Weather mod?

[rudewarrior]

Originally Posted by u crank

Hmmm .... Maybe you are thinking of another mod? I've used this mod for a long time without any problems. It's an external tool that only affects the weather at the start of your patrol. Once the weather changes it has no effect. How do you know that this mod was the cause? I'm not saying it wasn't, but I play at x256 TC a lot with no issues. Anybody else?

So here is the original thread on the mod. You can see some of the history of its buggy nature through the various posts. A brief summary of the relevant history:

1. Mod was working, but there were weird effects, including sometimes loading with an immediate crash dive to ~500m depth.
2. Skweetis (and others) managed to pin it down to the mod writing bad code into the save game. Curiously, it would only write this unusual code if the mission started in October or November.
3. Skweetis corrected the mod and released it as v1.5 as you can see in the first post.

If you look in the later posts of the thread you can see that people were still experiencing some of the above effects even though Skweetis claimed to have corrected it. You can also see that people tried to reach Skweetis about the issue, but he appeared to have left the forum by this point.

There are also threads at least suggesting, if not outright claiming, that SH3 Weather is the culprit with game crashes and involuntary uboat crash dives to self destruction. Here, here, and here are examples. It was suggested that the poorly written code line was randomly generated, so you could (theoretically) rerun SH3 Weather before reloading the save, and if you had good luck, you were able to recover the save game.

Personally, this seemed to work, but there was another weird problem for me. As long as I can remember, when going out on a mission and sailing past Scandinavia in that deep trench just to the west, there were two points where the game would hang momentarily. It was just an unusually long pause, but, once the pause was complete, the game would continue. However, when I was using SH3 Weather, immediately after the pause, my uboat would do the crash dive thing. Once I removed SH3 Weather, the problem went away. This may not constitute proof, but there was no change to my mod set up for a pretty long period in there. I seem to remember reproducing it, but it was ~5 years ago.

That was my experience and because of its buggy nature, I always pipe up to "anti-recommend" it. If the choice is perfect weather at mission start versus random crash dives and save game corruption, I'll take the former.