SUBSIM Review SH2 innerview part 3

SUBSIM
Review
by Neal Stevens January 22, 2000

Silent Hunter II Innerview: with Rick Martinez, Senior Producer

Part III: Focus on features

SUBSIM Review: Will Silent Hunter II include a scenario editor in the initial release?

Rick Martinez: Sure. What happened in the original is we added it later. But this time we want a complete package, we want it in the shipped product. It is planned for the initial product.

SSR: Silent Hunter I sold well for a submarine sim, over 300,00 copies. What do you project as the threshold of success for SH2?

RM: Silent Hunter was really unusual in that there was always enough demand for it that it stayed on shelves a long time. The odd thing about it is the sales probably has less to do with the game than with the way people market it. AOD got harder to find after a while and I don’t know why.

When it comes to the overall hit prediction, you never know. The thing is, when the game comes out and the first five postings on a BBS dun it, a lot of people hold off buying it. And when it doesn’t sell well early, the stores stop buying it, it’s finished. And then later on when you ask for it, you can’t find it—it’s not there.

The best thing that players of sims can do if Silent Hunter II is a good sim—and that’s all I ask, if it’s a good game—is to buy it. Buy the game, to prove the subsim is still commercially viable. This isn’t a request to buy the game, no matter what. It’s a request to buy what I think is going to be a very good game. If we on the team don’t do our jobs and it’s not good, then of course, don’t buy it.

Silent Hunter II is going to be an excellent, quality game. It’s a game that if you want to play in a realistic environment, you can. Don’t expect to survive much past ’42. But if they choose, they can use the option settings to balance the game and play a different war. What if Huff-duff didn’t betray your position…. You have your choice.

SH2 a game that if you want to play in a realistic environment, you can. Don’t expect to survive much past ’42.

SSR: You guys are planning on including neutrals and friendly vessels the sim, where you have to be careful who you sink?

RM: Oh yeah, we have to have them. We think it’s real necessary.

SSR: How about the motion of the ocean?

RM: Yes, it’ll be there. That’s real important.

SSR: Is it difficult to produce the rolling seas effect? Mike Jones (Aces of the Deep programmer) told me they based it on a sine wave and it didn’t use an excessive amount of resources.

RM: It depends. When Mike did it, he wasn’t using a 3-D engine of the sort we are using. It’s not an impossible task to get the ocean surface to move correctly, but that isn’t the problem. It’s to get it to look correct. The physics of making the ship to roll and pitch correctly—we can do that and we’re going to. The problem is how it looks. And we have that, it’s coming along very well. Right now you can look with the periscope view and see the water lapping up.

We’re going to have a very nice motion in the ocean, as they say. The screenshots that show the ships sitting in the water are very preliminary work. Those ships aren’t interacting with the water in those shots.

The physical model we are putting in this sim will take in a ship of certain size, with a specified beam, of a certain tonnage, should behave correctly in a certain type of ocean. The physics itself—it’s a challenge but we have done it before and we’ll do it again. The real hard part is how does the water look as it’s doing that.

SSR: What other details set Silent Hunter II apart from previous subsims?

RM: Lots of little details that will make the sim more enjoyable. You know the Captain’s logbook, in the old game it recorded what you sank and when? Now you can make personalized entries that when you click on them, become part of the logbook picture. It’s a fun feature. When you look back at that logbook, you’ll see your actions and all your observations, and they will all look like a natural part of the page.

That's only one example of what we feel will be a very personalized, high quality sim.

Aeon and SSI have rolled up their sleeves and are producing the most ambitious subsim to date. With the state of affairs in the sim community, this is welcome news. Rick was very enthusiastic about the promise Silent Hunter II and Destroyer Command offers.
Keep in mind, any planned feature could get sacked because something went wrong, some horrible design problem arose that the design team couldn’t fix. It was clear to me they care about their work and they hope their hard work will translate to many fun evenings of U-boat battle.

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