This thread is an "evacuated rework" of what had already been posted on the SuSi-whiners-forum. In the meantime they have deleted all of my posts there, so make up your mind whether you should deny us the dimes and always throw money over there.
In several discussions throughout the years diverse bug-descriptions have been discussed, some of which were very vague, ranging from "Early war I had to travel to west-UK and had a CTD nearby Norway" to "Upon loading a savegame and using SH3 Weather my sub would instantly crash dive to 1000m and hit "bottom". It would do it super fast, faster than ahead flank in full dive."
Hard to describe, hard to reproduce, hard to fix, and the author of S3W has never answered, so we more and more came to the conclusion to avoid that program altogether. What added to the problem was that many bug-reports were written by complete idiots who could not even write their mother-language properly, very often absolute nonsense comparable to "My car failed to run. Burnt it. Problem gone".
About the time we finally got frustrated enough to ditch it, H.sie and Stiebler both came out with their weather fixes, so many of us started using those and moved on and have not seen the problem since.
STIEBLER once wrote the best explanation in one of my threads over @ SuSi, here is what I was able to evacuate from there:
How the weather fixes work:
The original problem.
The devs have acknowledged that they made a coding error in the original SH3 weather. This causes the increasing number of storms and high winds - 'stormy gales', with low visibility and winds at 15 m/s. The bug was that wind speed could go up and down, and could in fact go up to 29 m/s under some circumstances. The devs 'cured' this bug simply by reducing any wind value above 15 m/s down to 15 m/s, so wind speed might be wandering up and down - unseen - from 15-29 m/s for extended periods. All the user saw was a constant 15 m/s. It was the high winds that brought 'fog' and 'precipitations' which could last sometimes for many weeks.
1. SH3 Weather - NOT RECOMMENDED
From memory, it alters the campaign_LND/SCR/RND.mis headers. These have little effect except for a few days after you depart on patrol. It certainly doesn't fix the code problem.
2. Stiebler's EnvSimAct - RECOMMENDED, D/L to follow
This is a hard-code fix for the dev's code-bug that works in a rather blunt manner. (Reduces wind velocity whenever it exceeds 15 m/s by subtracting 15m/s from current wind strength.) A second control is a forced end to any surviving storms after 4 days. This second code is checked every two days or so.
Another coding error, discovered by SubType Zero, see below, is that the time of checking seems to increase by 1 hour every day at sea. The result is that the 'two-day check' becomes delayed longer and longer.
Moreover, although the 'stormy gales' get hard-stopped after 4 days, the weather program can, and sometimes does, start them up again.
The advantage of this envsim.act is that it can be installed by anybody, at any time, without needing to make any other changes.
3. H.sie's V16B1 - where "Weather Fix - Yoriyn Edition" is/was included. - RECOMMENDED, very easy to install using S3F
This is the second of the hard-code fixes, with its own envsim.act file that cannot be used independently. I don't know what the Yoriyn Edition is, but H.sie's weather fix is called every second or so to check if a 'stormy gale' exists, and simply changes the weather randomly as soon as the player's time condition to end 'stormy gales' is met.
This is extremely effective, although 'random' means you may get 'stormy gales' reinstated as soon as the code stops the existing 'stormy gales'.
It requires that H.sie's V16B1 hard-code fix is installed. I would recommend this hard-code fix very strongly anyway (and the Stiebler4B_V16B1_Revised hard-code overlay), but some people have difficulty with the installation.
4. RealWeatherFix2. - unassessed because I have no D/L
This was created jointly by Stiebler and SubType Zero. It altered the scene.dat file to provide new weather parameters that, we felt after long trials, gave superior weather.
This fix gave improved results over any previous method, but has been superceded by the code fixes now.
Summary:
If you don't want to apply the H.sie V16B1 hard-code fix, use the Stiebler envsim.act replacement to improve the weather.
Otherwise, with H.sie V16B1 hard-code fix installed,
you can use either H.sie's envsim.act fix, or the Stiebler envsim.act fix. (If you overlay the Stiebler envsim.act file onto H.sie's envsim.act, you must use the 'Options Selector' supplied with the H.sie patch to turn OFF Hsie's weather fix.)
Both are effective at ending 'stormy gales' in different ways, which result in different types of weather pattern.
Stiebler.
For future ease of use I have added recommendations and download-links - at least those that I had.
