TMO + RSRD

[Newinger]

Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins

The word "compatible" to normal Joe Public does not mean "changes all aspects of TMO and oh yeah, the game won't crash when you use them in combination." To Joe Public it means (and should actually be) "makes the change claimed in the mod title but otherwise I'm playing TMO."

Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins

mods should confine themselves to their announced function? (...) "compatible" should mean more than "the game doesn't crash when you use the two mods together? (...) combining the two mods changes fundamental gameplay settings?

Even the implied meaning that Ducimus thought RSRDC AI and gameplay settings were better than TMO's and somehow Ducimus would abandon hundreds of hours testing and tweaking to thank Lurker for improving the mod seems a bit bizarre.

For me this discussion is very interesting, because I'm still trying to decide with which mods I'll stick, and you seem to have a detailed opinion on RSRDC.

I don't quite understand, though, the implication you assert to Lurker's answer ("they would tell you that all the changes and additions that I made to TMO and RFB were with their blessing and support"). I wonder how you infer from the words "blessing and support" the assumption that this implies any acknowledge of improvement given by Ducimus. "Blessing and support" could just be a simple "you want to create a mod that changes settings done by TMO? Sure, go ahead (= blessing), if you need help just ask (= support)", nothing more. When I create an aircraft for X-Plane and somebody does a modification for it, I might not like the goal or the result of his mod, but still help him, because, well, why not? Go and have fun! It does not make the original product any worse. If Ducimus likes or dislikes the changes must not necessarily be part of his "blessing and support"; he may just be relaxed about what other mods do when applied on top of his mod, because in the end it's up to the players to decide is something is enjoyable or not. (Of course I don't know Ducimus. So this is just a guess from my side, in order to point to another possible interpretation).

In addition, I wonder if maybe some of the additional changes RSRDC seems to make are indeed necessary to achieve the main goal. I don't have a deep knowledge about these mods (that's why I'm reading posts like yours), but isn't it possible that removing things like deadlier aircraft or making other changes to AI and gameplay is necessary for a mod that wants to implement historically accurate ship routes and engagements? Maybe without such changes too many other variables would interfere with the very goal of RSRDC (regardless if one agrees with that goal or not). Maybe when a player engages a historically accurate shipping route TMO's deadlier aircraft would just disturb the experience, or make it ahistorical, so they got removed. Just guessing, of course; as I said, I'm not deep into these mods so far. I just feel that your posts argue for one perspective very strongly, without reflecting possible reasons behind the things you criticize. So my understanding of RSRDC - TMO compatibility is, after reading your posts and thinking about it, that "compatible" in this case means "To create the intended effects, RSRDC changes TMO as much as necessary, but as less as possible". Of course I don't know if my assumption is true. Maybe RSRDC really makes changes totally unrelated to its main goal.

In a more user-centric view, my understanding of compatibility would base on the answer to this question: "Do the combined mods offer a consistent and stable gameplay experience". This is a question I always ask myself when addings mods to my SH games. Not just if the game does not crash, but if it is consistent. So if TMO and RSRDC create a consistent gameplay experience from the player's point of view, I'd say they're compatible (regardless if some players don't like this experience, because they don't like the scripted routes and prefer more randomly generated engagements. It can still be consistent.)

This is the hard question and I'd like to know if anybody could give me a detailed answer. Do TMO and RSRDC (and possibly also OTC) offer a consistent experience, or are there contradictions in terms of gameplay and content, technical glitches or real bugs? And if the routes in RSRDC are indeed scripted, isn't the replay value greatly reduced? (On the other hand, I just read a post that even in pure TMO ships follow scripted routes, just that these routes are not historically)...


Edit: And I want to add: If I'm interested in learning about the history and events and strategies and routes of the real history of American submarine war, is RSRDC a good way to do so?

[Rockin Robbins]

Wow! What a wide-ranging post!

I don't quite understand, though, the implication you assert to Lurker's answer ("they would tell you that all the changes and additions that I made to TMO and RFB were with their blessing and support"). I wonder how you infer from the words "blessing and support" the assumption that this implies any acknowledge of improvement given by Ducimus. "Blessing and support" could just be a simple "you want to create a mod that changes settings done by TMO? Sure, go ahead (= blessing), if you need help just ask (= support)", nothing more. When I create an aircraft for X-Plane and somebody does a modification for it, I might not like the goal or the result of his mod, but still help him, because, well, why not? Go and have fun! It does not make the original product any worse. If Ducimus likes or dislikes the changes must not necessarily be part of his "blessing and support"; he may just be relaxed about what other mods do when applied on top of his mod, because in the end it's up to the players to decide is something is enjoyable or not. (Of course I don't know Ducimus. So this is just a guess from my side, in order to point to another possible interpretation).

Of course "they would tell you that all the changes and additions that I made to TMO and RFB were with their blessing and support" to Lurker means that they supported his changes and knew all the changes he made to their work and were in agreement with them. Mind you, Run Silent Run Deep Campaign was sold as a simple addition of historical shipping routes and schedules to each of these mods. It was not sold as a wholesale revision of AI, weapon strength, etc from the submarine's angle. It was sold as a campaign mod to add historical Japanese routing of shipping and warships to the game.

Now there's plenty of room for discussion as to whether that alone is appropriate, because there are different viewpoints about what the word "historical" means. Ducimus came down to the viewpoint that "historical" means that the player's actions are historically plausible. The RFB Team's viewpoint of the word "historical" was that percentage outcomes of conflicts would come out much the same as they did in the war.

Both looking at the same set of data, the RFB Team would say, "of the x hundred depth charge attacks on submarines only a small number of subs were ever sunk. Therefore depth charges should be fairly ineffective." Ducimus said that the essence of simulation is the mindset of the participant. The real submarine sailors were afraid. They acted as if depth charges were dangerous. In order for the player to act with their degree of caution it's necessary that depth charge attacks be dangerous--with an outcome ratio worse than the real conflict. Otherwise players will be Rambos, charging around as if they are impervious---because they just about are.

The same type of discussions took place about AA and deck guns, effectiveness of enemy guns and the like. In the end Ducimus took the position that his mod wasn't a realism mod at all, but a difficulty mod meant to put you in the mindset of real danger that you must overcome. One particularly brilliant achievement was his introduction of "evil airplanes" as I called them. They could see you at or sometimes significantly below periscope depth and ruin your day while you were blind to them and busy setting up your attack plan. Initially I was against the idea and said something like it was his worst idea of all time. He sent me a sample version and when I played it I had to admit that it was brilliant. It meant using the night scope to look for planes as you set up and executed your attacks. And he demonstrated that really happened in the war.

The Real Fleet Boat Team took over the mod from Beery, it's original author, who had gone so far with the outcome ratio theory that you could sit at periscope depth and just let the depth charges rain down on you (I tell you no lie--I did it often) as you raised the periscope to set up the shot. The RFB team put some danger back into the mod and restored the AI to something close to stock. They had some beautiful graphic stuff and an absolutely wonderful S-boat. Far from supporting everything they did I was something of a gadfly to all three efforts: TMO, RFB and RSRDC.

My position on RSRDC at the time (because I didn't know about the gameplay changes Lurker instituted) was there is nothing historical about duplicating the actual ship movements of the Japanese during WWII. After all, determining those ship movements was a dynamic process, taking into account the movements and actions of the American side. However if you just blindly duplicate all the ship movements of the war, it's as if you were making a boxing simulation and loaded up Ali/Frazier II. You're Ali and out comes Frazier. He's punching the place where Ali stood in the real fight, landing and blocking the punches as they happened. But you're not the historical Ali, you're a player! You just stand somewhere else than where Ali stood and beat the snot out of a completely unaware Joe Frazier. Historical movement is not historical. It's a farce, as far as gameplay goes.

Suppose a Japanese port were free during the war and send out a gaggle of unescorted merchies unopposed every day. Well, you just saddle up your sub, lurk outside the harbor in the shipping lane that you know all about but the real war participants didn't and you get served dinner by the nice Japanese every day, don't you? Convince me that is historical. Were it the real war wouldn't they stop sending out unescorted merchies? Wouldn't they call in some ASW to your hidey spot to heat things up for you? Of course they would and putting the Japanese navy in a historical straitjacket is not the answer to making the game more historical from a gameplay standpoint.

In addition, I wonder if maybe some of the additional changes RSRDC seems to make are indeed necessary to achieve the main goal... isn't it possible that removing things like deadlier aircraft or making other changes to AI and gameplay is necessary for a mod that wants to implement historically accurate ship routes and engagements?

Hmmmmmm. Why would making those ships and airplanes more or less capable be necessary to make them travel historical routes? After all, the stock game has a random generator of individual and groups of ships. there's nothing you're going to run into in RSRDC that you won't run into with stock, TMO, RFB or GFO games. Lurker did add some ship types (they were great additions) and produced historical side throwers for depth charges in addition to the roll-off racks on the backs of warships. But we can be confident that because Lurker's AI was different for the versions meant for stock, RFB and TMO games there is nothing requiring that he change the AI from the base mods. He could have added the ships and routes to the game and made NO changes to the AI. I contend that is what he should have done.

One effort I made pretty strenuously while I was "one of the good guys that used to support everything that I and the TMO/RFB developers did back in the day" was to institute some kind of plugin system for supermods. That way the freedom would belong to the player. Do you want the RFB, stock or TMO plotting system? A plugin for each. Do you want the AI super-difficult, pretty difficult, difficult, above average or stock? A plugin for each. Would you rather randomly encounter the enemy (which is what the real sub skippers did) or would you like to chase historical enemy campaigns to tour the Pearl Harbor attack group, the Midway carriers, the Guadalcanal invasion force--choose your poison and see if you could give 'em a bloody nose? Plugins for all!

In effect I was advocating one supermod for all with designed compatible modules that the player could swap in and out at will, rather than saying "well, if you want my evil airplanes all the radar contacts will be plotted as dots." or "enemy AI is pretty doable for a beginner but if you stand too close to the plotting table all the contacts will vanish!" The player would roll his own supermod and all the ideas of all the teams would be on the table in a complimentary way that introduced no conflicts.

I'll leave it there and see if you have questions and we can talk about what you care about rather than what comes out of my keyboard that you might not care about.

[Armistead]

TMO and RSRD work together fine. and both work great with numerous other mods. For the most part mods are just values.

TMO and RSRD have different campaigns. I don't think TMO in the beginning messed much with a campaign, thus why lurker probably decided to give us a realistic campaign, something the game lacked. so it was something lurker and Duc supported each other on.. Later TMO did a lot more campaign work, both are different and offer you different options of play. RSRD give you historical accuracy, while TMO is about half historical, half random.

As far as the paths any group takes in in mod, it will remain the same for that group, the difference is lurkers groups are almost always historical, so it will always be the same makeup and spawn the same time, it usually spawns once and despawns once....TMO uses more percentages, meaning he can set parameters for that group to spawn over and over and use further percentage values to change the make up of the group and it will spawn over and over on a set time, say every 48 hours. You can also set percentages that a group may not spawn at all when spawn times come. What this does is spawn a different group makeup each time the group spawns, so it's not the same each time it spawns.. but waypoints are set for the group and don't change, so it will still follow the same path, the difference is because of percentages used, it won't be the same group or come through at the exact same time. This is the quick way to to make traffic, you create one group, one set of waypoints, but use numerous percentages to change platforms, times spawned, etc.... and respawn it over and over, whereas most of lurkers groups are independent one time groups. You can use something called loops that take you down a different path, also using percentages, but you have to reconnect it back to a previous waypoint, TMO uses some.

Now one fun thing about TMO traffic is the zag pattern, With RSRD the course doesn't zig zag, except for course changes, with TMO, he zags about every 10 nms, so you often have to deal with constant course changes during an attack.

Yes, with RSRD the same stuff will show at the same time at the same place, so if you learn it, you can always find it, however, he has 1000's of historical groups, so it'll take you a few years figuring it all out, but yes, if you mark times and locations, you can always find it there. One can only imagine the hours of work it took to make a historical mod where you can basically relive WW2 if you choose to do so.

RR usually contends if you mod of change a mod it trashes the intent of the mod....certainly, some have and some mods are incompatible, so it's good to understand them and talk to others and see what they like. The thing is no modder can make everyone happy, thus 100's of numerous other mods pop up with each persons views on how a certain aspect should be....the fact that some want to argue what should come first as a name is rather silly.. Most accept supermods as the mod they are working with, because the supermod changes about every aspect and is the first mod loaded in order. Simply, you load RSRD first, then TMO, you have no RSRD, if you load TMO first, then RSRD, you have 90% TMO and the campaign changes of RSRD. , thus RSRD for TMO or any other supermod lurker adjusted it to.....

[Rockin Robbins]

Originally Posted by Armistead

Now one fun thing about TMO traffic is the zag pattern, With RSRD the course doesn't zig zag, except for course changes, with TMO, he zags about every 10 nms, so you often have to deal with constant course changes during an attack.

That was something that bugged Lurker a lot, as he really wanted those zigs in his mod too. But when you are controlling what they do by scripting, each zig is another instruction in the .mis file. It just collapses under its own weight as it becomes more complex. Imagine having to script each zig in a 1000 mile trip from one port to another. Now multiply that by 1000 (conservatively) missions for the war. At the time we had 32-bit Windows almost exclusively so 3.2 GB was a rock hard ceiling. Stuff broke.

Since Ducimus reasoned that to a sub commander there was no knowledge of shipping routes beyond a vague impression, and no idea of warship routing at all, to them encounters were random. The sub went where COMSUBPAC sent it and encountered whatever was there. Now out of Pearl, commanders had a little more freedom than subs did out of Australia but they weren't just out there skylarking wherever they wanted.

From that point of view random encounters are much more realistic. However, even though we know that sending ships where they actually went in the war does not make them behave correctly it's hard to resist the question "what if I were sitting offshore with a sub full of torpedoes when the Tokyo Express decided to land troops on Guadalcanal?" To do that you need something like RSRDC.

But if you really like TMO and you know that when you load up RSRDC you aren't playing TMO any more it's a deal with the devil. Heads they win, tails you lose. The choices you'd like to make are unavailable.

Maybe I'll start work on some plugin AI mods to see what's possible. I already have universally compatible (by MY definition of compatible) plotting mods and keyboard input mods. I'm considering a new plotting mod, where there is a single silhouette for all ships that would point in the correct direction with no velocity vector or ID/course/speed info either. It would be halfway between the stock plotting system and the TMO plotting system. Could be a winner. More choices are good and players should be able to make those choices, not the modders.

The funny thing is that at the Silent Hunter Modding forum we used to wonder what Webster was thinking and why. Some of the things that were said weren't too nice. And it turns out that Webster was the right thinker all the time. There is a place for the single purpose one aspect mod. If they are carefully made you can roll your own supermod. Then the choices are in the players' power, not to be arbitrarily compelled by the modders.

There's no reason that in order to get ships going where they went in the war you have to lose Duci's evil airplanes, other than the capricious choices of modders. That should change.

It would be nice to disassemble several of the mod packages into their constituent elements to make them available as separate mods. But so long as the modders are still around, out of respect for the rights of those modders I think it wouldn't be right to do so. I guess RSRDC just went from fair game into a gray area.

[Armistead]

Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins

That was something that bugged Lurker a lot, as he really wanted those zigs in his mod too. But when you are controlling what they do by scripting, each zig is another instruction in the .mis file. It just collapses under its own weight as it becomes more complex. Imagine having to script each zig in a 1000 mile trip from one port to another. Now multiply that by 1000 (conservatively) missions for the war. At the time we had 32-bit Windows almost exclusively so 3.2 GB was a rock hard ceiling. Stuff broke.

Since Ducimus reasoned that to a sub commander there was no knowledge of shipping routes beyond a vague impression, and no idea of warship routing at all, to them encounters were random. The sub went where COMSUBPAC sent it and encountered whatever was there. Now out of Pearl, commanders had a little more freedom than subs did out of Australia but they weren't just out there skylarking wherever they wanted.

From that point of view random encounters are much more realistic. However, even though we know that sending ships where they actually went in the war does not make them behave correctly it's hard to resist the question "what if I were sitting offshore with a sub full of torpedoes when the Tokyo Express decided to land troops on Guadalcanal?" To do that you need something like RSRDC.

But if you really like TMO and you know that when you load up RSRDC you aren't playing TMO any more it's a deal with the devil. Heads they win, tails you lose. The choices you'd like to make are unavailable.

Maybe I'll start work on some plugin AI mods to see what's possible. I already have universally compatible (by MY definition of compatible) plotting mods and keyboard input mods. I'm considering a new plotting mod, where there is a single silhouette for all ships that would point in the correct direction with no velocity vector or ID/course/speed info either. It would be halfway between the stock plotting system and the TMO plotting system. Could be a winner. More choices are good and players should be able to make those choices, not the modders.

The funny thing is that at the Silent Hunter Modding forum we used to wonder what Webster was thinking and why. Some of the things that were said weren't too nice. And it turns out that Webster was the right thinker all the time. There is a place for the single purpose one aspect mod. If they are carefully made you can roll your own supermod. Then the choices are in the players' power, not to be arbitrarily compelled by the modders.

There's no reason that in order to get ships going where they went in the war you have to lose Duci's evil airplanes, other than the capricious choices of modders. That should change.

It would be nice to disassemble several of the mod packages into their constituent elements to make them available as separate mods. But so long as the modders are still around, out of respect for the rights of those modders I think it wouldn't be right to do so. I guess RSRDC just went from fair game into a gray area.

I think Duci somewhat toned down his planes in his more recent versions, but I stopped playing for a few years and been awhile since I played TMO alone, but think it was more the env changes of water transparency if he did. I actually like some of Travs ideas with plans, having one just track you way high until others come in. Only issue I have is the long contact times they hunt you, hell in places near many airbases, they'll keep you down all day if you are found out.

No mod makes everyone happy, but the past bickering over mods, who did what, don't do this, etc...just as you mentioned Webster being terribly raked over the coals, I found silly. To me it should be about making the game better for anyone and in the end no one has rights to the files, it's just respect to give credit, but it often turned into just a pissing contest of egos, very silly.

I use TMO and RSRD, admitting I've butchered RSRD to my own liking for more excitement and I use a much harder AI than even TMO, but even now I can probably sink 100K tons per patrol. The game at it's core , correct realism just can't be obtained, but still a great game.

[TorpX]

I've always used RSRDC in campaign play, and consider it an excellent mod. I note that it has been downloaded thousands of times; that, in itself, says something about lurker's work.

One should also note that nobody has released an 'ACME - improved historical' campaign mod. I guess that is due to either the sufficiency of RSRDC, or the enormous amount of work required to do one.

[As an aside, RR says lurker nerfed aircraft, but I've been killed by aircraft bombs more than once, below periscope depth in RFB+RSRDC, so I don't really know what he's talking about.]





These are some of the things I like about lurker's RSRDC:

There are new ships, and new aircraft, too.

Shipping goes from port to port in a rational fashion. Ships are encountered where one would expect ships to be. I haven't played the stock game in any significant degree, but I have no reason to think the Ubisoft stock campaign is worthwhile.

There is not a crazy over-abundance of targets. You have to work a little for your tonnage. I consider this very desirable.

[Newinger]

Thanks a lot for all the additional insights.

So, if I understand you correctly, both TMO alone and TMO+RSRDC offer stable and consistent gameplay and it's a matter of taste in the end. I guess we have a similar situation like in some of the strategy games by Paradox Interactive (like Europa Universalis series:

On the one hand players who prefer a campaign based on as many accurate historical data as possible, even if this can lead to very similar events if you play the same situation more than one time. That would be a RSRDC-enhanced mod.

On the other hand players who prefer a campaign giving an accurate historical feeling and a more varied (less boring when repeated) gameplay. That would be pure TMO.

I guess both approaches are valid and which one I should take just depends on what I like. I think what just facilitated my decision is the information that convoys don't zig-zag in RSRDC. I understand the reasons you explained, but this takes away a lot of the challenge for me. So it's TMO then for me. Thanks, guys!

[Rockin Robbins]

Yes, when you actually start working toward it as a goal, "reality" becomes a very slippery concept.

Then you come to the Achilles Heel of my idea of swappable plugins into a fairly generic over-mod. Both Ducimus and the RFB Team ran up against hardwired game restraints that made what you see NOT what you get. Interactions between settings that should have no relation to each other lead to some comical results at times.

We had targets in the fog that we could plainly see but the periscope wouldn't stay locked on them for more than five seconds. Initially calling that a feature, the process became so tedious in practice that the outcry made for a major RFB reconfiguration. In order for depth charges to have historical results, they had to be made so harmless that they could drop onto your deck, explode and you were almost perfectly safe. They had to be strengthened again.

It seems like the hardwiring of the game is specifically for enforcing the law of unintended consequences: for every consequence you purposely achieve there are at least two unintended consequences. One of them is bad.

A perfect example was Ducimus' struggle with environmental mods. Not happy with stock environment, he experimented with every environmental mod out there. But those environmental mods influenced the way sub sensors and enemy AI interplayed--badly! Finally, he nerfed one of the major environmental mods and tweaked it enough that he was happy with the balance between sub sensors and enemy AI.

But the first thing people tend to do, to this day, is say "the TMO environment sucks. I don't like the sky color. The waves are wrong and the wrong color. Yada yada." And they have a point. But what you see is not what the game mechanism sees. There is a reason TMO's environment looks the way it does and that is the result of hundreds of hours of testing every combination of environmental mods out there.

It's a shame that what the environment looks like influences enemy AI and sub sensors at all, but that's hard-wired. It's just like when you put three torpedoes into a merchie, take the camera and look. There's not a hole in it! But the merchie fills with water and sinks or just explodes in a ball of fire anyway. What you see is not what the game mechanism sees.

Ducimus called it eye candy. And his guiding principle was that gameplay must trump eye candy every time. Eye candy was tolerable only if it had no effect on gameplay. I agree with his conclusion.

If you're fighting the sub you're detecting a plane and diving. You aren't looking whether that's a Zero Sen with a torpedo (bad! bad!). You don't care if it's a weaponized seagull, you're under water and not looking at it anyway. It's a plane and planes are mostly dangerous. That's all that matters. Destroyers have hard-coded indestructible bows. IRL you send a torpedo at an oncoming DD, hit him in the nose and the front half of the ship is blown off. In SH4 the mostly undamaged DD runs over you and drops Christmas presents on you. There hasn't been a fix for that.

So reality is a slippery concept. I can't say Lurker's version of sub sensor/enemy AI is better or worse than Ducimus' or the RFB Team's or the stock game. I can say it's different and it should be clear to the casual player that when he loads up RSRDC he's no longer playing TMO or RFB or stock. It's truth in advertising. Nothing more and nothing less. Players deserve to know. And I believe they should have as much control as we can give them.