My Future Cold War 1945-1991 Sub Sim Project

[nsomnia]

Update: January 2016

June 13 - Updated the link below to the development thread, this one is old and dead.
Development is offically restarted click here for details (http://www.subsim.com/radioroom//showthread.php?t=224205)

Looking at the end of January to take this out of mothball and back into active development. I'll be cooking and posting .exe's regularilly.


Trello Board, Vote for Features and see progress: https://trello.com/b/W4yrCFe2/coldwarsubsim-wip
The Trello board above is the quickest way to give input to what you want in a subsim game or dont want, or make a post for more influential ideas and suggestions.

We are looking at the first week of April for a tech demo release goal, and a last week of April deadline.

http://i.imgur.com/iDlYDIj.png

We are still looking for artists, modellers, and C++ programmers. Even if you don't know c++ as long as you know how programming languages work (statements, functions, types, etc) you would be a useful team member and we can discuss profit splits


Email: info@blendertek.com (Feel free to email about anything)
Skype: blendertek (Im in the MST time zone (UTC -7:00 hrs) pacfic +1 central -1 eastern -2, but feel free to IM me for any reason at anytime)
Steam: Ssa_nsomnia (Feel free to add me to chat if you dont have skype)
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/Blender_Tek (http://twitter.com/Blender_Tek)
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Blendertekpage
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/Nsomnia
(http://www.youtube.com/nsomnia)Homepage (for now): http://www.blendertek.com/blog/
Github: https://www.github.com/nsomnia/ColdWarSubSim (https://github.com/Nsomnia/ColdWarSubSim)






######## ####### ###### ##### #### ### ## # EVERYTHING BELOW THIS LINE IS CONSIDERED OLD AND OUTDATED OR WRONG INFORMATION # ## ### #### ##### ###### ####### ########

The project is mothballed until I find a team member or get my coding skills up a bit.

I came across this. https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?42092-Community-WIP-Weather-amp-Ocean-Water-Shader-with-Downloads/page1

By the time I'm ready to start work on this project again: I think that will be an AMAZING place to start. Underwater fx, Beaufort scale for easy scaling of waves, full weather system, buoyancy system, boat wake waves and prop wash, the list go on and on.

Check out page 3 for some more details on us making the switch, the GitHub is only up to date for models and may be up to a day behind.







Old info for now:

Been around these parts for a few years, but obviously not an active poster. So for about the past year I was working on a new U-Boat sim using the Unity game engine (same as WoTA is using) but when I realized he has been working on it since 2010 or so I decided no sense "competing" if you will, and I was having issues with water physics. So over the past month or two I've changed my game design ideas completely to be a cold war sub sim as everyone says that's the one game missing from the genre.

Heres the github where all details will be centralized https://github.com/Nsomnia/ColdWarSubSim from me and any future team members, as well as all reference info and research as I come across it for anyone who wants to help/become a team-member on an unpaid/paid/partnership basis.

I'm a hardcore sim fan, started with plane sims and then heli and space sims, then I learnt javascript, then I learnt proper 3D modelling (I've been using sketchup and autocad for years and years and years now) and consider myself a very proficient modeller and animator, then I learnt C# and now starting on c++ for contingency. The only other members of my team is a very well versed C++ programmer and 2 graphics designers, were all local friends. I'm hoping eventually when I get this idea to take off somewhat to get some more people on the team over the internet.

Being that Unity doesn't really support c++ unless you use wrapper librarys, and also Unity is a lot harder to allow modding (Theres LUA and IronPython interpretor plugins but its much easier in c++ and UE4 to allow game modding I've read) I've started learning it (I work from home so I have unlimited time for my projects more or less). So that If we decide to go to Unreal Engine 4 I'll be able to do some coding when needed and convert my current scripts from C# to c++. For the time being though I'll continue on the design and ideas aspect and modelling, since that stuff doesnt matter what engine or programming language you use.

For now I'm just (re)laying out game details. When I first started my U-Boat sim game I first got all the historical data,drawings, videos, etc I could find and engrossed myself in it and then wrote/drew out the game logic and then started building and coding, and then started making it look pretty. (Well never got to the last step really, hit a road block with the water physics like I said)

So this morning I started all over and started designing some dateline charts (I'm very visual) which I will then serialize to text files to be used within the game. The same way that SH5's .upc files use date codes to determine when technology/upgrades is available (IE [UpgradePack 24]
ID=UpackCoatingAlbereichVIIC41
NameDisplayable=Alberich
FunctionalType=UpFTypeCoating
Type=NULL
ImageIndex=36
UpgradePackSlotType=Type7C41Coating
UnitUpgradePackIntervalOptionCurrent=19000101,1999 1231,0
UnitUpgradePackIntervalOptions1=19410801,19411224, 2000
UnitUpgradePackIntervalOptions2=19411224,19420801, 1500
UnitUpgradePackIntervalOptions3=19420801,19430801, 1000
UnitUpgradePackIntervalOptions4=19430801,19440201, 500
UnitUpgradePackIntervalOptions5=19440201,19991231, 300
IDLinkUpgradePackElements=EqpAlberich
Info=Material: Sound absorbent rubber|Thickness: 4 mm|Echo reflection reduction: 15%
Notes=Alberich consists of a layer of synthetic rubber sheets glued to the body of the U-boat using special adhesives, much like an outer skin. In addition to its sound absorbing properties, the coating also acts as a sound dampener, containing the U-boat’s own engine noise.
TrackingID=1102).

The basic idea in my head though is both US and Russian campaigns (obviously start with the US campaign and the Russian one can be way in the future cause there is much less info (and desire) for Russian cold war subs. Similar to SH5 in that you can walk around the ship, passive/active abilities and all but with the heavier simulator aspects of SH3/4 (choosing/promoting your crew). I also plan to have the ability to have full control over each sub IE. diveplane control, ballast and trim control, rudder control, independent engine control etc). You start out with a post war diesel-electric and when nuclears become available you can choose that campaign path or continue with the ship you've "built" through upgrades, experienced crew etc. Once cruise missles and ship to ship and ship to air missles become available they will be useable and once longe range cruise missles and say ICBMS become available by date you'll be able to use them when the campaign permits (ie message from Atlantic Sub Command: Korea is getting hot we need a missle fired to these co-ordinates on this date at this time, please get within firing range and fire 2 missles at the targeted area).

Lots of fun ideas planned (towed sonar arrays, fast attacks, boomers, missles etc) who knows how far a few people can go with 1 working full time and a few more part time. Look how far WoTA has come. Any game ideas are welcome, as well as C&C of course.

As with WotA I will probly be releasing just a simple version with one playable sub (probly a post war GUPPY conversion) to toy around with and then go from there. I dont intent on any mobile game and even OSx and Linux are probably gonna be a no go. I'd rather spend the time instead working on the win version. I like to release alphas and test stuff alot so expect updates as this takes form. No idea on a name yet as im still in the core design stages. Also I'm definitly going to incorporate optional voice control ala skwas/miltons voice control for SH5 since Microsoft has a beautiful API that works well with Vista onwards, so that would totally throw that version to Win only.

So this morning I started. After an hours work once I got bored of learning more c++ I got my first visual graph I can refer to which I'll be filling in more and more and more and more. Heres (http://www.blendertek.com/coldwarsubsim/img/boats.png) where I got (getting the date line even was the major chore I like nice visual stuff im a visual designer/learner).

Heres (http://www.blendertek.com/coldwarsubsim/img/boats.psd) a link to the PSD, its extremely well organized. If you feel like filling in more dates on major sub commissionings/decommissions/other sub based major events you'll earn a spot in the credits menu :rotfl2:

I'm going to be creating graphs for each class of boat, each type of equpment (sonar, radar, sound coating, electrolysis machine, compressor, reactor, diesels, battery types, weapons) etc. and then go from there. When I get bored of going through data I'll be working on my models, however good game design is 1. hash out a basic idea 2. build the game logic (since its all going to change anyways) 3. refine refine refine 4. replace placeholder items with real models, textures, shaders etc. 5. refine refine refine.

Any links to detailed drawings of major sub classes (or even minor) and equipment would be greatly appreciated. I have hundreds of drawings of a type vII uboat down to the windlass gearing and every single steam and water pipe but theres not many books with such info to cold war era subs. I'll be modelling everything imaginable because that's what I do best. I dont know what I'm going to model first, but when I do I'll post some progress, however like I said, making pretty models is pretty much the last step of proper game design, its more for "wow this looks like its going somewhere".

[nsomnia]

Figure I might as well model the USS Nautilus first cause it looks like a diesel and its so historic and would be a good starting point, but found some pictures of the rector and general compartment setup. Gonna start modelling tonight or tomorrow.
Found some photos but they are REALLY hard to come by. A lot of guess work and research is going to be needed.

The metal and glass/plexi setup around everything in the museum peice really makes it hard to see everything. I wish I had agood map of the ship too some nice blueprints.

Time to go do some "research" aka spend the rest of the night watching every video on youtube with nautilus or 571 in the title. Heh heh

http://navsource.org/archives/08/658/0865786.jpg
Good photo of all the nuclear subs and the number in each class with hull length. I wont be using all of them obviously, but this is a nice graphic depicting which ones to focus on.

http://navsource.org/archives/08/571/0857189.jpg
good picture of "Torpedoman Greenhill (TM3) routines the torpedoes as the Nautilus (SSN-571) makes her way to the polar ice cap in 1958." lots of details to enjoy modelling.

http://navsource.org/archives/08/571/0857100a.jpg

At least some details of what the obs scope looked like. "Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, USN, a former submariner himself, inspects periscope in the Nautilus (SSN-571), world's first nuclear powered submarine during orientation cruise 24 June 1957 off California coast.
Fleet Admiral Nimitz, who was Commander-in-Chief Pacific Fleet during World War II, had his first submarine command in 1909. On the Nautilus cruise, he was qualified as a nuclear submariner and manned bow planes during a dive."

http://navsource.org/archives/08/571/0857144.jpg
Some details of the conn "The watch crew in the control room of Nautilus (SSN-571) maintains exact course and depth while the boat passes under the polar ice cap in 1958."

http://navsource.org/archives/08/571/0857158.jpg (http://navsource.org/archives/08/571/0857158.jpg)
Another one of the torp room

http://navsource.org/archives/08/571/0857117b.jpg
Crews mess

http://navsource.org/archives/08/571/0857117c.jpg
diving station

http://navsource.org/archives/08/571/0857117d.jpg
Both scopes. That'll be fun to model might start there

http://navsource.org/archives/08/571/0857137.jpg
some sonar equipment



Any interior pics of the Nautilus (not the WWII namesake) would be greatly appreciated! Particular specific equipment IE compressors, backup diesels, batterys, any mechanical system, I'm a master hard surface (mechanical stuff) modeller.

[nsomnia]

Starting modelling of SSN-571 today. This post is just a placeholder for the future. Ive got around 300 pictures, 95% from the museum. The museum website also has panoramic virtual tours of the main areas so that will help in getting everything placed right after using high res individual pictures to model each part.
Where to start where to start. The control room seems fun, complicated and work from the center outwards?

Edit: Im starting with the diving valve controls and HPA manifold in the contol room. There is actually little information about this sub since it was the only one in its "class". The manifold system in the conn room seems similar to late WWII class subs, if only I knew the exact systems used on the boat then I could find more pictures on them. The only system we know about is the compasses, the reactor and really thats about it more or less Might be changing my mind about the first sub to model.

She must have used alot of equipment from the Tang class and the Sailfish class must have also.

Edit 2: Well I spent 30 minutes being bored modelling a HPA handle. 1 item down, 10,000 to go. (or who knows, theres so little documentation on this ship)

http://i.imgur.com/i06KBcf.png

Got a bit more when I woke up before I take off for an hour the rest of this valve bank will be easy now, fairly low tri count too, might have another modeller on board.
http://i.imgur.com/WOq08kJ.png?2

[nsomnia]

Anyone have any ideas for a working game title, so I can start a GitHub project? So far I have "Silent Water Red" but I think it came to mind because I live near a town called Red Water. :har:

4 water choices so far, no sky-boxes and the sub is just a placeholder with no buoyancy scripts on it or anything just to "look at"

1. Ocean4 (Free, comes with the Pro version of Unity, can be modified to your own needs, at the expense of time and effort)

http://i.imgur.com/m4CSdWK.png



2.Community Ocean Shader Modified (Free, very adjustable and easy to modify and the community is always adding new features)
http://i.imgur.com/zYhsiay.png



3. Triton (Very Expensive)
http://i.imgur.com/3rotCp7.png

4. My own modification of #1 or #2

5. My own complete written system

6. Somehow get the source for #3: Triton (its closed source 100% as far as I know but if im gonnalay down 500 bucks for a water system I should get the source, I could always use .net reflector to unpack the .dlls but im pretty sure that would be illegal to sell) and modify it to my needs.



Got a bit more done on the HPA manifold after answering business emails and before lunch (about 45 mins). Next up, some electrical lines and more valves and some covers and then the dive valve lever block.
http://i.imgur.com/wV02uE1.png


I was talking to a guy on youtube and he said a sub sim based on the cold war would be very boring I agree. This game will be historically accurate in regards to equipment and dates and such but youll actually be at war with Russia and vise versa in the russian campaign and youll need to destroy Russian merchant shipping, warships and subs.

Do you guys really care about small updates or should I keep it to bigger overall ones. Cause these only take a couple minutes to post.


Edit: I FINALLY found some makes and models of some equipment on her! Thank god for flickr!

Edit2: Did 2 more hours work on the ballast/snorkel controls. I'm slowly teaching myself to model like a game modeller again ie: dont model every single nut and bolt to 100% accuracy just make it look half decent. Then progress will get faster. Soon it will look like the control room.

I found the emails of 126 crew members and im emailing them all today asking for any information they might have.
http://i.imgur.com/FO147i2.png?1

This post reserved for future updates.

Got bored of modelling and did some UI work: systems overview revesion 1 (This is essentially a canvas, thats what the system is called in Unity and then I overlay the buttons, toggles, sliders etc overtop of it)
http://i.imgur.com/Pnh3UOA.png?1

Edit 3: If anyone knows about any of this equipment that sticks out at them feel free to let me know, I got lots of research to do. From my other posts:

The fuel supply was rated for 1 year but lasted 18 months (reported as 2 years), she had a jukebox, projector, coke machine, ice cream machine, automatic dishwasher, EM log "Sword" to get the ships speed, test depth of 700', typical 3000psi HPA system standard of late WWII boats, 24 knts submerged and 21-22 surfaced due to her old style bow, Kodak made a special periscope camera for her, 3 "Rev 0" alarms, some course indicator called "us navy BuShips; dead reckoning equipment no 750425; dead reckoning analyzer indicator class II; mark 3 mod 0 serial no <unreadable> contract no <unreadable> inspector <unreadable>; ARMA corporation; Brooklyn, N.Y.", C-1376/BPS antenna control the rest is unreadable except navy dept - BuShips western elctric company", AN/BPS-5A Radar <XXX> again all unreadable, C-3723(or 8)/BPS all unreadable, AM/SPA 48 something to do with the scope reads "before periscope maintenance insure the following switches are secured and red tagged 1. main power (radar dist pnl) 2. own ships head (IC/ACO swbd), 3. target bearing information (FC SWBD), 4. sync power (radar room fwd bulkhead)", fuses for: ships entertainment system (bet thatd be fun to pull during movie night!), ECM leak detector, AN/BPS-5A mast cont and h-something (hoist i think), salinity ind pnl, C.L.P.ILLUM, peris <unreadable> and <unreadable> solver , MAC stabilized platform and MAC indicator panel, TL dead reckoning and BRH-7<unreadable, sticker maker sticker>, mk 10X XX test resXrt, AN/WR<x> 57N7<unreadable> s0<unreadable>, Position Keeper Mk 1 mod 1, converter Mk4 mod 0, (wthe last 2 with their voltage readable), Firing Panel Off-on-Off, 24 VDC Off-PK, <unreadable> panel mark 21: mark xx mod 10 mark xx mod 0, mark xx, rel at indicator mk 10 mod 0, <lots and lots of unreadable>, intercom system from conn room: 1. torp room 2. CO stateroom 3. crews mess 4. unreadable 5. ships unreadable 6. wardroom 7. control room 8. attack something i dont think center, 9. radar room 10. radio room (9 and 10 may be reversed) 11. sonar room 12. unredable 13. unreadable maybe navigation 14. unreadable 15. something room. 16 unreadable, we have a OR-133(V)/URN Receiver-computer group supply 15v 400hz part of receiving set omgea an/brn 6 of receiving set omega an/srn-17, of navigation set omega an/arn-99(V) manufactured for navy dept naval electronics system command by contractor northrop corporation electronics divison, a nice plaque above the sonar indicator and handle that i havnt found a clear picture of that the museum has labeled sonar receivong set an/xxx-xx, a handle that says something MBT blow then indicates 3 positions something / neutral / air to stbd, a handle that says 10 LB blow 5A and 5B (10 lbs.... thats not alot of air) with positions open/shut, a label that says low pressure blower motor controller "Fast", AN/BLR-10A CONTR. AMP, SG-333, AN/BLA-2C, AN/<unreadable>, LS(5?)-474-v something planes something radio the last few things all beside the sonar unit, recorder-reproducer set recorder-reproducer sound RD246/UNQ-7B blah blah blah unreadable navy dept BuShips, below those tapes, SK-250 MAINTENENCE KIT (P/O AN/WLR-10(V)1) LOCATED INSIDE, by the drivers we got a ton of control panels i cant read, museum labels "general announcing panel" which is the AF AMPLIFIER TYPE TC-20, Got a nice pic of the Sperry gyrocompass control panel and below it the MK 21 auxillery compass, radio-room/ESM room doesnt have alot readable, got nice pics of the trim pump control switch, the trim tank manifold, the HPA manifold and diving/other levers (people say hydrualic controls but I think they are air) which im modelling currently, by the trim tank controls there is two switches one that has 2 positions slow and full and the other etst and no idea, the antenna mast hoist control manifold has 5 handles with positions hoist/neutral/lower labled VLF LOOP (very low frequency), BRA-9, BRA-19, ECM D/I, BRD-6. UHF IFF (ultra high frequency something something somehting) and I got a good picture of the mast position indicator with buships number and EB Div plan No., as well as radar mast lights, collision alarm: 9000-s6504-74055-rev 2 off/on, diving alarm: 9000-s6504-74055-rev 2 off/on, yellow colored alarm (battle stations?) 9000-s6504-74055-rev F off/on, emergency alarm off/on same serial number rev 2 looks like. the high pressure air manifolds youll all see soon enough when I have it done modelled, i got a photo of the xmas trees for the hull openings, vents, floods, valves and hatches, and snorkel ctrl pnl , wayyy too many lights to write, we ghot a mk 19 mod 31 gyro compass contro panel with the mark 24 mod 0 auxillary compass, and of course the AN/WQC-2 communicatinos set sonar with RT-67G/WDG-2 receiver-transimtiter sonar lots of buttons lights and stuff, another picture that has more fuses for the periscope illuminatinom, edm leak detector and a few others, general announcing control panel has at least 30/40 switches and some rotating switches the AF amplifier type IC/BGL-2S, the loudspeakers are dynamic type LS-305/S1C made by Jensen manufacturing co contract no. N126-090805, The nav center "radio direction finder set - an/brd-6b, a loran c receiver set - an/wpn-4 and a loran a receiver set - an/upn-2a, manual plot on the mk-19 plotter, the icecream machine was made by scottsman,

and lastly the scopes and sensors from aft to fwd in the mast
snorkel, IFF/UHF omi-directional antenna, VLF loop, BRD-6B detections and determines directino of enemy radio/radar transmissions, BRA-19 retractable antenna for transmission and receivning medium and high frequency radio signals ESM/DF electronic support measures detects and terminse directors of enemy radio/radar transmissions, BPS-5A general and tactical search radar for surface searrch, torpedo firing control, and detection of low flying aircraft, BRA-9 retractable antenna for transmitting and receiving medium and high frequency radio transmissions, type 2f perisscope any height attack scope for daytime use, type 8B scope can be used at niht includes internal radar radio and esm stub-antenna, at-441/MRC emergency whip antnna for med/high freq. radio signals navaid beacon light the ships bell and the ships signal whistle.

[nsomnia]

My c++ books arrived today. Whats the first line in the best one: "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead! - Adm. Farragut"

A sign? Too bad I wont have time to read them cause im sticking with Unity.

This post reserved for future updates.

[nsomnia]

A Mr. G. Clancy is going to mail me copies of some construction prints from General Electrics Electric Boat division. This is why I reach out!

This post is reserved for future update space.

[Chad]

I'm fond of the community water, pending where you want to go with the game. As far as I understand, the community water is also mobile ready, and received a good update with a plugin that goes into the Unity editor.

[nsomnia]

Your correct more or lessm even if we have no plans to go mobile. Plus I designed my own water system but could never get the water physics right hence why Id prefer to get something mostly built like that that I can build on.

After 3 hours, we have a nice compass that I dont have to buy.

http://i.imgur.com/Lh4VTFk.png?1

Taking a break from modelling, in contact with a ton of 571 vets who are getting me some drawings so I'm waiting to talk to them more before I model too much and have to step backwards. I'd rather work on stuff that wont change. Tonight/Tommorrows project: Get the map system working in-game. Thats one thing I never started in my U-boat version. Shouldnt be too hard to code its 2D and the new UI sytem in Unity although I JUST learnt it after knowing OnGUI() function for so long, its pretty powerful. I also have some nice binoculars for the later periods of the game but I should easily be able to edit it for 50's/60's period look. (ie no laser rangefinder and multiple zoom levels and night vision lmao)

Edit: Got some extremely hi-res drawings, and some hi-res layouts of all the FWD compartments from a vet. crew member. Amazing hunting, time for more work!

[nsomnia]

After spending the evening watching Run Silent Run Deep again I broke it up by coding a bit... 5 lines worth. The map function starts... it zooms at least.

Just a simple orthographic (2d) camera that changes size. I'm thinking of using a Vector3 (x,y,z) using the x,y to pan and and z axis to zoom.... start with the basics then refine is my process though, if it works dont break it. It'll be a long time before I can get a map system like SH where when you zoom in a level the map gets more detailed. At least not without some very ineffecient code and some HUGE images. After getting the 3d sub layout of ssn571 from an old crewmember however you guys will have a pilotable nuclear sub soon!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9dCI8_4zdxo

Edit: What do you guys think about pie menus on certain items? I was organizing my assets folder (assets are pre-made things you can add to your games, there is over 900 folders and 10,000 files I gave up early) but found a pie menu asset, so I saved this under my ideas folder

"pie menus context sensitive on items?

click on batterys get pie menu to check voltage cross cells etc
click on switch get pie menu for on off that triggers animation
click on tube get pie menu open tube flood tube
click on ballast tank #4 valve get pie menu flood in 100L flood in 500L flood in 1000L max flood purge 100L purge 500L max purge etc."

Today (Yep. When you work from home, Saturdays are work days too), I'm going to work on the pressure hull now that I have drawings and layouts. Get the ship layout setup and to scale. I use kit-bashing heavily (ie. I'll model a single box and use it for panels and siwtches and such or I'll model and hatch and use it over and over and over, I'll model stairs and use them all over, I'll model a switch and use it for 100% of the switches and eventually make a few different variations in later versions of the product)


At this rate I expect to have the first sub pilotable and explorable in 30-60 days with the amount of people I have working with me. Once I have the exterior hull, the interior basics, the sails bridge and basic code (ladder script (already done), simple boat movement script (being worked on), player movement script (already done), and some basic UI elements (working on it), and at least 50% of the interior textured (not started but I have thousands upon thousands of texture files): then I'll release the alpha beta alpha beta demo alpha demo version 0.00000001 .exe for you guys to mess around with.


This post saved for future update room.

[nsomnia]

Spent some time doing some measuring on the plans given to me by a vet (half of them, everything aft of the central ops compartment (so reactor aft) is off limits to the public) but through some careful measuring I came up with a total length of 318 ft 5 inches. Pretty damn close to her reported 320 feet length!

The pressure hull I calculated as 257 feet 6 inches though. That leaves 70 feet shared forward and aft as empty space. That seems excessive.

Well heres the outline of her pressure hull and decks. Now I can start "outfitting" her.

http://i.imgur.com/VCkramq.png?1





Edit: Spend a couple hours this morning getting reference measurments for the control and attack rooms. Started fitting in main areas. The Attack centers office is smaller than my closet!

http://i.imgur.com/NELn384.png

Edit2: Done working for a sunday (9 pm)

http://i.imgur.com/PXUGhij.jpg

[zakarpatska]

Hi nsomnia, This looks like a great project and I'm following your updates with interest. Take care.

[Aktungbby]

zakarpatska! after a silent run!:salute:

[nsomnia]

Good to hear you guys are at least hoping it comes together.

Compartment is coming together. Some pipes, scopes, nav tables, some equipment in the control room and she will be ready to pilot, abeit with only one compartment. Estimated time to release for you guys to play in the one compartment: 2 weeks.

http://i.imgur.com/7mOzW2j.jpg (http://i.imgur.com/7mOzW2j.jpg)

[nsomnia]

Got the opportunity to test a map asset (an asset is basically pre-made software you insert into your game) that I may buy to save myself coding a whole map system from scratch, thus fast tracking the alpha release.

http://i.imgur.com/vL5gOsm.png

Day 4 of modelling is about done. Might get a bit more done tonight but I really need to work on the stuff paying my bills!

http://i.imgur.com/qT3WV8t.jpg

Created a GitHub today cause I may have some 3D modellers helping out: https://github.com/Nsomnia/ColdWarSubSim
feel free to read the readme if your interested in helping or some more details about our vision.

[Chad]

Very cool, I'd like to help out where I can as a part-time member.

[nsomnia]

Very cool, I'd like to help out where I can as a part-time member.

Feel free to read the git-hub readme, and this morning all my files got committed to the repo so all my reference info is in there. Im currently modelling the attack center and control room compartment using Blender.

Edit: Had to take a break from modeling so I start doing some basic UV unwraps.
http://i.imgur.com/HqXqYS3.png

[nsomnia]

Got a character modeller going to create some sailors, officers and admiral Rickover so I can start making my intro/trailer.

Seperated every compartment into its own 3D .blend file for any future team members to work on instead of 1 huge file with all compartments. I'm really loving GitHub, even if I have no team-members on board yet.

Took a day off modelling so I got together with my graphic designer and we made some UI stuff.

Suprisingly this stuff takes longer than it would for me to model it in 3D. My photoshop skills arnt as good as they used to be but im getting my groove back.


Going to use this one anywhere a light can be turned on/off on the boat (yes its going to be that interactive, thats actually a very easy concept actually, basically a script that says on mouse click: toggle the light enabled/disabled (on/off) Also to get the siwtch in the off position... you just have to flip it! lol! :har:
http://i.imgur.com/nWKclph.png


This one I'll probly use for the game UI in some places possibly, or maybe some more modern subs equipment cause its my favorite its slick.
http://i.imgur.com/RibHHaz.png



This one with a nice normal map (makes a 2d image look like its 3D) will look real slick on ships equipment panels, need to fix up the text though, couldnt get a good look. And will have to make a 2nd one if I want an off-lit version.
http://i.imgur.com/sET3wVX.png

[nsomnia]

Played around with the DIFF (color) texture maps some more just to keep my mind fresh, I've been practicing my coding with practice projects to get back in shape so to speak. I realized if I cant sit down and write a few hundred to 1,000 lines of code to make a mostly functional map system.... I need more practice.

Got this result just messing around anyway, adding a railing around the stairwell opening. Not much changes though, those will come tomorrow (tonight im going to measure everything in the control room (below the attack center) and start adding equipment. Long weekend! Means 3 hours extra work time minimum.
http://i.imgur.com/KOCZ38A.png

Updated github alot.
Made a lowpoly valve handle that I can kitbash (re-use) over and over. 600 polys and could cut it down a little bit more if I wanted. I'm going to make sure the inital April 5th 0.01 alpha release includes negative tank blow/flood controls. Results: (this will look REALLY good with a normal map for such lo-poly)
http://i.imgur.com/sYeQXF4.png


Got my graphics tablet working again thank goodness. Was slowing me down because it was lagging. Just needed to restart the Wacom Tablet service. :/\\!!

[nsomnia]

Small update, saving this post for the long-weekend frenzy im going to try to get as much done as possible. Im working backwords usually you make the game logic (code) first and then the pretty stuff (models/textures/shaders) but I gotta sell this to get some team members so I'm not basically all alone.

Got the radar and radio rooms setup with their doors tonight. I think I have the entire layout setup now just need to add equipment, hatches, watertight doors, lockers, periscope #1, helms/planesmen controls and the rest of the HPA air system controls and this compartment can be considered version 1.0 done. Then move onto the torpedo compartment or something.

http://i.imgur.com/0ADAWYn.png

Edit: Another small update. Edited the GitHub page majorly, added a ton of info to the wiki, updated the readme to include more game details, and added issue trackers for game logic that needs coding (towed arrays, waterfall displays, radar displays etc.)

As well I started what I was dreading.. modelling the control room for the planesmen until I sort through my pictures to get some better angles this is as far as I could get. They really used a weird system on 571.
I need to take a break from modelling, when youve modelled a quarter million polygons in a couple weeks it gets old. I'm going to spend tonight off and tommorrow I'm going to actually start a new Unity project from scratch and start recoding some of my U-Boat scripts and the water system for starters. I also found a great equation for thermalclines that tells you how fast sound travels through water based on depth, salinity, and temperature so I'm going to code a nice temperature indicator to be used either in a UI function or on a screen on the subs (or both)

I was playing Janes 688i hunter/killer today and just had to gaze in awe at how amazingly realistic they modelled this stuff... back in 1995/6/7. If I can get data displays even somewhere near that I'll be a happy man. Their waterfall displays are just beautiful.

The beveled squares are all going to become indicators (depth, rudder, course etc)
http://i.imgur.com/RatyAmW.png

[Chad]

Looking good :up:

[nsomnia]

Today I was going to do some coding and make a simple thermocline detector... I realized my coding skills are not up to par for this scope of project so I'm either going to have to find/hire a coder, or its going to take longer as I learn to code more. I did make a mk-14 torpedo to change things up. Will post pics when I finish the diffuse texture map.

Edit: I should say what I mean by this is that while the core game fundamentals will be there from my efforts on my old u-boat hobby project and new efforts, thinks like proper waterfall displays and radar screens and modern (post 1970 technology) wont be implemented for a longgg time. I'm realizing im a better modeller than programmer.

[nsomnia]

A volunteer character modeller is working on an officer and sailor for me heres his WIP.

http://i.imgur.com/kWlU8Qm.png?1


Got the mk 14 torpedo textured up with a color and bump map... visable seams so I'll have to redo it or mirror one half. It'll work for now though. The screws also were just copied from an old fan I had modeled for an interor scene so I'll have to spend some time modelling the actual torps screws when the time comes. Didn't even bother to color texture them.
http://i.imgur.com/gycX4AQ.png

Then added a quick specularity texture to see how it would ingame.
http://i.imgur.com/hzDniBH.png

Realized im either going to have to scale everything down by at least 4x (working with 1k textures) or use enormous textures, since I'm modelling everything to real world specs IE this torpedo is 21" wide and 20' 6" long.

[Chad]

Perhaps that's where I can help.

I don't know the systems well enough to be able to recreate on the fly, but given proper guidance and requirements, I can help with the coding.

But first I would like to start with something easy, a thermocline detector could work.

From my understanding, it returns the largest gap in temperature at depth x. Do we want the depth to be random everytime, based on location in the world, seasonal?

The possibilities are endless, and so could the complexity of the sim, but let's narrow it down to what you're envisioning and I will help along the way.

[Chad]

Btw, I have dabbled in some 3d modeling but far below the skill of your character modeler and yourself. Those models look great.

[nsomnia]

Well this is.. how.. freaking... far.. I got all... freaking.. day yesterday. AT least for code that worked and I didnt even get the function to return the speed. Trying to graph it I got no where and I tried every asset I owned that might be able to do it, Vectrosity, GraphMaker, A* pathfinding, and even just using unitys own LineRenderer functions none were clear enough to me. I mean it works it would be easy enough to detect a change in temperature at a certain depth/temp by either changeing the equation to use depth and speed of sound (I havnt even graphed various depths yet I think its a fairly linear plot except around 100-300 feet (30-100m) so could just read from a text file that already has all the data every 10 ft. There really is no variable here, its just simple math. I went and confused myself the day I started with a goal, and ended up with a first day computer sciences class calculator.

Could go something like


//calll this function every 60 seconds using Time.time or Time.sincelevelstarted
void function speedSoundOneMinuteAgo(float depth, float temp)
{
//same equation goes in here
}

void Compare()
{
if (speedSoundOneMinuteAgo(currentDepth, currentTemp) - SpeedSound(currentDepth, currentTemp) > 200)
ReportFavorableSonarConditions()
}Of course you could solve for temp by using the known speed of sound in water which is easily found on wikipedia, also why not just write the data for every 25feet into a .txt file and read from it was it my other idea, no sense constantly calculating it, I just wanted a "screen" that showed it, one more of my outlandish ideas.

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

/*This script prints to the console the speed of sound in feet per second taking in two arguments temperate in f and depth in feet. ie. SpeedSound(32.0f,521.5f); will tell you the speed of sound in ft/s in the ocean at 521 feet 6 inches deep with a water temp of 32 f */

public class EquationTest : MonoBehaviour
{
//Global Variables
public float soundSpeed;

// Use this for initialization
void Start ()
{
SpeedSound(32.0f, 1.0f);
Debug.Log(SpeedSound);
}

void SpeedSound(float temp, float depth)
{
//Speed of sound in feet per second = this equation. temp is in F. Depth is in feet. Assumes average salinity of 35 ppt.
soundSpeed = (4388 + (11.25f * temp) + (0.0182f * depth));
}
}I'm spending the day doing something more productive... optimizing the under/above water system and getting it commited to GitHub properly.

[nsomnia]

I can see why WotA has been in development for so long. Even with the variety of water systems I have to play (including the 500$ Triton asset, plus the word of a half dozen community projects all mashed together or tried seperatly) with I cant even get SH3 style physics. I've got basic kelvin wake effects and the boat puts up a wake (the boat in this case just being an elongated capsule for testing), and my water shader looks nice but thats about it. Without a huge dev team your just not going to get decent results even in years time, this is so much larger in scope than any game I've built before (I think this is why all indie subsims peter out, less than 25-50 people each a specialist doing everything during a 1-2 year dev cycle). Losing hope in anything more than a pilotable Nautilus.

It breaks down to I can make it pretty, but not fun, and thats not worth it.

[nsomnia]

I'm going to throw something together quick for you guys to play with before I throw it back in the hobby bin. Expect an edit with a download tonight.

Edit: Played with it all day and got my cylinder turning like a u-boat and surface water physics half decent but it didn't build properly its not rendering my water shader.

[Julhelm]

Maybe you should try your hand at a less ambitious project if you are not an experienced game developer. Even comparably 'simple' titles like mobile games tend to be much harder to design and finish that you may think. The most important thing is to see a project through to the end and actually finish it.

[nsomnia]

Heard that one all over the net and its true. I've played with your standard hack n slashes, fps's and 2d scrolling shooters and platform'ers my 3d and realistic physics experience is indeed light though.. a construction vehicle "sandbox" sandbox game and then I was working on getting a good water system going witth a uboat. Its definitly true but I aim high, see what I can come up with the next time I had a decent version running fine a while ago but I deleted the project :salute: only lost my scripts water system is stilll intact try try again. Edit: Oh and I forgot the first game I ever "made" in Unity was a simple track lap time racer.


Spent most of yesterday trying to get the center of mass of a rigidbody edit-able in an editor window during runtime but it kept reverting. Found out after many hours you have to set it via script, so did that then had to make a script to display the center of mass. The things you never think of...

Consider it another project to check in on from time to time I'm not abandoning it, just learning more first as I go.

[nsomnia]

Since I couldnt get the build to render properly I took a short video.

http://youtu.be/GLAy4SebrRI

Screenshot:
http://i.imgur.com/iN5MYmY.png



It was a mis-mash kit-bash of my old scripts, my new scripts, some premade scripts, and some scripts from completely different projects all together.

I'm leaving it off here until my coding skills are up to par and/or I find a coding partner.

The problem is over the last 6 months I spent 100% of my time building up my website and YouTube channels income so that I could work from home. In that time I spent probly no more than 4 hours coding, and the rest of my time modelling/gaming/recording videos, so I lost everything I had learned about coding basically.

[Aside: I got into game development because I learned the basics of Blender years ago, which I became interested in because Sketchup led me there somewhere in the mid to late 2000's, and so I wanted to take my modelling knowledge and apply it to something "cool and fun"]

I'm more or less starting fresh. Gonna read C# 5.0 for dummies for the 3rd time (although its sooo basic at first I dont even think it gets into classes till like page 200, the first hundred pages are about data types and strings.... I want to skip over it but I always tell people in my videos "this might be review but theres no such thing as bad review or wasted review time") and slowly start watching my plethora C# coding courses I've purchased.

Project Status: On the sideline/on hold until I learn more programming and find a co-creator with programming experience.

[Chad]

I have subscribed to your YouTube channel.

You know i have failed and failed at completing my indie projects as well. It's too bad we couldn't come up with something unique that we could apply our skill sets to successfully just to say we 'completed' something. :shucks:

[nsomnia]

That's one of my secondary channels. Actually its my smallest channel but surprisingly generates the most income/video of anything. People love to watch gaming videos.

Thats the problem with indie games. A 1 man team means it will take years to develop a game (WotA), a 2 man team means it will take a couple years to develop a game (Stranded Deep, Besiege). A 10 man team can actually produce games yearly and make profits to life comfortably from (Euro truck simulator 1/2 (used inhouse engine), farming simulator 13/14 (used inhouse engine), spintires, goat simulator, kerbal space program are all great examples of graet games made by a small team by industry standards, but large by indie standards.).

I learn fast and im basically just trying to remember what I forgot. (Before I took time off from Unity to build up my web income I could actually code what I wanted more or less as long as it wasnt something new to the indie world (aka a sub sim)).

But then I run into the problem of finding someone intrested in subs with coding experience (and preferably other experience), that can work as a team, and unpaid until the game sells. Good luck... Thats why theres thousunds upon thousands of Unity Pro licenses sold and hundreds of thousands of free users but only a handful of solid games, and a chunk of mobile games).

I'm really starting to think bout switching to C++ and UE4.

Either way. I love 3D modelling and always will (at the VERY least we are getting a USS Nautilus Simulator this summer, even if it means no camera of outside the sub, no periscopes, and no map (and no water for that matter)) and love coding (just need more practice and skills) and always will and estimate 2 years of unlimited, no job, no wife etc. free time. So I will complete this one way or another. Just not on the timeframe I initally envisioned.

It seems survival/procedural and crafting games are the in-thing right now. Make a good story (the forest and stranded deep have no story) to go with basic crafting and exploring logic and you've got a winner. I just love my subs too much.

[nsomnia]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wk55pVf73JY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u82fxXHBFhA

I think im switching to UE4.

People are praising the visual scripting (blueprint) making whole games (and at least some game logic) without looking at a single line of code and I hate visual scripting, C++ is the most commonly used programming language, and models work just fine in either engine; add on the much better lighting and performance and source code of UE4 and its really really close. If UE had a community the size of unityforums I would be deleting Unity right now.

[nsomnia]

I bought 13 Unreal4 video courses. I think im gonna use UE4 since I've been slowly reading my c++ book I bought (Programming c++ by Bjorn S. (the guy who designed c++).

I just watched 2 courses on UE4 basics and going to do the projects when I get time. UE4 is so much different than I thought.

[Chad]

Best of luck with UE4! Those videos looked pretty sharp!

[nsomnia]

I know im going against what everyone says when they say pick a game engine and stick with it, but I have decided that a) I have only hobby projects from Unity to show, nothing public so im not losing anything
b) c++ will benefit me career wise

and after actually learning the basics of UE4 (I only played with it for about an hour before) I realize just how much more amazing it is than Unity. AAA quality game engine feature sets, plus source code... for 19$ a month! If UE4 took C# as an additional language, they would dominate Unity. (and its already been done 3rd party through Xariman (Monodevlop))

I'm still working on the model of Nautius since thats engine in-dependant as I learn C++ when I feel bored (its really quite similar to C#). But I'm putting some time back into my YouTube channels so that I can make more income so that I can continue living without a real job. When I took a 2 week break 100% for this project my profits leveled off instead of rising.

Expect updates eventually, I just have a lot of learning to do. I'm still determined to create a cold war sub sim as my first public project.

(I'm still going to do the standard hack n slashes, scrollers and 2D games that these UE4 games teach but I don't publish though, just like I dont publish the games I made following Unity courses infact I've deleted most of them).

That said Chad if you still want to collaborate im always game, learning C++ isn't going to slow down my C# skills they are really extremely, extremely similar, but I'm not cut out to make a profitable game yet, code wise... only art wise and I dont know your programming skill level and finding more if any team members is near impossible with such a niche idea.

[nsomnia]

I have subscribed to your YouTube channel.

You know i have failed and failed at completing my indie projects as well. It's too bad we couldn't come up with something unique that we could apply our skill sets to successfully just to say we 'completed' something. :shucks:

You know what I was thinking the other day and is perfectly suited to Unity and a small dev team that doesnt need intense math in your code... a good city builder. Citles xl/xxl scale with the gameplay of simcity4 (which is still the most popular city building game out there with a huge community despite being years and years old).

I always come up with ideas at the wrong time ie: i got into game design right as I was getting great at modelling... I got into youtube for a job right as I was getting into game design. i was getting into coding right as i got health problems. i come up with game ideas when im busy with something else or dont have a certain skillset.

[nsomnia]

Been splitting my time between UE4 and C++ its amazing what UE4 can do at first glance I hated it now I dont know how Unity will survive. No updates to my models though, I havn't started Blender in over a week now.

Edit: Thats a lie, I did some normal map baking today because the 3000# HPA valve tree was around 60,000 polys and everything else was less than 30,000. Not interesting though unless you want to see pictures of random purple colored shapes.

Found a good idea for creating thermoclines

public float GetOceanTemperatureForDepth(float depth)
{
return (this._oceanTemperature * ((depth >= 0f) ? 1f : this._oceanTemperatureThermocline.Evaluate(Mathf.A bs((float) (depth * 0.0078125f)))));
}

private void InitializeOceanTemperature()
{
this._oceanTemperatureThermocline.keys = null;
float num = 0.0001428571f;
float num2 = 0.01333333f;
this._oceanTemperatureThermocline.AddKey(0f, 75f * num2);
this._oceanTemperatureThermocline.AddKey(500f * num, 68f * num2);
this._oceanTemperatureThermocline.AddKey(700f * num, 53.6f * num2);
this._oceanTemperatureThermocline.AddKey(900f * num, 46.4f * num2);
this._oceanTemperatureThermocline.AddKey(1250f * num, 41.8f * num2);
this._oceanTemperatureThermocline.AddKey(1500f * num, 41f * num2);
this._oceanTemperatureThermocline.AddKey(2000f * num, 40.1f * num2);
this._oceanTemperatureThermocline.AddKey(3500f * num, 39.2f * num2);
this._oceanTemperatureThermocline.AddKey(7000f * num, 33.8f * num2);
}
Then we could just have static ones at set depths or lerping between them.

[nsomnia]

I'm currently drooling. This project just got revitalized!

I asked reddit if switching to UE4 would be the best choice, or if I should continue with Unity.

I got this (among a few others)
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?42092-Community-WIP-Weather-amp-Ocean-Water-Shader-with-Downloads/page1

That is a must see for anyone interested in ocean simulation. What the UE community has done in a few MONTHS has equaled and in some areas even surpassed Unitys 'Community Ocean Project' which has been worked on for YEARS.

Basically it is extremely organized and active, and they will have a build in underwater system, tiling system, Beufort scale, breaking waves, boat wake waves and wash, a weather system and so much more. Heres the features timeline https://trello.com/b/7dzOdkvw/ue4-ocean-weather-project

By the time I feel comfortable in UE4 to start work and get my C++ up to snuff I bet they will be far enough along that I can use that as a GREAT starting point. If they have made as much progress since October 2014, I cant imagine what they will have ready by Summer (my goal for having UE4 more or less figured out and be able to figure my way through most fundamentals of C++)
[/URL]

They also showed me some more cool stuff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBWLfpm0K0o (https://trello.com/b/7dzOdkvw/ue4-ocean-weather-project) generating oceans in UE4 using math only.
[URL]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0JYODQtnC8 Add-on to the above video moving the water plane with the player so you can have infinite oceans when needed.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?58179-Infinite-ocean-shader-download the link says it all.

[nsomnia]

Best of luck with UE4! Those videos looked pretty sharp!

Chad see my previous post. Whats your coding skills? C# I assume? The blueprint system in UE4 is SO much more amazing than I first assumed. Someone with no programming experiance could flesh out a basic game using it and a little help from the community/google. Throw in the fact that UE4 allows for basic mesh block-in in the editor and the fact that UE4 is only 19/month I bet we could make a profitable project. If I could find 1 more modeller, one more coder and a artist, I bet selling early access copies on steam could be done within a year (remember I can work 24/7/365 on this plus I'm kind've a jack of all trades as it is).

Something to think about. Id gladly buy you a subscription to UE4 and some courses in a few months once I get my c++ skills up and learn more about UE4 if you were interested and had the time. Especially if I could find more team members. Then just make a private git-hub and good to go.

Microsoft realased a free version of Visual Studio 2013 (soon to be 2015) for teams of less than 5 people too. I'm not sure if your aware of that (I use VS for Unity for on-the-fly debugging and because the ancient version of mono that Unity uses sucks (and the 2011 version of PhysX for that matter) and then I can use plugins like VAssistX which has probly doubled my ability to output code both quantitatively and qualitatively. Also Xaramin (Mono) created a version of mono that lets you do some C# coding for UE4, I'm sure in a few months time it will just get better and better, remember UE4 just came out.

Btw I received the WIP character models from my character designer (I told him to pause work on it for now) will post some videos when I get some time to animate them.

[Chad]

Once upon a time I was a C++ developer, for about a 6 month stint, but have switched to C#.

I appreciate the offer but is not needed! Perhaps soon I can afford a couple of months subscription to UE and try it out.

I just feel so at-home with Unity now, but it does feel a bit clunky(not sure if right word for it) compared to some things I have seen with UE, but at what cost for support and familiarity with the app.

What is missing from UE that Unity excels as it is a walk through of project setups, how code is managed, etc. Perhaps you could record a video and upload to YouTube and share. I would like to see a simple import of a 3d model, and then a creation of a simple class or script that just for instance rotate the 3d model on the Y axis when space bar is pressed.

[nsomnia]

Will do! I'm working on my c++ right now but it would be good practice to do exactly what you suggest (and learn if Blender exports to UE well, I've heard it really prefers Maya).

[Chad]

I'm a Blender user myself, let me know your findings :hmm2:

[nsomnia]

I'm a Blender user myself, let me know your findings :hmm2:

I asked on Reddit and got this comment

"Blender is mostly ok. Maya is better for UE4, but I get the feeling the Epic devs themselves use it, so that makes sense. Skeletal import is more difficult from blender, but for everything else, it's mostly the same

"
So anything character based it sounds like I would need to freelance out to Maya users. Or learn Maya myself. Then comes the problem... I've built my livlyhood (and thus the ability to spend as much time as I want on hobby projects) based off Blender training series and YouTube training videos.

I own Maya but I havn't had the time to learn it yet.

Once I'm done with this chapters (C++ Chapter 4: Computation (Vectors, statments, loops etc)) drills and exercises, which is the last "basics chapter (the rest of the chapters are about memory managment and graphics and more advanced stuff) I'm going to see how well Blender works with UE4 4.6.1 (I havn't even compiled the new version yet) and d some research... If Epic doesnt support Blender as well as Unity does then they are losing out on the market they are trying to grab: the hobbyisys/small dev teams.

I'll record my process. I'll quote you again when if I find out anything intresting... and for anyone else who might be following thinking about joining on.

Once upon a time I was a C++ developer ... ... rotate the 3d model on the Y axis when space bar is pressed.

While I'm here on the forums I'll add that I was thinking the exact same way as you, Unity felt "easy" and you could "jump right in to any idea". Once you watch a couple videos on the basics of UE4 its so similar to using Unity the first time "OK this is a little confusing, but overall its making sense very fast"

Support... the UE4 community it turns out is amazing and HUGE (since theyve been around since the original Unreal Tournament years) and since it "costs" a WHOLE 20 dollars a month with no free version (I consider 20/mo free) it removes all the 13-year-old idiots that think they can make the next Call of Duty in about 2 days with a few assets and some code bits copy-pasted from the internet. The community seems very mature and open to helping: at least so far.

As well for support I've heard that people asking questions on the forums and even places like Reddit they get answers from people as high up as Todd Sweeney (The guy who runs the show) and I've personally seen people with the tag "Unreal Engine Developer" or similar titles under their username on the forums helping out brand new users with simple questions. That really stands out for me.

BTW I don't quite understand what you meant by "that Unity excels as it is a walk through of project setups".



Back to C++ drills. 5 down 11 to go, then 23 exercises and I'm gonna start-up UE4 and do some basic practice.

[Chad]

BTW I don't quite understand what you meant by "that Unity excels as it is a walk through of project setups".


Disregard, what I meant was Unity has plethora of user shared videos demonstrating simple project setups. I don't have a problem for paying for online training either, I have actually purchased a few 3rd party training tutorials for more advanced concepts in Unity.


Back to C++ drills. 5 down 11 to go, then 23 exercises and I'm gonna start-up UE4 and do some basic practice.

Best of luck! Sounds like you are really making some headway :up:

[nsomnia]

I didnt even notice 4.7 was released yesterday

https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-47-released

I'm downloading the source right now and then I'm going to make a video "Switching from Unity to UE4 Vol 1" for both my channel and yourself.

With everything they added in this version I can't think of one thing its missing from Unity, they just use different names.

Not so useful to me right now but what I think is really cool is they have DLC support right from the get go:
Downloadable content (DLC) can now be packaged up for distribution!
Currently this feature is in beta testing and requires a command-line tool. Create your add-on DLC inside a game plugin Content folder, and use the new packaging tool to “cook” and optimize your content for your platform of choice.
This feature makes use of the game’s asset registry to know what content is already supplied in the shipped game, and will cook anything needed from the game’s content into the DLC.
To use this feature, run the cook utility for your main game with “-CreateReleaseVersion=x.y”, then again for each DLC plugin with “-BasedOnReleaseVersion=x.y -DLCName=MyPluginName”.
I'm so reinvigorated. You could get all the features in UE4 in Unreal through the Asset Store but youd be spending thousands of dollars.

[nsomnia]

Well unfortunatly I spent 3 hours debugging an error with the solution (A folder name was had # in it which wasnt allowed apparently... which sucks cause I keep my important folders prefixed with # so they are at the top of the directory listing ie #Blender Stuff #YouTube #Photoshop #Video Courses #Unity Stuff #Coding Stuff, Blueprints, Models, Textures, etc)

and then it took 2.5 hours to compile on my 6 core 4ghz computer :huh:

So tommorrow I'll get started. Today was a compiling day (and I re-watched some video courses so that I was sure I had a general feel for UE4.x)

I created some 2 basic meshes and associated diffuse maps and exported them to .FBX in Blender. We will see how they import (4.7 now automatically knows what your trying to import), then I'll use blueprint (node based, visual scripting) to show how easy it to rotate along an axis.

The new version also checks your projects folder every 5 seconds or so for changes so if you change a texture its immediately shown in the viewport, no more having to re-fresh images or removing/re-adding components all together.

The material system is SOOOO cool. Its just like blender. No more having a diffuse and normal map texture on a mesh with the alpha channel holding your spec map that you have to have a special program to put in the alpha channel and then code a shader... its all visual node based now... just like Blenders material editor! You bring in a texture and apply modifiers (math, grime node, etc. etc. etc.) to it then plug it into the diffuse node, and the same for spec, AO, normal etc. and it does all the shader compiling for you. What a time saver, plus you get a real-time preview of what the shader/material WITH textures will look like.

Then after you create whats called a "master material" say a metal floor you create instanced materials by editing any values you determine to be parameters when you design the material/shader setup. So you might have metal_floor.material metal_floor_rusted.materialinstance and metal_floor_spilled_paint.materialinstance.

Not to mention you can do 95% of the coding with this node based system... I'm excited to see how much further I can get in this than Unity before I actually have to start using code for complex things but I have yet to see very many things that cant be done in blueprint. Heres an example of an input node, math node, and get/set node used to change a value in a function or class or something (havn't looked at the whole tutorial)
https://d26ilriwvtzlb.cloudfront.net/8/81/PhysicsHandle03.JPG

They also added a git-hub plugin stock for teams using git-hub. That with Visual Studio 2013's git-hub system will be soooo nice with extra team-members in the future. Not to mention they are using the PhysX 3.3 engine (I just checked, Unity isnt switching to version 3 till Unity 5 comes out ) gonna be some cool oppertunities.

The one downside is the marketplace is really empty so far since its only a few months old. I'm gonna start making videos on UE4 to supplement my Unity and Blender and other channels. I need to start a dedicated channel currently my Unity videos are spread out across 2 channels.

[nsomnia]

You know i have failed and failed at completing my indie projects as well:shucks:

http://youtu.be/FX8G3XdK1vU

Its not exactly the video you want to see yet (the video on importing a mesh, making a nice material, then creating a component to spin it on a mouse or key press will only be 5-10 minutes long) but for my Blender channel I made a 40 minute long video comparing Unity 4.6.2f1 to Unreal Engine 4.7. I go over all the basic functionality (asset importing, organization, hierarchy and inspector window and components and a few others) we are used to in Unity and where to find it or what its called in Unreal to show people how incredibly similar they are and where Unreal exceeds or doesnt exceed (only one thing I found so far: unreal imports assets slightly slower).

The first 25 minutes is the comparison. The last 15 minutes I import and material two meshes in Unity and then I do the exact same thing in UE4 for the first time ever.

If you have 45 minutes to blow throw it up on your TV otherwise I'll create that video tommorrow or saturday now that I know the basics of UE4 I can move onto blueprint coding.

I used to argue with everyone that said Unreal was better on my Blender channel, now im re-replying with apologies LOL.

The fact Blender exported the mesh just fine made my only worry go away.

This weekend I re-start the project in Unreal Engine and update the Git-Hub. :rock:Going to layout all the decks, bulkheads, and hatches and then import it into Unreal to start filling out with equipment etc. Then start some basic game logic and then start working on the ocean. Then start work on a map system (which is where I struggled before) and so on and so forth.

Procedural ocean floors is another feature thats going to be implemented, was directed to some ways to do it easily.

[Julhelm]

You do realize there have been node-based shader editors like that available for Unity for free since, 2010 or something?

[nsomnia]

You do realize there have been node-based shader editors like that available for Unity for free since, 2010 or something?

Yep but I'm now starting to agree that having it built into the editor from the get-go is just.... nice makes the pipeline smoother. Just plug your nodes in and go. You have to remember I'm an artist first, coder second.

That and budget. Unity was getting expensive.

[Julhelm]

You know, if you're going to make any serious project it's going to end up being expensive. That said, while it is nice to have such things built in from the get-go, I like that Unity forced me to learn how to write my own fragment shaders. It just gives me more control over final performance. All of the node-based editors output the same CG code anyway, but they do so using their own proprietary nodes which means it is difficult to edit or understand the code afterwards if you need to manually optimize calculations. Writing your own code makes this much easier.

[nsomnia]

You know i have failed and failed at completing my indie projects as well. It's too bad we couldn't come up with something unique that we could apply our skill sets to successfully just to say we 'completed' something. :shucks:

http://youtu.be/qk-Yi7DVDy8
(http://youtu.be/qk-Yi7DVDy8)
00:30 - Intro
2:00 - Start with importing the same mesh and texture
3:40 - Create the same material
4:45 - Apply material
5:20 - Making a prefab/scripting part
14:15 - Testing
14:45 - Previewing in the blueprint editor
15:05 - Conclusion Start
16:20 - Conclusion End / Final Conclusion



Heres the video I got figured out this morning if you got 10 minutes (4-14 minute mark is what your intresting in I think). Starts at minute mark with importing the same mesh and texture and creating the same material then turning it into a prefab with a script to rotate it a set amount when 'Y' is pressed. It went on a little longer than I thought but I recorded this directly after I 'figured it out' from playing around.

Let me know what you think about the general idea of Unreal, curious. I'm loving it so far and I used to argue for Unity so much. Only thing im noticing is its a little taxing on the computer, a bit slower than Unity and takes up an extra 150-200 megs of ram.

You know, if you're going to make any serious project it's going to end up being expensive. That said, while it is nice to have such things built in from the get-go, I like that Unity forced me to learn how to write my own fragment shaders. It just gives me more control over final performance. All of the node-based editors output the same CG code anyway, but they do so using their own proprietary nodes which means it is difficult to edit or understand the code afterwards if you need to manually optimize calculations. Writing your own code makes this much easier.

I take your points and agree. I am learning C++ as I go for optimization because I heard blueprint can be up to 10x slower than straight code with complex calculations. Whats cool is you can flesh it out in Blueprint then convert that to a C++ solution to continue working on/optimize/change things. Some very neat features as I explore this more and more.

They also released the 4.7.1 minor release hotfix less than 24 hours after the 4.7 major release. (and its cool on the GitHub they have Release Candidate versions available for testing and Alpha/Beta versions available for testing, as long as your subscription is valid anyway, otherwise your stuck with the last version you downloaded.

Doing this video and figuring out the basics of the Blueprint system took longer than anticipated so I might not get as much work done today as promised but this weekend for sure expect some major updates (going to model a 1950 era sub exterior and flesh out the major structural details in every compartment and also start looking into the ocean/weather project. Will be posting updates, hope to eventually convince someone to come on board.

My biggest gripe with Unreal so far is compatibility between versions. Since they are updating versions SO fast since its such a new idea for them, and the marketplace being BRAND BRAND new... assets from the marketplace currently have to be updated for each release. For example the free assets are for the last major release 4.6.1 from a month or so ago. They havnt been updated for 4.7 released 3 days ago, although some are already updated for the 4.7.1 released a few hours ago. The marketplace is also lacking majorly for the time being. The community forums makes up for it with the amount of free stuff people are sharing as they explore the engine but its no-where near Unitys Asset Store. At all.

I just bought the new Digital Tutors course "Building an Interactive Day Night Cycle Game in Unreal Engine. I think I own every course on UE4 from the major tutor websites... just havn't started any.

Does Unity have the ability to create animations by recording physics interations in the editor play preview? What about making cinematics from within the editor is there an addon for that? Those two, especially the animations from physics simulations are some of the coolest features IMO. And Blueprint is starting to get up there.

[Julhelm]

I do know there is an asset on the asset store for cutscene creation. When I was lead technical artist on Perils of Man which also used Unity we animated the cameras within the 3d app and then exported proxy objects for these to which the camera was then attached in Unity.

When I last worked with Unreal Engine (was UE3 I think) I found it clunky and the fbx importer cumbersome. As for Blueprint, a similar tool exists for Unity called Playmaker which is also a node-based editor that allows you to make an entire game. However I think any tool that 'simplifies' programming by removing the programming itself is always going to end up limiting what you can make.

When I worked with Frostbite it had node-based editors for scripting and shader creation similar to what is available for Unreal and Unity. I think CryEngine has some equivalent function. Of all the engines I've worked with I think Unity is the most user-friendly.

[nsomnia]

I agree it is the most user-friendly and I'll code anyday vs node-based anything. But its nice for learning while I go, as long as I dont depend on it. I own playMaker but never used it really, never had a project where I thought it would help me.

Edit: I did by this course and I am excited to see if its great or sucks. http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/1861-Creating-Gameplay-Systems-using-Blueprint-Features-in-Unreal-Engine

[nsomnia]

Did alot of measuring tonight and starting fleshing out the other compartments here for example is the base walls for the COs & XOs staterooms as well as the officers shower and sr wardroom 2 and 4.

Edit: And cleaned up github and updated it a bit.

Edit2: The picture would help yes I know I havnt recalculated my normals yet

http://i.imgur.com/AxyOM6X.png

[Chad]

@nsomnia,

Thank you for recording and uploading the videos you've linked to. As I mentioned in the video's comments section, very helpful for me to see it step by step.

I do not have experience with node-based development, I never jumped on the Playmaker bandwagon, but I do see it's value for quickly prototyping. Perhaps when my work-load decreases in April I can afford some spare time to play with Unreal.

Thanks again,
Chad

[nsomnia]

I'll definitly pay for your subscription for you to mess around with it even if just to try it. 20$ for the chance to have someone with more experiance than me the change to maybe add something small is a bargin to me.

Will update this post later I'm filling out more of the compartment as seen above. Updated a ton of the github wiki as well.

Edit: Got the Galley/Mess/Officers Quarters compartment layout finalized. Got the ocean setup updated for Unreal 4.7 hotfix 1 so I'm gonna play with that for a while later tonight, but only for a bit I'm going to do something more constructive and start fleshing out the general exterior shape of Nautilus. I asked a submarine modeller what he would charge. 100 for the model. 300 for the .blend. Psh I'll model it myself thank you, even though thats an acceptable price its unacceptable with my current project budget. I read a good phrase. "Game development success: Time, budget, skills. You'll succeed as long as you have two, and each one changes the others"
http://i.imgur.com/PC2etvy.png

[Chad]

Did you find some decent blue prints? I know you are familiar with TheBlueprints.com, saw one of your YouTube videos include a reference to the site.

I always get hung up on the exterior of the boat despite the least amount of time is spent outside of the hull :/\\!!

[nsomnia]

A crewmember got me blueprints of everything fwd of the reactor compartment (check out the main reference folder on github). Nautilus is basically just a WWII fleet boat with a reactor inside. I find modelling subs easy, I just havnt started on her yet. That said it is hard to find blueprints of subs of anything more than a side view since they are so top secret.

Trying to create some of those "cloth" doors you see on ships. Its been so long since I've done cloth simulation im having a hard time. Might be better off doing it by hand it'll be faster then trying to simulate it just right.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=364722&d=1425174234

Blueprints I've saved since starting this project: https://github.com/Nsomnia/ColdWarSubSim/tree/master/Reference%20Material/Blueprints%20%26%20Drawings got everything a sub of that era would have when I have time to REALLY get specific/detailed. Way past version 1.0 kinda thing

In terms of 571.. this is the one the vet crew member Twiggy sent me everything aft is top-secret still. (Warning: HUGE its all the decks and tanks and profile.) https://github.com/Nsomnia/ColdWarSubSim/blob/master/Reference%20Material/Nautilus%20Plan%20View%2010001.jpg I've been using it to get 90% accurate measurements of everything in the ship with his help. He cant send me anything aft what-so-ever though :(

This one is the one ill be using to model the exterior, one I take it into Photoshop to turn it into a black and white line-drawing. I've checked and its to perfect scale. If you know how to model well and use blueprints well its indispensable its got the profile at various points of the hull, profile views and dimensions in addition to your standard front/back top/side: https://github.com/Nsomnia/ColdWarSubSim/blob/master/Reference%20Material/Blueprints%20%26%20Drawings/SSN-571/SSN571.jpg

This one was the only one on the-blueprints just a orthographic render would have to trace it by hand: https://github.com/Nsomnia/ColdWarSubSim/blob/master/Reference%20Material/Blueprints%20%26%20Drawings/SSN-571/USS%20SSN-571%20Nautilus%20the-blueprints.info%5BSubmarine%5D%20%5BLIMITED%20to%2 0500px%5D.jpg

This one can be helpful im sure: https://github.com/Nsomnia/ColdWarSubSim/blob/master/Reference%20Material/Blueprints%20%26%20Drawings/SSN-571/uss-nautilus-ssn5717.jpg

Did you find some decent blue prints? I know you are familiar with TheBlueprints.com, saw one of your YouTube videos include a reference to the site.

I always get hung up on the exterior of the boat despite the least amount of time is spent outside of the hull :/\\!!

I know what you mean, that's why I've spent no time on the exterior yet, that and this other crew member was supposed to be sending me prints from Electric Boats but he isnt replying to my emails anymore :( Is there a specific boat or class your looking for? I'm a great googler is all with a lot of reference links, emails and forums.

What helped me learn to do vehicle modelling was to follow the 57 thunderbird Blender tutorial on youtube. I downloaded all 16 hour long lessons or however many they are and modelled it vert for vert as close as I could. It ended up looking amazing. Unfortunatly that was on my laptop when I was starting to learn Blender professionally and its all lost now except a few early renders.

Modelling ships, even though they are easier than say a car. Is very hard. MY least favorite things to model except for characters because everything has to be "smooth and 'flat'" but everything has to be contoured and curved and the topology has to be perfect/near perfect or you'll get visible "wrinkles". That's where a profile view really helps as in the blue colored blue print.

If your trying to model a U-boat for example I have drawings of the entire boat that were probably better than the German boat builders had. I also have the entire "Anatomy of the ships" series of books. Most of them are classical boats but if you need to model the anchor gearing for the Bismark its got it lol. I want that guys sources! At least one day when I do a UnrealDLC (once they've got the system perfected) I'll be able to model a type XII U-Boat better than Ubisoft!

Also I have a list of about 30 crewmembers I havnt emailed yet to see if they have any documents kicking around. For example just today Twiggy emailed me a top and side profile view of 571's mast with the correct placement and sizing (and listing) of everything... ELF loop, periscopes etc. that he found going through some old documents. He worked on all the analog computers so he saved all this stuff for some reason?


For ships though the general rule is you want the deck view and the side view minimum. Bow view is a bonus and aft view is nice. Having the hull profile views is what makes a blueprint a blueprint vs just a drawing IMHO.

I think im done for the night though. The doctor is having me try to take less of my happy pills each day so I've been putting less night time hours in especially during the weekends. Tomorrow morning I'm gonna start the layout of the next compartment. By next weekend I'll have the entire ship layed out and ready for "filling in" (after I send a walkthrough video to all the vets to make sure the decks, rooms, ladders, stairs and hatch positions seem "close enough". Tomorrow I also want to start modelling the 24"x38" watertight hatches. Thats gonna be a PAIN because I want to animate the gearing system that locks them. I want the alpha version interior to be so amazing that Epic Games wont refuse me at least a 2500$ grant. https://www.unrealengine.com/unrealdevgrants
I downloaded some amazing creative commons models too of 50's cars, architecture, planes, so many things I cant even begin to list them and havnt even started to sort them for github yet. I'm going to start putting together some cutscene clips soon. (In case you guys havnt noticed I jump around from one thing to the other especially when your a one man & few helpers team.

[Chad]

That screen capture of the curtain doesn't look bad!

And as for the Developer's grant, I hope you get it! Before you apply for it, perhaps we can get some publicity for your project by way of interviews with game reviewers in which you can talk about the project and your communication with the ol' salts who used to sail the Nautilus in making it as realistic as possible.

-----

I don't particularly need anything and I don't want to de-rail your thread anymore, though it is now the most active thread in the Indie forum :woot:

I will ask Neal if I can create a thread in this forum about a non-Naval game and share a little bit of what I'm working on.

[nsomnia]

That screen capture of the curtain doesn't look bad!

And as for the Developer's grant, I hope you get it! Before you apply for it, perhaps we can get some publicity for your project by way of interviews with game reviewers in which you can talk about the project and your communication with the ol' salts who used to sail the Nautilus in making it as realistic as possible.

-----

I don't particularly need anything and I don't want to de-rail your thread anymore, though it is now the most active thread in the Indie forum :woot:

I will ask Neal if I can create a thread in this forum about a non-Naval game and share a little bit of what I'm working on.

I saw your videos I didnt watch them and it looks like the gears are spinning in your head. I saw you were trying to model a old Winchester. That was one of my first ever models boy did the barrel rifling get me for a while back then. We seem to have similar intrests.

Thats the whole idea I'm having. Make the interior so amazing and use community projects (community ocean project) with my own changes and additions that I share openly. Showcase how I use UE4 features like blueprinting, matinee, and physics animation recording, how I use Blender to do all my modelling and how I strove to get details right. Get a audio interview with some of the vets is exactly what I was thinking! The whole story behind me contacting them and stuff. Get a video of me touring a museum ship taking measurments. My sister is a professional photographer/videographer and would help I'm sure (with pay). Then if Unreal granted me 2500, 5000, hell say 10k that would start to fill the pockets... right now my budget is 200-1000 Canadian dollars. So like. 3 USD :har:

Heres my second attempt at some "cloth doors" but they were origonally around 80,000 polys so I unsubdivided them down to about 5000. Hence th euglyness. Gonna take one more crack before I leave it for another day and start work on the exterior of 571.

http://i.imgur.com/RGlIBs0.png

Trust me this thread will stay active. I plan to be #2 behind WotA. I'm dedicated to this and I have at least 1 more year of "unlimited free time" at my estimations. Although that has the side effect that I'm not banking huge amounts of money I can put towards my project. My income just pays the bills and daily life stuff. No fancy cars no million dollar houses. etc.

I really need a WORKING TITLE FOR THIS GAME. ColdWarSubSim is too generic.

Edit: 1 hour 15 minutes in photoshop and you have probably the best 571 prints available to the public (resized 6:1)
http://i.imgur.com/s4WiEZ4.png?1
Now to seperate them into their own individual images and see how far I get today. Sundays my least productive days.

Edit: Got the blueprints all sized up and lined up in blender Side Top Front and Aft (back). Time to start what I dread: vehicle modelling. The idea is easy. It just takes FOREVER. And I have to do it twice. Once for cutscene quality (750k-1mill tris) and once for game asset quality (20-30k tris).
Funny enough the blueprints came out to near perfect scale. it made her 298' long (320 reported) and a perfect 26' wide. Unfortunatly the blueprint is a little off center from the photocopy and the bow view of off center in the drawing so I'll have to do a little bit of guess work. I might have to go buy a scale model (one of my other hobbies) for reference.

[nsomnia]

http://i.imgur.com/yRp4nRC.png

Tested out the blueprints. Seems like they will work out alright. I'm going to purchase a scale model for sure to help speed it along. I have scale models of surface boats but no subs oddly enough. If anyone knows where I can find a model of skipack, nautilus, seawolf class, or any fleet sub let me know. Digital that is; any format.


PS: Chad did your prohibition game ever get anywhere? I love doing retro art its my photoshop specialty.

Camera drops are gonna be so cool
http://i.cubeupload.com/XSLqtX.gif

I found this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0tU-oqSiKE
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0tU-oqSiKE#t=87)
Definitely gonna play with that at some point especially if I can think of a use in this game.

Edit 3 am ok make that 415 am. gonna try an old school CAD technique since we have the profile views of 90% of the ship.
http://i.imgur.com/2fWEo0F.png?1

Oh how I hate organic vehicle modelling.

Edit: Well I got the cross sections modelled low poly with the same amount of verts (quads, good topology) dunno if I can finish it this way though. Might have to just scrape something together I just need a placeholder to throw into the game engine so I can start working on the community ocean project.
http://i.imgur.com/VOSJrkt.png

[nsomnia]

I used the profile view in a different way and got this result by letting the program interpolate the difference between the profile cross sections (A is forward and section K is about where the rudder starts (you can actually see the A where it starts and H,J,K at the end, the rest aft I did by hand). So 11 cross sections. The bow has to be done by hand as does the sail and any thing else. Not looking forward to the bow. You can see the wrinkles if you look real close FWD I dont think thats how these subs looked. Aft is fine, but forward of the sail I think is wrong. Either way... I'm gonna work from here, the topology is perfect (all straight quads with no terminators edge loops all around) 8000 polys so far.

http://i.imgur.com/2dvJWpV.png

One or two more days work and I can throw her into UE4 and get some action shots finally. I smashed my finger building a new desk chair and so modelling is a little hard cause I'm a hotkey fanatic and I cant do my code drills at all right now due to that so I'm just gonna read forward. We are finally getting into classes in the C++ book by building a console calculator. Woo-eee.... been there done that. Good practice though.

I already have the perfect texture pack picked out Doschs' "2k Sci-Fi Teture Collection" theyre all tileable with spec maps but unfortunately I'll have to generate normal and bump maps. Had to resize them heavily cause its an expensive pack and not allowed to redistribute to non-team members obviously. Speaking of that, lets say I had 5 team members and bought a subscription to Digital Tutors or Lynda and downloaded a bunch of video courses. Could I share those with my team or would I have to purchase 5 subscriptions. Makes you think, if my team was 100% local or in the same building, we would just share the files I'm sure or watch them together, how does the internet differentiate that.

http://i.imgur.com/S6pzF3Z.jpg?1http://i.imgur.com/SVS2hSk.jpg?2http://i.imgur.com/rCjAdz8.jpg?2http://i.imgur.com/n9sOet0.jpg?2http://i.imgur.com/GlTo0tM.jpg?1http://i.imgur.com/ZKWTkTW.jpg?2http://i.imgur.com/aoovCAd.jpg?1

Just a sample of the "rust" collection, I think theres 30-40 of them and theyre all tileable and 2k with spec maps.

[Chad]

Hey nsomnia, have you seen this??

http://www.pcgamer.com/unreal-engine-4-is-now-free/

And as for my Prohibition idea, nah, it went several iterations with playable builds, but never as far as I wanted it.

I saw you were trying to model a old Winchester. That was one of my first ever models boy did the barrel rifling get me for a while back then. We seem to have similar intrests.

It does seem we do! I am a sucker for spaghetti westerns, the anti-hero kind.

Edit: 1 hour 15 minutes in photoshop and you have probably the best 571 prints available to the public (resized 6:1)

http://i.imgur.com/s4WiEZ4.png?1


That's pretty sharp! I can't wait to see more as you get more done.

I need to download from your GitHub and keep current with what you are working on.

[nsomnia]

Hey nsomnia, have you seen this??
http://www.pcgamer.com/unreal-engine-4-is-now-free/

And as for my Prohibition idea, nah, it went several iterations with playable builds, but never as far as I wanted it.

I need to download from your GitHub and keep current with what you are working on.

No I havnt....
Account Balance

$30

Now I have :D They just revolutionized the gaming industry for the 3rd/4th time.



I didn't really see it coming though. Like I said the whopping 20 dollars kept the people who thought they could create the next call of duty or minecraft in a few clicks away (ala unity forums). Thats great though that means people will really start coming over. Epic is REALLY REALLY great people and I think in a years time most indie games will be built with UE4, excepting mobile, I think Unity has the market there, at least for now. Another thought, they really are not losing money, at last check before they opened the github repository to the public they had 21,000 current subscribers. So they are losing 400 grand over the course of a couple years and gaining who knows how much from the huge amount of games your gonna see on steam/self published etc. with UE4. They follow my strategy. Do the work now for free, and get payment later continuously forever.

I dont keep my github 100% up to date cause I have no worry about anyone needing the latest updates and because I really havnt created anything useful yet save for the compartment models.

Having a bitch with the exterior I hate modelling vehicles, still. Tomorrow morning I'll probably grind on 'er again. :/\\!!

I love spaghetti westerns too haha. See back when I totally shelved my U-boat game more or less I was thinking of game ideas to start on that could involve a story (I was making hobby simulator games at the time only) and a prohibition game could've been a great idea. Then again Mafia II didnt do the greatest.

What did I say about my luck? I update my subscription on UE and then they release it free. Smart smart business move because as indie game devs see the potential of UE4 they are making the switch, of course give it development time, say another 4-6 months before we start seeing a huge influx of Alpha releases but just browsing the Unreal forums makes my jaws drop at the things people are doing already. People have to remember how new UE4 is (UDK cant be compared and UE3 was apparently not easy to use).

A whole 30 dollars credit for the marketplace where there is no assets yet. At least now that people can download it for free the marketplace will get submissions. HOWEVER a big issue right now is that Epic is only accepting Marketplace submissions from people who are known well by the community and company so they can update their Assets in a timely matter for new versions because Epic is going through so many changes so fast they just cant gaurentee new-version-compatibility for some things. (Unless you write your whole game in C++, your own shaders etc.) so alot of people are still using 4.1 and 4.3 for compatibility which were released mid 2014.
Another problem they are discussing right now is if a developer makes a plugin for UE4 should he release the source code along with it so that people can fix it themselves if the creator decides to stop supporting it. Big arguments on the forum. So far the best solution is some assets will be closed source with a "buyer beware" warning and most will be open source and some will be opensource with "special parts" in some sort of a wrapper and lastly people who cant comply with that just sell it themselves. This is only for plugins/blueprints/code though. Props are of course compatible 100%.

I think this is great. I got on the bandwagon at just the right time. Now you have no excuse to download it, drag n drop yer assets in and start playing with blueprinting and node based PBM shaders. (Ive heard the Unreal offical youtube channel tutorials are among the best, and on the wiki search for tutorials by Rama he is amazing).

I should've started this model first before I did all that work on the interior. Then I would've had it done by now and then some. Oh well you cant expect a whole ship model in a couple days by someone who likes to take naps often.

Edit: The unreal forums are exploding already. I hope you downloaded the source (If you have Visual Studio 2013, or 2013 Community Edition) or the compiled binary to at least say "I have it" incase they change their mind and start learning it before Unity becomes for mobile games only ;)

[Chad]

I see you are still online, do you happen to have an Instant Messaging tool, or another way we can chat without continually writing on the forum?

I have Steam, you can find me with the username of FuriousChad. I also have Playfire with the same name.

[nsomnia]

I see you are still online, do you happen to have an Instant Messaging tool, or another way we can chat without continually writing on the forum?

I have Steam, you can find me with the username of FuriousChad. I also have Playfire with the same name.

I'll add you to Steam I really dont have anyone to instant message with these days so I dont even have Skype intalled (have an account though). I'm a lone wolf.

Edit: Added. I dont particularily like Steams resource hogging. I'll download playfire and see how laggy it is.

The person that welcomed me to help co-develop the community ocean project who is a forum moderator says this is the most crazy time he has ever seen in his history of Unreal and the free version was only released 5 hours ago. I love that even free, you get EVERYTHING even the source code. Anyone with enough time and skills, or skills and money, or time and money can create blockbuster games in their free-time now.

Edit2: Ehhh playfire is buggy and uses up more memory than Blender! Steam it is. Wow I did not realize I've been on Steam for 10 years. A decade badge is kinda cool. It looks like Epic Games implemented a small friends messanger in their Epic Games Launcher (tracks your projects/installed engine vesrions/assets & more)

Edit3: Worked on the sail and got the deck bevel down. Gonna work on it with a clear mind tommorrow. I lose my steam (no pun intended) after dinner. Updates on the hull tomorrow!

You can see the wrinkles clearly here as I struggle to get the bow "to shape" its a very very interesting shape progression.

http://i.imgur.com/ydrnFoM.png

Edit4: Ok worked a bit more and just guessed on the bow. Still lots of wrinkles to iron out but the topology is still perfect which I take pride in so it can be pushed and pulled and geometry added or taken away anywhere. Not bad for a days work. You could use that in a game alpha (which I will be doing. soon. (perfectionist))
http://i.imgur.com/3b4EGUb.png

I came up with an idea for some acheivments feel free to add a list of creative or funny ones: im keeping a list of them on github for the beta 1.0 release.
Chernobyl: Reactor Meltdown on your sub
GlobeTrotter: 60,000km travelled
Swimmer: Get back to port with 75% flooding or more
Mechanic: Fix 10 breakdowns
No Potato: Go an entire patrol without any starch foods
No Broccilli: Go an entire patrol with no vegetables
Scurvy: Go an entire patrol with no fruits
Expensive Yacht: Spend 10 hours on the bridge
A Pin Drop: Man the sonar station for 10 hours
Ring around the rosie: Get back to port >100km with a stuck rudder by using one engine at 110% output when needed
Duracell: Have 2 hydrogen explosions on one patrol
The Hunt for Red October: Drop a seal team directly in Mamirsk port for no reason
Back Emergency: Travel 500km backwards
Stuck in Reverse: Travel 5000km backwards
Flank Speed: Exceed your subs rated max speed
Extreme Depths: Exceed your subs rated max depth by 100ft
Pounds Per Square Inch: Exceed your subs rated max depth by 250ft
Tons per Square Inch: Exceed your subs rated max depth by 500ft
Duct Tape and Hose Clamps: Repair a system failure without spare parts
The Red Green Guy: Repair 250 system failures
Surely don't call me Shirley: Skip the tutorial 3 times
Driver: Go an entire patrol without firing a shot
Fuel economy: Go an entire patrol without exceeding 1/3 speed
U-571 - Fix a radiation leak
U-571 re-told: - Fix a radiation leak that kills 8 or more crew members
Say Cheese: Take 50 screenshots
Showoff: Take 250 screenshots
Movie Star: Take 1000 screenshots
Whale waiting for a whale: Identify 5 biologic signitures into the computes.
From Russia With Love: Identify every single Russian vessel in the game
Uncle Sam Wants You: Identify every US vessel in the game
Fish n Chips: Identify every UK vessel in the game
Wasteland: Go an entire patrol without letting your crew shower
Rollover Rickover: Take a nuclear powred vessel to 100% power
Luck is my middle name: Take reactor level to 125% without damage
Red Light, Green Light: Go an entire patrol with red lights on only
Eyes like a cat: Go an entire patrol without using the red lights
AA Ace: Shoot down 10 planes
Ack ack: Shoot down 25 planes
Ice Station Zebra: Get to 90deg N 0deg W under the polar ice cap
Gone Fishin': Command a wire guided torpedo its full length until the cable breaks
Broken Line: Snap a torpedo door shut on a wire guided torpedo
Snapshot 2500: Hit a ship without using the TDC over 2500m
Snapshot 5000: Hit a ship without using the TDC over 5000m
Red to black or is it black to red: Wire the batterys in series for at least 15% more amps
Its Red to Red and Black to Black: Wire the batteries in series for at least 25% more amps
Watch your fire: Hit 1 friendly target
Friendly Fire: Hit 3 friendly targets
5 minutes to Nuclear Midnight: Fire 50 nuclear missles
1 minute to Nuclear Midnight: Fire 100 nuclear missles
MIG Hunter: Shoot down 25 fighter planes in the US Campaign
The Bear Hunter: Shoot down 25 bombers in the US Campaign
Good Morning Vietnam: Survive the Vietnam conflict without firing a single shot in-land
This is your captain speaking: Call general quarters 100 times
Inflate the autopilot: Make a plotted route over 10,000 km
Red Party Victory: Lose the US Campaign or win the Russian Campaign
Stars and Stripes: Win the US Campaign or lose the Russian Campaign
Doctor Please: Last an entire patrol without a medical trained crewmember and no injuries
Vacation time: Cross the equator 25 times
World Traveller: Dock on every continent
Enemy at the Gates: Attack an enemy vessel from within an enemy port

[nsomnia]

UGH UNITY 5 IS RELEASED NOW BECAUSE OF EPIC GAMES! I saw this in a dream last night I swear. Now I have a really hard choice. Chad? Input? I'd switch to Unity 5 if I had a co-creator on board, but even then its really really close since the Unreal Engine Community Ocean project is so beautiful and all blueprinted. Otherwise I'm loving UE4, but havnt started a project for this in it yet so the switch wouldn't have me lose anything except the c++ coding I learned so far [which is moot since most people are doing everything in blueprint except extreme cases like really complicated algorithms]
Gonna turn up the tunes, forget about the whole engine debate, and work on 571.

PS adding skype as a contact option for anyone. IM username - blendertek

Heres the list of major changes I added to the wiki
Unity 5 released for free on March 3rd, 2015 added the much anticipated real-time global illumination (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_illumination) based on the Geomerics Enlighten technology. Other major changes include physically-based shaders (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaders), HDR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDR) sky-boxes, reflection probes, a new audio mixer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_mixer) with effects and enhanced animator workflows. PhysX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX) was updated to 3.3, whereas Unity 4.x had an aging version. Unitys Cloud Build system was introduced (for $25/month for non-pro users) as well as 'Game Performance Reporting' and the beta 'Game Analytics' (also 25$/month for non-pro users) which logs players usage and performance on released games, something that many developers found hard to implement in Unity 4.x. Previously, a game developer needed to code support for player logging directly into their game engine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_engine).
Smaller additons include: A 64-bit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit) editor to handle large projects, iOS 64-bit support, new deferred rendering, graphics command buffers, improved linear lighting, HDR, skybox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skybox) and cubemap (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubemap) workflows, improved job scheduling system, a new 'CPU Timeline Profiler' lets you see and investigate multicore usage, improved NavMesh pathfinding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathfinding) system, integrated SpeedTree (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpeedTree) (a 3rd-party vegetation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetation) creation program) support to create lush, rich and dynamic vegetation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetation), new Frame Debugger to track down graphical issues in your projects, Improved Project Wizard, updated standard assets, new UI and scripting APIs for AssetBundle Build system and lastly, access to the new Asset Store Level 11 program: Available for free to Unity 5 Professional customers, and soon to be available to Unity Personal Edition users for $19/month.

PhysX 3.3 Update Up until Unity 5 the engine was using a fairly outdated version of Nvidias PhysX physics middleware. The 3.3 version included in Unity 5, which is standard among triple-a quality video games includes the following features: multithreaded simulation for platforms that support it, a new cloth component for character clothing. New wheel colliders make better support for suspension and tire force simulation in vehicle based games. Collision mesh detection is improved and bake-free scaled MeshCollider support as well. All these features means the physics will be much more realistic in Unity 5 and no longer prone to the problems and bugs that plagues developers in Unreal 4.x.
Supported Platforms in Unity 5 Unity 5 brings support for Windows (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows), Mac (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac), Linux (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux)/Steam OS, Unity Webplayer, Android (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android), iOS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS), Blackberry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackberry) 10, Windows Phone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone) 8, Tizen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizen), Windows Store apps, WebGL, Playstation 3 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playstation_3), Playstation 4 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playstation_4), Playstation Vita (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playstation_Vita), Wii U (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_U). Xbox One (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_One), Xbox 360 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360), Android TV, Samsung Smart TV, Oculus Rift (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oculus_Rift), and Gear VR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gear_VR) for a total of 21 supported platforms.
More Unity 5 Release notes can be found in the Unity 5.0 changelog (http://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/unity-5.0)


Todays goal: Get the hull of 571 game ready.

Edit: Intalled Unity 5 and will do a quick comparison video but the activation server is down for now Unity is now 11 gigs to download and 6 gigs once installed.

Edit2: Yep Epic Games Launcher now has a friends system. If you try out UE4 chad add me: Nsomnia or sderek02@gmail.com I dont know which one it uses.

[nsomnia]

With advice and knowledge of my best veteren crewmember and fixing up the bow with the proper profiles (I was modelling Seawolf instead of Nautilus doh!)

Got the general shape done. I got lucky and lots of the geometry lines up perfectly with the bow tube doors and sonar window.

Still needs lots of cleaning up before I can add any real detail though.

http://i.imgur.com/lXB3cCj.png

Modern boats will be a breeze.

Ohio class
http://i.imgur.com/wFKt3bf.jpg?1

And I have pictures of the Typhoon class down to her reactors. Go figure. God bless my American brothers...

Worked 7.5 hours straight to get that done and record/edit/post a video and install Unity 5. Time for a break. Well ok 3.3 hours looking at pictures, 2.5 modelling, .5 emailing, .5 video-ing and hte rest misc.

Regarding unity 5: it does run fast, I like that I can now keep my normal, bump, AO, emission, spec, diffuse and masks seperate for materials, but without any assets it still doesnt come close to UE4. Im not sold yet. It looks just as good as UE4 out of the box with realtime GI then UE4 which doesnt have realtime GI. With just a simple model though. More testing required. But it is SERIOUSLY unoptomized. A cube on a plane with a directional light the stock skybox with no materials makes for 60 FPS on my GTX 760 TI. I used to get 130-180 and UE4 gets me above 110-120 with a similar setup. Having it recalculate the lighting drops the fps by 5-10. Bump up the quality settings from fantastic to max and it drops another 5-7.

I do like that duplicating an object increments the name now. And it does feel homely just from all hte hours I've spent in it though. Monodevelop still sucks ass. I will refuse to even try it any more until they update the visual studio plugin. And I got a socket error on startup. And the authentication system was lagging my system bad oddly. The editor is butter smooth though, and you can snap, but its hidden way in a menu. Not a tiny button up top or hotkey like in UE4 and no near the same amount of flexability with snapping. I could of scripted the same snapping system into the Unity 4.x editor in an hour or less.

Unless something seriously changes my mind otherwise: UE4 stays, I'll still continue to use Unity for games that are better built on it. 2D mobile, simple games... etc. For a project as ambitious as mine with hardcore simulation, modding, DLC's, extreme graphics quality... UE4 fits it. If I wanted to build my simcity clone, I'd probly choose Unity in a heartbeat. If I was gonna steal Chads prohibition game idea in FP or TP i'd probly go to UE4. If I wanna build a mobile 'ColdWarSubSim', I'd port everything over to Unity. Why not have both, now that I can?

[nsomnia]

@nsomnia
I do not have experience with node-based development, I never jumped on the Playmaker bandwagon, but I do see it's value for quickly prototyping. Perhaps when my work-load decreases in April I can afford some spare time to play with Unreal.

Its giving me weird errors when I try to add you to steam. Will attempt again later. Otherwise im nsomnia (altough my username is ssa_nsomnia if that doesntwork) and I'm now using Skype for business, username: blendertek

Got alot done on the hull will post pics in a bit!

Edit: Woke up at 4 am thats why I got the hull patched up. This photo is the raw geometry and the top one is just basic diffuse color with a smoothing modifier since there are still some wrinkles in the topology especially around the hull and where the deck bevels aft into the pressure hull. I cant texture her yet because If I change any topology then Id have to retexture that part. So I'm going to play with it when I have time to perfect it. For now though I _almost_ have a game ready Nautilus. The bow planes need doing, I just stole those ones off my U-Boat model from my old game, same with the props and their shafts I did the same. So I need to make the moveable surfaces and make then animated then I can bring it into an unreal project and start for real! Pretty high quality placeholder LOL.

I had to spend 3 hours this morning from 9-11 am answering emails and making videos for my channel so I havn't got as much done as I'd like. By this weekend v1.0 will be ready though for in-game use. When I get sick of modelling I'm going to watch UE4 videos so I can start learning more, as I said I really didn't like Unity 5 as much as I thought I would and was gonna swap back for C# but said screw it I'm alraedy a third of the way through the C++ basics book, plus Blueprinting is a replacement for scripting it "is" C# kind've. Once you learn the API (if your coding) and the few differences with UE4 its actually a real easy switch. I might make the mobile version in Unity.

http://i.imgur.com/pNn3myq.png

Edit: I added a ton of "issues" (features needed) to the issue tracker so that we know how far we are to completion of each release. Going to add more as I think of them but got the major ones added. Alpha 0.01 is 5% complete according to it now. I wish I had team members that could assign themselves to issues :(

Edit2: Local hobby shop went out of business. Spent some of the game budget on "research and development"
http://i.imgur.com/nbhQ9xU.jpg

Edit3: Getting away from the exterior and going back to finishing off some compartments. I really wanna get this into the engine but for some reason I'm hesitating. Its like the feeling driving the first time you wanna do it but its scary. And I dont know I'm having this problem, I'm not doing anything in Unity either. Probably cause im spending so much time learning C++ when I should be watching UE4 courses.

Edit4: The crews qtrs + torpedo room (Bow compartment) turned into a mess. At least I got the measurments so I'm going to redo it and build it like a house with walls and floors and then build a pressure hull around it later as a "roof" since you wont see outside of that anyway, when you exit a hatch it will load the exterior model.
http://i.imgur.com/GQQQtj0.png

I'm done for today though. 12 hours of work.

Remaining immediate goals:
a) Finish the general layout of the other compartments - Thurs/Fri
b) Start an unreal project - Fri/Sat/Sun
c) Get an explorable, driveable ghost-ship Nautilus - Next week.
d) start work on russian subs from the era
e) start work on game logic
f) start work on the game intro

[nsomnia]

I may have a team member on board! We'll see how the discussions go!

Todays goal: get the exterior model finished and animated/rigged so I can start an actual game project.

[Relmu]

Heres to hoping it'll work on linux. I'd lend a hand if I knew anything about what I was doing >.<

Edit.

I could possibly help out with some coding, but only at a particularly junior level. Statements are fun, pointers are nightmarish.

[nsomnia]

Heres to hoping it'll work on linux. I'd lend a hand if I knew anything about what I was doing >.<

Edit.

I could possibly help out with some coding, but only at a particularly junior level. Statements are fun, pointers are nightmarish.
I havnt event got to pointers yet.

Download UE4. Try out blueprinting. You dont code, its all visual adding parameters and connecting return values, creating variables etc.

In talks with 2 people regarding some help. This might go somewhere!

I got the top half of the rudder done and moving and the prop shaft housings blocked in.

Enough for now. Been at it for 8 hours again. Gonna go setup my garage for my scale models again, gonna go work on New Jersey.

[Chad]

@nsomnia, stick with Unreal!

Sorry for my absence, busy at work. But I plan on downloading Unreal and begin learning the ins-and-outs of it. I already have a head start with the video you made for me last week :yeah:

The sub model is really coming along, and when you apply even a diffuse map it will look very good.

You did successfully add me to Steam, I accepted and see you are 'Away' currently.

[nsomnia]

I'm out for the day. Worked too much for my birthday, even if I am getting too old for birthdays.

The rudder moves (If you can tell) and the bow planes too, but they are placeholderss.

I can plug it into unreal when I get the balls. Got a team member for sure it looks like.

http://i.imgur.com/g6PHJet.png?1

[nsomnia]

Didn't get much done today. Will finish the model tommorrow.

Underwater Camera Effects: confirmed feature:
"Fringe, Color Grading, DOF, and other settings in a Post Process Volume below the water surface."

Water Drop/Stream Effects: confirmed feature:
"A Post Process blendable Screen FX with water drops and small streams of water running down the screen when the camera moves back up out of the water."

So is rain/sleet/snow so as you progress through time, and different biomes you'll get different weather effects. May even implement historic or random hurricanes/typhoons/tropical storms.

We are working on a full calender system so that the moon and sun rises and sets in the proper place and time according to time of year and location.

If peformance allows too, fish and whales and such will be implemented to swim past at random intervals which you would see with the external camera, on the bridge, through the periscope, or portholes/windows/cameras on the sub classes that have them. Its a goal, but I'd like to implement them "fuzzying" the sonar readings and large whales maybe even radar? Sea life has AI and are attracted to the player but are scared by sounds and moving close to them inwhich case they will flock and move around the player.

Also there is a fully functional swimming implementation, I'll probably remove it for extra performance but it could be cool to play out the "send SEAL team to this location" missions as the actual soldiers. Mix up FPS with simulation genre. Change of pace. Also could make it so under extreme flooding you could swim to the surface and be "rescued" for a large time advance and the loss of your boat/mission.

[nsomnia]

Me and my most likely co-founder teammember are laying down the groundwork for the game this weekend. Expect big updates.

[nsomnia]

Got Nautilus imported into Unreal from Blender just fine with its rig. Now the planes and the rudder and the screws can be animated in game. Just waiting for the new version of th eocean project that was supposed to come out sometime today and we're starting the project officallly

[Chad]

Very nice! Can't wait to see it :ping:

[nsomnia]

Very nice! Can't wait to see it :ping:

For now http://youtu.be/h47e62Mx-ok

[nsomnia]

Talked with my co-founder for 2 hours tonight. It sounds like this is gonna become something alot faster than I anticipated. He already has the ability to make ships patrol and fire at enemys and have planes fly overhead in patrol areas + the ocean stuff. I need to catch up fast.

[nsomnia]

Todays goal: learn to make GUIs in Unreal Engine, my teammemeber has the basic game logic more or less finished already, so we've assigned me to learning how to code/script the GUI.

Also switched to a private bitbuket repo. We will still be releasing certain things though open-source.

[Chad]

For now http://youtu.be/h47e62Mx-ok

I will be watching this later today!

[nsomnia]

Ok need your guys input. To get an alpha out faster we are thinking of skipping most of the explorable interior at least for now and leave it as a 2d side view of all the compartments in one of the corners where you can see the crew and yourself moving and interact with things but the 3D exterior view is still viewable at the same time and if you wish you can switch to full screen 2D side view of the interior or 3D first perseon view of the bridge and attack center + control room.

Opinions?

I dont have any pictures cause I forgot to take a printscreen during one of our Skype calls but you guys are going to be pleasantly suprised.

[Chad]

It is a start! I'm perfectly fine with this approach :yep:

[nsomnia]

It is a start! I'm perfectly fine with this approach :yep:


The main reason I'm going along with it (for now) is that it would be must faster to implement. Maybe once he sees my video of a half hour of everytyhing about silent hunter 5 he will change his mind. But it will lengthen the devlopment time signficantly every compartment we need to add.

[nsomnia]

The ocean script, with our own scripts to make the boats have AI, and my model and thats about it for now.

http://i.imgur.com/ig7z5pB.png http://i.imgur.com/4a51dw5.png http://i.imgur.com/eErTj9s.png http://i.imgur.com/lZi5wll.png http://i.imgur.com/7JliaVe.png http://i.imgur.com/EFJmlKZ.png http://i.imgur.com/iDlYDIj.png

[nsomnia]

Can a moderator apply the title change to my OP? OR am I stuck with the original and would have to start a new thread?

[Hitman]

PM the forum moderator if he doesnt see this :)

Nice project, good luck with it will be watching :rock:

[nsomnia]

We are working on getting the physics of a submarine working right and then will be releasing a demo which will just be the campaigns tutorial level

[ReallyDedPoet]

Nice work here !

[zakarpatska]

Nice work! I'm amazed at how rapidly things are progressing.

[nsomnia]

Thanks guys. Any input is welome. What do you WANT in a subsim. What should be OMITTED in a subsim?

[Hitman]

From my point of view as realism-nut two things:

- A random at least, and dynamic if possible campaign is something that any enthusiast will rquest :) Adds the element of uncertainty (As in real life) and loads of replay value.

- Ability to operate yourself as many systems as possible, or let the AI do it.

Of course a great physics model with believable dynamics is always welcomed, but that one doesnt need to be ultimately perfect, just a good one should suffice.

A good example of the style of game/campaign I'm thinking of, is "Red Storm Rising" :rock:

[nsomnia]

From my point of view as realism-nut two things:

- A random at least, and dynamic if possible campaign is something that any enthusiast will rquest :) Adds the element of uncertainty (As in real life) and loads of replay value.

- Ability to operate yourself as many systems as possible, or let the AI do it.

Of course a great physics model with believable dynamics is always welcomed, but that one doesnt need to be ultimately perfect, just a good one should suffice.

A good example of the style of game/campaign I'm thinking of, is "Red Storm Rising" :rock:

The alpha will be scripted but enemies are friendlies are currently free to do as they please via AI.

I want to operate as many systems as possible, more will get added in time. We are going to start with propulsino and weapons, then sonar.

Have to replay it! Been a looooong time. We want some sort of intense story with a spirital kindve feeling. "Why am I fighting this war. Why must I extinquish these evils?"

Today im getting starting on the alpha GUI and optomizing the code. My partner is working on the boat physics and player control. I'm making characters in my spare time. Expect a downloadable demo within a couple/few weeks. Tops.

[nsomnia]

http://youtu.be/RgfiOfVJpk0

Diving, periscope depth, surfacing etc. at all stopped. Simulating blowing tanks and opening vents.

Its a skype call so the quality is terrible and the underwater FX dont kick in till its real deep but it shows the basics.

[nsomnia]

Is anyone really even following this? considering posting a new thread now that the following features are implemented:

Diving, surfacing, keepig depth, periscope depth, changing speed, down/up angle, underwater caustics & damage models. We are going to use a struct for buyouancy test points, hundreds of them all over the boat so that we can simulate damage very realistically.

Will take a video tonight. Or do you guys prefer pictures?

[nsomnia]

http://youtu.be/WwMPDPYsVNI showing off some of the new features.

A screencapture no texture yet. Well except the ocean normal map and foam maps.

http://i.imgur.com/rmrz0I7.png?1

[Chad]

It's coming together nicely!

The submerging and surfacing physics need a little more tweaking but I'm seeing all the hard work you guys have been doing come to fruition. :up:

[zakarpatska]

Is anyone really even following this? Hi nsomnia, I'm following this thread with great interest. I visit it everyday to see if there are any developments and I'm really looking forward to the alpha. Take care.

[nsomnia]

Thanks guys. At the rate we are going if we had a dedicated modeller (Especailly one that can model clothing for makehuman in blender) it would come together 2x as fast and with another programmer/visual scripter we would have an early access in no time. Weve gone from a model to what you see in a week and a half. Most of it just monday-thursday. 4 days.

[nsomnia]

Re-compiled the source with the fish manger and fish addon c++ code. Will be importing all the models and testing the flocking and prey behaviors.


Taking some time off though. It appears the canvas system (UMG) aka for the GUI is broken in Blueprint, and I hate making GUI's through code, so I posted to the forums for a workaround.

[nsomnia]

PRogress. Finally getting some GUI (yes the SHV stuff are obviously just placeholders)

http://i.imgur.com/pYKwjoW.png

[nsomnia]

Got the speed readout working, depth readout, a basic message log system started (one at a time for now, need to figure out how to make a log that appends messages line by line), simple audio, periscope overlay with zooming in/out, and the simple submarine dynamics from before.

Next up: Get the periscope camera to move up/down with [ins]/[del]

My partners back tonight so this week should make for some major changes. Especially once we rewrite the buoyancy system to use huge structs instead of a small array.

[nsomnia]

Periscope rotates along the z, and y axis clamped to +/-30d on the Y, zooms in and out, depth and speed meter work, fixed to feet (not to scale yet though) and knots and obvservation periscope goes up and down with page up/down.

Video http://youtu.be/9evN8IBry9w its only a couple minutes no energy to do screenshots sorry guys. Downloadable demo by april 5th goal, end of april max. Early access sales by june 20th.

[nsomnia]

Scrapping the side view idea. Fixing up my interior and using that, starting with the bridge/sail, attack center and control room.

Updates soon, were rewriting the buoyancy system and had to switch to first person from third person.

We have the ability to swim. MY partner wants the choice to load a save or launch a rescue mission commanding a surface ship then a deep submersible if you get sunk. Comments?

[nsomnia]

Day/night cycle check it out (30 seconds) http://youtu.be/bwtt5gf-uto

[Avolanty]

Hey guys I am currently working on the Nautiluis SSN-571 tanks and I will be simulating 17 tanks for dive and surfacing so I will have questions later on about what to blow and what to fill. I was an aircraft mechanic at one point but never dealt with vessels of the deep. I am working with Nsomnia currently and appreciate the help you guys have to offer.

[Avolanty]

So Im making the Main Quarters and Galley compartments into flood able compartments. Can anyone tell me how they are divided up so if a rupture was to happen on one side I can tell which and how many to flood? I understand that the crew could shut certain doors to stop flooding and that's what i want to simulate.

[nsomnia]

http://i.imgur.com/UqxhW0s.png

[Chad]

Welcome to the forums Avolanty! I have been following nsomnia's progress since, well probably the start of the thread, and things seem to be progressing really quickly and great quality.

Can't help you with the flooding question though unfortunately.

[nsomnia]

Started set dressing the tutorial level with some battleships, PT boats, coastal defense boats, ack ack guns, piers, crates, forklifts, cranes etc.

Gonna start rebuilding the GUI tomorrow while I wait for Avolanty to migrate his new buoyancy system over with my finished Nautilus model.

Big updates soon. I have a preview video but I'm gonna wait a bit to post it. I'll try to get a pic up of the demo/tutorial level soon. Takinga break for a while another 10 hour day.

[nsomnia]

Made a port, it looks nice but I'm redoing it to look more intense with barbed wire fence, big tall lights, forklifts etc. got some PT boats, a cruiser a battleship, nautilus of course, an ohio class, lots and lots and lots of props day/night cycle, basic calender keeping. (I can compress time, but not the physics yet so have to look into hiring a c++ coder for that)

My partner has the boat 100% ready to go. Every tank is simulated and if you want to play on hard settings you can trim your boat out choosing how many litres of water to pump around the trim tanks you can drive the boat with the bow and stern planes manually.

Should be combining our work together this weekend or early next week looking at a April 5th free pre-alpha demo release for beta testing and feedback.

[nsomnia]

A minor set-back on the buoyancy system during a maintain depth command. We have oscillation rather than sitting at a steady depth. In talks over the next step: either I write my own controller code and have my partner work on something else major, or he irons out the bugs and perfects it while I work on other major systems. Will post pictures right away. Unless you guys want videos to see how it drives?

[nsomnia]

Playing around with some props for building a naval base (trying to figure out the best way for chain link fences without having hundreds of thousands of tris) for the demo level aka tutorial level.

http://i.imgur.com/jlcH1cY.png

[nsomnia]

Making a turn hard to starboard at ahead 2/3 rudders are placeholders, old model, and not textured other than a metallic black PBM material.

I've taken time away from the GUI to model.

http://i.imgur.com/oXrZPRF.png

[nsomnia]

Basic time compression system in place in a test project, just not implemented in the main project yet.

Features being worked on

-Chunked terrain for endless oceans rather than moving the world origin with the player
-Random ocean floor
-Snow, rain, sleet, ice, lightning all other weather
-Camera effects like shaking and water dripping
-First person exporable ships
-Flat calm through hurricane weather
-Biomes from the arctic sea all the way to the pacific equator.
-Dynamic rope system for mooring/towed array&&antenna
-Radar & sonar
-Taking control of the dive system (adjusting trim, controlling the planes etc)
-Torpedo system
-Prototype weapon systems (add 2x 5" deck guns to an Ohio class, why not?)
-Research tech tree
-Home port ala Janes 688i/Kerbal space program (interactable buildings for upgrades/supplies etc)
-Characters, voice acting (for now it will be cheesy, but random & soundtrack (in talk with a couple musicians)
-Damage system currently only about 12 damage zones per ship that affect its buoyancy
-Homing and wire guided torpedos
-ICBMS and boomers
-Fully dynamic campaign
-Crew upgrade, morale and abilities, and stats system including rank
-Friendly forces fighting alongside you when deemed appropriate from HQ how dynamics we can make it... will have to be seen
-Full sub vs sub multiplayer
-ASW addon commanding a cruiser
-Better ocean visuals
-Intelligence gathering/SEAL team missions
-Russian campaign
-When you get sunk you can load a previous game, or play a "mini-game"where you have to rescue your sub before they run out of oxygen or something and you get to save your crew youve worked so hard to upgrade and they gain toughness points or something
-Earth sized map system
-A lot more... note all of this is either in extremely early alpha or only in the design/research stage.


Features completed 100% for the first alpha (not the free demo)
Fish flocks (small numbers, more for eye candy cause it will kill performance)
Fully controllable ballast system
Explorable interior
Basic game dynamics Save/Load, GUI, ship controller, first person controller
A number of enemy and friendly ships
USS Nautilus

[nsomnia]

Some of the weather effects being worked on

http://i.imgur.com/uWLrROY.png

[nsomnia]

An example of the fish, not that will we be using it outside of the port, other than a few easter eggs. We all live in a yellow submrine...

http://ibin.co/1vCVhIcSwdt9

[nsomnia]

And lastly in terms of performance we have about 80sq km blocks of ocean the player can physically be in at once before having to stream another one, at 85-110 fps on my GTX 760 Ti (2013 card)

[nsomnia]

My partner simulating every single tank on the Nautilus. 18 I think.

http://i.imgur.com/F5EoSXn.png

[nsomnia]

Got a basic radar system setup that detects all enemies within your radar systems range. Currently its just a GUI but unreal makes it easy to display it on a 'monitor' on a 3d model, so future feature -> man the radar station.

Next up get a basic sonar system working. Much harder.

Tech demo still april release date.

[nsomnia]

Blender doesnt appear to be working well with Unreal 4 so I'm having to learn to apply my 3D modelling skills to Maya. Will take us back a little bit but a demo release for first week of april is still my goal and somtime in april is my deadline.

[nsomnia]

Got it rigged up in Maya, now we can focus on building everything we were supposed to be building when we were trying to bandaid the Blender skeletal problem, should've just used Maya in the end. It took me one day to learn to rig and bind in Maya properly for Unreal 4.

Expect big updates soon. Radar, time system etc.

The cool thing about Unreal is now that its rigged I dont need to animate it, I just go into Unreals skeleton editor and record me rotating the rudder 45 degrees and then cut out the empty frames and call it "rudder45dToPort_anim" its pretty frickin cool. Once Unreal fixes its bugs and adds some more support for formats other than .fbx and .png it'll blow Unity out of the water for anything except 2D and Mobile.

http://i.imgur.com/FAHH1rO.png

Unfortunatly theres no webplayer for an unreal game (well there is sortve, but not for what we are doing) so I have to post videos of the "cool stuff" if you guys dont mind watching them.

[Chad]

Post everything you got! Videos preferably, but will take just about any update :D

[nsomnia]

A lot of work for two people. Got a basic compass working tonight in about 30 minutes of playing around. And in inverse, it allows us to calculate angle off bow from an enemy ship, whether that will make it into the free demo, we'll have to see how far we get and how long we put the release date off, we have a new buyoancy system to play with and weather is supposed to be done this week. Im offically on the ocean plugin dev team should I should have access to beta features earlier.

Simple example just drawn on the hud.

http://i.imgur.com/Mzuzkve.png

[rainiere]

This is one intriguing thread! Following the progress here and just being amazed at what is being created!

[nsomnia]

Got a whole new buoyancy system which uses the water density versus the mass density so we can simulate blowing and venting tanks more realistically. We also have the ability to make any mesh blow apart into random seeded chunks and float on the water (working to make them sink randomly at random speeds)

[nsomnia]

Having to do my C++ coding on the new buoyancy system to add a feature for my co-founder and having errors. Calling it a day for the time being. Coding stresses me out when I cant use regular debugging.

Building bird flocking based off fish flocking so when your on the bridge and surfaced birds will be attracted to the player if wihin a ceertain distance of land.

[nsomnia]

Putting things like environment and sensors and modelling aside because while I'm not putting blame on my partner, alot of changes has caused our base sub logic to change 3 or 4 times over. Were now doing it for hopefully the last time., together.

Then the real fun can start.

[nsomnia]

Helped him out to get it turning. How do you guys figure it looks when turning?

http://youtu.be/VOK3ZubX6a4
2 minutes - dead slow ahead hard to starboard then back flank.

Edit: I should add I got my binocular script from Unity ported over about 75% to Unreal. The reaason we've made such progress so fast is because I have an 'in' in the community ocean project and weve been working 10-16 hour days each.

[nsomnia]

Getting drag figured out today with my partner and while he takes breaks I'm making my binoculars and learning raycasting (its not advanced per-say in Unreal, just very very flexible, it returns what object it hit, how long it took to it how, how far the ray took to hit it, where the object is the ray hit, where on the object the ray hit, the surface normal it hit, the location of the impact point, the location of the normal it hit, the physics material type it hit, the actor type it hit (actor = gameobject like a mesh, light, skybox, trigger volume, character etc.), the component it hit (components are things like text widgets, meshes, cameras, etc), the bone it hit (in a rigged mesh aka a skeletal mesh aka a 3d object with moving parts), the bone item it hit (not sure about that one), and it returns a boolean (true/false) if it hit anything at all as well as a boolean if anything is preventing it from ray casting to its full distance IE did it raycats the full distance you specified or did it hit somewhere inbetween.

Thats outputs. Inputs are where to start the raycast, where to end it, trace channel (visibility vs camera have to research that one), trace complex boolean (allows for complex hits it says), it allows you put input an array of actors (again actor = gameobject) to ignore and pass right through, it has input for drag debug type to draw an actual line which is an enum selectin of none, one frame, or full raycast duration, and a boolean input to ignore itself.

Very flexible. You will love Unreal once you get used to it Chad you will be able to build your prohibition game like it was nothing. Especially with a partner that can get you started (like I was lucky to get).



So yeah, binoculars today and getting the drag setup so the boat slows down and speed up properly.

Just so I'm sure. Ahead slow is is about 1/16-1/32 speed, slow is about 1/3, standard is 2/3 ful is 3/3 and flank is 110% right? And then reverse dead slow is 1/32-1/64 full speed, reverse slow is 2/3 minus about 15-20% reverse full is full speed minus about 25% and emergency back is full sped minus about 35-40%.... sound about right for a WWII boat like the Nautilus? (No cigar shaped bow). If anyone has any speed figures for any US submarines post WW1 at the different telegraph settings let me know.

[nsomnia]

Some atmosphere pics WIP on the lightning.

http://i.imgur.com/oqrNDok.png

[nsomnia]

Tonights progress. I was watching tv and my partner suprised me with this.

Gotta fix a small bug and some technical innaccuracies (for example you only use the stern planes to level out not dive and surface, correct?) then I can add crash dive and blow all ballast some sounds, work on my textures and materials and then start a torpedo system.

The clock is ticking.

I dont want to release a terrible demo on the 5th.

http://youtu.be/VQnLMIPo4v8 - 30 seconds just to show all the moving parts.

[nsomnia]

Forgot about this one. Our debug HUD (you can have multiple huds for different levels, debugging etc.)
http://i.imgur.com/xbeJK5I.png

[nsomnia]

So we've been playing around (in spare time) with an idea that I beleive is unheard of in subsims: the ability to take control of the planes

Check this video out, shows the new buoyancy system and what im talking about http://youtu.be/RZUh9pPzHCw

About 2 minutes, youll see I can fake it "jumping" out of the water. Keep in mind he was just playing around with adjusting the pitch of hte whole model, this isnt the real way the game will be played although an improved system of manual plane control will be implemented in time for advanced players.

[nsomnia]

A screenshot. http://i.imgur.com/mE9Gi0R.png

[nsomnia]

Got the ass end sinking bug fixed and a few other updates.

We are so close to having the sub working 100% that we can work on adding torpedos and enemies and build a port so we can release a tech demo at that point we decide. Tech demo, or spend a couple weeks making a character and tutorial mission that will be similar to the very first mission in the full game?

Anyways, its a sunday, not much more work will get done, maybe a bit of tweaking but it took us an hour and 15 minutes to get that bug fixed and I'm slowly weaning my partner off gigantic scripts that do everything in one long string of statments and showing him how to use functions that take input, do math or something, and then output something (or nothing). Modularity. WIP.

[ReallyDedPoet]

Great work :up:

[nsomnia]

Great work :up:

Ah just havin' a time there boy.


The basic infinit terrain system is in pre-alpha state. Based off the marching cubes project. Will allow us to generate random sea floors when out at the oceean depths if needed (at first once you get to a depth thats wayyy past crush depth I dont plan on even having an ocean floor, other than to cover up the moon/interior/other stuff you shouldnt see in free camera mode.

Got my laser range finder worked on not perfect yet, It can detect distance to other ships/planes etc. but not totally accurate.


Got a basic sonar system down. Havnt got audio working yet but unreal has a noise making system that works with their AI system so that you can have certain objects "emit noise" at a certain level that you can set based on as complicated math as you wish or just a value 0-1 which the enemies will then be able to/or not to detect depending on their sensiitivity and if they do detect you they will investigate and it works in reverse, when we have time we will set it up so that you output a certain noiose value based on engine rpm, sound coating, weather conditions, sea temp, biologicals/land blockers, rigged for silence etc. This as also had me start writing down some basic logic for acoustic homing torpedos but I dont want to get ahead of myself.

Looking into using the fish flocking behavior the community started (it uses the predator/prey approach, as in the fish will come check something new out like a player, but if it moves or is listed as a predator once they get in close enough to "identify" it they will hightail it out of there, and if you attack they will go it on their own forgetting there friends, otherwise they just investigate, move around you etc.) for the enemy and friendly AI for truely dynamic battles against extremely smart enemys WITH friendly ships helping. UE's AI system is mind blowing, and only getting better.

Speaking of sound, going through some old threads on here got me some great sounds to use as a started and taught me into how to create a hydrophone with a mic, when I have time I'll head to homehardware and buy some abs to build one and see what kind've interesting sounds I can come up with for when you man the sonar system. For towed array etc. I'm still waiting on a reply from a community projcet that does what we need for it to be visible, otherwise the towed array will be a moving object with a scaled cylinder for a rope, if I get him to allow us to use his code, or he releases his project (its a WIP) then the towed array will actually be visable as a sonar buoy looking deal with a cable with a little slack in it.

[Avolanty]

I had to rebuild the logic for the submarine a few times, not to mention update the buoyancy system. Been a real hard 2 weeks but now I think its safe to say we got something that is working now. What I need though is how the sub climbs and dives, in seconds versus meters depending on which tank is blown or flooded. That kind of information will help me make this subsim much more accurate to the real thing. Any calculations you guys can offer will be greatly appreciative for Nsomnia and me.

[nsomnia]

Added a Trello board so people can view progress at a glance/click and vote on features. https://trello.com/b/W4yrCFe2/coldwarsubsim-wip
(https://trello.com/b/W4yrCFe2/coldwarsubsim-wip)
Also adding in particle systems and working on torpedoes today. I'm asking my partner if he can have a alpha working sub controller for April 3rd. Tech demo is still set for April deadline and first week of April goal (but of course goals are never met)

[nsomnia]

My partner started work on some convoy AI while I took over finishing up, tweaking, and cleaning up the sub controller. Its a mess, not his fault, its visual scriptings fault. April 5th is looking more like april 15th now.

[nsomnia]

Well in just a few hours I was able to get regular and crash diving with the boolean option of negative tank vented or blown rewritten to a simple one page function. Going to add in the ability for advanced players to adjust the fwd/aft trim if wanted at a later date.

[Woxor]

Well in just a few hours I was able to get regular and crash diving with the boolean option of negative tank vented or blown rewritten to a simple one page function. Going to add in the ability for advanced players to adjust the fwd/aft trim if wanted at a later date.

This sounds great! Will we be able to control the ballast as well?

Cheers.

[nsomnia]

This sounds great! Will we be able to control the ballast as well?

Cheers.

We had that implemented in the original sub controller, we simulated every single tank in the nautilus except for sanitary, fresh water, torpedo tube drains, and oil tanks beacuse I dont think those affect buoyancy. So yes, its definitly a feature there will be a tab for advanced players to adjust ballast in each tank on the fly if they want, how fun that will be? Unknown. Maybe advanced hotkeys like ****+M pump 500L to port ballast tanks to compensate for damage, or shift+ctrl+1 pump 500L out of main ballst tank 1b && shift+ctrl+alt+1 pump 500L into MBT 1b.

So far I thought the easiest way would be a tabbed menu you bring up with a keypress where you drag sliders, 100% slider = full of water fully vented, 0% = fully blown

We have a very very cool effect of an AI ship sinking after getting hit on the bow. After a torpedo hits it starts slowly filling up with water and then goes bow first down, its pretty cool watching and its a start to the damage system. Will get a video from my partner later or wait till we do a file update so I can record it in HD.

Unfortunatly, we are behind schedule for the free tech demo, but hey, thats game deadlines, they are rarely met.

[nsomnia]

After a 5 minute crash dive to 2000 feet (past crush depth obviously or at least what the government will tell us) at all stopped I can verify the new buoyancy system works flawlessly looks pretty horizontal to me

http://i.imgur.com/C9UwmEY.png?1

[nsomnia]

HEy guys I created a new Trello board the proper way so you can Vote on features and comment.

https://trello.com/b/LxPedp4X/project-redwater-wip-board

Ive also added imported links to my siggy which you'll see in my next post for important links.

And BTW I've moved back the goal date to Apr 15 but still making my deadline End of April for the free tech demo.

Will release some shots of the FX and sinking my partner has been working on in his spare him when I get the files from him to record a nice video.

[nsomnia]

Will be posting picture and video updates of our ship sinking dynamics and our first version of a torpedo bubble trail.

Edit: LAter today, kindve enjoying Assasains Creed

[Woxor]

We had that implemented in the original sub controller, we simulated every single tank in the nautilus except for sanitary, fresh water, torpedo tube drains, and oil tanks beacuse I dont think those affect buoyancy. So yes, its definitly a feature there will be a tab for advanced players to adjust ballast in each tank on the fly if they want, how fun that will be? Unknown. Maybe advanced hotkeys like ****+M pump 500L to port ballast tanks to compensate for damage, or shift+ctrl+1 pump 500L out of main ballst tank 1b && shift+ctrl+alt+1 pump 500L into MBT 1b.

So far I thought the easiest way would be a tabbed menu you bring up with a keypress where you drag sliders, 100% slider = full of water fully vented, 0% = fully blown

We have a very very cool effect of an AI ship sinking after getting hit on the bow. After a torpedo hits it starts slowly filling up with water and then goes bow first down, its pretty cool watching and its a start to the damage system. Will get a video from my partner later or wait till we do a file update so I can record it in HD.

Unfortunatly, we are behind schedule for the free tech demo, but hey, thats game deadlines, they are rarely met.

That's amazing, hype meter just went through the roof!

[nsomnia]

That's amazing, hype meter just went through the roof!

In regards to manual trim adjustment for each tank or the sinking effect?

I have the files for our first attempt at sinking a damaged boat and basic torpedo trail. Going to record a video tonight (its easter sunday/monday so with family)

The more input you guys can give the better. Anything you can think of that you would love in a subsim, or you think should be omittted something speak up, we take all input very seriously! We are building off silent hunter 4/5 as a starting point by mixing them and then building off their strengths, fixing their weaknesses, and adding our own twists.

[nsomnia]

Got a 3 minute video and some screenies to post here in a few mins. Note these are just placeholders, just to test out the ai and torpedo bubble trail emitters.

Heres the video: http://youtu.be/J1dh9GBNc-Q


Some screenies to come.

[nsomnia]

Screenies:

http://i.imgur.com/IyxWaXX.png
http://i.imgur.com/6CVfNeo.png
http://i.imgur.com/64Q1HUE.png



Sorry about the resolution, straigfht outta the video recording.

Yes there is micro cavitation on the blades. You can just make it out as if the water is swirling around just barley visible, its based on an LOD system we are tweaking and this is just the right distance.

[nsomnia]

Got the sub controller code version 4 or 5 (still pre-alpha) half way done tonight. It now crash dives and allows the player to blow or vent the negative tank as well as the proper speeds that nautilus would have gone as best as I can figure.

Tomorrow probably re-do and improve the rudder so its not so jerky and if I have time get emergency surface and safety tank added in.

After that its just features. Make the aux/MBT/trim tanks functional (input, GUI sliders on a HUD screen or a ton of hotkeys to remember for quick action? I dont think that quick of action is needed personally I think being able to see the current tank levels and override them if wanted through a simple slider for each tank would be best, both for the players sanity and ease of setup on my end)

[BigBANGtheory]

modern sub/naval sim with Unreal Engine 4 :sunny:
I'll be keeping an eye on this, good luck gentlemen

[nsomnia]

April 8th: Got maintain depth working. Got it to go to periscope depth from anywhere. Got all the speeds working (not tweaked though). Got surface and blow all ballast emergency surface working with negative tank vented boolean. Everythings commented.

Pretty productive day, for the 5 hours it took me to do all that. Soon the fun starts... literally and un-literally.

Steering tomorrow, and probably enough time to start planning out speed based angles and dangles. Or at least just jimmy rig something that works. Oh and find out if steering causes any roll or pitch. Will have to make a pitch and roll readout even if its just the values (still wanna learn how to make a instanced material setup to visually show it)

Note this is just me re-writing the sub controller to be cleaner and re-usable for the next class of sub, and make it more accurate.

[nsomnia]

Today not alot got done but we did solve a potential future bug.

Our ships were very very slowly rolling pitching and yawing on their own (like one thousanth of a degree a second) but that would mean once I implement my time compression system that adds up fast.

We tracked it down to the mesh/rig for our boats. So for now we are using a static mesh (no rig, primitive shape like a cylinder, sphyl, cube rectangle etc) for all the physics that is the rough shape of the boat and the actual boats mesh with moving parts and everything is what you'll actually see, just no physics will be applied to it except ray traces. (which isnt physical physics).

Its a WIP system but the outcome is looking positive now our boats can sit there (I let it sit for 15 minutes just to test) without moving 0.0000001 (the max range you can test with a float, to test with doubles I'd have to create some custom C++ classes to allow use of doubles inside the UE4 engine they havnt implemented doubles yet.

Tomorrow I get angles and dangles working (based on speed and negtank blown/vented for now) and after that I'll be adding/re-writing features as time allows.

I'm happy to announce FuriousChad is going to try some modelling which may or may not make it into the free tech demo and/or game depending on how he goes about it. (I respect intellectual property, I wouldnt want anyone stealing my models, textures or code from me and would give the same respect back)

No features promised like the manual trim and manual ballast tank control have been scrapped yet. Infact they are still fully functional in my test projects, just not merged with the master yet.

[nsomnia]

Today I will be getting angles and dangles working. To start they will simply be based off of speed.

Heres a quick update video of something we got working by accident yesterday while examining a bug: walking around the deck and inheriting the boats base rotation (IE if the boat rotates you do too; your aim doesnt stay where it was it moves with the ship but your still free to look and move around)

http://youtu.be/XzzaE87BHnA

[nsomnia]

Got the basics of angles and dangles started and working. Just need to clenaup and rewrite hte function so they work with all depth changing commands.

Heres a 1:30 video with a crash dive at ahead flank and then a maintain depth order.

It came together in 2 hours, my first idea, my first try. Pretty rare that that happens. I thought this was going to take all weekend to conquer, not one day.

http://youtu.be/okXbIR68Zic

At the moment its only speed based but will be merging all my prototype projecst together in time so that we can have the manual ballast tank control affect how quickly it gains pitch (how quick it dives).

[nsomnia]

The sub controller is done. Done. The last month we have poured 95% of our time into the subcontrolller. Its finally in alpha. We have an ocean 100km x 100km with not a single FPS lost.

Major, major updates to come.

Edit: I wanna add we accidently caused a feature. In creating the angles and dangles we accidently allowed the boat to roll every so slightly during a hard turn. Now we can use that to manipulate things if we want. A) its visual you see a slight roll when turning hard (like no more than 1.5-2.0 degrees lets be realistic) but we could have say crashing noises and stuff play sometimes when you make a hard turn while crash diviing or something.

But yeah, prepare to be suprised guys, I know I'm late on my goal (apr 5th moved to apr 15th), but we still might make deadline (apr 30th) for the free tech demo. You can see on the trello board everything with a pink rocketship will try to be implemented in it in even the smallest ways.

I have 2 secret weapons up my sleeve too that even my partner and team-members dont know about.

[nsomnia]

Gonnna start rebuilding my periscope code today. When we put our initial draft of our project together it would go up/down and you could go down at any points or up and any points but you couldnt set the height. Fully extended or fully retracted. I need to make it so the keys adjust the height while held.

BTW All the keys are editable in .ini file. This game will be hot-key heavy, but most/all functions will be accesable from the GUI in some way.

Heres the inital draft of the periscope GUI through the observation scope. Let me know what you think like/dont like.

http://i.imgur.com/5iQ6Kdn.png

[nsomnia]

http://i.imgur.com/TWPhqnz.jpg

[nsomnia]

A quick video showing the new obvservation periscope setup in action as well as the GUI and firing off some torpedos with the system we started, they fire forwards a certain amount then take a course bearing straight at a certain speed and depth.

Theres supposed to be FX but for some reason it was disabled when I recorded this.

http://youtu.be/d-CocsM7yms

[ReallyDedPoet]

A quick video showing the new obvservation periscope setup in action as well as the GUI and firing off some torpedos with the system we started, they fire forwards a certain amount then take a course bearing straight at a certain speed and depth.

Theres supposed to be FX but for some reason it was disabled when I recorded this.

http://youtu.be/d-CocsM7yms

Just got this when trying to access your vid:

http://s29.postimg.org/8lirb5587/Untitled.png

[nsomnia]

Just got this when trying to access your vid:

http://s29.postimg.org/8lirb5587/Untitled.png

Sorry I left it to upload and didnt realize the title was too long. Its up now.

[ReallyDedPoet]

Sorry I left it to upload and didnt realize the title was too long. Its up now.

No worries, thanks :up:

Looks good. Nice continued work on this.

[nsomnia]

The sub controller is done we can replace it with any sub mesh now basically.

Were just setting up the torpedo tubes, currently you can only fire from two.

And the GUI to go with it.

Then some models to start fleshing out a port/sub base.

And an npc or two.

Then give it away.

Then see if its marketable or not (probly where most projects fail, subsims are just not a great market)

[Blacklight]

I'm VERY happy to see a Cold War sim being worked on!! This is my favorite era for subsims and it just doesn't get enough love (I'm so tired of being stuck in WWII all the time). Considering the fact that we're eventually losing our Dangerous Waters due to the fact that it absolutely has no compatibility with Windows 8 and beyond, we're going to be completely out of luck for a REAL Cold War subsim.

I really hope this project gets finished to a proper end state!
Good luck!!! I can't wait to see where this goes!

[nsomnia]

Time is the most important factor. Game development is not easy. 1.5 months to make a realistic submarine controller. (Its a beautiful peice of work, and the first of its kind in this engine) but it was tough, rewritten many times. And its only setup for a fast attack, not a boomer.

I've taken the last week off from overworking myself. Avolanty is plugging away at planes and anti submarine helis.

Thanks for the homepage mention Neal. Not pointing any fingers but I can guess he or someone else with admin powers thought we needed some pressure.

[Blacklight]

I can tell you that the things that made Dangerous Waters fun for me were these things:

1. Multiplayer
2. Operating the individual stations
3. The full featured mission editor and unit encyclopedia to learn about the units and see the unit stats
4. The modability

3 and 4 REALLY added to the replay value and is a HUGE reason that I still play that game today.
These are things that I would really love to see in any sub sim.

[nsomnia]

Moddability is on the list of goals. No idea how easy that will be though. At least with the game engines being free you can download unreal engine make your own content then add it to the game with whatever system we end up making.

A unit encyclopedia would definitly be something to be added over a period of time, I love history and stats and stuff.

The ocean setup got delayed a few weeks due to a surgery but develop is back on track this weekend.

[skoop]

I can tell you that the things that made Dangerous Waters fun for me were these things:

1. Multiplayer
2. Operating the individual stations
3. The full featured mission editor and unit encyclopedia to learn about the units and see the unit stats
4. The modability

3 and 4 REALLY added to the replay value and is a HUGE reason that I still play that game today.
These are things that I would really love to see in any sub sim.

It would be great if DW went open source so you guys didn't have to reinvent the wheel and just upgrade DW.

I think DW just needs a face lift, but the game play is spot on.

[ReallyDedPoet]

Thanks for the homepage mention Neal. Not pointing any fingers but I can guess he or someone else with admin powers thought we needed some pressure.

Check your PM.

[nsomnia]

Hehe. We'll I've taken the last week off for relaxation and GTA V after getting a sub controller working 100% in unreal engine.

We've been taking it a little bit slower lately. We realize how ambitious a project of this scale is versus your typical FPS or the vehicle games I build for hobby projects.

I'm sad to say in this regret I have no intentions of having a free demo to play at the end of this month unless you guys just want to play around with driving the natuilus in an ocean and fire torpedos off randomly. I could release a tech demo in a few days if you guys really want that, but its nothing special.

I set my goals too high... release date for free first level demo: later than expected.

[BigBANGtheory]

I think the main thing is to use your work to try and inspire and attract the right sort of talent to your project. Releasing a tech demo in the next week isn't likely to change that, I'd say having the tech demo do one thing really well is the key however long that takes. Perhaps a Polaris missile launch for example which obviously distances itself from WWII...

Then I think as a team you need to start nailing down a vision and some objectives before the feature creep kills you. All too often you see people discuss things like "will there be a dynamic campaign" far too late. If you have a commercial interest you are going to have to protect your code and assets, look what happened with the Stalker Lost Alpha project where someone basically put a dev copy in the public domain.

[Blacklight]

It would be great if DW went open source so you guys didn't have to reinvent the wheel and just upgrade DW.

I think DW just needs a face lift, but the game play is spot on. It would be nice if DW worked past Windows 7. We're losing it completely the second we're forced to upgrade our computers beyond it unless we use a virtual machine and just HAPPEN to have an old copy to Windows 7 or XP hanging around. Most people I know don't. (Thankfully I DO have a copy of Windows 7). But running games on virtual machines has never produced very good results aside from maybe dos games. Windows games don't seem to run very well on virtual machines. At least not in my experience.

Our last hope is if Gog or someone can get ahold of it. But probably fat chance of that considering that Sonalysts is a defense company and probably doesn't want anyone futzing with it's code for ANY reason.

It would have been REALLY nice if Sonalysts would have continued the series and improved it. In an ocean of WWII sub sims, their modern sub sim was such a breath of fresh air. I'm SO DAMN TIRED of World War II all the time.

[zakarpatska]

This may not be worth much, but I've had good results running Dangerous Waters under Wine in Linux. This is another possible path to keeping Dangerous Waters running past Windows 7.

The Linux/Wine combo worked fine whereas running DW in a virtual box under Windows was completely unusable last time I tried which was some time ago.

[1st Capitan Melechin]

Hello mate!
First, congratulations. You have modelled beautiful meshes, and the project is fantastic! Everything is perfect, from the water to the ligh system of the scene. I use Blender too, but I'm not so good at it...
Anyway, it's an awesome project and I think that you are developing it in a really good way!
I'm a fan of the cold war's subs, especially of soviets one...
Just one question: do you use c++ or python?

Good evening and long live Subsim!!!
(Ps: sorry for my bad english!)
:salute:

[nopoe]

FYI, there are some issues with Unreal for naval simulations. The worst of which is the limited world size. For a single player game you could just use a streaming level, but you'll be responsible for all physics and simulation outside of what UE4 can do. You can also scale all your stuff down and pretend everything is 1:10 scale model.

It's also hard to model the curvature of the earth for your 3d rendering. Additionally, VaOcean, what I picked to do the ocean with, doesn't extend very far. It also has some gaps in the mesh when you try to make it huge.

I'd also caution against picking GPLv2 for your license then making everything closed source. You're responsible for distributing or making available the source code as soon as you release a binary. If you don't, that's a GPL violation and any of the contributors can sue you. I'm not a lawyer or GPL expert, but that's my understanding. It's also explicitly against the UE4 EULA to GPL a UE4 project, and I think Unity's license is GPL-incompatible.

If you want to make it closed source, immediately get in writing the consent of all contributors to relicense it and take down your public github repo (if you want). If you want to make it open source, immediately get in writing the consent of all contributors to switch it to a permissive open source license like MIT or BSD.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5419923/can-gpl-be-re-licensed

Best of luck!

[nsomnia]

Sorry about lack of updates. Summer, team problems etc. its still coming along though!

The oceansetup is great! I like VaOcean, but it does have its problems. Our ocean tiles are able to be scaled up to 1000x and the wave generation stays the same. They can also be lined up and the waves move from one tile right the next seamlessly.

I work in blueprints so far. A few things I've done in C++, a few plugins, a few blueprint nodes for my friends, some test code for things that just couldnt be blueprinting but I dont enjoy working with unreals API in c++ and being that I'm a C# coder and havnt got very far in the C++ world its hard to do much.

With that said, at first I was VERY suspicious of blueprints. I said when I was first introduced to Unreal Engine 4 "How the HELL could you create code visually. I'll eat my hat if it can do anything more than move a mesh, play a sound, and print a message"

I've eaten many hats since.

[SiggeMan]

This looks nice so far, and i love the idea! :D I am completely in support of this game! Any chance of seeing a swedish submarine DLC? :O::up:

[nsomnia]

...

With the DLC and update features avilable in the 4.8 release of UE4 very very possible.

Latest news... infinite ocean, GUI work, a real human character and the start of an interior.

I'll get a beauty screenshot of the ocean when I get a chance. SSS + SSR + foam + displacment wakes + infinite ocean; no cheating and setting the horizon to a color, truely infinte to the end of the skydome.

Also learning to kcik out my old school texutinr ways of diffuse/spec/disp/norm and going with new school PBR albedo/metallic/norm/spec/AO. Big learning curve, you have to remove all the lighting details (shadows and highights) and then re-create that through the use of texture maps and let the light tracing calcualtions take effect to create realistic looking objects.

[nsomnia]

Wakes, also SSR, foam and blending between under/above water no more snapping from above water to underwater looks.

http://i.imgur.com/esmWwRch.png

[RushTheBus]

This really has a lot of potential...looking forward to watch it blossom!

[w4rlord117]

Looks very promising, really hope this is seen through to completion

[Aktungbby]

w4rlord117!:Kaleun_Salute:

[Jimbuna]

Welcome w4rlord117 :sunny:

[w4rlord117]

Thanks for the welcoming guys :)

[zakarpatska]

Any updates?

[nsomnia]

We got the physics of boats on the surface of the sea to much more realistic levels they are now directly affected by every single wave exactly like in real-life.

We also got compartment flooding so that you can see water pooling/moving-around/rolling in realtime in full 3D (as well as other liquids like hydrualic fluid leaks, fuel leaks etc).

Got the generator and screw basics setup as well as other basic systems such as sonar. Enemy submarines and ships can now "Hear" and "see" you and this is based on weather/water temp/depth/upgrades etc.

A basic weather system works with fog, rain, sleet, snow all in varying degrees. We also took the compartment flooding technology to the rain and could, if we wanted, make rain pool on areas of ships.

The quality of the AI is absolutly amazing. I can create ships that spawn and go out on full attack missions or stealth missions and they are fully autonomous they will "drive around" completely on their own and when your in battle they will react in real-time to physics threats such as underwater volcanos sticking up or a torpedo coming their way.

Unfortunatly my team-members have moved onto other projects and I'm full-tmie in school so its considered "mothballed".

I'd love to get back into it I just dont have the time nor the man-power for people with 3D/Programming/Unreal Engine skills. The biggest hurdle getting in the way of making a playable demo is creating a map of the size required for play. Currently with the biggest map size at 30 knots you could only travel for about 2-3 minutes real time before you'd hit the edge of the map. The game engine allows whats call "world-origin rebasing" which means you could go on forever but it also means we only have about 20km that enemies/friendlys could be in. There is another technology called world compositing which allows you to "stich" terrains together to create maps and some people have made 12,500km sq maps but unfortunatly I dont have the skills personally to do sometihng like that.

Another hurdle is prop wash and wakes.... havn't figured out how to displace the ocean mesh in that way in real-time.

As the game engine technology evolves I'm sure it will become more feasable to complete without requiring heavy-duty re-writing of the game engine source code. I really dont know how Silent Hunter does alot of these things and wish I knew the secrets. They wrote a custom game engine obviously and that would take me years.

Art-wise though I've learned all about PBR rendering in its entirety and I can make photorealistic boats/subs etc. unfortunatly the ocean is a bit harder, the picture above is still the quality of the ocean we have.

One day :)

[Hawk66]

It's a pity that your project does not move forward anymore but the needed time is really a killer for such an endavor.

I guess there are enough skilled people here to create a naval sim engine but the sponsor is missing...isn't there a very rich person here in this community, who wants see a naval cold war simulator ? ;)

[harishrajan96]

Hi nice to see this projec till follow it closely...count me onboard !

[nsomnia]

I dont mind open-sourcing infact everything is open-source available but I've been part of groups of 30+ "hobby developers" that cannot develop a game. ITs a tough go. When I had a small group of dedicated friends that liked the idea we were much more efficient, but then world of warships came out...

Theres always a custom game engine or modifying unreal engine heavily to make the large issues easier to over-come as a single person.

[nsomnia]

I'm seriously thinking of getting back into this again, I've been playing with vehicle physics (big trucks and tanks with suspension and trailers) and could get a playable game in very little time.

At the end of January I'll have near infinite time on my hands to spend re-blocking out the Nautilus's interior and giving it a quick texture job in Substance Painter as well as continuing to code on the Ocean setup.

A weather system, sea floor generation, coasts/ports and maps are the biggest issues.

A full blown cold war sub simulator accurate down to some nitty gritty details that allows you just infinite travel and battle at random though. No problem...

Edit: We have time multiplication (and slow down too maybe) down. Realtime is realtime no matter how many frames per second your getting and is multipliable as fast as your computer can keep up.

I see my trello board is still up with my old ideas, I might do some sketching of the blocked out models to do later this month.

Edit: Some screens from our current demo version of the ocean setup that isnt public yet but incorporated underwater fogging and a few more visual fixes as well as a simple and very early setup of the marching cube algorithim for coastline generation, but seafloor is still static outside of handbuilt levels and I dont fancy creating the entire earths seafloor by hand.

http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/c49b/zr2avynw0q4n28vzg.jpg?size_id=a
http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/d988/p5dqrvvzwa7b8a4zg.jpg?size_id=a
http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/1058/jlzy5fgp7nym55ezg.jpg?size_id=a

http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/89a7/ey77bcb3kqzv26azg.jpg?size_id=a


Sorry about the size.
When I have time I'll make a video showing the new surface ship flotation physics model that uses a simple (16-64 triangles) hull to allow the boat to be affected in realtime by the waves. For surfaced subs too of course. Underwater is still more "space" like but I already have lots of ideas for flotation by pumping tanks dry/wet and runnning compressors floating around in my head.

some other new stuff I probably forgot to mention after such a long absense:

Got the wave manipulation computation way way less taxing of a computation by using a generated heightmap and also by making sure shared triangle verts arnt calcuated more than once. This has been giving me a bigger insight into some idea on how to incorporate real weather and not just bigger waves. IE a spiral post process to the heightmap might be able to create hurricane like looks, only testing will tell.
Anything with buoyancy has water drag simulated.
Very simple prop wash/cavitation that increases with blade pitch and RPM and decreases with blade count.
A very effective system for generating "sounds" that whatever setup I use as a working concept for sonar can "pick up" on (probably use the AI's hearing senses built into the engine)

Edit: I found this on Reddit which looks like it will be quite helpful in getting another part of simulation out of the way: latitutde heat changes, should be easy enough to port to blueprints or UE4's API.
http://www.jgallant.com/procedurally-generating-wrapping-world-maps-in-unity-csharp-part-3/

Linking for my own memory.

[nsomnia]

I'm thinking of going this route for developing the (new idea for a) demo.

You start out with graphics similar or better than seen above in third person in 1945ish USN attire and are prompted that the captain and FO and a skeleton crew are aboard {some fleet sub that survived WWII} and doing engine work right now and it needs to be tugged over a couple knots to the dock for technology upgrades. Thus you get to take control of the tug boat and have to select which (oh what the heck are they called im so rusty the round cleat things) to attach ropes to.

Once your ready to get underway the skipper of the tug gives you an overview of the controls and how a boat works and what the tide/weather is like comes from the FO or something. Once your ready to go a torque meter appears, go from green -> red and ropes snap and you start over.

I already have a cable setup that would allow you to attach from x to y and have it go slack and tense up, snapping it would probly be easy enough just create 2 with the breakign point being teh center and make tehm 1/2 the size. If it went into the water it would play a small water spray effect and the mater would get shinier.

[Infact thats one cool thing i've been thinking about is every material (textures applied to a 3d object) in unreal can be changed dynamically so I can make a parameter for the roughness (shiny-ness) called "dryness" and overtime it goes to say 0.1 (barely shiny paint) to 0.5 (wet paint) and could even apply water drops on top with their transparency set by a dynamic value too. Going even further Substance Painter would allow me to make a rust layer where the ship would actually rust (hence Physically Based Rendering) and then I could apply that Substance to the ship and overtime your ship would slowly rust in areas where water hits it and you can have the men paint it to get "admirals points" or something.]

You have the ability to open a widget (menu) to "radio" over to the sub for them to go slow ahead or back slow or rudder x degrees to y with a short delay.

After "docking" the sub successfully the tugs skipper radios to the fleet subs captain how you did well and you start your way into the full career.

After that your've given command of a boat (I'd still like to make the main "big start" of the game the Nautilus) for after war patrols or something and get to select a loadout and where to attach it (which will affect center of mass and thus how she handles), start off with the ability to select 1x bow mounted 3" gun or stern & bow quad 50's, torp loadout, how much freshwater, your crew, how much fuel oil, what kind of luxerys ie maybe you take on a set of tv's + whatever else for crew leisure instead of 1 freezer full of food for a long trip since you plan on at-sea replenishment etc. You can choose to automate all functions except speed and course or take control of them yourself through menus on the F1-Fx keys and you go on a short cruise to a friendly port to pick up crew members or some other "quest" to get "accustomed" to the way a sub handles with drills required to pass this 'second' mission.

Thats whats been going through my mind lately, then I can do it, cook it and release it here for you guys to play and get feedback.

When I start development for real I'll start a thread for just development updates I'm really feeling getting back into this.

This little demo of 1-2 mini missions with no real action would be a good chance to try out the static (doesnt affect the ocean) weather setups and dynamic flooding/water pooling setups I've been working on too.


Would love to hear your guys ideas for what you'd like to see in an indie demo of 5-15 minutes gameplay with a 1-3 month development period.

thinking of kickstarter too. Maybe 10,000 USD and tehn look for a 5-10k Epic Games dev grant and see if anyone on here with skills or in the Unreal Community wants to get onboard.

I'm thinking of incorporating BB's and DE's and probably PT's and Oilers etc. too. Or would that be taking it too far. Gotta compete with teh best afterall (world of warships). Surface boats are really no harder than subs and easier to model the interiors sicne theyre more "house like".

[nsomnia]

Also this

https://youtu.be/5xJnypAfsiQ

In regards to the user interface I'm thinking of having the main controls such as speed, depth and course as well as quick menus similar to SH5 with mods installed that give you officer options (only more advanced menus that can spread out very far) with all the nitty-gritty details in {Shift} + F1-F12 screens for up to 24 advanced deatils/controls screens.

During an emergency say the pressure hull was breached that "block" of information from the pressure hull screen would be shown in a "message" window and could be closed or clicked on to bring you to the "Pressure Hull and Trim Tanks" page for example.

The entire HUD wil be able to be hidden with a hotkey such as Left Alt + H I intend to have as many hotkeys as a flight simulator for each class of subs. This will be done by using .ini config files for each class of ships.

I have code written to import image files at runtime at the very least so modding so far will allow you to apply your own insignias etc. to your ships. Eventually model replacment and mission creating will become a reality hopefully and later a map editor in addition to the mission creator.

I will be designing the entire project around modding if the inital input is positive and looks commerical viable enough to do a kickstarter. I'll be thinking "How should I write/design/whatever this so that it can be exposed to allow users to modify it however they want when compiled"

You would be able to do everything in the ship walknig around as well such as replacing lightbulbs after depth charged or replacing fuses or adjusting the torpedos running depth.

One thing I love from Farming Simulator that I'm hoping to incorporate is a small screen in the top left corner that is turned on/off with F1 key that shows all available & important keys available to you to use at your current position.

So if your sitting in the attack scope it might be mouse wheel zoom in/out, home & end view up and dow,n pg up & down rotate scope, E exit scope.

When walking around you might have nothing shown and it will auto-hide but if you walk up to say the sonar station E Enter sonar station would appear or T Talk to sonarman or shift+t get quick report on sonar status.

Initally the playable area will be as much time as I have to stich together real world creations of the americas west and soviet east coast by hand with anything outside the view of the coast "infinite ocean tiles". You will probably be limited to only major cities/ports and the rest of the coastline will be straight with a random noise algorithim applied to it like in the screens on the last page the terrain is hand sculpted but the coast is procedural. The seafloor past the coastal areas (about 20x20km) will be "bottomless" until I can create a seafloor algorithim. If this is deemed to take too much time to get the first demo out then I will just do single battles with say 32 20x20 coastal areas stitched together and the ocean "infinite tiles".

I dont have the means of plotting a course right now. Maps has always been my #1 issue.

Fish swimming past teh scope underwater is still going to be there. Weve been able to spawn thousands of schools of 100's of fish each around the players area with only a few frames per second drop :)

Heres what I'm hoping the world will look like once completed

http://www.jgallant.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/0.png



Heat Map (Top Left) (for cold layers)
Height Map (Top Right) (for sea floor and terrain obviously)
Moisture Map (Bottom Right) (fogging and shorting of instruments, temperature inside compartments and thus lifespan of compopnents and happiness of crew)
Biome Map (Bottom Left) (certain areas will have different kinds of fish, and differnet kinds of enemy spawning at differnt rates, plus certain types of weather compared to others)



Any ideas for gameplay, story, mission ideas, looks, user interface, likes, dislikes, needs, wants, whatever is definitely going to go into designing the demo and beyond if it gets there.

[nsomnia]

public BiomeType GetBiomeType(Tile tile)
{
return BiomeTable [(int)tile.MoistureType, (int)tile.HeatType];
}


This will return the biomes heat and moisture levels at any given world tile.

Dynamic weather one day...

[nsomnia]

I've begun sketching up plans for this "test/demo mission" in my notebook and may get started as early as monday blocking it in and re-doing the game logic.

Start in first person mode aboard a sub, asked to drive the tug as the captain is out and the SS-1 has got to get to the drydock for repairs.

Your mission is as follows


Enter Crane 1 and drop crate of naval rope on deck of tug tied off at 180d at dock 2
Exit Crane 1 and Enter Tug 1, first officer will talk you through the controls and notifys you it needs fuel since this is a heavy haul and the weather is a little choppy even inside the sea-walls.
Radio the captain and skeleton crew of the SS-1 to make sure you can use their maneuvering capabilities since this is a tight squeeze and youll have to back or push her in to the dry dock.
Pilot tug to fueling station and moore up then connect fuel lines, fuel up 1500 gallons, while its fueling go into the dry dock and open the roof doors so you can load stores into SS-1 afterwards and open the dock doors to flood the dry dock.
Disconnect fuel lines to tug 1 (overfuelling or spilling is a XP penalty), let go of mooring and tie up to SS-1
Radio captain to un-tie SS-1 and keep the tension meter low so the lines dont break to her
Using radio to captain of SS-1 and your power manuever her to the door of dry dock where you can see if she can back in aft-first otherwise un-tie and push her in straight, a meter showing your degrees will show and +/-15 degrees causes a fail
Radio captain of ss-1 to moore up and tie the tug up and get off.
Go into dry dock and close the doors and start pumping the water out, dont let the pumps run dry for too long if you forget, a heat meter will appear (XP penalty)
enter crane 2 and load stores for the short trip ss-1 will be taking to be outfitted for after-war service.

After that I want to come up with some sort of gameplay and story as you how you might become the captain of SS-1 or at least FO. Dont want to make palyers climb the ranks but I want to allow them to take control of any station they want if so desired at any time.



The results of the code that I'm going to try to port over to UE4 except using the OpenStreetMaps API to build the real world.

http://www.jgallant.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/mappy.png

[nsomnia]

Made an offical fork of the community ocean project to place all my code in as I release it open source and work on it today.

https://github.com/Nsomnia/OceanProject/

Also getting "un-rusted" in my c++ programming and with all the papers I have on ocean simulation going to look at getting some major simulation working and debugging.

Going to make the first playable boat just for debugging and simulating at first.

Will start a new thread when real development starts, for now I'll keep the updates to "news" but development is officially re-started!

[Cybermat47]

I look forward to the results :)

[nsomnia]

Got a gato done up real quick since it was available and will allow me to build up the gameplay test bed real real quick for testing simulations.

Water simulation addons get harder and more intense in complexity and such the smaller they become ie breaking waves, spray etc.

Gonna get it rigged and animated tomorrow. Not gonna worry about an interior for now and I didnt bother with the 40 or 20mm deck guns.

http://i.imgur.com/H6T93fE.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/H6T93fE.jpg

[zakarpatska]

It's great to see this project active again.

[nsomnia]

It's great to see this project active again.

The more feedback i get the more i want to work on it. Tell me what you want to play with right away and ill make it and release it!

[nsomnia]

Did some research on explosive simulations undewater water and it seems that you have your inital blast wave and reflected blast pressures off surfaces.

One more thing to take into effect to make this realistic :arrgh!:

[nsomnia]

I havnt been able to get anything more done this last week except some research but starting this weekend I'm going to make a playable gato class simulator real quick just as a teaser and as a test bed to start playing with simulation code.

Underwater currents, underwater drag, detection by planes based on ocean opacity. Oil leaks leave a sheen on the surface making you more visible to planes and air leaks do the same.

It wont take me long to have a driveable sub (again) with the ballast/trim/safety/negative/water/fuel tanks and batterys simulated for buoyancy with controls plus propulsion.

I have both laser and acoustic range finding algorithims and forumulas put to code already as well as all the other stuff from earlier in the thread ill be porting over to the "new" project.

If anyone has the time to layout a basic setup of the Gato class interior with major instruments/devices/machinery etc. I can make that interactive as well

[nsomnia]

Maybe the pamantino guppy II conversion would be a better boat to start off with I forgot about this page! http://maritime.org/tech/drawings/

[Polak2]

This is very ambitious project and good luck (sincere !) with it.

My interest here is touch basis with someone like you who obviously knows game engines and leading environmental plug-ins for them. My first issue is the best ocean/sky system. My kind of 1st choice (for purely visual effect) seems to be CETO Ocean System for Unity. Yes, it carries a price tag, but it looks really good.

However, as I see, you are more aligned with Unreal engine. What best system for ocean UE has to offer? Is UE generally better/cheaper/more accessible than Unity?

BTW, because of pretty stunning effects and graphics my keen eyes are on Naval Action development and of certain interest to me is what they have used. My preliminary research tells me that they used Unity and perhaps CETO.

More questions to follow....

[nsomnia]

Got the radar, scopes, planes, rudder, screws, hull, search lights, TBT's and loop antenna as well as radio antenna all ready for use today. This weekend a lot of work will get done and ill post a playable version of my work.

[nsomnia]

It seems there has been some new development in Unity in regards to their ocean, although I could easily port the C# to blueprints then to c++ I'm sure; if they stay in development then it will take some of the surface work off me.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/the-community-ocean-shader-open-source-unity-5.370818/page-3

[nsomnia]

Got my basic Gato imported cause I was bored tonight and setup a nice ocean set to 1946 Feburary in the northern Pacific. Got a basic wake going and surface movement re-worked REALLY quickly. Gonna get the planes and rudder imported and then get underwater dynamics working again.

Once I get her textured up and the mast details (scopes etc.) and the conning tower accessable (only spent 5 minutes making it so you can walk on the deck) I'll be happier. The surface dynamics are great and I only have the bow and after ballast tanks simulated so far. Tommorrow I'll make them flood/ventable and see how she swims.

The shaders are looking alot better than I expected. Got some explosion particle FX ready to test out with my old fish bubble wake trail cant wait to fire some fish. The one thing that will take me a while is making an underwater explosion since thats something you cant find any references on and has to come 100% from stock.

http://i.imgur.com/JyvO5phl.png

Edit: here she is foamy and wake-y with decks awash all textured up after completing a "Y Turn" with a crew member on deck with a mouth full of salt water!

http://i.imgur.com/zMVSTvpl.jpg

[nsomnia]

Got a basic gui knocked up for debug info and turning the 4 diesels on/off

Going to do the tank flood/venting later and see how she drives. Ill try to get a download as soon as its driveable.

http://i.imgur.com/dJyeGZYl.jpg

[nsomnia]

Got basic aft/fwd tank flooding/venting down for testing underwater dynamics. It drives... like a sailing ship.
attempting to cook and package it for ya'lll to play right now.

Edit: Uploading extremely buggy early tech demo, drive a gato class around with ship, not boat dynamics and flood/vent tanks at dutch harbor alaska and... try to make it do a flip?


http://www.filedropper.com/redwater - download here 250mb (http://www.filedropper.com/redwater)

~ to bring up console or mouse cursor when stuck
T for tank controls
wasd to drive... engine buttons do nothing yet
E to interact (take control of sub just aft of conning tower)

http://i.imgur.com/iLyEcKb.jpg

:/
If I get (alot) further with good response I'm thinking of starting a kickstarter. Donations can go to http://paypal.me/blendertek to anyone that wants to help the cause however this is only a days work... an afternoons work actually.

[InvisibleDeath]

I sent you an invite on Skype. I am a developer with a little C++ knowledge and a ton of C# tech (I work as a contractor for Department of Defense)

If you still need a developer I love creating new technology.

[nsomnia]

I sent you an invite on Skype. I am a developer with a little C++ knowledge and a ton of C# tech (I work as a contractor for Department of Defense)

If you still need a developer I love creating new technology.

I'm sure I got it, I updated the trello today with some basic tasks now that theres 5-6 potentital team members to get the game really going, most people have just never developed with unreal engine before and thus have to learn the engine but so far I'm feeling confident!

[Onkel Neal]

Looking good.:salute:

[nsomnia]

Who stickied this?

This is the old project when I was a (mostly) lone wolf doing the nautilus bit.

The full GUPPY->688i cold war sim with a team of 10 working every day development log is the other thread, which is updated when 'Mail arrives from patrol' over at http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=224205

Dont want old stuff to be up here although I do appreciate the publicity!