10, must have, items for SH4

[mfykes]

Wow, reading over all 5 pages of the wish list is really something. I remember reading the wish list when SH3 was in the works, seems like we were asking for some of the same things we’re asking for on SH4. There was one of the SH4 threads that stood out the most. It was from an ex-submariner “PLAICE� who said “I enjoyed the first one very much, and since I served on one it was a great game� I assume that he was referring to the original SH. Being one of the earlier Sub games, the original SH had a lot to offer and many are still playing it today. It also lacked a few things but it was a really great piece of work.
The items I would want to see in SH4 would be the following:

1. A simple and effective mission editor. Something that allows me the ability to acquire a chart, position some ships, adjust the weather, sea state, and time, save the whole lot then start shooting! It worked that way with SH.

2. I don’t need 3-D crew members; I can do that in my head! Besides, the more 3-D images of crew members, the more power that’s needed to render them as individuals. This includes all of their individual and random movements. It’s either a “SIMS� game or a Submarine war game. It shouldn’t be both. It’s starting to turn into an interactive WWII movie. What’s next, the smell of fuel oil in your living room?

3. Insertion and extraction of Coast Watchers! Provide a mission or two where the sub has to land a coast watcher on to an enemy island and then retrieve him several days later in preparation for a major strike against an enemy convoy near the island.

4. Mining operations.

5. Attacking enemy harbors and rivers.

6. Passive AND Active sonar.

7. If possible, include other sub types and let the user set its national default, I.E., Dutch, American, New Zealand, Australian and Japanese. This feature alone would make MANY of us very happy.

8. Individual engine control. Please give us the ability to operate our Port and Starboard engines individually. PLEASE!

9. Make it possible to load the entire game onto the hard drive and not have to access the CD. The CD is the weakest link! If it is damaged in any way, you’re SOL! My wife accidentally rolled over my SH CD 4 times on the freeway years back. She said she was sorry!


10. Last but not least, Good documentation on the game and a separate booklet for the mission editor. By having a mission editor it's like getting two games for the price of one (flexability).

Ok, I am off of my soap box now. I am done! Thanks all.

[CCIP]

Hmmm...

1. What's wrong with the current one? While not the absolute friendliest, SHIII's editor is quite easy to work with. I've never had to take longer than a few minutes to put together just 'a quick mission'.

2. I can do it in my head too, but I love SHIII's graphics and by no means should this relatively successful new feature taken out, I think. There's few complaints about them, simple as that, and I think what you speak of as "irrelevant detail" is actually crucial immersion that drew a lot of new players into this game.

3. It'd be nice, but not absolutely essential. More generally, though, I agree that some special missions should be re-introduced into campaign.

4. Would be nice, but I'd say that's a comparatively bland task. I'm personally fine with the focus on attack boats. Perhaps as bonus, but not a 'must have'.

5. It's kind of in SHIII already. It's limited by default, though modders have definitely extended this. Frankly, I'd rather their campaign in the open sea be more complete than have this far more exotic role for submarines done.

6. ...it's in SHIII

7. Again - I'd rather only have the essential America, but done RIGHT - but this would be a nice-to-have feature.

8. Agreed. Some of the finer systems control in general in SHIII was sorely lacking.

9. Unlikely in this day and age. If not, then expect other copy-protection measures which you might find equally inconvenient.

10. Again, unlikely in this day and age. It's quite sad that we can't have the days of Falcon 4.0-sized manuals back - I'd pay extra just for the good documentation!

[Enigma]

2. I don’t need 3-D crew members; I can do that in my head! Besides, the more 3-D images of crew members, the more power that’s needed to render them as individuals. This includes all of their individual and random movements. It’s either a “SIMS� game or a Submarine war game. It shouldn’t be both. It’s starting to turn into an interactive WWII movie. What’s next, the smell of fuel oil in your living room?

Im willing to vbet you are completely alone on this.

Oh, and if you can figure out how to make my room smell like fuel, im all ears.

[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!

[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.

[g-z]

Originally Posted by Enigma

Im willing to vbet you are completely alone on this.

Oh, and if you can figure out how to make my room smell like fuel, im all ears.

I personally feel that the sub interior is just as important as the ocean you are sailing in.

A feature that would "float my boat", would be a camera track that transports you between compartments and stations. It would add to the continuity of moving around your sub.

I know i've mentioned this before, but really it would be the icing on the cake in terms of an engrossing interior. In my opinion anyway.

[Safe-Keeper]

1. What's wrong with the current [mission editor]?

You can do just about nothing with it. Nearly no trigger options, no options, very little of anything. It's relatively simplistic, sure, but there's lots of stuff I want to try that the editor just won't let me do (for example, have trigger x fire when someone else than you reach area y).

Oh, and if you can figure out how to make my room smell like fuel, im all ears.

Well, next time you go outside your house (this'll require you to disconnect from the Net and leave your computer, leaving you in a very deep MMORPG-style environment known as "Real life"), seek out a "Gas Station" and buy "gasoline". It comes in containers of various colours.

Pour some of that in your bedroom and you've got it.

[/shameless smartass]

10. Last but not least, Good documentation on the game and a separate booklet for the mission editor. By having a mission editor it's like getting two games for the price of one (flexability).

Oh, I remember the good old days of full-colour Super Nintendo manuals and epic, detailed PC game manuals.

Not today, though. People don't read anymore (nor do they bother with spelling or grammar), there's a pre-dominant "manualz r 4 n00bz"-line of thinking, and publishers are limiting manuals to small, thin, and vague little booklets that offer next to no information whatsoever .

[CCIP]

Originally Posted by Safe-Keeper

You can do just about nothing with it. Nearly no trigger options, no options, very little of anything. It's relatively simplistic, sure, but there's lots of stuff I want to try that the editor just won't let me do (for example, have trigger x fire when someone else than you reach area y).

I think it's less the editor and more the mission system. You can do all that's possible within the game's mission/campaign system. They need to add working triggers into the game, not so much the editor.

Otherwise, eh, I've spent many hours in the editor and, compared to some other games, it's not too bad at all (not to say it couldn't be better) :hmm:

[squigian]

^ A clone of the FRED2 editor from Freespace 2 would be great. You could make almost anything a trigger, from a ship moving x meters, to something getting attacked, to the player changing weapon systems. Mission objectives could range from destroying something, to escorting something, to knocking out subsystems on ships. It was pretty easy to use, too. :hmm:

[XXi]

Originally Posted by squigian

^ A clone of the FRED2 editor from Freespace 2 would be great. You could make almost anything a trigger, from a ship moving x meters, to something getting attacked, to the player changing weapon systems. Mission objectives could range from destroying something, to escorting something, to knocking out subsystems on ships. It was pretty easy to use, too. :hmm:

Completely, absolutely, totally agree. Sure, current SH III editor is not a bad tool, but FRED2 was something on the very top of editors, IMVHO.
And it was, indeed, very easy to handle.

The one thing I hope the dev team does do right is get good voices for the crew. The commentary track for 'Das Boot' mentions that the actors were from all over Germany and their accents were important to the story. I now can hear some of the different accents after watching the film so many times. SHIII's crew voices don't strike me the same way it seems to me to be the same accent, I only play with German voices.
The U.S. sub crews should have a variety of American accents to complete the immersion. Every Hollywood war movie has the squad or crew from all over the states, a guy from Brooklyn-' Noo Yoork F**kin A' ,a Dodger fan for sure, a guy from Texas; named Tex, a southener-Tennesee or Alabama usually- 'That's fer sure. That's fer dang sure'. New Englander from Maine- 'Aayyup!', Boston 'Paahrk the caah in the yaaahrd',the Californian will be Blonde or named Rodriguez etc.
I hope we don't get a generic-U.S.-accented crew:hmm:

When Pacific Aces for SHII came out, some of the voices still had German accents. One player redid them all. When he complained about his own southern accent, the rest of us said "No, it sounds great! It sounds REAL!" Hopefully they can find different people who not only have different accents, but sound more like real people and less like professional voice actors.