10, must have, items for SH4

[SkvyWvr]

Originally Posted by don1reed

go siphon a cup full and leave it unattended beneath the bed



do not, I say again, do not let the Mrs. know...oh Jeeez!

:rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:

To Justin Prince: that has to be just about the best post I've read on this subject! I agree with every single point; your negative reasons concerning multi-national campaigns reflects the way I feel exactly. I also like every one of your suggestions, most especially number four: air raids while in base.

[Lionman]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

To Justin Prince: that has to be just about the best post I've read on this subject! I agree with every single point; your negative reasons concerning multi-national campaigns reflects the way I feel exactly. I also like every one of your suggestions, most especially number four: air raids while in base.

I agree Steve - that was a great post and I too agree with all his points.

Those who don't want immersive simulation with 3D crew members and mobility around the boat - go play SH II - better yet get rid of Windows altogether and revert to DOS - after all it's all unecessary eye-candy, right? <sigh> I am soooooo bored with hearing this tired old stuff from gamers who "don't get it" as regards realism and simulation and who create a false opposition between realism and game-play. It is NOT necessary to say either/or in today's computing environment. A simulation means a simulation of reality, in detail.

Proof? Check out the screenshots and videos of Microsoft's coming Flight Simulator X (10) with migrating birds, herds of moving wild animals, moving traffic, car headlights, real-world dynamic weather downloaded in real time from satellite, specular reflections in cockpit glass, complex shadows, thermals updrafts, airport ground traffic animations and moving trees and cornfields. THAT is the kind of level of realism and immersion possible, demanded, enjoyed and possible in today's flight simulators whose flight models are immesaurably more complex than the hydrodynamic models for submarines and have to be different for every aircraft. I have over 450 aircraft in my current FS9 installation and I am running all that on a 7 year old PC with only just over 800 MB of RAM, an old nVida 5200 128MB GFx card and an Athlone 1700 MHZ CPU, so this level of immersive realism does NOT require an Alienware Ferrari. MS FS9 2004 is already so realistic that you can take a whole course of flying lessons and get a virtual license within the "game".

This is 2006 for goodness sake so let's just IGNORE all these "who needs the future I just want a board game" folk and press for the same levels of immersive realism in Ocean combat simulators that the flight sim world demanded and got long ago. We did it with SH III which, for all its faults, was a really massive upgrade from SH II, because we all stuck to our guns and requested what we mostly eventually got. Let's do the same for SH IV and one day soon we'll find ourselves walking around inside our creaking, humming, ultra-immersive Gato class sub, listening to Tokyo Rose, with asdic pings and crew chatter in the background, off watch sailors sleeping in dark bunks, others sitting on the torpedo racks playing harmonica and joking, fish in the sea outside, trees on the headlands we pass, and wind blown spray whining across the conning tower.

[rls669]

Originally Posted by Lionman

Those who don't want immersive simulation with 3D crew members and mobility around the boat - go play SH II - better yet get rid of Windows altogether and revert to DOS

A total red herring. I am completely in favour of increased detail in the ship models, ocean, weather, wildlife, seafloor, you name it. I just simply don't care about the 3d crew or boat interior, as I find navigating between stations that way boring and pointless for me. Having crew and passengers on surface ships would do far more for my immersion than having a bunch of crew models standing around the control room doing nothing in particular. And believe me, if you want them to move around and do anything convincing you're going to need to graft on a high-end FPS engine and its AI scripting and pathfinding.

My point is that in the real world there are limited resources available for game development and I don't want any more of them spent on eye candy overlaying a broken simulation. Get the guts right first and then spend all the time you want on the graphics. Maybe it's just because I come from a first-person shooter modding background and SH3's crew models and interiors are 1998-quality anyway, the engine capabilities to breathe life into them nonexistent. I know the kind of work it would take to redo those assets to modern standards and unless they double the SH4 budget and dev team, other areas will suffer.