My Future Cold War 1945-1991 Sub Sim Project

[nsomnia]

Today not alot got done but we did solve a potential future bug.

Our ships were very very slowly rolling pitching and yawing on their own (like one thousanth of a degree a second) but that would mean once I implement my time compression system that adds up fast.

We tracked it down to the mesh/rig for our boats. So for now we are using a static mesh (no rig, primitive shape like a cylinder, sphyl, cube rectangle etc) for all the physics that is the rough shape of the boat and the actual boats mesh with moving parts and everything is what you'll actually see, just no physics will be applied to it except ray traces. (which isnt physical physics).

Its a WIP system but the outcome is looking positive now our boats can sit there (I let it sit for 15 minutes just to test) without moving 0.0000001 (the max range you can test with a float, to test with doubles I'd have to create some custom C++ classes to allow use of doubles inside the UE4 engine they havnt implemented doubles yet.

Tomorrow I get angles and dangles working (based on speed and negtank blown/vented for now) and after that I'll be adding/re-writing features as time allows.

I'm happy to announce FuriousChad is going to try some modelling which may or may not make it into the free tech demo and/or game depending on how he goes about it. (I respect intellectual property, I wouldnt want anyone stealing my models, textures or code from me and would give the same respect back)

No features promised like the manual trim and manual ballast tank control have been scrapped yet. Infact they are still fully functional in my test projects, just not merged with the master yet.

[nsomnia]

Today I will be getting angles and dangles working. To start they will simply be based off of speed.

Heres a quick update video of something we got working by accident yesterday while examining a bug: walking around the deck and inheriting the boats base rotation (IE if the boat rotates you do too; your aim doesnt stay where it was it moves with the ship but your still free to look and move around)

[nsomnia]

Got the basics of angles and dangles started and working. Just need to clenaup and rewrite hte function so they work with all depth changing commands.

Heres a 1:30 video with a crash dive at ahead flank and then a maintain depth order.

It came together in 2 hours, my first idea, my first try. Pretty rare that that happens. I thought this was going to take all weekend to conquer, not one day.



At the moment its only speed based but will be merging all my prototype projecst together in time so that we can have the manual ballast tank control affect how quickly it gains pitch (how quick it dives).

[nsomnia]

The sub controller is done. Done. The last month we have poured 95% of our time into the subcontrolller. Its finally in alpha. We have an ocean 100km x 100km with not a single FPS lost.

Major, major updates to come.

Edit: I wanna add we accidently caused a feature. In creating the angles and dangles we accidently allowed the boat to roll every so slightly during a hard turn. Now we can use that to manipulate things if we want. A) its visual you see a slight roll when turning hard (like no more than 1.5-2.0 degrees lets be realistic) but we could have say crashing noises and stuff play sometimes when you make a hard turn while crash diviing or something.

But yeah, prepare to be suprised guys, I know I'm late on my goal (apr 5th moved to apr 15th), but we still might make deadline (apr 30th) for the free tech demo. You can see on the trello board everything with a pink rocketship will try to be implemented in it in even the smallest ways.

I have 2 secret weapons up my sleeve too that even my partner and team-members dont know about.

[nsomnia]

Gonnna start rebuilding my periscope code today. When we put our initial draft of our project together it would go up/down and you could go down at any points or up and any points but you couldnt set the height. Fully extended or fully retracted. I need to make it so the keys adjust the height while held.

BTW All the keys are editable in .ini file. This game will be hot-key heavy, but most/all functions will be accesable from the GUI in some way.

Heres the inital draft of the periscope GUI through the observation scope. Let me know what you think like/dont like.

[nsomnia]

[nsomnia]

A quick video showing the new obvservation periscope setup in action as well as the GUI and firing off some torpedos with the system we started, they fire forwards a certain amount then take a course bearing straight at a certain speed and depth.

Theres supposed to be FX but for some reason it was disabled when I recorded this.