however couldn't dive or surface by themselves. Since I haven't encountered any AI subs at sea yet in GWX 2.0 I ask myself: has this been changed and if so: why?


So that's about it for now. Let's hear what you've found out.



My Specs for comparison:
AMD Athlon XP 3000+
1,5 MB DDR-Ram PC3200 @ 200 MHz
NVidia 6600 GT 128 MB
Windows XP