Blue Water Development Diary

[AzureSkies]

Apologies for the late update, here's some replies and in them I describe some of the work that's been going on since last update with regard to SAM behavior and simulation.

Originally Posted by Herman

You have described some very complex fragmentation behaviour.

IIRC, one of the big concerns regarding point defence weaponry such as Phalanx intercepting Soviet high-speed missiles, like Kitchen and Sunburn, is the fact that fragmentation and ballistic effects of destroyed missiles. Will those effects be simulated within the game?

To an extent, they already are, with missiles capable of taking multiple damage modes, some of which merely throw off their guidance.

Originally Posted by drmezza

Ad 1) Maybe 688i H/K overdid it a bit with their sense of realism (I never bothered with manually plotting target solutions, but the options was there), but: the way the passive sonar waterfall in Cold Waters is solely used for target classification purposes, seems a bit like babying the player. What I'm trying to say is: lovers of this genre are total suckers for realism. We understand certain sacrifices will have to be made in the interest of broader market-appeal, but please, don't dumb it down too much.

Ad 2) This is not true for all lovers of this genre, but it certainly is for me: I'm having a hard time enjoying (naval) simulation games when the graphical realism is not up to speed with the times. I'm not even talking about ray tracing etc., but using a modern state-of-the-art engine (like Unreal) and having us pay the licensing fees for doing so, are a conditio sine qua non. In fact: I don't even care that much about trains, but take a look at TSW on the one hand, and Train Simulator 2019 on the other, and you'll get my point. It's supposed to be a simulation, and these days a mid-range GPU suffices to make a game look awesome. Make sure to let us pay for the privilege, like the devs of TSW do (every DLC comes at a price, but that's allright). We understand you're operating in a nich market, so appropriate prices are part of the deal.

That is all for now. Keep up the good work!

Best,
DrMezza.

I can see two big probable reasons why CW had less TMA work:
1. decreasing the active management/workload for the player so they can actual captain the sub. There's a good reason in real life you have separate crew doing the TMA work while the captain just rolls with the reports that are given.

2. It's a significant extra time and resources to develop something that's not necessarily even a good feature.

Similarly, I plan for TMA work to be unnecessary since there's enough to do with managing weapons, helos and ships.

But that's not to say it's absent. One thing I worked on awhile back is active intercept/ESM code with passive detection legs. Some are saved into long-term history while all are saved into short term history, and they're visible when you only have one contact selected. If you have more or less than one non-friendly contact selected, you only see the sonar pings or ESM intercepts that have happened in the last few seconds.



That being said, I'm always a fan of leaving extra options available so I do plan for contact assignments to be able to be made, at least, among a few other manual overrides.

Another fun quirk is any weapon can be fired at any contact. It's really only a question of if the target has a radar reflection and if the weapon's guidance system is capable of detecting and handling whatever you threw it at.

You can even throw an S-300F with a range of 75 km (5V55R missile) at a target 300 km away - it's just the guidance director won't be too happy about it and it'll be a very sad missile.

But the fun thing about systems like this is the "range" of a weapon isn't a magic barrier. Aside, perhaps, from cruise missiles which will run out of fuel and lose speed relatively quickly, the minimum and maximum ranges of most weapons is kind of a blurry line and depends a good deal on how fast and/or maneuverable the target is.

And let's say making a realistic physics-based guidance system on a SAM with quadratic drag, realistic trajectories, limited attitude control authority at higher altitudes, etc. is certainly a challenge.

But it's definitely worth it when it allows players to interact with situations more realistically and creatively. Helicopters will need to keep a further distance than faster supersonic jets, targets with more predictable trajectories are easier to hit, and evasive tactics that take advantage of missile's limited maneuverability should work.