SH3 broken for good for me?

[KeineK]

Hello, I've been playing SH3 for a couple months, enjoying it greatly with the GWX 3.0 mod and SH3Commander. I've run into a problem though that I cannot seem to fix, and as it stands is stopping me from playing SH3 again. There is a lot that leading up to this and a lot of information that may or may not help diagnose the problem at hand, so I will attempt to condense it, though this may be quite verbose anyway.

First things first, let me provide some background on my system and directory.

OS: Windows XP SP3
Version of SH3: STEAM (I'm assuming it fully updates SH3 to 1.4b, as GWX worked without issue this entire time with it)
Mods: GWX w/ 16km atmosphere, enhanced damage effects, and open hatch addons, Thomsen's Sound Pack v3.0, SH3Commander (if you need further details on my settings with SH3C, please ask) and SH3Gen.
Graphics: ATI Radeon 4870
Hard Drive: Two 500GB internal, system/OS on C:, games (including STEAM and thus SH3) and other things on E:, both defragged since the problem started). This would mean the save information is stored on C: in the documents folder, while the game is on E:, though it has worked like this without issue for the past month.
RAM: 3GB DDR3

(If anything more specific is required, please ask)

Now, to the actual background of the problem. As before, I have been running SH3 with GWX 3.0 with mods, SH3Commander and SH3Gen without any issue for about a month, working on a single career in that time. Starting with Patrol 10, the game started acting out of the ordinary.

During Patrol 10, merchants seemed to be "super armored", taking single torpedoes with no effect and often needing a second before they would instantly sink. I am aware that GWX models flooding instead of "health", and I waited several in game hours and could not see any noticeable flooding in ANY of the ships hit, ranging from ore carriers to large merchants. I usually hit ships in the forward area of their hull, as it appears that GWX models the forward momentum of the ships forcing water faster into the breach, as flooding is more severe when they are moving at speed and are hit at this point.

However, they would not flood at all during this patrol, I had to hit every ship with a second torpedo, at which point the "She's going down!" message would appear and it would sink. To compound the oddities in this patrol, a Large Cargo took FOUR torpedoes without any noticeable damage effects. Most alarmingly, though the propeller was visibly destroyed, the ship maintained 7 knots for several hours, again with no flooding. I used a fifth torpedo and it sunk instantly.

To add to the already bizarre behavior in this patrol, the game corrupted one of my saves while in the Bay of Biscay. I am very obsessive about saving, and have two saves I alternate saving with. For example, I will save at one point as "save1", then later as "save2", then later overwriting "save1" as I go and so on so I always have an earlier save to fall back on. Alongside these, I have a "hard" save I make that I don't overwrite at all, usually after a convoy attack or something equally difficult or drawn out.

I am aware of the various issues that SH3 has with saving and corrupting, hence the save paranoia, however before this point I had not encountered any such issues with save corruption whatsoever. When I attempted to load this save, the game crashed when it reached the "Not so long ago.." screen. Repeated attempts to load this save received the same result. To make this even more strange this save was in relatively open water, the Bay of Biscay, with no ships in visual range or hydrophone range. I was able to fall back to a previous save without issue, however, I don't dismiss this as simply a one-time anomaly as this is the start of my issues from hereon out.

After Patrol 10, the ship invulnerability seemed to disappear, but other, more subtle issues started to creep up. Destroyer AI seemed to know exactly where I was regardless of having seen me or detected me on hydrophone/ASDIC, even at 180m, which, this being early 1940 and early-war sonar not being particularly good, I believe is strange. Destroyers would gravitate towards my position in a "search pattern" despite having not detected me at all before that point, ultimately finding me as I inevitably enter their ASDIC cone. I have a fairly good idea of the game's mechanics regarding destroyer AI, and this seems to be contrary to it.

Furthermore, the save corruption started to appear more often now, forcing me to rely on more "permanent" saves more often, as it wasn't uncommon for both "temporary" saves, the above mentioned "save1" and "save2" system, to be corrupted and crash upon attempting to load them. Still, as I am persistent in these sort of things and it was still possible to play, I continued with this career. Crashing started to occur more often, notably in ports or when lots of ships were around, forcing me to load saves, which would in turn be corrupted and make me lose even more progress.

I believed that this may be just the career, and at some point in the game, most likely at Patrol 10, the save had become corrupted and only gotten more corrupted as time went on as I continued to save in future patrols. I was upset, but persistent, and continued all the way until Patrol 14.

This is the point where I must diverge from the current story and elaborate on another detail. I encouraged a friend to buy SH3 over STEAM as well, and together we played multiplayer with GWX. We did this once, before he uninstalled it because the load times with GWX were too frustrating with his lower end computer. I went back to playing singleplayer without any notable issues.

This is where this digression rejoins the main story, as midway through Patrol 14 I asked him if he would like to try playing vanilla SH3 multiplayer, as the load times were his only issue with GWX SH3. He agreed and reinstalled. I backed up my SH3 folder to a seperate folder on E:, rolled back SH3Commander, and the uninstalled SH3 through STEAM, following GWX's uninstall procedure and deleting the residual folders left over. I reinstalled SH3 and we played vanilla multiplayer together without issue. He didn't want to play again, so I DELETED, not uninstalled, the SH3 folder and replaced it with my backed up folder.

I loaded up the game and attempted to load my save in Patrol 14, only to see this very odd graphical error.



I was very early in the patrol, so I figured I may as well restart the patrol as I hadn't made a "permanent" save yet at that point. I loaded up the "in base before patrol" save and started the patrol again. I had the same graphical error. Annoyed, (after rolling back SH3Commander) I UNINSTALLED SH3 this time, as opposed to just deleting the folder and replacing it, and reinstalled SH3 from scratch. I then reinstalled GWX, then Thomsen's sound pack. I loaded up the game and started Patrol 14 only to realize I hadn't activated the 16km atmosphere, enhanced damage effects, open hatch mod, and Thomsen's sond pack through JSGME.

It is important to note though, however, there was no graphical glitch when I loaded it up this time. I closed the game and activated the mods through JSGME again, then loaded up the game and restarted the patrol. The same graphical glitch was back. I figured it had to do with the activated mods, although not being able to pinpoint which one, I tried deactivating them one at a time. The strange part here is that even after going through them all, the graphical error persisted. Indeed, even with ALL of the addon mods disabled, the graphical error was still there. I tried loading naval academy, as I figured it would possible that the save was at fault somehow, but the graphical glitch was there too.

I reinstalled SH3, reinstalled GWX, and tested it with just GWX. I could NOT replicate the graphical glitch with GWX alone. I tried activating the mods one at a time, starting with Thomsen's Sound Pack. Sure enough, when I loaded up naval academy, the graphical glitch was there. I was not ready to believe a SOUND PACK could cause a graphical error, let alone one of this magnitude, so I reinstalled SH3 and GWX yet again, and tried to replicate it again with stock GWX, this time with SH3Commander. I could not get the graphical glitch to appear again. I tested the other addon mods, only to find that activating 16km atmosphere caused the graphical error to appear again. Reinstalling SH3/GWX again, I tried activating Thomsen's Sound Pack again, to find it did NOT cause the graphical glitch this time. Indeed, NONE of the addon mods caused the graphical glitch to appear when I activated them this time.

Because of this, I believe none of the addon mods can be faulted, and that the graphical glitch and the addon mods are a false correlation. Something else must have been causing this, I considered, and played around with this installation.

I started Patrol 14, and only then did something catch my eye. As far as I know, the starting "time" of the patrol is random every time, and it happened to start at nighttime. The water seemed unnaturally "glowy" and bright for being 1 in the morning. Not the complete brightness as seen in the picture above, but a sort of residual glow. It was very obvious up close on the watch crew, as it cast light on their faces from below. I thought it could be because I was in port, and it was ambient light, so I moved out of port well into the North Sea. At this point it was daytime, and I could notice nothing out of the ordinary. I waited until nighttime, and sure enough, even with a new moon and cloud cover, the water was still glowing. Testing around with the free camera, I looked underwater to see that the water was very clear and bright.

I don't believe I am imagining it being so different from what I remember, but I do not have a good "comparison" screenshot from before the game started acting weird that illustrates what nighttime "should" look like. If anyone could please take a screenshot of their own game at nighttime with varying degrees of lighting from the moon, stars, etc, I would appreciate it greatly. I am currently reinstalling SH3 at this moment over STEAM, which means I have to redownload it every time I reinstall, so I will have to wait before I can get a screenshot of what I am talking about.

The problem with this is, and most alarming for me, is that even VANILLA SH3 is showing this glowing. I wouldn't be so terribly bothered by it, but it accompanies the same crashing and save corruption as before, even with completely removing the SH3 save data and career data. Starting a new career is as broken as the old career was, EVEN IN VANILLA SH3.

What alarms me most about this is how unstable the game is between reinstalling, it seems it changes what is broken about itself every time I reinstall. Once the game simply refused to load anything, career, naval academy, until I reinstalled it again. I have looked for registry data, application data, purged the STEAM folder, defragmented both drives, and yet I cannot return SH3 to the condition it was before it started to break down. I have deleted the backups, emptied the recycle bin, quite possibly everything I can think of, yet I have no idea what I can possibly do next. I refuse to accept the game is irrevocably messed up for absolutely no reason. NONE of my other games are showing any ill effects, including ones I play very regularly and are familiar with the behavior of, so I do not believe my hard drive is encountering any sort of failure, and games I have installed during this time show no anomalous behavior either, so it is not a disk writing problem.

I honestly do not know what else to do, but I ask if anyone has any ideas or sees anything that I may be missing please tell me, no matter how obvious you think it may be or if you think I've already done it, because I am absolutely desperate to get this game working again. Thank you if you have read this far, I apologize it was so verbose.

[danlisa]

A lot to read. Welcome to Subsim, I just wish it was under better circumstances.

Firstly (I'll read more and digest later), when you failed to Roll Back Sh3 Commander at some point, it corrupted you file set in the 16km (and probably the 8km) Scene Mod. That copy, original or backed up is now borked.

Commander should always be rolled back BEFORE altering any Modded file sets and you should always do this docked at base before/after a patrol.

Moving forward. You said that you reinstalled SH3+GWX completely and used a backup copy of your save data and everything was fine, even with activated mods. You then add additional mods and the problem returned. Did you roll back Commander? Did you use 'clean' source versions of these additional mods or were they left over form a previous installation.

TBH, I'm 99% sure your issues (black sky & Uber enemies) are a direct result of files becoming corrupted after changing mod sets without rolling back.

You're part way there with your clean installation, just ensure that the non-native (to GWX) mods you are adding are re-downloaded from source and are unaltered.

Edit - If the Steam Install is causing you trouble in file removal, check both the Steam Program files folder & the Steam Apps folder. you will find SH3 files in both. I assume you know that GWX needs to be installed to the Steam Apps folder, as do all other mods.

[HundertzehnGustav]

that screen ,looks like a scenery distance mod gone wrong...
had it once when i was swapping scene dat files...

?

[KeineK]

Originally Posted by danlisa

Firstly (I'll read more and digest later), when you failed to Roll Back Sh3 Commander at some point, it corrupted you file set in the 16km (and probably the 8km) Scene Mod. That copy, original or backed up is now borked.

I believe you are right, for the graphical error, as I haven't gotten it since I completely reinstalled everything from scratch, I only have the glowing issue along with saves. I have not been launching with SH3 Commander since then, and have uninstalled it for the time being.

Commander should always be rolled back BEFORE altering any Modded file sets and you should always do this docked at base before/after a patrol.

Yes, I don't use the automatically roll back function, but I always roll back before activating any mods or installing anything else. I must have forgotten to at one point.

Moving forward. You said that you reinstalled SH3+GWX completely and used a backup copy of your save data and everything was fine, even with activated mods. You then add additional mods and the problem returned. Did you roll back Commander? Did you use 'clean' source versions of these additional mods or were they left over form a previous installation.

Yes, mostly, I did NOT have any mods activated when everything seemed fine. I had forgotten to activate them and only noticed because I didn't hear Thomsen's sounds. At this point, I was running with Commander, and I may have neglected to roll back when I went to activate them.

You're part way there with your clean installation, just ensure that the non-native (to GWX) mods you are adding are re-downloaded from source and are unaltered.

The only mod there would be Thomsen's, I will redownload it to make sure.

Edit - If the Steam Install is causing you trouble in file removal, check both the Steam Program files folder & the Steam Apps folder. you will find SH3 files in both. I assume you know that GWX needs to be installed to the Steam Apps folder, as do all other mods.

I know about steamapps\common\silent hunter 3, that's where I've been installing it and such, but what do you mean Steam Program files folder? All I know about is the ncf file in steamapps which removes itself when the game is uninstalled and the game data in steamapps\common\silent hunter 3.

Originally Posted by HundertzehnGustav

that screen ,looks like a scenery distance mod gone wrong...
had it once when i was swapping scene dat files...

Yes, as above, I believe it had to do with SH3Commander not being rolled back.




I managed to forget something as well, when I was playing around with the naval academy to test the water glowing issue, I also managed to complete it, but it did NOT save a rating or the fact I had completed that training mission, it still says "No exam yet". Unrelated, or maybe it's not writing files correctly? -Edit: Nevermind this, it was an error on my part.

[KeineK]

Well, I'll be damned. I don't know what exactly I did differently, but I went off your advice danlisa and just was very careful with making sure everything was clean and such before reinstalling the mods and such, now all the anomalous behavior is gone, no glowing water, saves working fine so far. Thank you, so much, I was at my wits end.

[danlisa]

Happy Sailing.

[Jimbuna]

Welcome aboard KeineK....enjoy the GWXperience

Nice one Dan

[Apache312]

Originally Posted by HundertzehnGustav

that screen ,looks like a scenery distance mod gone wrong...
had it once when i was swapping scene dat files...

?

It actually looks like he is in Scotland...lol. I too am looking for Nessy.