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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I'm spending the day doing something more productive... optimizing the under/above water system and getting it commited to GitHub properly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Then we could just have static ones at set depths or lerping between them.

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/show...ownloads/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++)


They also showed me some more cool stuff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBWLfpm0K0o generating oceans in UE4 using math only.
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/show...hader-download the link says it all.

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.