Navigation Game Wishlist
 

For a long time I've wished there was a nautical game or sim that had accurate celestial navigation in it. And I was just thinking: I know how to make that work. At least in theory. So I wonder if there are any developers out there who would be willing to either add it to an existing game or - better yet - make a simple [or even complex] navigation simulator.


I have all of the formulas and algorithms ready to go in my spreadsheet (available here). It would just be a matter of tweaking them to work in whatever language the developer uses. And I could certainly provide some guidance should any problems arise. I even have a little bit of experience programming (I know: a little knowledge ... :shifty:).


I don't think it would be a trivial undertaking and I am in no position to finance the operation, so I'd understand if there were no takers. But if there were, I'd love to see:

• A semi-accurate representation of Earth. Land masses could be complete abstractions, but positions and scaling would ideally be accurate.
• A choice of at least one simple motor vessel and/or sailing vessel. (Sailing mechanics need not be included and could be controlled by a simplified "auto-pilot". In fact, I'd prefer that.)
• A simple [procedural] weather/current model. (If an accurate current model could be implemented, that would be awesome.)
• Accurate celestial and navigational models (of course).
• Some way during or after the voyage to compare one's fixes with the actual ship's positions to assess one's performance.
• A radar model and other ship traffic would be super cool, but not necessary.

Anyway, it'll probably never happen. But it didn't cost me anything to throw it out there, I guess. Whaddya think?


(Poll never expires, multiple choice allowed, results public.)

https://i.imgur.com/ZaQqtqL.png


POLL: 100% OF PEOPLE WANT CELNAV GAME
Analysts say as much as 20% of votes cast may be fake.














:hmmm:

Hi Sean,

a really nice idea. I did in fact try to develop something similar. Well, it was not about CELNAV but to have a game that is running on a curved surface with the same size of the earth.

Here are my findings:

1. All game engines and theire corresponding physics engines I could find use linear physics. For a game like that to work, one would need a physics engine that is using spherical terrain physics.

2. I tried to convert those physics engines to use spherical physics. The problem with that were the numbers involved: You are dealing with objecs with a huge difference in mass: Your vessel may have as little as 1000kg mass, while earth has 5,972 × 10^24 kg of mass. I was not able to fit those differences into a game physics engine, because it's hard and very inperformant to do computations on really large numbers like that. And I was simply not smart enough to come up with an abstraction model that would be fast enough to calculate for a real time game and still be accurate enough to be used for such a sophisticated use case.

3. All game engines use linear coordinate systems and assume a more or less planar gaming "surface". It was very hard to convert those to work on a huge spherical surface.

I looked at some games that introduced spherical physic/game mechanics like "Space Engineers" or "Kerbal Space Program". What those have in common is, that planets in those games are only a fraction of the size our earth has. I assume they did this because of the limitations and problems I mentioned.


To sum it up: I guess it needs someone way more capable then me, to pull this off.

There's mega mod for silent hunter 5, called The Wolves of Steel. You can use sextant to measure the altitude angle of stars, and calculate your own location.

Yes, thank you. I've heard it's quite buggy, though. However, it looks like Subsim member Alpheratz might have solved that problem by reverse-engineering an almanac to work with the game.



That would be cool. But I think it would be even cooler (and probably even simpler, believe it or not) to just get the mechanics right in the first place and use regular "off-the-shelf" almanac data.


But who am I kidding? This thread has had almost 400 views, only seven poll responses and two real replies (thank you). If I want a game like that, it looks like I'll have to make it myself.


Maybe I'll start learning how to do that if I ever finish turning my spreadsheet into a mobile app.


Hmmm ...

Very interesting, thank you!

Be sure to follow Crush Depth (see my sig), that has a spherical world already and celnav is very much the goal (using Kriegsmarine sight reduction tables, the F-Tafel). It is VERY early in development but the sphere is already in.

Maybe 20% of fake are votes for first and second options?

^ This guy is fake news. ;)