Community-Developed Submarine Simulation: Wishlist

[Karl Heinrich]

In the light of SHO, there seems to have been a fair amount of talk recenlty about the future of sims and the possibility of a community-led creation of a new sim. A product by subsimmers for subsimmers as it were (would be nice to get a dedicated thread for this).

More on that in this thread:
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...=201664&page=4

Obviously there are a lot of potential issues about the extent of development by the community itself and the issues of funding, obviously several have mentioned Kickstarter - but we can't just start a kickstarter and hope for the best without an idea of what's trying to be achieved.

Even amongst our relatively niche group, there's going to be a desire for different levels of realism (or even differing definitions of what's realistic).
But what is that you would want from such a sim, what are the must-have features and elements?

My general proposal for an ideal world would be that a platform is developed that creates a physical world that simulates standard features and phenomenon and then from that a WW2 and Cold War (and whatever else) version could be built upon that. Very much pie-in-the-sky thinking, I know. As such it would certainly be "moddable" - inherently so.

The List
Updated based on posts below - anything with more than one vote will be noted.

Generally divided into four categories: Your Sub, the Physical World, Crew, and AI/Other Vessels. Certain things will be marked of higher priority eventually, I think common sense can direct that... Obviosuly many things may be near impossible, but I suppose it's nice to have something to aim for.

Crew
- Realistic crew roles and responsibilities
- Watch switching (automatic / manual option)
- Optional fatigue (ideally based on length of patrol / time submerged? not because the crew are getting "a bit drowsy", the R/L watch system would and does minimise that).
- Real navigation with scalable assistance from "Navigation Officer" (what sort of assistance would you want?)
- Weapons Officer assistance scaleable - much as with current mods (any specific suggestions for this?)
- Evacuation Procedure

AI / Traffic
- Realistic/Historic traffic for shipping and warships- Surface skirmishes and battles between AI

The Sub
- Real subs and their upgrades (like most things, this is probably a given, but added for sake of completeness)
- Optional manual control of ballast pumps/individual tanks
- Optional manual control of hydroplanes / manual trim etc

Physical world
- Realistic hydrodynamics and oceanographic elements, including but not limited to tides, currents, thermal layers, internal waves etc. etc.
- Well-modelled coastlines
- Realistic / historic celestial data modelled for real navigation
- Intelligent Convoys and Task Forces (realistic/historic behaviour)
- Realistic / variable (and seasonal) water opacity

UI/Interface etc.
- Multiple monitor support
- Use of internal windows a la MSFS (Flight Sim) so different displays and gauges can be dragged and dropped to different monitors

Multiplayer functionality
- One sub multiplayer (something Ubi once talked about )