[Lionman]

I was most encouraged by the subsim review email with all the links to the reviews and screen shots from E3 2004.

SH III sounds better than many of us expected and I am delighted to read that the interior views are 360 degrees, include animated crew that react to the player and even valves that "blow" and spray water when the sub is under attack! Sounds great. It is also reassuring to confirm that the trailer sequences we have all seen are truly in-game and not from linking videos. The film of water clearing from the periscope sounds delightful and gives one a taste of the attention to "immersive detail" (literally in this case) in SH III. Interesting news about the player being able to manage the crew but no indication as to whether the player can change role within the crew.

As for the SH III campaign structure, it sounds to me as if they had a fixed campaign tree and have just expanded it to include alternate branches and options to make it a "semi-dynamic" campaign. One might almost suspect that the developers have actually been reading these forums although perhaps too late to make the campaign truly dynamic. Mind you, no mention of seagulls yet!

PT Boat Knights of the Sea looks cool too. Just as in SH III they really have the "wetness" of the ocean rendering cracked now, but I wonder if they can yet model storms or big rolling seas? These both have a vast influence on combat at sea, not to mention crew morale and motion inside a boat!

Personally, as I have no interest in arcade gaming, I have never explored "Pirate ship" or "Galleon" simulators, but the sea-going combat graphics of some of those in the E3 review are mouth watering and I think they even mentioned Wagner on the sound track! You can almost hear the creak of oak and canvas and I note that all vessels are crewed with AI teams that man the guns and set the sails etc. So that should surely be equally possible in SH III and other modern naval sims where nothing as complex as sail handling is involved?

I once sailed a small sloop single-handed with a female partner who was purely a (very decorative) passenger, between the coast of Turkey, Rhodes and the other the Greek islands using celestiel navigation, so I can claim a teensy bit of sailing experience. The only decent sailing simulator I have seen to date is "Virtual Skipper 3" which works really well technically, but somehow totally lacks the adrenaline rush that real sailing inevitably involves. Arm-chair sailor landsmen and their wives can always be found busily comparing the number of bunks in yachts at Boat Shows as a (totally spurious) indicator of "bang for your buck" for a given yacht price. Had any of them ever tried sleeping or cooking at 45 degrees in a pitching yacht interior with regular changes of tack violently reversing the vertical orientation of their environment by almost 90 degrees, they would realise that the fewer bunks the better, as those on board need every centimeter of space for hanging on, avoiding impact with fittings and remaining sane! Most decent well-equipped sea-cooks in well-found yachts actually strap themselves in and have to use a gimballed stove, lamps and sink, if they are not to scald themselves or set fire to the boat. So I can't imagine what cooking daily for 30 odd men inside a WW2 submarine in action would be like!

The sedate, caravan-like, semi-suburban interiors of family yachts at boat shows give no clue as to how violent and insecure an activity sailing actually is, especially offshore in "big seas". Anyone who actually chooses to sail in the North Sea, the Southern Ocean or around Cape Horn is either suicidal or quite mad. Even the Bay of Biscay can terrify experienced seamen and George Cluny's performance in "The Storm" reminds one of the "price of fish" off the Newfoundland coast. The ocean is very frequently "awesome" and very violently so. Accordingly any ocean simulator "worth its salt" should convey that, rather than merely modelling calm seas and slick water. Let's have some white foamers, spindrift and roaring gales whipping sleet horizontally across the deck as occurs in real life! After all, as any experienced seaman will tell you, even in wartime the enemy are secondary to relentless combat with the ocean itself.

Waves that merely look "quite large" from the deck of a commercial or passenger vessel become utterly terrifying small mountains when viewed from the open cockpit of a small yacht, so I suspect that they would look equally scary from the conning tower of a submarine. I say this as one who once sailed in one of the notorious "Meltemi" storms of the Aegean, wearing a life jacket around the clock and "clipped on" with safety lines. This is why there was a "rum ration" of grog in Nelson's Navy and why sailors always carry "medicinal spirits"! Incredibly, on leaving Rhodes harbour to make the crossing, we saw in the distance a wind-surfer atop a giant mountainous wave, heading back the way we had come. He must have been a South African surf-nazi as no Californian would have been that crazy or macho. But I'll certainly never forget that tiny outline of a man silhouetted against the stormy sky, caught in a momentary shaft of bright sunlight, atop a sinister moving mountain of silver grey water . . .

Why mention any of this in a subsim forum? Because when all is said and done life in a WW2 submarine was life in the cramped interior of a small boat offshore with approximately as much space "per crew member" as in an ocean going yacht, so although a sub can (mercifully) dive and avoid the worst of the conditions described above, otherwise most of these conditions and observations apply. Watch the interior life in that marvellous TV series "Das Boot" and see how much violent heaving about there is. Add red combat lighting, the deafening noise and violent vibration of depth charge attack, the frantic yells of the crew, people running everywhere spinning valves and slamming hatches, shattering guages, leaks springing from seams and valves and you have an environment as (virtually) adrenalating, violent and scary as the Russian landings in Call of Duty under artillery bombardment or the Omaha Beach landings in Medal of Honour. Yet former subsims have been positively sedate and about as exciting as Monopoly! (Mind you, Monopoly is a sure-fire way to have family members eventually threatening to murder each other. Especially when "seasonal cheer" has been liberally involved, as almost every family reveals an unsuspected "mini-Napoleon" who sometimes turns out to be the least expected person of all!)

Swashbuckling pirate adventures don't really cater to my lust for historical verisimilitude but perhaps an ocean warfare simulator of Nelson's era might be fun! All that cannon smoke, the shot and shell and the sailor's cries and shrieks in battle would certainly be immersive. (I should end by saying that Wood's Navy rum at sea once got me the drunkest I have ever been in my life and gave me a hang-over that made the fantasy of suicide a pleasurable daydream!)


By the way if anyone doubts just how insane some of the "ubergeeks" out there can eventually become - check out "Fish Tycoon" which as far as I am concerned comes a close second to the infamous "Sea Bass" fishing simulator for totally lunatic software. Sitting in front of a screen with an imaginary fishing rod (they actually made a plastic handled mock up of one as an accessory- I kid you not!) waiting for imaginary fish to bite, sounds like an activity for the criminally insane to me, but "feeding virtual fish in a virtual tank" just to WATCH THEM GROW???? DOH!!!!!!!!!
I am frankly lost for words . . . . (Pass me the virtual dynamite Number One!)

Yo ho ho my hearties!

(Pass me the Grog, there's a good fellow . . . . . )

. . . . . CONTACT!!!!!!!! DIVE! DIVE! DIVE!

[Sailor Steve]

Educational and entertaining as always, LM. I once passed through seas somewhat heavier than the ones in Das Boot. The bow of the ship would dip under a wave, the water would hit the forward gun turret and the spray would drench us watching from the signal bridge (that's the open deck above the bridge in the picture).

And this was a 2,000-ton destroyer; I can only imagine what it's like in a "pleasure" yacht.

[Lionman]

Steve,
I know just what you mean and thank you for your kind words. Excellent picture of your destroyer. I take it, from the numbering (as I can't quite read the signal flags!) that you were in the US Navy? As I am bound to have mentioned somewhere in former posts, I am an ex-pro sat diver and spent almost 18 years at sea with a couple of side trips to the Baltic (freezing fogs and ice) and the Indian Ocean (barracuda, sharks and poisonous jellyfish) and the rest of it all in the North Sea (conger eels, killer whales and wolf fish) so I saw plenty of weather in big ships too.

Most of the purpose-built Diving Services Vessels I lived and worked from were about the same length as your sleek and elegant Destroyer, but were fatter and heavier, with twin diving bells launched through inboard vertical "moonpools" amidships, most of the superstructure hunched up for'ard behind a helideck, a big flat back deck (for packages and deck cargo) and sometimes a large side crane or stern A frame for big lifts. I can remember seeing seas just like you mention and even once found myself on a 600' long "Heerema" crane ship that had been converted from an oil tanker, towed by two huge ocean-going super-tugs in weather so bad and seas so mountainous that nobody was allowed on deck and we all slept in our life jackets. I have some photographs of 90'-100' waves taken in such weather, landlubbers really have NO idea do they!

[I have a pictures I'd love to show you, but currently have no webspace to host them. So is there any way I can browse to a hard disk location and just add a couple as attachments to my post as one can on some forums and as I have here with my Avatar?]

I have "swallowed the anchor" now of course, but sometimes I miss the deep ocean so much . . . .

. . . . I sure am looking forward to virtual and vicarious sea time in SH III however and hope that it will have excellent multiplayer online play although that hasn't yet been mentioned in the previews I have managed to find. If they have a multiplayer dimension surely that will mean there will have to be Destroyers and surface ships crewed by players too, or will that be all AI?

[Neal Stevens]

Excellent post! Thanks.

[Lionman]

It's always most encouraging to get positive feedback.

[Sailor Steve]

[Torgen]

I have a friend I knew in Pascagoula, MS that served on one of those. He said the oil seals blew on the forward turret (might have been all turrets) every time they fired them.

[Sailor Steve]

I was a radioman and they didn't let me near the big guns, so I wouldn't know, but I've never heard or read of anything like that before. Could have been a problem with that one turret.

[Lionman]

Just to let you know that I haven't submerged for ever, but have been and still am very occupied preparing for my immanent move to the USA.

It certainly seems as though UBISOFT or at least their scouts and developers have been reading our forum doesn't it, as the delayed launch and changes to SH III reflect very accurately the demands the gamers here have expressed, ourselves included. This is good to see and encourages one to use these forums to give the developers accurate customer feedback so that they can craft their product to fit the market better and hence increase their success and our pleasure.
:know:
I am amongst those who have pre-ordered SH III already - as well as UbiCom's other much anticipated flight sim title Pacific Fighters, the next in Oleg Maddox's excellent combat flight sim series that began with IL2. Oleg is such a clever marketeer too, saving the title likely to be his greatest hit ever, Battle of Britain, for last, having created a vast pre-order market for it in advance. A shining example of how to run a software company.

SH III really does seem to be shaping up to be a classic game and they have at last taken onboard the widespread observation that the ocean combat simulators lag far behind flight sims. Finally realising perhaps, that the small market used to justify a lack of advanced progress especially in 3D graphics, has mainly been the result of that very lag in graphics! Now that we have incredibly realistic FPS like Call of Duty out there, every combat simulator gamer now expects and requires maximum immerison through surround sound, real world weather and top-quality 3D graphics. Any gaming genre failing to provide these now, will inevitably fail to create a profiatable scale of market.

Best of all it appears that they are building SH III with a quasi-open architecture to encourage the community to create add-ons, MODs and expansions, which is definitely the way to go. We are also going to get crewed decks, guns fired by animated gun crews and at least three modes of weather. It is still unclear however if they are going to have true dynamic weather, or just three "fixed modes". My dream of course is for the ocean going equivalent of the dynamic real-world weather in MS FS9 A Century of Flight, updated every 15 minutes from a satellite feed. I fear it will be a long time before we can have that however - of the maritime world would already be using such a feature on every ship's bridge on earth! It has to come eventually, if only for its commercial utility as a navigation aid. (In some ways there already IS something like that one every ship's bridge, but it lacks the 3D gamer's realism and is purely a map-style "look-down" display.)

But STILL no seagulls! LOL They obviously didn't thinkwe meant it chaps!Yet as a seaman I can assure them that wheeling seagulls are an excellent navigational indicator of the proximity of land and/or the presence of a vessel's dumped trash in the water. An important clue in anti-submarine warfare. Also although a tiny, land proximity or trash dumping activated seagul algorithm wouldn't add too much code, it would hugely enhance atmosphere, immerison and realism. It is often just such tiny illusive features that make a good sim addictively good and an excellent one truly great and a work of art.

Let's hope that they also have the courage and forsite to have an equally updated and modernised version of Destroyer Command in the pipeline, as their dual-game-online environment was an excellent and radical gaming concept, marred only by out-of-date semi-DOS style component games. But the new SH III will create just the "wave" of enthusiasm to demand a New Destroyer Command too and make the dual-game online concept leap back into vibrant life. Dammit I'll even write them a free promotional puff to that effect if it'll get that plan back on the table! A great Destroyer sim with gun crews running about on deck, manning AA guns, 3D crew and all the rest of it would be just as appealing to gamers as SH III looks as if it is going to be. Destroyer command was a failure because its graphics were so DULL and (as with SH II) one felt entirely alone on a deserted vessel in an empty ocean with deserted enemy vessels too, so that one felt really cheated after having believed the marketing blurb on the cover!

Currently as far as I can gather from reading the review updates, the online game takes two forms, both against an AI enemy with one allowing a wolf-pack style collaboration. However I cannot, on the face of it, see much real difference between being a solo sub playing an AI enemy online or in the single player game. So, other than the fact that there may be other subs around too, why would one go online to play that style of game?

Hopefully their marketing people will realise that a game's true success depends hugely on its appeal to the online community, who are in the end, the biggest consistent game buying group. Appealing to the online community means giving them a variety of game types or modes and enabling complex game play within the server bandwidth available. But above all it means devising a way that human beings can compete with each other online, rather than only with AI enemies.

With flight sims that means different maps and co-op play as an alternative mode. With an ocean sim it would have to mean different climate modes (including the three they have already in view) and sea states and weather options like a very stormy sea, hail, rain, snow, ice, calm, strong currents, a tidal coastal area with changing depths, minefields, coastal targets such as enemy vessels in harbour etc. The variations are actually as unlimited as with flight or FPS infantry combat sims and just as those market's developers have already discoverd, the best source is real historical battles, at sea, in harbour, or on the coast. Maybe they even have to think about Allied Submarines as the enemy, thus permiting far more exciting online combat.

Here's a radical thought - instead of Destroyer Command as the second game in a dual-game online scenario, how about later adding German surface vessels to SH III and producing a second game of the equivalent ALLIED vessels, including Allied submarines. THAT would create a really engrossing online WW2 ocean combat world that might just grow and grow into a whole new market!

Personally (you heard it here first folks) I am certain that a time will come, both in TV soaps and online combat games, when all the different modes will start to converge on a single online mmultiplayer environment. Policemen and stories from the Bill will start overlapping into plots and episodes of Eastenders, fighter pilots from IL2 Battle of Britain will escort merchant ships and Destroyers from SH III & Destroyer Command II, whose players will also pilot landing craft to land Call of Duty combat troops on the beaches, who will then fight their way inland with support from tank simmers driving Shermans against other simmers in Panzers! Cyberspace is infinite, the creativity is there and only bandwidth and hardware are limited. A limitation that has a whole global industry struggling to transcend it ASAP.

It is my belief that eventually, if only for purely creative, marketing and commercial reasons, the virtual world of both gaming and TV will merge to become an interrgated, immersive, interactive, multi-user, multi-player environment, accessible to all who have a combined, wide screen, ultra-high definition PC/TV. (The next big family hardware item.) Science fiction? I don't think so! Hell we only just had the 100th anniversary of flight as a probe is launched to Mercury and think what has happened in online computer gaming since 1980? This is a prime arena in which to observe what Alvin Tofler called "Future Shock" actually happening to us.

Battlefield 1942 was a brave early attempt at a version of this idea, but it was a semi-arcade game and none of its component combat modes even remotely approached the realism of current stand alone sims. But if Multiplayer sims were written with all the necessary tags and code to hook into a compound environment, just as Destroyer Command and SH II were, THEN the individual components could remain top quality. Companies who did this first could establish a standard linking code-style or protocol to suit themselves and be in at the ground floor of the "next big thing" in gaming. A marketing opportunity if ever I saw one. (Anybody out there want to offer me a job in creative marketing? Seriously - highly PC literate creative genius touting for hire and all too available!)

As always, all it takes is bandwidth, more RAM and (even) faster processors - ALL of which are relentlessly developing. The Pentagon's investment in America's Army Online shows that even the global military have grasped the fact that gaming drives, fuels and accelerates PC development, as well as being the greatest recruiting tool in the history of combat. As in the real world with real warfare, nothing accelerates technical development like simulating interactive real war online. It is also incidentally by far the best, safest, non-lethal environment in which to practise for real war and develop tactics against guerrila enemies and terrorism. This applies as much to ocean combat as to land warfare and aeriel combat. In fact I think we are going to see simulation of every kind playing a greater and greater role in all areas of our society, culture, recreation, medical, educational, security, safety and other services.

[Lionman]

reposted the same thing in error. DUH

[Sailor Steve]

Part of the reason for the delay in SHIII and the addition of a dynamic campaign was a near riot over at UBI's own forums when they announced their original campaign system. People in large numbers threatened not to buy it. They then conducted their own poll, after which they announced the delay so they could implement a dynamic campaign, and add some other goodies.

The powers-that-be at UBIsoft agreed to postpone release of the game, and the dev team have since conducted two online chats to answer questions about game features.

I've gone from hesitant hope to being downright excited about this thing. They seem to really want to please the hardcore sim crowd this time, and have hinted at further U.S. sub and surface warfare sims should SHIII do well enough.