My Future Cold War 1945-1991 Sub Sim Project

[SiggeMan]

This looks nice so far, and i love the idea! I am completely in support of this game! Any chance of seeing a swedish submarine DLC?

[nsomnia]

Originally Posted by SiggeMan

...

With the DLC and update features avilable in the 4.8 release of UE4 very very possible.

Latest news... infinite ocean, GUI work, a real human character and the start of an interior.

I'll get a beauty screenshot of the ocean when I get a chance. SSS + SSR + foam + displacment wakes + infinite ocean; no cheating and setting the horizon to a color, truely infinte to the end of the skydome.

Also learning to kcik out my old school texutinr ways of diffuse/spec/disp/norm and going with new school PBR albedo/metallic/norm/spec/AO. Big learning curve, you have to remove all the lighting details (shadows and highights) and then re-create that through the use of texture maps and let the light tracing calcualtions take effect to create realistic looking objects.

[nsomnia]

Wakes, also SSR, foam and blending between under/above water no more snapping from above water to underwater looks.

[RushTheBus]

This really has a lot of potential...looking forward to watch it blossom!

[w4rlord117]

Looks very promising, really hope this is seen through to completion

[Aktungbby]

w4rlord117!

[Jimbuna]

Welcome w4rlord117

[w4rlord117]

Thanks for the welcoming guys

[zakarpatska]

Any updates?

[nsomnia]

We got the physics of boats on the surface of the sea to much more realistic levels they are now directly affected by every single wave exactly like in real-life.

We also got compartment flooding so that you can see water pooling/moving-around/rolling in realtime in full 3D (as well as other liquids like hydrualic fluid leaks, fuel leaks etc).

Got the generator and screw basics setup as well as other basic systems such as sonar. Enemy submarines and ships can now "Hear" and "see" you and this is based on weather/water temp/depth/upgrades etc.

A basic weather system works with fog, rain, sleet, snow all in varying degrees. We also took the compartment flooding technology to the rain and could, if we wanted, make rain pool on areas of ships.

The quality of the AI is absolutly amazing. I can create ships that spawn and go out on full attack missions or stealth missions and they are fully autonomous they will "drive around" completely on their own and when your in battle they will react in real-time to physics threats such as underwater volcanos sticking up or a torpedo coming their way.

Unfortunatly my team-members have moved onto other projects and I'm full-tmie in school so its considered "mothballed".

I'd love to get back into it I just dont have the time nor the man-power for people with 3D/Programming/Unreal Engine skills. The biggest hurdle getting in the way of making a playable demo is creating a map of the size required for play. Currently with the biggest map size at 30 knots you could only travel for about 2-3 minutes real time before you'd hit the edge of the map. The game engine allows whats call "world-origin rebasing" which means you could go on forever but it also means we only have about 20km that enemies/friendlys could be in. There is another technology called world compositing which allows you to "stich" terrains together to create maps and some people have made 12,500km sq maps but unfortunatly I dont have the skills personally to do sometihng like that.

Another hurdle is prop wash and wakes.... havn't figured out how to displace the ocean mesh in that way in real-time.

As the game engine technology evolves I'm sure it will become more feasable to complete without requiring heavy-duty re-writing of the game engine source code. I really dont know how Silent Hunter does alot of these things and wish I knew the secrets. They wrote a custom game engine obviously and that would take me years.

Art-wise though I've learned all about PBR rendering in its entirety and I can make photorealistic boats/subs etc. unfortunatly the ocean is a bit harder, the picture above is still the quality of the ocean we have.

One day

[Hawk66]

It's a pity that your project does not move forward anymore but the needed time is really a killer for such an endavor.

I guess there are enough skilled people here to create a naval sim engine but the sponsor is missing...isn't there a very rich person here in this community, who wants see a naval cold war simulator ?

[harishrajan96]

Hi nice to see this projec till follow it closely...count me onboard !

[nsomnia]

I dont mind open-sourcing infact everything is open-source available but I've been part of groups of 30+ "hobby developers" that cannot develop a game. ITs a tough go. When I had a small group of dedicated friends that liked the idea we were much more efficient, but then world of warships came out...

Theres always a custom game engine or modifying unreal engine heavily to make the large issues easier to over-come as a single person.

[nsomnia]

I'm seriously thinking of getting back into this again, I've been playing with vehicle physics (big trucks and tanks with suspension and trailers) and could get a playable game in very little time.

At the end of January I'll have near infinite time on my hands to spend re-blocking out the Nautilus's interior and giving it a quick texture job in Substance Painter as well as continuing to code on the Ocean setup.

A weather system, sea floor generation, coasts/ports and maps are the biggest issues.

A full blown cold war sub simulator accurate down to some nitty gritty details that allows you just infinite travel and battle at random though. No problem...

Edit: We have time multiplication (and slow down too maybe) down. Realtime is realtime no matter how many frames per second your getting and is multipliable as fast as your computer can keep up.

I see my trello board is still up with my old ideas, I might do some sketching of the blocked out models to do later this month.

Edit: Some screens from our current demo version of the ocean setup that isnt public yet but incorporated underwater fogging and a few more visual fixes as well as a simple and very early setup of the marching cube algorithim for coastline generation, but seafloor is still static outside of handbuilt levels and I dont fancy creating the entire earths seafloor by hand.








Sorry about the size.
When I have time I'll make a video showing the new surface ship flotation physics model that uses a simple (16-64 triangles) hull to allow the boat to be affected in realtime by the waves. For surfaced subs too of course. Underwater is still more "space" like but I already have lots of ideas for flotation by pumping tanks dry/wet and runnning compressors floating around in my head.

some other new stuff I probably forgot to mention after such a long absense:

Got the wave manipulation computation way way less taxing of a computation by using a generated heightmap and also by making sure shared triangle verts arnt calcuated more than once. This has been giving me a bigger insight into some idea on how to incorporate real weather and not just bigger waves. IE a spiral post process to the heightmap might be able to create hurricane like looks, only testing will tell.
Anything with buoyancy has water drag simulated.
Very simple prop wash/cavitation that increases with blade pitch and RPM and decreases with blade count.
A very effective system for generating "sounds" that whatever setup I use as a working concept for sonar can "pick up" on (probably use the AI's hearing senses built into the engine)

Edit: I found this on Reddit which looks like it will be quite helpful in getting another part of simulation out of the way: latitutde heat changes, should be easy enough to port to blueprints or UE4's API.
http://www.jgallant.com/procedurally...csharp-part-3/

Linking for my own memory.

[nsomnia]

I'm thinking of going this route for developing the (new idea for a) demo.

You start out with graphics similar or better than seen above in third person in 1945ish USN attire and are prompted that the captain and FO and a skeleton crew are aboard {some fleet sub that survived WWII} and doing engine work right now and it needs to be tugged over a couple knots to the dock for technology upgrades. Thus you get to take control of the tug boat and have to select which (oh what the heck are they called im so rusty the round cleat things) to attach ropes to.

Once your ready to get underway the skipper of the tug gives you an overview of the controls and how a boat works and what the tide/weather is like comes from the FO or something. Once your ready to go a torque meter appears, go from green -> red and ropes snap and you start over.

I already have a cable setup that would allow you to attach from x to y and have it go slack and tense up, snapping it would probly be easy enough just create 2 with the breakign point being teh center and make tehm 1/2 the size. If it went into the water it would play a small water spray effect and the mater would get shinier.

[Infact thats one cool thing i've been thinking about is every material (textures applied to a 3d object) in unreal can be changed dynamically so I can make a parameter for the roughness (shiny-ness) called "dryness" and overtime it goes to say 0.1 (barely shiny paint) to 0.5 (wet paint) and could even apply water drops on top with their transparency set by a dynamic value too. Going even further Substance Painter would allow me to make a rust layer where the ship would actually rust (hence Physically Based Rendering) and then I could apply that Substance to the ship and overtime your ship would slowly rust in areas where water hits it and you can have the men paint it to get "admirals points" or something.]

You have the ability to open a widget (menu) to "radio" over to the sub for them to go slow ahead or back slow or rudder x degrees to y with a short delay.

After "docking" the sub successfully the tugs skipper radios to the fleet subs captain how you did well and you start your way into the full career.

After that your've given command of a boat (I'd still like to make the main "big start" of the game the Nautilus) for after war patrols or something and get to select a loadout and where to attach it (which will affect center of mass and thus how she handles), start off with the ability to select 1x bow mounted 3" gun or stern & bow quad 50's, torp loadout, how much freshwater, your crew, how much fuel oil, what kind of luxerys ie maybe you take on a set of tv's + whatever else for crew leisure instead of 1 freezer full of food for a long trip since you plan on at-sea replenishment etc. You can choose to automate all functions except speed and course or take control of them yourself through menus on the F1-Fx keys and you go on a short cruise to a friendly port to pick up crew members or some other "quest" to get "accustomed" to the way a sub handles with drills required to pass this 'second' mission.

Thats whats been going through my mind lately, then I can do it, cook it and release it here for you guys to play and get feedback.

When I start development for real I'll start a thread for just development updates I'm really feeling getting back into this.

This little demo of 1-2 mini missions with no real action would be a good chance to try out the static (doesnt affect the ocean) weather setups and dynamic flooding/water pooling setups I've been working on too.


Would love to hear your guys ideas for what you'd like to see in an indie demo of 5-15 minutes gameplay with a 1-3 month development period.

thinking of kickstarter too. Maybe 10,000 USD and tehn look for a 5-10k Epic Games dev grant and see if anyone on here with skills or in the Unreal Community wants to get onboard.

I'm thinking of incorporating BB's and DE's and probably PT's and Oilers etc. too. Or would that be taking it too far. Gotta compete with teh best afterall (world of warships). Surface boats are really no harder than subs and easier to model the interiors sicne theyre more "house like".