Resolution question
 

I was playing a lot SH4 in the last year, starting from v.1.4, now with TMO 2.5, and RSRDC mods installed, and the forum discussions help me a lot in improving my manual targeting skills. I intend to play at full realism a new campaign, and I have one question, should the resolution in the game be set up at the same level as my TV 1920x1080, or should be different?
It seems that the visibility in the periscopes/TBT, during night it's not so good, even in case of clear sky and no fog.
Or should I install OTC 1.5 mod to have better visibility?
This is my first post, so thanks for your help in advance.

I'm sorry I'm not in a position to help with your questions. I just wanted to be the first to welcom you to Subsim. :sunny:

A possible answer
 

It seems to me, when choosing a screen resolution for the game, whichever one you choose should not distort the image on your screen. My monitor doesn't do a good job with 1920x1080, aspect ratio 16:9, for SH4. The dials and ships always look a bit "squashed", meaning the ships look shorter than they actually are, and the dials all look a bit like eggs, rather than properly circular. I found that at an 8:5 aspect ratio, resolution 1680x1050, my monitor displays everything properly, so that's what I use. OTC is a fine piece of work, and I have used it over TMO. CapnScurvy has done an amazing amount of work to fix problems with accuracy in the game caused by the rather careless work of the devs. I however found that for my own tastes, playing TMO/OTC changed TMO in ways that I missed, so I'm currently back to just TMO, though I do wish I could incorporate the aspect ratio fixes that CapnScurvy made into TMO itself.

As far as TMO/OTC, I think you will find the scopes/TBT to be much easier to use in low light conditions, as the darkness of the attack scope is not there like it is in plain TMO. A bit of a long way to your answer, but I believe it should be "yes."

Welcome aboard! :salute:

You are using v1.5 with TMO, right? TMO 2.5 requires SH4 v1.5.

Redmane answered much better than I am able, so I'll just welcome you to Subsim.

Welcome aboard! :salute:

Now quit fooling around and get that radar screen fixed.

As far as TMO/OTC, I think you will find the scopes/TBT to be much easier to use in low light conditions, as the darkness of the attack scope is not there like it is in plain TMO. A bit of a long way to your answer, but I believe it should be "yes."[/QUOTE]

Thank you for your help.
I tried to download OTC mod from Downloads, but it seems that the WINRAR file has some problems, I can not extract the files, some file has some issues.

Yes, the following mods installed:

TMO 2.5;
RSRDC_TMO_V502;
RSRDC_V5xx_Patch1;

That's the resolution I use (1920x1080) and have noted a very slight "squashed" look as you noted. Have you any data which supports that look effects your range calculations during manual targeting or anything else for that matter?

Personally, I have not compared my periscope observation with my sonar/navigation map yardage to see how much if any the periscope obs are off. I may check that out this weekend. Thanks.

Well, I don't think the "squashing" of the image on your display will cause any problems with accuracy regarding range or anything like that. So far as I'm aware, its simply an aesthetic preference whether or not you choose to keep the setting as is or use one that won't produce a distortion of the image. One of the things that caused me to look for an aspect ratio my monitor would properly display was the fact that I always use the tool helpers on my nav map for plotting, and the compass that shows up for your ruler tool could be difficult to read and accurately use due to the distortion. Other than that, I cant think of why a stadimeter range or even a telemeter estimate of range would be off, since the distortion is uniform and applies only to the display of the image, not to the actual dimensions of things observed.

I have had some problems getting winrar to cooperate at times, and finally figured out that if I used the wizard rather than the "extract to" option it worked just fine. Try the wizard and see if it works. It will likely unzip to a folder on your desktop, but you will easily be able to find it, at any rate. Also, try running a test on the rar file if you haven't done so already. If you have tested it and found a problem, you may have a corrupted download. You may try to download the file again, but disable any antivirus software you may have running in the background first. I've seen posts by some people stating that doing so allowed for a clean download on the second try.