Poll: FPS camera for sub walkthrough.

[Dowly]

[Lionman]

Originally Posted by Reaves

^^^

I always liked B-17 the mighty 8th because of the detail of the crew. If you moved your tail gunner to the navigators chair you would see him walk through the plane and into the new position. THAT was probably the greatest sim i've played because of the immersiveness. The problem is the graphics are dated and it doesn't have the same effect that it used to.

I agree, I really loved B-17 The Mighty Eight and agree that it was awesomely immersive, indeed I still have it on my (1 TB) HD although I haven't played it in ages.

I once made the mistake of naming my whole B-17 crew after my own friends and then flying a long haul Berlin raid in real time. After many hours (I paused it for meals!) I was totally wrung out. We got badly bounced by Me 109s on the way in and Fw 190s on the way home, ending up shot to bits with only two live engines, limping home at low alt. I tried really hard (I was the pilot) to get us home in one piece but we were too low to jump and so when we didn't guite make it home and ditched in the channel with the loss of all hands, I felt really bad for days! As if I'd let my friends down. Now THAT's immersive!

There have sometimes been rumours of an updated multiplayer version with a co-op mission structure and if that ever happens it will be a killer sim to die for. It had the most intuitive and user friendly sim interface I have ever seen in an air combat game. Also you could play it as a crew management game and in that way it was a very similar recipe game-playwise to SH III and IV. All in all a fantastic package and a classic, way ahead of its time.

[V.C. Sniper]

I want to walk into the torpedo room and watch the men load them big beautiful Mark 14 torpedoes, and then go to the engine room just to listen to them mighty diesels sing its beautiful song.

[Lionman]

Originally Posted by V.C. Sniper

I want to walk into the torpedo room and watch the men load them big beautiful Mark 14 torpedoes, and then go to the engine room just to listen to them mighty diesels sing its beautiful song.

Hell I want to lean over the table in the torp room and watch the poker game! LOL

Also think of local sounds changing as you walk through the boat - fragments of music - conversation - engine note change, hissing valves, deck plate footsteps, flushing heads, laughter . . . . . . in a word, the sub-sea "ambiance"!

[Capt Jack Russell]

Totally agree! This is the stuff that makes the game for me. I just took a break from SH4 while the 1.4 upgrade gets sorted out. Went back to SH3. I prefer the U.S. and the Pacific but ... I rediscovered the micro management of the crew, the great cut-away view and repair icons and best of all ... the movement through that little boat!! It's great. Sure it's only (2) horizonal rooms plus the capt'n bed. But it feels like so much more when compared to SH4. I'd pay for more sub and micro management in a heart beat!

[TheSatyr]

I wouldn't buy it. If they put that much work into a sub's interior than it would mean that they didn't put alot of effort into other parts of the game.

It's simple. Sub sims don't make alot of money and I'd rather see the money spent on game play,not on eye candy I'd only look at once or twice.

If you want FPS,then go play an FPS game.

[Hanzo]

Originally Posted by TheSatyr

I wouldn't buy it. If they put that much work into a sub's interior than it would mean that they didn't put alot of effort into other parts of the game.

It's simple. Sub sims don't make alot of money and I'd rather see the money spent on game play,not on eye candy I'd only look at once or twice.

If you want FPS,then go play an FPS game.

Typically unreasoned response. Who is saying they want a first person shooter? I want a submarine simulator.

I think it's quite clear that having the ability to walk around within your sub would only add to the immersion factor (one of the reasons I, and a lot of people, play SH4 in the first place - atmosphere). Saying that dev-side wouldn't be able to focus on other aspects just because they put effort into making interiors is more than generalising. Currently, we have all these wonderfully modelled interiors in SH4, yet we stand locked in the middle staring at hardly animated mannequins. It's meant to be a submarine simulator, so surely you would agree that the more realistic interior interaction is, the closer it'll get to the real thing? That's the point of simulation after all.

Immersive, interactable interiors are something I hope the SH series will incorporate in future iterations, for sure.

[Lionman]

Originally Posted by Hanzo

Typically unreasoned response. Who is saying they want a first person shooter? I want a submarine simulator.

I think it's quite clear that having the ability to walk around within your sub would only add to the immersion factor (one of the reasons I, and a lot of people, play SH4 in the first place - atmosphere). Saying that dev-side wouldn't be able to focus on other aspects just because they put effort into making interiors is more than generalising. Currently, we have all these wonderfully modelled interiors in SH4, yet we stand locked in the middle staring at hardly animated mannequins. It's meant to be a submarine simulator, so surely you would agree that the more realistic interior interaction is, the closer it'll get to the real thing? That's the point of simulation after all.

Immersive, interactable interiors are something I hope the SH series will incorporate in future iterations, for sure.

Here here! I totally agree. I am so fed up with hearing that tired old "it's only eye candy so why bother" line. Indeed if such people hadn't been ignored for the last two decades, why would we have bothered with ANY graphics at all? We all still be playing board games and using computers only to do accounts and word processing!

As for all this tosh about "using up resources", in a submarine simulator you have ONE single interior to model, not a whole small town of buildings complete with furniture in every room, pictures on the walls, opening doors, coke cans that roll, trees, bushes, birds and grass ALL of which move independently, as you have in any decent modern FPS like ARMA, COD2,COD4, Airborne or Soldier of Fortune:Payback. Surely the modelling of the ocean, which is very similar to weather modelling and mainly a matter of dynamics and classes of motion, cannot be more CPU-intensive than modelling a whole jungle (as in CRYSIS) with every leaf and tree animated and realistic physics when bullets hit them? Not to mention transparent animated water that you can swim in and under as in Far Cry and CRYSIS!

IMO it has far more to do with the "compartmentalisation" of the gaming industry. What do I mean by that? Well, combat flight sim designers have got into the habit of not bothering with anything like enough realistic ground detail, Civilian flight sim designers go crazy for ground & aircraft detail but exclude firing weapons and still use laughably poor and unrealistic avatars for pilots and ground staff, while nobody in that design realm seems to think it odd that they are on the tenth version of MS FS after nealry 25 years and have modelled the whole earth and almost all its passenger airlines but all the planes and cockpits are still TOTALLY EMPTY! Meanwhile in our beloved submarine realm, although avatars are finally approaching the quality of some FPS games, (I hated the gargoyle-like SH III Avatars) we STILL remain tethered to very limited immobile viewpoints in the interior of our subs and the crew appear rooted to the floor! That just means the 3D space has replaced the 2D backdrops of the original Silent Hunter's 1 and 2, which is not much of an advance for a decade.

The first games design house to combine the first person mobile immersion of an FPS simulator with the weather and ocean modelling of a civilian flight sim or sub sim, plus the action dimension of combat, will sweep the market. I want to be able to walk to my aircraft, or up to my submarine by the dock, climb into the cockpit or climb aboard, into the conning tower, open the hatch scramble down the ladder into the sub, pulling the hatch shut after me and I want to see my knees in the cockpit, or my feet when I look down while walking through the sub and my hands when I open hatches or grasp aircraft controls. (Speaking of which have you all noticed that THE hardest thing to model totally realistically in avatars or real robots, is the human hands! They ALWAYS give away the AI nature of the beast, well so far at least. Even "Real Dolls" - Google for it - ruin their amazingly realistic glamour girls with hands whose fingers just don't look right.)

Other than the luddite throw-backs who "still can't see why we stopped using DOS" and the Grinches who think everything that aids immersion most is "just eye candy", the rest of us ALL want ever increasing realism and so, eventually, it WILL happen. We just have to be patient and keep on asking for it in Forums like this and making intelligent and feasible suggestions for improvement.

Imagine being in a sim sub in combat, but able to run down the corridor closing watertight doors behind you, as light fittings shatter and the bilge water sluices around your feet with the rolling of the sub, then climb ladders between decks or into the conning tower! i.e. SH IV is already an awesome piece of work but it is NOT the end of the line. The thirst for ever more photographic realism, more complete physics (debris that rolls with the ship, bodies of the injured and dead that fall to the deck and move with the ship's motion) more realistic ocean and subsea environments, is unending. I forsee a time when it all WILL be "photo-real" with ALL these functions implemented and we will look back to these days of lego-brick avatars in FS2004 and FSX flight crews, and "animated dummy" crews in our subs, with hilarity and shake our heads, wondering how we "maintained immersion" with such clunky features.

As for the financial dimension, just look at the accelerating figures of internet usage and online gaming. I started using SKYPE when there were less than 1 million using it and I rmember seeing 1 million plus and being surprised. Recently I have seen 9 million on SKYPE at once! This is never going to go "backwards", there will just be more and more people, joining faster, so this is an almost bottomless market because "virtuality" is not only a WHOLE NEW MEDIUM but an "infinite" one in terms of population space, as virtuality, like the human imagination, has no end and is perhaps the first TRUE "infinite space" ever. Well virtually. LOL

This is a non-trivial issue because we gamers DRIVE the (increasingly VAST) PC development industry, which in turn drives the military and civilian use of simulation, and the spin offs for other realms, such as CGI, GPS, medical imagting etc. Ad infinitum. (My youngest daughter is currently engaged in a medical degree and the incredible medical imaging of the whole body inside and out now available for the training of medical undergraduates has come directly from the gaming industry's avatar modelling.)

We are living in the post silicone revolution era now, and, just as the industrial revolution did before it, it is changing EVERYTHING about our world and at increasing speed. As information literally IS power, this is also altering the political and social demographics of our species and the trigger to that whole sequence, the butterfly's wing beat that leads to the storm on the other side of the earth, is US - we gamers and our endless hedonistic quest for the Hollodeck from Star Trek.

One day we will have it guys, make no mistake and by then, the whole of our (Western at least) global culture will have been irreversibly changed by the effort to make it happen.

[Torplexed]

Originally Posted by Lionman

- we gamers and our endless hedonistic quest for the Hollodeck from Star Trek.

Geez Louise. Enjoy yerself in there.

[Lionman]

Originally Posted by Torplexed

Geez Louise. Enjoy yerself in there.

Yeah bro - I enjoyeth mightily! & Happy New Year!

[Iron Budokan]

Yes, I would like to walk through the submarine, please, with sugar on it.

[Front Runner]

While giving those who choose, the opportunity to take an inspection tour through the boat, it could also provide a jumping off point for future mods.
The OP mentioned more controls. I like to have ultimate control over all facets of a simulation, including control over each engine, whether or not it is assigned to propulsion or charge, control over the dive planes etc. etc.
Also from a historical point of view, just make sure that each sub model has all of it's own correctly rendered compartments.

[Extra Ketchup]

I am really enjoying the free cam mod, the one that let's you "walk around" the command room (actually, it's more like floating, like a ghost). One of the things that amazes me is the amount of 3D detail in the modeling of the rooms. Get close, and you'll see the individual bolts are modeled (not just flat textures). At least one poster on the wall has a real 3D curl. Each pipe is modeled and almost everything looks good up close. Even brackets that hold the metal boxes to the wall are modeled accurately, and you have to "climb" to some odd places to even see them!

This is a lot of detail for the default stay-in-the-center-and-spin mode. It makes me think that the devs did have plans to allow you to walk around at one point. Another thing, ever notice how the crew's eyes follow you as you "walk" around? Creepy! Again, why code that into the game unless at some point the object was to have a walk / "float" mode.

The other thing I've been doing with the free cam mod is exploring other ships using the < and >. While not as detailed as the command room, I am amazed at how much detail is rendered on these ships, considing they would normally be seen far away through the scope. One doesn't appreciate the size of a battleship until he stands on the deck (even virtually). One thing I really enjoy is going up to the bridge of a warship and watch it exchange fire with another ship. Though I know this isn't the original goal of the devs, it's actually quite immersive. I recently used the mission editor to pit the Iowa against the Yamato, and then I just "walked around" on the deck of Iowa as these two massive battleships slugged away at each other for hours. Completely outside the original intent of the game, but fun none-the-less!

[Sailor Steve]

Extra Ketchup?

WELCOME ABOARD!

[Reaves]

Originally Posted by Dowly

QFT!