Old-timer resurfacing with mod questions!

[VikingGrandad]

One thing leads to another...
(for anyone who may remember me from the old days and wondering why I've suddenly re-surfaced)

I stumbled upon the very promising "Uboot" project on Kickstarter a few months ago and gave them my support... But it's not due out until next year, and the anticipation has also got me reminiscing about the good old days of playing SH3. I hadn't been out on a patrol for 5-6 years!

So I purchased SH3 on Steam the other day (can't find my old Ubi CD...), figured out how to install GWX3 on a Steam installation, tweaked a few things to make the game run full-screen without crashing, installed SH3 Commander, and prepared to set sail across the Bay of Biscay once more!

Well, I must admit I couldn't even remember how to get the damn boat moving to start with... But it didn't take long for things to start feeling instinctive again and I felt pretty much in command of U-94 by the end of my first patrol. Even remembered my tried and trusted torpedo settings! Now completed 2 patrols, and sank 3-4 lone merchants on each. Very chuffed!

And so, inevitably, I find myself at the Subsim SH3 forums, amazed (and very pleased) to see how active the SH3 community continues to be, and wondering what I've missed out on over the last 5 years or so!

I've been looking at the SHII Mods Workshop forum, and it seems there's a lot of new, exciting toys to play with!

'SH3 Front-End' and 'Living SH3' both caught my eye as very promising new additions that have emerged during my absence. I'm sure there are plenty of other great new mods that I haven't seen yet.


SH3 Mod Questions...

1. I'm curious to know about these mods/patches included with 'SH3 Front-End':

• 4GB patch?
• H.Sie patch?
• S3S / S3K?
• Steam Fix? (I've managed to get SH3+GWX3+SH3C working without this - but do I still need it?)
• I'm familiar with the other features in 'SH3 Front-End', such as JSGME - but what are "JSGMEMV" and "JSGME4S3C"?

Sorry if I missed an obvious link to the descriptions of these items... I did try using the forum's search tool to look for these terms in the "SHIII Mods Workshop" sub-forum, but I got either no results or hundreds of results mentioning these terms but not one obvious release thread describing what they do!


2. Is there a widescreen mod that works at 1680x1050 resolution with no stretching or other problems?
I'm currently running SH3 at 1400x1050 with Anti-aliasing etc. set in the Nvidia control panel. This works quite well but of course using this 4:3 resolution on a wide-screen gives me black bands either side of the game area. It would be great if there's a hi-res widescreen mod that will work with my gfx card (Nvidia GTX 750 Ti) and monitor's native resolution (1680x1050). I use Windows 7 64-bit.


3. Did anyone ever find a way to force the lazy WO to go back to his station on the conning tower when surfacing?
This little problem is so annoying! I dive and surface repeatedly while using Time Compression, so I need the WO on deck instantly to tell me if there's any aircraft when we surface!

4. Is modded SH3 more fun than modded SH5?...?
I expect there's no easy answer. I've never played SH5, and have only ever heard negative things about it. But I notice that there's a lot of SH5 mods available, so I'm curious to know how it compares to SH3. Perhaps the key question for me: Is modded SH5 as immersive as modded SH3?