My Future Cold War 1945-1991 Sub Sim Project

[nsomnia]

A volunteer character modeller is working on an officer and sailor for me heres his WIP.




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.


Then added a quick specularity texture to see how it would ingame.


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.

[Chad]

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.

[Chad]

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

[nsomnia]

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

//calll this function every 60 seconds using Time.time or Time.sincelevelstarted
void function speedSoundOneMinuteAgo(float depth,  float temp)
{
//same equation goes in here
}

void Compare()
{
if (speedSoundOneMinuteAgo(currentDepth, currentTemp) - SpeedSound(currentDepth, currentTemp) > 200)
ReportFavorableSonarConditions()
}

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.

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

/*This script prints to the console the speed of sound in feet per second taking in two arguments temperate in f and depth in feet. ie. SpeedSound(32.0f,521.5f); will tell you the speed of sound in ft/s in the ocean at 521 feet 6 inches deep with a water temp of 32 f */

public class EquationTest : MonoBehaviour 
{
    //Global Variables
    public float soundSpeed;

    // Use this for initialization
    void Start () 
    {
        SpeedSound(32.0f, 1.0f);
        Debug.Log(SpeedSound);
    }

    void SpeedSound(float temp, float depth)
    {
        //Speed of sound in feet per second = this equation. temp is in F. Depth is in feet. Assumes average salinity of 35 ppt.
        soundSpeed = (4388 + (11.25f * temp) + (0.0182f * depth));
    }
}

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

[nsomnia]

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.

[nsomnia]

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.

[Julhelm]

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.