| Title | Silent Hunter III: it's 1940, do you know where your DJ18 is? |
| Author | Marcin |
| Posted in | Game diaries |
| When | April 5, 2011 |
For the next five days, I'll be playing Silent Hunter III with the Grey Wolves mod, which fixes lots of bugs from the original game and tweaks tons of environmental values, ranging from visibility and detection ranges in low light to crew fatigue factors..
Read the full articleWas playing this a few months ago, really love the game. And the GW mod is fantastic.
This may just be the push I needed to get back into the game. I'll be sure to check out the mod right away.
Woot! SH3! Will be reading. :)
It's good you're napping now, because (as you know) it gets awfully hard to sleep with destroyers pinging your hull. ;)
Hurray! I fired up SH3 again not too long ago after a failed outing with SHV, eventually dying on a port incursion. It'll be fun to watch someone else go swimming in the Atlantic ;)
Hmm, maybe I should try this. Or, should I try one of the newer Silent Hunter games first? I've never played a sub sim, though I've always loved the history of the Battle of the Atlantic. What's a good one to start on?
Is there a mod like this one for SH IV or V? Or is III considered the best?
Great column, btw. Will be reading.
That's actually a good question, J.A. I'd be curious to hear why Marcin didn't pick one of the newer games. Silent Hunter 4 is a Pacific theater sim, and that has a different appeal than the battle of the Atlantic, so maybe that's a factor. But I suspect one of the advantages of SH3 over SH5, another Atlantic theater game, is the availability of mods like Grey Wolves.
The first few paragraphs describe perfectly why I play with unlimited fuel on. If they can't be bothered to model how the actual captains got fuel, I'm not going to bother with keeping track of it.
Oh, and what about this SH3 "Commander" mod (?) the Grey Wolves site talks about? Is that a thing worth having?
Thanks for the kind words. Now, some answers...
@thebigJ_A : Silent Hunter IV takes place in the Pacific theatre as Tom mentioned; as such, it's of much less relevance to me (I'm from Poland) than U-Boats. Second, the Pacific is just so huge! The first part of the outward trip there is longer than even this unusual setup, and you have to do it every time. However if that floats your boat, you'll want either Trigger Maru or Real Fleet Boat for your "complete mod overhaul" pleasure there. Silent Hunter V is a bug-riddled mess that can't even save the game properly, much less have a decent mod community around it yet.
@Hawkeye: there's a reason for this unusual request from HQ. Stay tuned!
@thebigJ_A: SH3 Commander is a launcher utility that manages your captains (if you're playing more than one campaign at a time), keeps track of your patrols outside the game, and gives you access to a few more realism settings such as removing fatigue (which is a bit flawed in SH3). It's not mandatory, but I'd recommend it.
I spent a bit of time inside the USS Drum in Alabama last year. It's really beyond me why anyone would want to go to war in a soda can like that. Those things are like sailing coffins.
Silent Hunter has always been a story of "close, but not quite" for me. Maybe Grey Wolves will change all that.
The crippling bugs and the basic design flaws as already mentioned, makes it one of those Total War style "I love it, but it hurts me so" stories for me. I miss the days of approachable SSBM sims. Red Storm, where art thou.
I spent a bit of time inside the USS Drum in Alabama last year. It's really beyond me why anyone would want to go to war in a soda can like that. Those things are like sailing coffins.
Silent Hunter has always been a story of "close, but not quite" for me. Maybe Grey Wolves will change all that.
The crippling bugs and the basic design flaws as already mentioned, makes it one of those Total War style "I love it, but it hurts me so" stories for me. I miss the days of approachable SSBM sims. Red Storm, where art thou.
Also, Marcin, how did you make it work on Windows 7? Any chance of pulling it off for a Steam user?
I'm running Win7 64-bit, and the Steam version worked out of the box. The GWX mod installed itself just fine, too, as long as you pointed it to your steamapps/silenthunteriii folder.
Where I ran into problems was the widescreen mod but I eventually got it working - however it does absolutely not play well with any screen capturing apps. Raptor and other overlays might cause problems too, so I'd disable those first if you're having issues.
Thanks for getting back to me Marcin.
I simply can't figure it out. I've installed and reinstalled the game, tried every fix, but I still get 3d engine can not start or whatever that message says. Got Win 7 x64, Geforce 560 Ti (might be the culprit) and no matter what I pick up on the SH forums or the Steam forums, nothing helps. Not fair.
@DSB: Argh, I had that same problem! I wish I could remember what the solution was. Did you try the resolution or refresh rate changes? Or windowed, or widescreen mode via the widescreen mod?
I finally got it working!
It's a very embarressing story about how Windows 7 remembers the settings for all deleted files, so when I reinstall, it's still trying to run them in compatability, which Steam is not very fond of. Won't try to change the resolution for a while, I've had all the tech headache I can stand.
Humiliated or not, I'm hunting the great grey beasts of the sea!
@DSB: Great to hear!
And I hear you about giving up for a while. Usually when I get Grey Wolves and widescreen working I am done. No more mods or any other tweaks - too much effort.