StarDestroyer.Net BBS

...Everything looks as if hastily put together at the last minute, without any betatesting or quality control...

Ubisoft should not have published the game in this state. According to our opinion, at least half a year of quality control and optimization done by more competent programmers would be necessary, to have this game even start to resemble anything approaching "fun".

Thanas wrote: - Torpedo aiming AI does not work, one has to manually aim torpedoes. Uuh....hooray for betatesting? The most important feature does not work?

Thanas wrote:- The first patch fixes that by forcing players to enter the speed manually. Yeah, I guess every player had a course in how to judge the enemy ships speed.

Thanas wrote:It is not that difficult, but completely impractical in convoy attacks to use that tactic - also, one should not have to do so in the first place.

I always edited my SH4 game files, so that "Start outside harbor" actually had me start past midway island -- great time saver.

Bounty wrote:How do you do that?

How to start near your patrol location like in SH1!

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Okay, if you want to start near your patrol location, like you did in SH4, some editing is required.

Go into:

\Data\UPCData\UPCCampaignData

and open up Flotillas.upc

(don't worry, it's just a TXT file renamed differently)

You'll see some stuff; but what you want to look for is:

DepartureDescriptionOut1

Replace the value for that flotilla's DepartureDescriptionOut1 in there with:

16887670, 2520495, 236 - A little bit south of Iwo Jima

And when you start the game and pick "start outside harbor"; you will end up south of Iwo.

Please note that you have to repeat this for each flotilla base;

[Flotilla 1.Base 1]
ID= PearlHarbor

[Flotilla 2.Base 1]
ID= Manila

;[Flotilla 2.Base 2]
;ID= Corregidor

so on so on etc. Some more work is needed to find good patrol start points for non Pearl Harbor based boats; but this is a start.

Oh yes, you'll start with 100% fuel, unlike SH1, in which you had like 50% fuel....so just impose a self restriction, that you can only take your fuel down to what 60% or so.

CaptHawkeye wrote:Man, is it a testament to the current status of the sim genre that the only major naval sim being released is a buggy, broken, unplayable mess?

I predict someone will slash through the word "naval" in a future quote of this post.

As for the sim genre; arent't they still developing new game variants based on the Il-2 Sturmovik engine? At least the console version is fairly recent.

Earlier tonight i played some SH5. Found a huge 32 ship taskforce and attacked it. Went rather terrible.. Managed to cripple 2 ships. They started burning alot, so im confused they werent destroyed in the first place. (If those kind of fires were present on any real life ship, the sailors would get the hell off it. and fast). Anyway, i apparently destroyed the engine on one of those ships. So i observed it and happily waited for the rest of the convoy to leave their friends behind for shark food. Once it seemed safe i got up, sunk the ship with the deck gun, since i was fresh outta eels. After that i gave myself a pat on the back and set up a nice route to head home for some sauerkraut.

Sometime during this journey i was ordered by my "captain" to join her in the sofa for some TV. So i saved the game and were fed some junk TV instead.

Now later i decided to pop in to just sail home and start my second patrol. I Load the save, and was surprised to see it rather far down the list, and sure enough, the save was old. Altho the timestamp said othewise. I got mad, and reloaded another auto save, which, luckily enough was at a point where i was waiting for the convoy to move away from the crippled ship. Hooray!.. Altho, when i peered thru the periscope that ship was not burning anymore. and was happily trying to catch up with their friends..

And all i could do was to laugh. and get angry.

My theory is as follows:
To reduce the file size of the save games, because they are transferred to the stupid UBI servers. Minimal info is saved.

The reason i had to load that save is also because somewhere my real save game disappeared, which is UBI's servers fault.

If i hadn't bought the game digitally, i would have thrown this piece of crap out the window.. I had some hope for this game, but all the bugs and other gameplay issues. And recently the DRM servers not working and even savegames vanishing from the face of the earth have finally gotten me fed up...

Needed to vent some anger and frustration, and i shall stop now before i end up typing stupid things about the devs and such..

You can turn online saves OFF.

but i doubt this would make any differance since :-

This is an old save bug.... present from SH3... so i would say the rules for saving would be the same advice from SH3....

DO NOT SAVE
when submerged.
when within 50km of a ship.
when within 50km of a harbour.
When within 50km of a sunk ship.

But Ubi have made the bug issue worse with this online saves.

*Edited to add more info.*

Unfortunatly, you cant blame DRM on this one. Here's a tidbit that i just assume is common knowledge because it's the same behavior in SH3, and SH4.

The game keeps track if basic info. Speed, heading, position, ship type, stuff its equped with, etc. It does NOT keep track of things like damage incurred, shells expended, things of that nature.

What this means, is that in SH3, Sh4, and Sh5, when you damage a ship, you MUST follow through. The damage incurred, shells it expended, etc, is only kept track of while the ship is within 30KM of your own. ( At least i think its 30KM). After a ship gets away from you, and has exceeded 30KM distance, it is no longer rendered. So all temporary information is reset. After that, the game ony keeps track of basic information again, and does not render the ship until it is within 30KM. It does this to save system resources. (consider how many convoys and single ships the game is simultaniously tracking).

So as an example, you can create a single mission where a convoy of Allied battle ships are traveling in a 60KM circular route, but passing some stationary axis battleships. As the allied task force goes by, it will incurr damage, and use its shells firing its guns. Sit there and wait for it to come back, and it will be fully restored to prestine condition because it exceeded 30KM distance. The game stopped rendering it, and when it started to render it again as it came closer, it called upon the data files for the specifications of what to render.

This is what your encountering when you reload a saved game where you know you damaged a ship. The damage is not tracked. Its temporary data not written to file. So the moral of he story is, if you damage a ship and you really want to sink it, DO so before it gets too far away from you, or before you decided to save the game and quit.

Thanas wrote:It is not that difficult, but completely impractical in convoy attacks to use that tactic - also, one should not have to do so in the first place.

MKSheppard wrote:I always liked playing SH3 in hardcore mode, but with weapons officer assistance turned on -- it actually increased the immerson of the game -- I could just ask my crew to do things, while I concentrated on the best method to get into the convoy, rather than juggling torpedo firing angles...

MKSheppard wrote:I always liked playing SH3 in hardcore mode, but with weapons officer assistance turned on -- it actually increased the immerson of the game -- I could just ask my crew to do things, while I concentrated on the best method to get into the convoy, rather than juggling torpedo firing angles...

PeZook wrote:but in a pitched battle, there was simply no time to run around computing firing solutions.

But for hardcore retard fanatic brigade, the fact that goddamned Otto Kretschmer delegated responsiblity is not a good enough reason to have weapon officer assistance

MKSheppard wrote: Well, in a pitched battle; ranges were close enough that an experienced captain could simply eyeball ships (remember, the flat screen of a computer monitor takes away a lot of dimensional data we're used to) through experience and just fire off the cuff.

MKSheppard wrote:My biggest beef with them is the way they try to remove any and all markings of ships on the automatic map -- in many of their mods. I simply delete the files that replace the stock ship icons with blank files, and go on my way; because in real life, Silent Otto would be calling out ship ranges and bearings, and a Lieutenant would be marking them up on the map.

PeZook wrote:SH3 play feels more like sniping, when IRL u-boat commander would often fire spreads at convoys or even single ships, because it's not always possible to ascertain range and bearing with the necessary precision, and of course ships don't zig-zag in a standardized manner.

MKSheppard wrote: You do know you can fire spreads automatically in SH3? Just set how many torpedoes you want to fire in a spread, and the angles between each individual torpedo; and then push the LOS button?

Julhelm wrote:I don't get that mindset either from the 'lol realism' crowd. I liked it much better in say, Red Storm Rising where even the sonar and TMA are automated because the game assumes you have a decent crew who actually take care of these things for you, letting you concentrate on the fight. It's for the same reason Dangerous Waters is nigh unplayable for me.