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Silent Hunter III
Developer	Ubisoft Romania
Publisher	Ubisoft
Released	March 15, 2005
Genre	Simulation game
Mode(s)	Single player, multiplayer
Ratings	ESRB: Teen (T)
Platform(s)	PC
Media	DVD-ROM

Silent Hunter III is a submarine simulation developed by Ubisoft Romania and published by Ubisoft. It was released for the PC on March 15, 2005. Like Silent Hunter II, it places the player in command of a German U-Boat during World War II and the Second Battle of the Atlantic. It sought to address many of the complaints leveled against its predecessor, specifically the lack of a dynamic campaign. The game was critically praised, receiving a score of 8.8 out of 10 from IGN, an 8.9 out of 10 ("Great") from GameSpot, as well as a 5 out of 5 by GameSpy, and 100% by Subsim.com.

Silent Hunter III features a fully dynamic campaign. Instead of giving the player a specific set of objectives for each mission, Silent Hunter III simply assigns the player a certain patrol grid, and appropriate naval traffic, such as convoys, destroyer escorts, and task forces are automatically generated by the simulation engine. How the mission proceeds and what targets are attacked is left totally up to the player. In addition to being a more accurate representation of WWII U-Boat warfare, the dynamic campaign significantly improved the game's replay value, as the campaign would play out differently each time.

A stated goal of the developer was to fully immerse the player. The game featured a fully 3D U-Boat control room, allowing the player the freedom to move about the interior of the submarine. Unlike other submarine simulations, where the crew is often heard but not seen, Silent Hunter III allows the player to see and interact with crewmembers. The game also tracks the stats of individual crewmembers, such as rank, experience, morale, and decorations, between missions.

Players can upgrade their U-boat's anti-aircraft gun(s), deck gun, diesel engines, batteries, radar, and sonar, and install special features such as a radar detector and anti-radar and -sonar coatings. Many different enemy vessels and aircraft are included.

While the dynamic campaign goes a long way to addressing the criticisms of the former Silent Hunter title, some gameplay issues still remain such as destroyers/escorts depth-charging at slow speeds, which in real life would normally result in critical damage to the destroyer. The Starforce copyright protection used for Silent Hunter III has also been criticized for installing incompatible device drivers.

The stock version of the game (often referred to as "vanilla SH3" by players) includes the following playable U-boats. The player enters the war with only a limited choice of U-boats if he choses to start in 1939. However, the types of U-boat available to the player can vary greatly depending on the year during which the player wants to start his career in. To transfer to another U-boat, the player has to spend "renown" (points awarded to the player everytime he completes a patrol). U-boat costs can vary from 500 to 30 000 points depending on the type of U-boat he choses.

• Type II A & D Variants
• Type VII B, C, C/41 & C/42 Variants
• Type IX B, C, C/40 & D2 Variants
• Type XXI

See Main Article: U-boat

SH3 has been patched several times by the developers since its release date with most issues having been addressed. The current version is v1.4b.

The simulation has been extensively modified after release, with thousands of improvements and features added by various users of the game. The first major free mod for the game included a large number of individual mods - this was the Real U-boat mod which was released by the SH3 Mod Team. This mod was featured in the July 2005 edition of Computer Games magazine. A later mod named "The Grey Wolves Expansion" is over 700mb in size. These Expansions fix many many bugs which are actually not fixed by the "official" patch. There are also some bugs which could not be removed by the mods. For Example the "Conning Tower of Doom" bug which appears when you are using type IX D2 boat and saving the game submerged. When you reload the game all of your crew dies one by one trying to "man the conning tower" as if you were on the ocean's surface, even though you are submerged.

RUb, GWX, Generic Mod Enabler and SH3 Commander are called "must have" addons among the users. RUb can be downloaded from http://www.beerymod.com/sh3.htm SH3 Commander and Generic Mod Enabler can be obtained from: http://www.users.on.net/~jscones/software/products.html while GWX addon can be downloaded from http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=102096

• Silent Hunter, released in 1996.
• Silent Hunter II, released in 2001.
• Silent Hunter 4 released in spring 2007

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Silent_Hunter_III

• Official Site
• SubSim.com A site dedicated to naval simulations
• ubi.com Silent Hunter forums
• SubSim Silent Hunter 3 forum
• Silent Hunter III Community Manual