Fast convoy of death!

[slipf18]

Originally Posted by Redmane

I bought the Silent Hunter series from Steam a little over a year ago, SHIII, 4, and 5. The problem isn't your computer, its the Steam version of the game. I also had many issues of the sort you are dealing with, and saw a similar large gathering of destroyers while trying to do a photo recon op in Tokyo Bay. It seems the Steam version is actually unpatched and unpatchable. I'm not sure what version they offer for download, but I had whatever that is, with the U-boat missions as well, and had repeated problems with the game crashing and not wanting to run. I downloaded the 1.4 patch for the retail version of that game, but that wouldn't work because the installer couln't find the program on my machine, even though I pointed it to the proper folder. When I contacted Steam "support" about this they told me the game automatically updates itself... yeah right. I uninstalled the Steam version and bought another copy of the game from Amazon.com. I never had such problems again. For the most part the game is very stable, even with mods activated, but whatever you decide to do, I would advise that anytime you save a game and quit back to the main menu, close the game down and then reload it before trying to play a single mission or war patrol scenario. Its been my experience that quitting out of one part of the game (career for example) and then loading another mode of gameplay (single mission, etc.) ends up corrupting the saved game files. Other people have had their own issues with loading saved games, and their solution is to never over-write a saved-game file. I don't need to do this myself, others do. At any rate, sorry about wasting your money on the Steam version. My experiences with Steam over the last few years forced me to conclude that they are no longer worthy of my dollars.

I have both the Steam version and the Amazon downloaded version.

I run the Steam version stock and have actually never had any kind of issue at all especially the one described or the <64x problem.

The downloaded version I run with the GFO mod and occasionally (inexplicably) I encounter the <64x problem. It is extremely frustrating because it normally pops up thousands of miles from home port and it takes forever to get back. It will not revert to working properly nor will it be fixed if I visit a friendly port and refit. I have not really noticed if it happens after a contact or not. Will have to pay attention.

My point is that I do not think it is a Steam related problem.

[Gray Lensman]

When I first started playing SH4 a month or so ago, I experienced several bugs, the worst of which was the time compression bug. Perusing the forum, I found a strong statement/suggestion concerning NEVER overwriting saved games due to much higher incidence of file corruption in the overwritten saved game files.

Up until that time I had overwritten my saved game using the same name "savegame" continually. When you do this, you will get a pop up box asking if you want to overwrite that game... DON'T DO IT. Save to a new name each time maybe rotating thru SaveGame1, SaveGame2, SaveGame3, etc. When you get more saves than you want to keep just use the DELETE function (found under the Save Game option NOT the Load Game option) to cull down however many of the superfluous saves you no longer want or need. Incidentally after you have deleted, those game files and associated saved folder I generally cycle BACK to the menu and select Save Game again just to be sure the delete process has occurred, then you can reuse some of the previous SaveGame names that no longer exist

A little more info... When you allow an overwrite, the game uses some already written files associated with a previous save and probably introduces some corruption in the overwrite process

When you create a new saved game, it has to create brand new files from internal game information and this process greatly reduces the corruption issues from an overwrite process.

Hope this helps

P.S. I'm using the Steam version v1.5