nice progress

one question: what was the reason you choose unreal, did you consider unity3d?

I started on a WW2 uboat simulator in Unity and while it has it advantages an old co-developer that helped me start my 'company' showed me Unreal when it was still a monthly paid engine and I fell in love. Over a year later and I can do so much more in Unreal than I can in Unity and I'm going to school for game development and everyone in the industry says Unreal and c++ are going to be needed for future devs.

Gonna do some more UI work today and see what else pops into my head, I get great ideas during the night but always forget them. I made a new engine telegraph indicator with a spinning disk but I dont like it I think I'm gonna keep it simple with the 6 arrows/1 red bar I thought of

Tried out a much more simple telegraph UI setup which I think polished up into overlapping arrows would look good. Wrote a function to sample the ocean height less 10 cm and if the camera manager (im just learning about camera managers in unreal, will allow water spray to get on the "lens" and camera shake etc.) is below that level then it enables the underwater post processing. Its much more efficient than my old way of looping through all the camera checking if one is active and below 0 height.


This is how accurate it, im less than 10cm from the ocean surface on this frame.
http://i.imgur.com/sXN66Fe.png

Got mad at my animating skills and decided to just model and animate the doors for now. I'll come up with abetter solution when shutter door animations are actually required but got this tonight

http://i.imgur.com/fWM4YqM.gifv

http://i.imgur.com/fWM4YqM.gif

Working with custom stencil buffer depth masking to get the water inside boats to be masked so that I can build the interiors isnide the boat instead of making a hackish solution like SH. This will allow for very cool flooding FX etc.

You can also see the icons for my crew setup I'm going to make v0.01 of, each crew member will have a rank, position, level, stamina level, isOfficer? boolean, and expertise in skill level(s).

I fully intend to have 8-64 AI crew members manning their station through a variety of AI idle actions and if you call battlestations they will run to a predestined area for example. Unreals pathfinding and behavior tree setup is top-notch in that regard.

http://i.imgur.com/g7Se1jrl.png

Found some tuna or albacore couldnt tell, flocking around the ship today. Mini-game anyone ;)

http://i.imgur.com/Imi2lkm.png

The toggle-able compass and an example mof the new telegraph arrow sizes

http://i.imgur.com/DpSkev9l.png

Edit: Just noticed a major bug where my "steering" rudderangle solution causes rotation to stop happening at 45d to port and 135d to stbd which you may notice is 180d of difference. Going to have to investigate this one, I noticed it when I was checking my longitude addition per cm math precsion.

Subs arnt much use if they can only travel NE through WSW

Had 100$ donated via my YouTube channel (unless someone on here shares the persons name) will be going into the game fund!

http://i.imgur.com/spcZnz9.png

Was able to mask the ocean out of an area, leaving only the base color of everything else.
Its a start! Yesterday I had no idea how custom stencil buffers work, now I kind've know how to play with them.

Once I figure themasking out I can start building an explorable sub and start a real game.

Playing around with the wake some more. It stays active much longer before being destroyed now.

Eventually that will be built into the settings (wake lifetime)

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

Evnetually it'll actually modify the water mesh too.

Looks very good :) Especially blur effect when water flows down

I spidered and downloaded every document i could find on maritime.org some 80,000+ pages, figures and images.

That with my new reading material (C++ books) should have me on my way to making some good simulations.

I did some beginner setups for missions and boat fittting out today.

Its mostly GUI work as most of the graphics/simulation I need to learn more, the gameplay I feel just wouldnt be appreciated yet (why shoot at a randomly spawning ship over and over no fun) so I might do some cinematic renderings. And start modelling the interior of a pig boat.

(Theres over 500 pages and images on the 5" gun alone... I could spend days reading this, if only I had the skills to boil it down to gameplay fast enough)

Pretty close to getting a simple crew and sub-systems selection screen setup and then some projectile work, a few bot AI ships to shoot at and then gonna get back to learning more C++/UE4 API. We'll call it v0.1-alpha

We'll ive got most of the propulsion and basic gui setups demo'ed and going to work on a simple damage and torpedo system when I feel like it, otherwise going to take a small time (a couple months?) to shape up my programming skills in the areas I need for this game. Updates will still be posted just less regularily.

Latest ocean version development teaser pic

http://www.mediafire.com/convkey/596....jpg?size_id=6