My Future Cold War 1945-1991 Sub Sim Project

[w4rlord117]

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

[Aktungbby]

w4rlord117!

[Jimbuna]

Welcome w4rlord117

[w4rlord117]

Thanks for the welcoming guys

[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.








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...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



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

• 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

1. Enter Crane 1 and drop crate of naval rope on deck of tug tied off at 180d at dock 2
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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Disconnect fuel lines to tug 1 (overfuelling or spilling is a XP penalty), let go of mooring and tie up to SS-1
6. Radio captain to un-tie SS-1 and keep the tension meter low so the lines dont break to her
7. 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
8. Radio captain of ss-1 to moore up and tie the tug up and get off.
9. 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)
10. 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.

[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