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
