My Future Cold War 1945-1991 Sub Sim Project

[ReallyDedPoet]

Originally Posted by nsomnia

Sorry I left it to upload and didnt realize the title was too long. Its up now.

No worries, thanks

Looks good. Nice continued work on this.

[nsomnia]

The sub controller is done we can replace it with any sub mesh now basically.

Were just setting up the torpedo tubes, currently you can only fire from two.

And the GUI to go with it.

Then some models to start fleshing out a port/sub base.

And an npc or two.

Then give it away.

Then see if its marketable or not (probly where most projects fail, subsims are just not a great market)

[Blacklight]

I'm VERY happy to see a Cold War sim being worked on!! This is my favorite era for subsims and it just doesn't get enough love (I'm so tired of being stuck in WWII all the time). Considering the fact that we're eventually losing our Dangerous Waters due to the fact that it absolutely has no compatibility with Windows 8 and beyond, we're going to be completely out of luck for a REAL Cold War subsim.

I really hope this project gets finished to a proper end state!
Good luck!!! I can't wait to see where this goes!

[nsomnia]

Time is the most important factor. Game development is not easy. 1.5 months to make a realistic submarine controller. (Its a beautiful peice of work, and the first of its kind in this engine) but it was tough, rewritten many times. And its only setup for a fast attack, not a boomer.

I've taken the last week off from overworking myself. Avolanty is plugging away at planes and anti submarine helis.

Thanks for the homepage mention Neal. Not pointing any fingers but I can guess he or someone else with admin powers thought we needed some pressure.

[Blacklight]

I can tell you that the things that made Dangerous Waters fun for me were these things:

1. Multiplayer
2. Operating the individual stations
3. The full featured mission editor and unit encyclopedia to learn about the units and see the unit stats
4. The modability

3 and 4 REALLY added to the replay value and is a HUGE reason that I still play that game today.
These are things that I would really love to see in any sub sim.

[nsomnia]

Moddability is on the list of goals. No idea how easy that will be though. At least with the game engines being free you can download unreal engine make your own content then add it to the game with whatever system we end up making.

A unit encyclopedia would definitly be something to be added over a period of time, I love history and stats and stuff.

The ocean setup got delayed a few weeks due to a surgery but develop is back on track this weekend.

[skoop]

Originally Posted by Blacklight

I can tell you that the things that made Dangerous Waters fun for me were these things:

1. Multiplayer
2. Operating the individual stations
3. The full featured mission editor and unit encyclopedia to learn about the units and see the unit stats
4. The modability

3 and 4 REALLY added to the replay value and is a HUGE reason that I still play that game today.
These are things that I would really love to see in any sub sim.

It would be great if DW went open source so you guys didn't have to reinvent the wheel and just upgrade DW.

I think DW just needs a face lift, but the game play is spot on.

[ReallyDedPoet]

Originally Posted by nsomnia

Thanks for the homepage mention Neal. Not pointing any fingers but I can guess he or someone else with admin powers thought we needed some pressure.

Check your PM.

[nsomnia]

Hehe. We'll I've taken the last week off for relaxation and GTA V after getting a sub controller working 100% in unreal engine.

We've been taking it a little bit slower lately. We realize how ambitious a project of this scale is versus your typical FPS or the vehicle games I build for hobby projects.

I'm sad to say in this regret I have no intentions of having a free demo to play at the end of this month unless you guys just want to play around with driving the natuilus in an ocean and fire torpedos off randomly. I could release a tech demo in a few days if you guys really want that, but its nothing special.

I set my goals too high... release date for free first level demo: later than expected.

[BigBANGtheory]

I think the main thing is to use your work to try and inspire and attract the right sort of talent to your project. Releasing a tech demo in the next week isn't likely to change that, I'd say having the tech demo do one thing really well is the key however long that takes. Perhaps a Polaris missile launch for example which obviously distances itself from WWII...

Then I think as a team you need to start nailing down a vision and some objectives before the feature creep kills you. All too often you see people discuss things like "will there be a dynamic campaign" far too late. If you have a commercial interest you are going to have to protect your code and assets, look what happened with the Stalker Lost Alpha project where someone basically put a dev copy in the public domain.

[Blacklight]

It would be great if DW went open source so you guys didn't have to reinvent the wheel and just upgrade DW.

I think DW just needs a face lift, but the game play is spot on.

It would be nice if DW worked past Windows 7. We're losing it completely the second we're forced to upgrade our computers beyond it unless we use a virtual machine and just HAPPEN to have an old copy to Windows 7 or XP hanging around. Most people I know don't. (Thankfully I DO have a copy of Windows 7). But running games on virtual machines has never produced very good results aside from maybe dos games. Windows games don't seem to run very well on virtual machines. At least not in my experience.

Our last hope is if Gog or someone can get ahold of it. But probably fat chance of that considering that Sonalysts is a defense company and probably doesn't want anyone futzing with it's code for ANY reason.

It would have been REALLY nice if Sonalysts would have continued the series and improved it. In an ocean of WWII sub sims, their modern sub sim was such a breath of fresh air. I'm SO DAMN TIRED of World War II all the time.

[zakarpatska]

This may not be worth much, but I've had good results running Dangerous Waters under Wine in Linux. This is another possible path to keeping Dangerous Waters running past Windows 7.

The Linux/Wine combo worked fine whereas running DW in a virtual box under Windows was completely unusable last time I tried which was some time ago.

[1st Capitan Melechin]

Hello mate!
First, congratulations. You have modelled beautiful meshes, and the project is fantastic! Everything is perfect, from the water to the ligh system of the scene. I use Blender too, but I'm not so good at it...
Anyway, it's an awesome project and I think that you are developing it in a really good way!
I'm a fan of the cold war's subs, especially of soviets one...
Just one question: do you use c++ or python?

Good evening and long live Subsim!!!
(Ps: sorry for my bad english!)

[nopoe]

FYI, there are some issues with Unreal for naval simulations. The worst of which is the limited world size. For a single player game you could just use a streaming level, but you'll be responsible for all physics and simulation outside of what UE4 can do. You can also scale all your stuff down and pretend everything is 1:10 scale model.

It's also hard to model the curvature of the earth for your 3d rendering. Additionally, VaOcean, what I picked to do the ocean with, doesn't extend very far. It also has some gaps in the mesh when you try to make it huge.

I'd also caution against picking GPLv2 for your license then making everything closed source. You're responsible for distributing or making available the source code as soon as you release a binary. If you don't, that's a GPL violation and any of the contributors can sue you. I'm not a lawyer or GPL expert, but that's my understanding. It's also explicitly against the UE4 EULA to GPL a UE4 project, and I think Unity's license is GPL-incompatible.

If you want to make it closed source, immediately get in writing the consent of all contributors to relicense it and take down your public github repo (if you want). If you want to make it open source, immediately get in writing the consent of all contributors to switch it to a permissive open source license like MIT or BSD.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5...be-re-licensed

Best of luck!

[nsomnia]

Sorry about lack of updates. Summer, team problems etc. its still coming along though!

The oceansetup is great! I like VaOcean, but it does have its problems. Our ocean tiles are able to be scaled up to 1000x and the wave generation stays the same. They can also be lined up and the waves move from one tile right the next seamlessly.

I work in blueprints so far. A few things I've done in C++, a few plugins, a few blueprint nodes for my friends, some test code for things that just couldnt be blueprinting but I dont enjoy working with unreals API in c++ and being that I'm a C# coder and havnt got very far in the C++ world its hard to do much.

With that said, at first I was VERY suspicious of blueprints. I said when I was first introduced to Unreal Engine 4 "How the HELL could you create code visually. I'll eat my hat if it can do anything more than move a mesh, play a sound, and print a message"

I've eaten many hats since.