Uboatsim.com now known as Crush Depth - Page 5

celeronpm · 08-09-21, 10:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by iambecomelife

Just became a patron and I highly recommend it! It's a modest expense - freed up some cash by quitting services I don't need - lol.

As a bonus, there are many images, stories, & details that I have never seen shared before on the web, and I've been into submarines for years.

I am no shill - admit I was skeptical - now, assuming the pace of work is maintained, I recommend.

Truly appreciate the support and the time you took to let others know. Welcome aboard!

iambecomelife · 08-10-21, 11:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by celeronpm

Truly appreciate the support and the time you took to let others know. Welcome aboard!

Thanks! I'm obsessed with submarines and 1940's era merchant ships so of course much of the modeling work is right up my alley....I believe I've identified the tanker that is sunk by U-96 in the 3 part war photograph sequence you posted!

Based on the masts, ventilator arrangement, etc I think it's the "Clea" from Convoy HX - 106. Sunk 02/13/41:

https://www.uboat.net/allies/merchants/ship/760.html

Weird, I know ...

- the ship architecture really interests me.....I'm the amateur ship modeler who created the "Merchant Fleet Mod" for Silent Hunter 3 around 2009, and I am planning replacement ships for Silent Hunter 3/4/5.

Onkel Neal · 08-14-21, 10:51 AM

Weekly update #56, 5th of August 2021.

Quote:

A very short update this week as well, as we're still looking into the possibilities and potential risks of making the change from the Unity to the Unreal engine. I can imagine you might be thinking: 'Why does this take such a long time?' and well, there are a couple of reasons for those which I hope to go into a little bit in this update.

First of all, this is the single biggest decision this project will face for years to come. At this stage of development, we still have the possibility to make the switch. Anything we add to the Unity version of the project will add to the cost of making the switch; for that reason, we've also postponed all development on that part, until we've reached a decision. Other parts of development, such as modeling, ideation, development of pseudo-code, etc. will continue as normal.

We have to make absolutely sure that this is the right choice and in order to do so, we simply have a whole lot of boxes to check. Checking those boxes isn't just simply looking up what possibilities both engines have to offer, but very much a process of getting our hands on it, in the Unreal engine, playing around with it, experimenting with it, until we've gotten enough of a feel for it to say either yes or no to it. In the end, we come up with a very, very extensive list of pros and cons between the two engines - specifically for this project - on which we hope to reach a decision.

Just to give you a couple of examples there, we're looking at stuff like how well the editor is integrated with the software we use for modeling and texturing, what kind of third party assets are available, the speed of the editor itself, the cost of relearning certain parts of the workflow and how that would influence the production speed, what this means for our networking infrastructure, and many, many, many, many, many other factors.

I hope you understand such is a rather time-consuming process since we simply cannot allow a mistake here. A day here can potentially save us a month later. Hitting a wall a couple of months later, a year later, maybe even two years later simply because we didn't do our due diligence during this part of the process is simply a risk we cannot afford.

That's all for this week, just a little update on how we're coming along. It's very likely that this process will take another couple of weeks, so in the meanwhile, I hope to bring you some more news on the other aspects of development. Thank you all for your support, and see you next time!

von faust · 09-14-21, 07:51 AM

There is an update on Facebook status of Crush depth page. A new surprise ?

celeronpm · 09-14-21, 07:16 PM

Quote:

Update #60, 10th of September 2021.

Hi @everyone,

First thing to notice of course is that this is the first update in some 14 odd months that doesn't have 'weekly' in the title. It has become more and more apparent to us that there is more value in doing updates whenever it is relevant, than tying that to a strict schedule. Some weeks, we are rather bogged down in technical stuff and although a lot of value is added to the project, not much of that is immediately apparent to the player.
Conversely, there are plenty of other weeks in which we manage to break through a couple of walls in a row, meaning we have to leave out some milestones from the weekly updates so it doesn't become a complete wall of text and/or put them somewhere in between, meaning they don't get the attention we would like them to have.

All that being said, our investigations into a possible switch from Unity to Unreal are nearing its conclusion. There are a few items left we still want to check off. Even though we're close to finishing the process, there are still plenty of reasons left why we might decide to stick with Unity; no decision has been made yet.
We also realize we cannot let this process carry on forever. We have therefore decided to set the deadline (first ever in the project!) for September the 18th, 2021, on which day we will announce our decision.

I'm sure that no matter what we'll decide, it might come as a disappointment to some of you. Such is simply the nature of this-or-the-other propositions. The only thing I can hope is that you appreciate that whatever decision we arrive at, we have done so after long and careful deliberation, and truly believe it to be the best for the project. Thank you all very much for allowing us to undertake this experiment and your continued support throughout.

Until then! :heart:.

Please see above

Angelis · 09-15-21, 06:39 AM

I can only speak for myself, of course, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they choose Unreal.

celeronpm · 09-17-21, 05:11 PM

Hello everyone,

We are incredibly excited to announce that, after months of careful consideration and due diligence, we’ve decided to move forward with Unreal Engine. Please have a look at our release trailer below. Apart from that, we would like to introduce Code Orchestra, a brand new framework for combining C#, Rust, Python, and UE5. Further information about how we spent the last couple of weeks, as well as what to expect moving forward, can be found below.

Unreal 5.

When Unreal Engine 5 dropped, it would be fair to say that it took the game development community by storm. The technology advancements in the engine, such as Nanite, Lumen and MetaHuman caused a tidal wave which we were swept up in. We were compelled to look further into the technology.

Our aspirations are grand, using the best technology that can cement us as the definitive U-Boat simulator for years to come means we need to use the best technology available. Unreal Engine 5 offers unparalleled revolutionary graphical fidelity easily ahead of all other engines.

When UE 5 features were announced, we developed a system similar to Unreal’s Nanite, attempting to enhance what we had to help us forgo a complete project refactor away from Unity. The example scene below shows fifty billion triangles being rendered using our dynamic mesh quantization technology in Unity HDRP.

To illustrate the significance, that scene contains 2500 times the triangles count we had in the entire museum scene of the Unity build. Even though this proof of concept worked, we ran into significant roadblocks in interleaving this subsystem with Unity HDRP (decals, DXR lights, etc) and the Unity Game Editor, due to the closed source nature of Unity. This sealed the door on Unity HDRP meeting Nanite-like performance without investment from Unity.

As a side note, over the last 12 months, we’ve also looked into Unigine, Lumberyard, and other options. Those exercises were short in nature since it became apparent quite early in the process they would not provide significant advantages over Unity HDRP.

Analysis.

During the analysis, our goal was to perform thorough due diligence to ensure we fully understood the cost, ramifications, and benefits of refactoring our project into Unreal Engine. A project refactor will set us back by at least half a year and will require significant re-training for the team. We wanted to ensure that we understood these costs well by going through the effort of attempting to port the project over while leveraging the features we were interested in (Nanite, Lumen, native 64-bit double-precision float support, Metahuman, and more). We also needed to ensure core systems such as weather, water, and physics were customizable enough to allow us to reach the quality and fidelity we aspire to.

Unreal Engine is an extremely capable Game Engine built on a core that was released in the late 90s. The core APIs are not as well documented as Unity’s and the core programming language is C++. We found it significantly more difficult to work with, from a programmatic perspective, than Unity, and it became clear we needed to address this.

Challenges.

Not being able to use .NET / C# / and Rust in Unreal Engine with native-level integration (such as debugging and API support) would cause a dramatic drop in productivity for our developers. Our simulation subsystems are incredibly complex and ensuring we can maintain a high level of throughput, code safety, iteration speed, and polyglot language support etc. is crucial for the project.

Solutions.

To solve this, we leveraged the open-source nature of Unreal Engine 5 and developed a revolutionary polyglot extension framework to allow us (and other devs) to write .NET C# code in Unreal Engine. We’re launching this capability as a separate product, direct to game developers. We’re calling it Code Orchestra!

Code Orchestra

Code Orchestra is a holistic polyglot development solution for multi-framework development in Unreal Engine. Our goal is to bring multi-language and multi-framework support to Unreal Engine and enable game developers to leverage their existing skills in Unreal Engine.

Code Orchestra uses a novel, patent-pending approach (a combination of custom high-performing framework hooks, heavy code generation, IDE analyzers, and other mechanisms) to provide polyglot (.NET C#, Rust, Python) support for Unreal Engine.

Code Orchestra also supports high-performing Rust code for low latency high accuracy simulations and even allows you to use Python for quick and dirty prototypes (with more languages supported on an as-needed basis).

How will Code Orchestra help Crush Depth?

Code Orchestra will allow us to port over years of .NET libraries we’ve written in C#, will allow us to write our high fidelity, high accuracy, performant simulation code in Rust, and will enable us to quickly prototype new subsystems in Python. The end result will be accelerated project development velocity with the incredible Visual fidelity of Unreal Engine 5.

To learn more about Code Orchestra and to try out the beta for yourself, please visit: http://www.code-orchestra.com

Next steps:

Although we have made the decision to move over to Unreal, that transition is still far from over. We have a wonderful opportunity here to analyse and rethink some of the concepts we have developed over the past few years. If we were to just make a one-to-one copy of the current Unity build in Unreal, there would have been no reason to make the switch to start with; we would also be missing out on the opportunity to leverage the exciting new possibilities that Unreal has to offer. It would be a shame to let that opportunity go to waste.

The next couple of weeks will mostly be spent on further developing the frameworks we need to have in place in order to start creating the world we want to create, very much from the ground up. The downside to this is that it will take a while before we can get a first Unreal build-out. The upside is that we expect that build to be of a much higher quality, higher visual fidelity, and more performant than what we were able to offer in Unity.

At this stage, we can't give a reasonable estimate of how long we think it will take us before we feel our first shiny new Unreal build is good enough for a wider release. We have some very exciting ideas there though, of which we will be updating you regularly through our Discord and other outlets. In the meanwhile, we will keep the current - now already outdated - Unity build up, so you are still more than welcome to hop in and explore some of our concepts.

Rest assured that we would not have arrived at this decision if there was a single shred of doubt that this was not the best decision for our project and our long term strategy. It is a very, very exciting time for all of us and we hope the subsim community ultimately recognizes the effort we are going to in order to realize our dreams of building the most realistic U-Boat simulator.

Ask-Me-Anything session on Oct 3, 2021.

As much as I would like it to be the case, I am quite aware that it's undoable to cover all of your questions that come with such a massive announcement. We are therefore hosting a live Ask-Me-Anything session on October the 3rd, 18h00 Berlin/09h00 Los Angeles, on our Discord . Should you have any questions in the meanwhile, or if you wish to submit a question for us to cover during that session, feel free to leave a message here.

As always, thank you for your tremendous support. We are extremely grateful and humbled by the support you have given us thus far and hope we provide you with enough reason to keep doing so. If not, please let us know what you think we can do to improve. Let's not forget that it is you who we make this for, so if you ever feel we should be doing something differently, have a question, or just want a chat, always feel free to send me or anyone else on our team a message.

Angelis · 09-19-21, 03:27 AM

Whoa, this is so amazing! Congratulations and hats off to you guys!

Wünsche euch viel Erfolg und gute Fortschritte. Bin sehr gespannt, wie's weitergeht.

Gute Jagd, ihr Himmelhunde!

AllegPeet · 07-12-24, 12:31 PM

A sad announcement on the Crush Dept discord server about Paul, one of the devs.

Those who have access to said discord channel may read the general chat channel announcement of July 1st.

09-17-21, 05:11 PM	#67
celeronpm Dev: Crush Depth Studios Join Date: May 2016 Location: Brea, CA Posts: 59 Downloads: 7 Uploads: 0	Hello everyone, We are incredibly excited to announce that, after months of careful consideration and due diligence, we’ve decided to move forward with Unreal Engine. Please have a look at our release trailer below. Apart from that, we would like to introduce Code Orchestra, a brand new framework for combining C#, Rust, Python, and UE5. Further information about how we spent the last couple of weeks, as well as what to expect moving forward, can be found below. Unreal 5. When Unreal Engine 5 dropped, it would be fair to say that it took the game development community by storm. The technology advancements in the engine, such as Nanite, Lumen and MetaHuman caused a tidal wave which we were swept up in. We were compelled to look further into the technology. Our aspirations are grand, using the best technology that can cement us as the definitive U-Boat simulator for years to come means we need to use the best technology available. Unreal Engine 5 offers unparalleled revolutionary graphical fidelity easily ahead of all other engines. When UE 5 features were announced, we developed a system similar to Unreal’s Nanite, attempting to enhance what we had to help us forgo a complete project refactor away from Unity. The example scene below shows fifty billion triangles being rendered using our dynamic mesh quantization technology in Unity HDRP. To illustrate the significance, that scene contains 2500 times the triangles count we had in the entire museum scene of the Unity build. Even though this proof of concept worked, we ran into significant roadblocks in interleaving this subsystem with Unity HDRP (decals, DXR lights, etc) and the Unity Game Editor, due to the closed source nature of Unity. This sealed the door on Unity HDRP meeting Nanite-like performance without investment from Unity. As a side note, over the last 12 months, we’ve also looked into Unigine, Lumberyard, and other options. Those exercises were short in nature since it became apparent quite early in the process they would not provide significant advantages over Unity HDRP. Analysis. During the analysis, our goal was to perform thorough due diligence to ensure we fully understood the cost, ramifications, and benefits of refactoring our project into Unreal Engine. A project refactor will set us back by at least half a year and will require significant re-training for the team. We wanted to ensure that we understood these costs well by going through the effort of attempting to port the project over while leveraging the features we were interested in (Nanite, Lumen, native 64-bit double-precision float support, Metahuman, and more). We also needed to ensure core systems such as weather, water, and physics were customizable enough to allow us to reach the quality and fidelity we aspire to. Unreal Engine is an extremely capable Game Engine built on a core that was released in the late 90s. The core APIs are not as well documented as Unity’s and the core programming language is C++. We found it significantly more difficult to work with, from a programmatic perspective, than Unity, and it became clear we needed to address this. Challenges. Not being able to use .NET / C# / and Rust in Unreal Engine with native-level integration (such as debugging and API support) would cause a dramatic drop in productivity for our developers. Our simulation subsystems are incredibly complex and ensuring we can maintain a high level of throughput, code safety, iteration speed, and polyglot language support etc. is crucial for the project. Solutions. To solve this, we leveraged the open-source nature of Unreal Engine 5 and developed a revolutionary polyglot extension framework to allow us (and other devs) to write .NET C# code in Unreal Engine. We’re launching this capability as a separate product, direct to game developers. We’re calling it Code Orchestra! Code Orchestra Code Orchestra is a holistic polyglot development solution for multi-framework development in Unreal Engine. Our goal is to bring multi-language and multi-framework support to Unreal Engine and enable game developers to leverage their existing skills in Unreal Engine. Code Orchestra uses a novel, patent-pending approach (a combination of custom high-performing framework hooks, heavy code generation, IDE analyzers, and other mechanisms) to provide polyglot (.NET C#, Rust, Python) support for Unreal Engine. Code Orchestra also supports high-performing Rust code for low latency high accuracy simulations and even allows you to use Python for quick and dirty prototypes (with more languages supported on an as-needed basis). How will Code Orchestra help Crush Depth? Code Orchestra will allow us to port over years of .NET libraries we’ve written in C#, will allow us to write our high fidelity, high accuracy, performant simulation code in Rust, and will enable us to quickly prototype new subsystems in Python. The end result will be accelerated project development velocity with the incredible Visual fidelity of Unreal Engine 5. To learn more about Code Orchestra and to try out the beta for yourself, please visit: http://www.code-orchestra.com Next steps: Although we have made the decision to move over to Unreal, that transition is still far from over. We have a wonderful opportunity here to analyse and rethink some of the concepts we have developed over the past few years. If we were to just make a one-to-one copy of the current Unity build in Unreal, there would have been no reason to make the switch to start with; we would also be missing out on the opportunity to leverage the exciting new possibilities that Unreal has to offer. It would be a shame to let that opportunity go to waste. The next couple of weeks will mostly be spent on further developing the frameworks we need to have in place in order to start creating the world we want to create, very much from the ground up. The downside to this is that it will take a while before we can get a first Unreal build-out. The upside is that we expect that build to be of a much higher quality, higher visual fidelity, and more performant than what we were able to offer in Unity. At this stage, we can't give a reasonable estimate of how long we think it will take us before we feel our first shiny new Unreal build is good enough for a wider release. We have some very exciting ideas there though, of which we will be updating you regularly through our Discord and other outlets. In the meanwhile, we will keep the current - now already outdated - Unity build up, so you are still more than welcome to hop in and explore some of our concepts. Rest assured that we would not have arrived at this decision if there was a single shred of doubt that this was not the best decision for our project and our long term strategy. It is a very, very exciting time for all of us and we hope the subsim community ultimately recognizes the effort we are going to in order to realize our dreams of building the most realistic U-Boat simulator. Ask-Me-Anything session on Oct 3, 2021. As much as I would like it to be the case, I am quite aware that it's undoable to cover all of your questions that come with such a massive announcement. We are therefore hosting a live Ask-Me-Anything session on October the 3rd, 18h00 Berlin/09h00 Los Angeles, on our Discord . Should you have any questions in the meanwhile, or if you wish to submit a question for us to cover during that session, feel free to leave a message here. As always, thank you for your tremendous support. We are extremely grateful and humbled by the support you have given us thus far and hope we provide you with enough reason to keep doing so. If not, please let us know what you think we can do to improve. Let's not forget that it is you who we make this for, so if you ever feel we should be doing something differently, have a question, or just want a chat, always feel free to send me or anyone else on our team a message. __________________ www.CrushDepth.com Last edited by celeronpm; 09-17-21 at 05:32 PM.

09-14-21, 07:51 AM	#64
von faust Soundman Join Date: May 2009 Location: Genova, Italy Posts: 148 Downloads: 430 Uploads: 0	There is an update on Facebook status of Crush depth page. A new surprise ?

09-15-21, 06:39 AM	#66
Angelis A-ganger Join Date: Dec 2009 Posts: 77 Downloads: 143 Uploads: 0	I can only speak for myself, of course, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they choose Unreal.

09-19-21, 03:27 AM	#68
Angelis A-ganger Join Date: Dec 2009 Posts: 77 Downloads: 143 Uploads: 0	Whoa, this is so amazing! Congratulations and hats off to you guys! Wünsche euch viel Erfolg und gute Fortschritte. Bin sehr gespannt, wie's weitergeht. Gute Jagd, ihr Himmelhunde!

07-12-24, 12:31 PM	#69
AllegPeet Watch Join Date: Oct 2019 Posts: 17 Downloads: 1 Uploads: 0	A sad announcement on the Crush Dept discord server about Paul, one of the devs. Those who have access to said discord channel may read the general chat channel announcement of July 1st.