1. Please describe yourself and your position at Ubisoft and at Silent Hunter 4.

I am working for Ubisoft from 1997, so I accumulated many years in this meaningful domain which is video games. My position on Silent Hunter 4 was as a producer and I have the same position in Ubisoft, currently I was assigned as producer for another project which will be developed entirely here in Romania as Silent Hunter 4.

2. Which is the budget for SH4? How many team members worked for SH3 and SH4?

As you maybe already imagine any information about budget is confidential. Regarding the team members involved in SH3 and SH4 I can tell you that were around 25 people in each of the two projects (excluding the test teams - around 30 people / project).

3. Which were the sources of inspiration for SH4?

At the base of any good simulation game is hundreds and thousands of hours of research from history books, ships plans, technical books, documentaries, movies, etc. The hard part was to find and put together in the game the historical accurate technical details with recreating the feeling and atmosphere on board of US submarines and Pacific Theater in general.

4. What should a fan get from SH4? What about a hardcore gamer?

The simulation game quality players appreciated so much in Silent Hunter 3, in a different context - Pacific theater of war, with different factions - US submarines against Imperial Japanese Fleet, with a better dynamic campaign - a large new variety of missions (spy insertions, photo recons, commandos drop, life guard duty, etc), take part in major naval battles (Battle of Midway, Battle of Coral Sea, etc) and island invasions (Philippines invasion, etc), a streamline interface and better graphics.

5. What are the differences between SH3 and SH4?

The main difference is that the war takes place on the Pacific theater of war which means different submarines (German submarines where smaller vessels made to perform individually, while US subs where fleet boats made to operate at long distances and to support the main surface fleet), weapons and sensors (US torpedoes had different characteristics like range and speed, radars where used earlier in war), different doctrine (US submarines perform a large variety of missions from classis merchant hunt to spy and commando infiltration missions, photo recon missions and life guard duty. Above all changes made for to the new theater of war, we redesigned the interface - much easier to use and customize and add a totally new multiplayer mode - convoy commander - where one player controls a convoy against human control submarines.

6. What changes have been made regarding the UI in SH4?

We made the new interface based around the stations on board the submarines, so instead of spreading the orders among officers and crew, we group them around stations. This should allow players to control the submarine easier and faster. Also we design the interface in such way, that fans can make new mods and skins very easy.

7. Will the crew management remain the same as in SH3 or will it suffer modifications?

The crew management while using the same principles from SH3 like efficiency, morale and fatigue and same compartment structure will have major improvements like watch system (automatically shifts where some crew sails the ship while the other is off-duty resting or sleeping), chain of command (sailors are affected by compartment leaders, and active watch is lead by officers) and individual abilities and skills for crew (while advancing in rank crew will gain unique abilities).

Is hard to be 100% realistic, but definitely Silent Hunter 4 will have the most accurate modeled ships ever seen in a computer game. On top of that player will be able to destroy with deck gun parts of ship structure like masts, funnels, Command Bridge, weapons, etc or make holes in the ship's hull.

9. What are the differences regarding the difficulty settings of the game?

The difficulty settings in Silent Hunter allow player to change the game from a simulation game, where you need to manually compute the torpedo solution, your weapons have higher malfunction rate, etc to an easy click-and-shoot game where solution is automatically computed and weapons are easier to control. The great thing about settings is that player can gradually increase the campaign difficulty by turning on various setting from weapons and sensors behavior, to unlimited fuel and camera control.

There are a lot of Graphic improvements on Silent Hunter 4, all vehicle from the game were slightly improved, have more polygons and textures have a better quality. Also on Patch 1.2 we implemented the Anti aliasing and players can now play in any resolution and textures will be resized automatically on resolution settled. We changed the animation system, now we are using a bone animation system and characters are locking more natural.

Also we are using perception filtering, we have volumetric fog, detailed 3D ship wake, transparency of the water, realistic foam for wake ship and many other features that are mentioned here but surely will be discovered by the player during the game play.

What I can tell you is that we have a very talented graphic team so that even if we make mistakes we have enough ‘soul power' to start again some assets and redone the necessary elements. We are always ready for this situation because we know that sometimes the implementations and the ideas evolve together with our project.

The sound suffered some major improvements comparing with SH3. We greatly improved the memory usage and we also limited the number of concurrent playing sounds (configurable through an option in the game).

Both have a major impact on game performance.

Another major improvement is the "Realistic Sound Travel Time" option. In real life, if a ship is at 1 km from you and it fires its cannons, you will first see the light and smoke and only after around 3 seconds you will hear the sound.

On all the games out there (at least the ones we know ofJ) and on all the movies this "real life option" is not implemented. Actually, it doesn't matter the distance, the sound is heard all the time...

When activating this option in our game the sound will travel some time until it reaches you! This means that the sound simulation is event greater, meaning that you will first see the shot and after a while the sound will reach you.

12. What can we expect in the future from the SH license?

Always developers are thinking for a sequel in any title, I cannot say anything about our future projects on this moment but I can tell that our goal on the next Title of this license will meet all fans expectation about naval simulation games.

13. Any final words?

I hope that all players will enjoy the game where the environment looks fantastic and all vehicles form the game have an incredible amounts of details.

In the end I would like to say that Silent Hunter III was a gorgeous game and we hope that Silent Hunter 4 will meet the fans expectations and will be highly appreciated by the public and media.