Hello,
yesterday I read through this old thread
Studying the AI & fully dynamic game sessions. At some time the point was raised that Dangerous Waters is not suitable for long scale dynamic missions but only for rather small tactical engagements (
see this post from GrayOwl). So far so good.
Now after I had read this
Fighting Steel in the North Atlantic came into my mind.
Quote:
Fighting Steel in the North Atlantic (FSNA) is a strategic campaign for Fighting Steel.
Similar to the campaign mode of GNBNA, it will allow to control task forces in the North Atlantic to either attack allied convoys or to prevent the German task forces to do so.
It is a separate program that will generate a scenario file for Fighting Steel when two task forces engage for a battle and launch Fighting Steel to play the battle.
When the battle has ended and Fighting Steel has been left, FSNA will continue the campaign.
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You can download this application and play it without Fighting Steel, but you'll need a very old version of a Java Runtime Environment (1.1.x I think) and it is a very early version.
A similar application for Fighting Steel is
Thunder at Sea. It is a commercial program which basically does the same as Fighting Steel in the North Atlantic. There's also a
demo available which cannot be played without Fighting Steel though.
Another example is
Subwolves which does something similar for Silent Hunter III in an even bigger scale.
What I want to know is if anybody has ever thought about doing something similar for Dangerous Waters?
I think technically it is feasible; DW scenarios are plain text files which can be generated automatically (SuBB and kage have done something similar before?). Of course it is not trivial and even developing a prototype of such an application would take rather months (or even years) than weeks depending on the complexity (does it need AI, is it multiplayer compatible or only singleplayer, is there a fixed area of operations or is it possible for the player(s) to load different parts of the world similar to the DW mission editor...).
How complex do you think an automatically generated scenario for DW can be? Do you see possible problems due to shortcomings in the DW AI and scenario editor features?
How open (modable) such an application could be (would it be possible to add new areas of operation easily or would this be limited to only one like in Fighting Steel in the North Atlantic)?
Do you think this is feasible in the first place (technically and does this Dangerous Waters community have the manpower and Know-How to pull this off)? Where are the limitations?