Sub^3 reboot

[nopoe]

I made a thread earlier about a sub sim I was working on in Unreal Engine 4. That project, in a few words, didn't end up going anywhere.

I have a long summer ahead of me and I've decided to take what I learned and restart the project. I'll keep this brief because I assume many of you may have already seen that thread and a lot hasn't changed.

The vision of the project is simple at its core. I want a multiplayer sim that's fun to play and realistically, if not accurately, simulates things that impact strategy. The focus will be on acoustics, but I'll try and get other things right too, within my abilities.

Sub^3 uses a program called the Under Sea Modeling Library for sonar. It uses gaussian beam tracing to model sound propagation. USML is unique in that it uses spherical coordinates in all of its math. This, combined with the fact that I've decided prepackaged game engines are wholly unsuitable for naval simulations and ditched UE4, means that it's nearly trivial to allow Sub^3 players to seamlessly roam a spherical earth.

The new Sub^3 is written in C++11 with SFML, SFGUI, USML and Boost as key dependencies.

Development takes place at: https://github.com/nopoe/Sub3

Sub^3 is nearing the initial release. Sub^3 0.1 "Bumper Subs" will feature arbitrary-size games in an arbitrary size-world. About the most you'll be able to do in this first release is play hide and seek. Physics and broadband sonar are both working, but there will be no weapons. If you wish, you could use your sub as a weapon, ramming anybody you can find.

I expect a release within about a week. There are only 2 blockers left, but I'll need to get it building on windows before I'll consider actually releasing anything, which might be a challenge. The download should be about 500mb, because there is a lot of temperature, salinity and bathymetry data required for accurately modeling sound.

I'd love to hear feedback or ideas about where to take the project from here. I want to make something you want to play!

[nopoe]

Getting things to build on windows is a nightmare. I've spent around 2 days trying to get a windows binary to no avail, so 0.1 is a source-only release.

Sorry, I was really hoping to get some feedback but that might have to wait until 0.2.

GitHub page for this release is here:

https://github.com/nopoe/Sub3/releases/tag/v0.1-alpha

[Hawk66]

I have also Ubuntu but I am not familiar with building c++ stuff (know only the very basics...)

So, maybe if you add an instruction how to compile the stuff with cmake and get the dependencies?

[nopoe]

While writing out an explanation I realized it's pretty difficult to do even on linux (and it involves cluttering up /usr/local a bit). Tomorrow I'm definitely going to try and figure out how to use CMake to package a .deb file. Source-only releases aren't going to cut it for long.

[Hawk66]

ok...maybe if you have later time a setup guide would be good never the less...might increase the chance that people are getting interested to contribute...

[nopoe]

Yeah. It's not too hard, it's just I think you need SFML and SFGUI to be installed from source. It's a big download too.

First thing to do is install boost with your distro's package manager.

Next clone these respositories:

https://github.com/SFML/SFML
https://github.com/TankOs/SFGUI

Install the dependencies listed here: http://www.sfml-dev.org/tutorials/2....with-cmake.php

Build SFML and SFGUI in that order with "cmake ." and "make -jX" where X is the number of threads to build with (number of cores works well for me). If they build without errors, do "make install". There might be some dependencies not listed, but I can't remember and I don't have a Ubuntu install handy to test it out.

Once those are installed, clone these repositories in the same directory:

https://github.com/nopoe/netcdf-4.1.3-with-cmake
https://github.com/nopoe/usml
https://github.com/nopoe/Sub3

Then, in that order, go into each directory and execute "cmake ." and "make -jX" like before. There's no reason to install these, and it should all just work unless I'm forgetting something.

When you're done, run the sub3_server then 2 sub3 instances. Make sure to move the first client's sub out of the way so the server doesn't spawn the second one on top of it (takes about 10 seconds at 20kts I think). After that you should be able to play a very bad version of hide and seek where there's no penalty for cavitation or going fast or anything like that.

Let me know if you have issues. My friend and I were both able to build it on 14.10 without too much trouble but then I replaced my ubuntu installation with arch because it's easier to do this stuff on arch.

[Hawk66]

ok...thx...when I've time, I'm looking into this....you were right....that's not so trivial

[jsinicro]

Hi, I wanted to see if this app has gone anywhere... I was actually thinking of continuing the idea into VR as that was the original thought.... I was able to get it built on Centos7.4. What I like about this idea is that it actually uses realistic acoustic models to try and do range predictions, loss propagation and such. I am not sure if there are any good sub sim that use this... Anyway I wander if there are any screenshots of sub3, because I think since I am using Centos7.4 inside a virtual machine it may have issues with the graphics.. I will build this on windows 10 64 bit and see if there's any difference...

[Aktungbby]

jsinicro!