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Silent Hunter

Quilty

Magister
Joined
Apr 11, 2008
Messages
2,406
There's a fine megamod for sh5 called Wolves of Steel, well explained, supported by a good community, it's the one I'm currently using. The mod itself is easy to install, but patching the exe is slightly more involved, though not by much. It's all explained here (make sure you go to the first page of the thread):

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=210703

The modded game is very resource intensive, 8 gigs of ram is a must, a good gfx is needed, as well as patience due to often long loading times when starting a career and loading a saved game. The mods in the abovementioned megamod allow the player to do much more than in mods for sh4 or sh3, but those older games with mods are more stable and reliable, and have many more ship types. I would definitely recommend the Operation Monsun megamod for sh4 if sh5 turns out not to be to your liking.

Edit: Also, for many of those new to sh5 a huge turnoff is often the fact that you only get to command the type 7 submarine, and its variants. The older games are, in this regard at least, more enjoyable for many players.
 

TripJack

Hedonist
Joined
Aug 9, 2008
Messages
5,132
There are tons of mods for SH5 out now, has anyone tried them?
Yes but no mods will ever change the fact that SH5 is a much buggier, glitchier, more incompetently made sack of shit than its predecessors (a remarkable achievement really). There are some neat little novelties that have been done for SH5 that none of the previous games have, but novelty pretty much sums up this entire game.

Don't bother :rpgcodex:
 

trym88

Scholar
Joined
Jul 11, 2010
Messages
193
There are tons of mods for SH5 out now, has anyone tried them?
Yes but no mods will ever change the fact that SH5 is a much buggier, glitchier, more incompetently made sack of shit than its predecessors (a remarkable achievement really). There are some neat little novelties that have been done for SH5 that none of the previous games have, but novelty pretty much sums up this entire game.

Don't bother :rpgcodex:

Have you actually tried any of the new megamods for SH5 or is it just butthurt talking.
 

TripJack

Hedonist
Joined
Aug 9, 2008
Messages
5,132
Yes it is butthurt talking but I have played with sober's mod list and the wolves of steel collection that quilty mentioned. I used the unofficial patcher too of course, that does fix some gamebreaking stuff but don't expect any mods to eliminate the CTDs, graphical glitches, horrendous load times or laggy performance of this game. Indeed for the latter two as quilty said mods naturally make them worse :lol:
 
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Quilty

Magister
Joined
Apr 11, 2008
Messages
2,406
Desite the fact that I'm able to squeeze out quite a bit of enjoyment out of sh5, I have to agree that it can be a taxing experience. Personally, I haven't had much trouble with CTDs ever since I upgraded to 8 gigs of ram. I'm not entirely sure which graphical glitches TripJack is referring to, or what he means by lagginess (I assume the fact that the game can stutter on lower end PCs, but again, this is not something I experienced much of), but the loading times are definitely a huge negative.

I would still recommend playing sh4 over sh5 if any of the aforementioned negatives sounds like too much bother. However, sh5 is, to me at least, an incredibly immersive experience, and I'd suggest you give it a try one day. It was VERY broken on release, but has been fixed up quite a bit, though obviously tastes vary and what one player can endure and forgive, another might find gamebreaking.

Edit: One thing I forgot to mention (and this could be just personal taste speaking) but the AI of the destroyers is very strange in sh5. The modders have fixed it somewhat, but the perfect balance between dead stupid and unforgivably omniscient has not yet been achieved. It often veers from one to another, so that a destroyer latches onto you from a HUGE distance away if you so much as move a finger at 150 meters of depth and relentlessly pursues you for hours on end, or it is just damn stupid and runs into another destroyer while searching for you. Sh4 Operation Monsun had much fewer of such problems, in my experience.
 
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TripJack

Hedonist
Joined
Aug 9, 2008
Messages
5,132
Definitely not just your personal taste. And the detection problems aren't limited to enemy AI either, half the time your watch crew chucklefucks are spotting ships from 15km away and the other half the time they are sitting on the deck gun staring blankly into space while a british merchant ship casually floats by at less than a hundred meters and you're furiously mashing the target button.

If only all the modder effort put into shining up SH5 had been put into SH4 instead....
 
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trym88

Scholar
Joined
Jul 11, 2010
Messages
193
What about the magnum opus mega mod, is it as good as wolves of steel?
 

Quilty

Magister
Joined
Apr 11, 2008
Messages
2,406
Yeah, magnum opus is way out of date, don't use that.

As TripJack said, the way the watchcrew AI is handled is just immensely weird, which is why one modder made it so that you can change some game parameters so that time compression drops to 1 whenever a ship enters a player preset range to your submarine. Obviously, you want to avoid the strange and sudden run-ins with enemy ships, so you can set it to, say, 10km or whatever, but then the game just becomes absurd since you as the player know that there is a ship somewhere in the 10km range, but neither you nor your crew can actually see it. It just feels like cheating, but it is necessary.

That said (and these are some MAJOR negatives we are talking about here), I still suffer from Stockholm syndrome when it comes to sh5 and tend to forgive most of its flaws and play on. Think of it as a gamer's equivalent of the WW2 fighting spirit, stare in the mouth of doom and fight on! :D

But first play Operation Monsun, seriously.
 

Burning Bridges

Enviado de meu SM-G3502T usando Tapatalk
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Apr 21, 2006
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Tampon Bay
If you have a very fast computer with 8GB RAM you may get something out of SHV but if you dont its just a piece of shit and a resource hog.
I still play SHIV once or twice every year. See my old LP how it can look if everything is configured and installed
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/lets-play-silent-hunter-iv-u-boat-missions.65743/
It ended with a savegame / CTD failure, and this is a problem with OM but I could solve most problems since then which were (strangely) due to certain sound mods.
There must be a problem with the sound engine. Many people have problems loading games near convoys etc, for me they went away after restoring all original sound files from SH4.
 

Makabb

Arcane
Shitposter Bethestard
Joined
Sep 19, 2014
Messages
11,753
We need a new silent hunter. Gotta try 4 myself, played 1 and 3.
 

Norfleet

Moderator
Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
Obviously, you want to avoid the strange and sudden run-ins with enemy ships, so you can set it to, say, 10km or whatever, but then the game just becomes absurd since you as the player know that there is a ship somewhere in the 10km range, but neither you nor your crew can actually see it. It just feels like cheating, but it is necessary.
Wait, how does no one see a SHIP at 10km? Is it really foggy or dark out? Is the ship hiding behind an island? The last time I was on a ship, I couldn't help but notice that the open ocean was pretty much bare, featureless, and devoid of cover, and anything that looked even remotely like a feature stuck out like a sore thumb. You were far more likely to spot something that turned out to not be a ship than to NOT spot a ship, at least during the day.
 

Thane Solus

Arcane
Joined
Apr 29, 2012
Messages
1,681
Location
X-COM Base
the head designers of SH 3-5 left UBI years ago, Dan made Door Kickers, Tudor is doing his thing, forming new companies, trying new things... Only left are a few Level Designers, and that shitty Producer that i think he managed to fuck everything up because of no backbone(see SH 5). I was still working at UBI back then, and was asking the programmers i knew, how the hell is the performance so fucking low(it was a mess), and then i saw the tutorial, 3D exclamation pointers above shipos, then i knew this wont end well...

:dead:

they were making a hardcore sim which was played by hardcore fans, and trying to cater the casual market, Typical UBI management retardation... Most of the talented devs left years ago, when the retardation reached the highest levels...
 

Burning Bridges

Enviado de meu SM-G3502T usando Tapatalk
Joined
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Messages
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Tampon Bay
Good to see a former dev around here. I know that the original Silent Hunter III team must have been exceptional. After Ultimation had failed so hard before everyone was totally surprised how good the game turned out.
Afterwards I could not help noiticing a downward spiral with every coming game as if there were still some people fighting to make the games outstanding but swampted by mediocrisy.
Btw there is still the page with the original guys http://www.silenthunteriii.com/de/dev_team.php
I would not worry people will play Silent Hunter for many years, and such a decline is normal see what happened with IL2.
 

Quilty

Magister
Joined
Apr 11, 2008
Messages
2,406
Obviously, you want to avoid the strange and sudden run-ins with enemy ships, so you can set it to, say, 10km or whatever, but then the game just becomes absurd since you as the player know that there is a ship somewhere in the 10km range, but neither you nor your crew can actually see it. It just feels like cheating, but it is necessary.
Wait, how does no one see a SHIP at 10km? Is it really foggy or dark out? Is the ship hiding behind an island? The last time I was on a ship, I couldn't help but notice that the open ocean was pretty much bare, featureless, and devoid of cover, and anything that looked even remotely like a feature stuck out like a sore thumb. You were far more likely to spot something that turned out to not be a ship than to NOT spot a ship, at least during the day.

I could be wrong, but I don't think you can see a ship all that well in the game when it's around 10km away from you. It might be visible as a small dot on the horizon, but I don't remember how the game handles distance and visibility, or whether or not any of it is realistic. I haven't played it in a long while.
 

Norfleet

Moderator
Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
Probably not. Games traditionally have terrible visibility and cause everything to look like it's way far away. This is why in a shooter, you see a dude and he looks like he's half a mile away, but when you look at the game's scale, it turns out he's like 20 meters away and in real life you could spit on him. Or I could, anyway. I'm pretty good at spitting, though.
 

Drakron

Arcane
Joined
May 19, 2005
Messages
6,326
Well weather in the Atlantic also made things difficult, its also not a lake and waves can obscure ships .

In fact in the Convoy battle ONS-122 visibility was reduced to less that 300 meters due to heavy fog, apparently a surfaced U-Boat could be detected by radar up to 10 km as the snorkel would only be detected up to 5 km.

I think SH5 have a HUGE distance in compressed speed, something like within 100 nm because of the sonar contacts and the risk of running aground, I would not be surprised if you get out of compressed speed because a convoy heaving out of your position is 50 nm away, you have no chance of catching up even surfaced and you cannot even see it because its too far away.
 

bonescraper

Guest
We need a new silent hunter. Gotta try 4 myself, played 1 and 3.

There is nothing coming for years. The only thing that remotely comes close is a new sailing sim
There kinda sorta actually is.

http://www.wolves-of-the-atlantic.c...the_Atlantic-mobile-submarine-simulation.html
http://www.wolves-of-the-atlantic.com/games/simulation/submarine/mobile/WOTA-U_96-Uboat-subsim.html



This guy should do a kickstarter and go directly for PC.
 

Burning Bridges

Enviado de meu SM-G3502T usando Tapatalk
Joined
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Messages
27,562
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Tampon Bay
I could be wrong, but I don't think you can see a ship all that well in the game when it's around 10km away from you. It might be visible as a small dot on the horizon, but I don't remember how the game handles distance and visibility, or whether or not any of it is realistic. I haven't played it in a long while.

In the game there are hard limits, I think there are mods that raise it to 10 or 15km.

In real life it depends on many conditions, but the short answer is that you can see ships at 10 kilometers. I was able to see Teneriffe from La Palma, which is over 100 kilometers away. I was at sea level by the way, but Tenerife is over 3000 high, that must be said. I did however see most of it. You can see clouds 100 kilometers and more.

According to this, a mast that is 10m high should be visible for ~12km for someone exactly at sea level, and more for someone on a conning tower.

1024px-How_far_away_is_the_horizon.png
 

Jack Of Owls

Arcane
Joined
May 23, 2014
Messages
4,279
Location
Massachusettes
Having played and enjoyed the original Silent Service on my ol' Commodore 64 of yore back in '88 or so, I kind of wanted to recapture that gaming orgasm I had back then watching my POV submarine taking out "realistic" nip convoys running at a framerate of about 8 FPS against a burning pink 8-bit 8 color-sky that would give me such a MASSIVE headache that I would literally be on the verge of vomiting. So I bought a copy of Silent Hunter 5 with the intention of using a megamod that also works as a bugfix mod since I understand that the game shipped broken and even with all official patches, remains broken. I selected The Wolves of Steel mod. Thoughts from SH5 veterans playing this mod? And what's this I hear about the campaign mode STILL being broken even with mods? Is this even worth playing? It certainly looks nice, especially in that opening bunker where I get a minimum of 40 FPS, and 120 FPS on the open sea (!). I think I just blew my megawad seeing that! Even on my old GTX 660 Ti I was only getting about 25 FPS. Still sure beats the tar out of 8 FPS anyday (may my beloved Lady Commodore 64 rest in peace).
 
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Burning Bridges

Enviado de meu SM-G3502T usando Tapatalk
Joined
Apr 21, 2006
Messages
27,562
Location
Tampon Bay
Get Silent Hunter 4 and Operation Monsun Mod.

SH5 is popamole and never really worked, even with mods.
 

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