Development updates

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Hey everyone!

I hope you all are having a good summer!
I have been travelling and visited a few new museum ships that I havn't seen before. So good times!

Code wise I have been working on AI vs AI combat, and added a few new ships.

Here's some photos from a recent battle I set up:

The German force consisting of a few Hippers, Deutschlands and a Scharnhorst.



The Brittish force.



Around 15km in between the opposing fleets.



It got sweaty very fast with the Hippers sinking one after the other.



Soon enough I was also targeted.




Heavy list starting to develop.



Hipper firing.



A Brittish cruiser dead in the water.

[iambecomelife]

That three stacker has seen better days. I guess it's a historical result, German cruisers were better (on paper) than the British county - type cruisers (because of course the Nazis didn't really care about abiding by the treaty limits)... Nice pictures.

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Originally Posted by iambecomelife

That three stacker has seen better days. I guess it's a historical result, German cruisers were better (on paper) than the British county - type cruisers (because of course the Nazis didn't really care about abiding by the treaty limits)... Nice pictures.

Yes, that County got unlucky!
They were a very even match the Hipper and the County. I believe the Hipper only had slightly better armour, but nothing that made a huge difference.
So the winner would probably the one who scored the first hit.


In the above battle there was a KGV class battleship who pulverized all my Hippers...


Cheers mate!

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I am currently working on AI behaviour and the "quick mission" mode, but I needed a break from the code and decided to update my T2 tanker model:

[iambecomelife]

Great work, I like how much attention you paid to the rigging. Now since I can never leave modelers alone ..

will there be lots of great particle effects? Burning/leaking oil would look nice and dramatic; I like simulators that have different types of fire/smoke depending on what you hit. Also survivors in rafts/boats? Maybe with a small bonus for capturing enemies with intelligence, like in U-Boat?

And even better, I would LOVE to have you able to blow off a ship's bow/stern with the other half still floating - this happened to several torpedoed WWII tankers, like the "Esso Nashville"..

https://www.uboat.net/allies/merchants/ship/1461.html

The front half of "Esso Nashville" ended up on the bottom of the sea and is popular with scuba divers from North/South Carolina to this day...the back half survived the war and sailed for many years!

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Originally Posted by iambecomelife

Great work, I like how much attention you paid to the rigging. Now since I can never leave modelers alone ..

will there be lots of great particle effects? Burning/leaking oil would look nice and dramatic; I like simulators that have different types of fire/smoke depending on what you hit. Also survivors in rafts/boats? Maybe with a small bonus for capturing enemies with intelligence, like in U-Boat?

And even better, I would LOVE to have you able to blow off a ship's bow/stern with the other half still floating - this happened to several torpedoed WWII tankers, like the "Esso Nashville"..

https://www.uboat.net/allies/merchants/ship/1461.html

The front half of "Esso Nashville" ended up on the bottom of the sea and is popular with scuba divers from North/South Carolina to this day...the back half survived the war and sailed for many years!

Thanks! The rigging adds alot to the looks. In the beginning I had a hard time with the models looking like tiny toy boats ingame, and there was no feel of scale/size.
That changed when I started to add details like rigging and handrails (is that the word?).
Regarding particles, atm you see most of them in the pictures above. There is explosions of different sizes and burning fires with smoke of different size and intensity. I am planning to add more types of explosions and fires, it's fairly easy with my current system.
I haven't planned to add people and floating lifeboats, but maybe later in the development because I would like to have it.
I haven't yet experimented with parts breaking off the ships or hulls splitting in the engine, so I don't know how to do it efficiently. So that would also come much later unless I suddenly get a good idea how to do it.
The fun part with being a programer is those "eureka" moments, for instance I recently managed to implement ship wakes and foam after the shell splashes into the water shader. Something I've been wondering about for years, and suddenly after I stopped thinking about it, two weeks ago I just realized the solution.


Edit: I forgot to answer the oil trail question. I haven't decided yet, but fairly easy and cheap to implement.

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Hey everyone!

Long time no update, and you won't get much of an update now either.
A lot is being worked on, but nothing that I can really present yet.

But I'll leave this one here:


Have a great weekend everyone!
Cheers

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It's a new year and I am eagerly travlling to see what lays ahead, at the horizon! It looks promising!

On a personal note, I have been on this forum for many years, so some of you may know me allready.

But for those who does not, I am a music teacher who allways loved to play subsims, flightsims and military sims on my free time.

I had only been a hobby programmer for some years as I started working on Battleship Command.
Now during my parental leave I decided to study software development at a HVE (Higher Vocational Education), and since programmers are in high demand here in Sweden,
I am allready in the process of signing the contract for a nice developer job.
So soon I will be a PROFESSIONAL programmer!

Battleship Command is progressing steadily and I am now deciding the scope for demo 3.0 so that I have a goal in sight.
As it looks now I need to bring up the detail and texture level of the warships to atleast the same level as the merchants.
I've started to build new interiors for the Scharnhorst based on the actual plans of the ship, that needs to be finished at a basic level atleast.
And then the demo needs to be built, with missions, some bugfixes and some small features needs to be added.
It's impossible to set a time frame, so I'll just say "soon".


Cheers!

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And first out we have the Suffolk who is getting some new textures and added details.
Here she is with new hull texture and lower superstructure texture. Up next for a repaint is the upper superstructure.

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Here's one of my favourites, the Nelson class with a fresh set of textures and details.
Apart from the untextured guns, she's looking quite badass.

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Another battleship is getting refurbished.
Plenty of new details in the model.
Now I am adding textures and checking how they look ingame.

At the moment I am quite conservative with texture resolution and vertice count, so that I can see how the minimum level of detail affects my engines performance.

Which class is this?

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With this beauty being close to finished (for this iteration), it means I am pretty much done with the British ship roster for the upcoming demo 3.0.

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And here she is, reimported into the game.
In duty protecting a large convoy.

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Here's a look at how the water and splash FX looks at the moment.
The foam in the water after the shell splash has added alot to the feel.