Hi everyone, welcome to another Sea Power Dev Update.
The biggest developments over the last weeks have got to go to our terrain team. Ian, Martin, Mek, and Nils have completed fantastic work on the terrain shaders, along with other systems. These improvements mean that you should see excellent lighting effects from cities, those lighting effects from cities impacting clouds, clouds casting shadows on terrain and a number of other cool features. Every time that Ian shows us an update on the autogen system in our chat we all think “Wow, that looks cool!”. To give you an idea of progress the first image below is what the autogen system looked like in its first throes at the end of October last year, the other images are all from the last two weeks.
We tend to work in multiple streams as a team, bringing our work together through what is called a Continuous Integration (or CI) stream on Steam (For those that are interested in technical info this means that we all have our own copy of the development build we work in. This this gets uploaded to our version control system, which is monitored by an automated build machine. The build machine creates the Steam version of the game, lets us know if it was successful, and if it was automatically uploads to our developer branch).
So while all the terrain work was going on around them Ivan and Danill have been working away hard on testing, fixing, and improving old systems. Plus adding new systems, most of these being revealed as Ivan primarily works on the AI tools. All this means that Ivan is probably the person with the most hours in playing Sea Power and he has graced us with these lovely shots below, from a mission called Gauntlet made by Danill, where you have to escort some cargo ships to Narvik while under combined arms attacks.
There has been a fair amount of testing of the air defence mechanics too in the last few weeks (the CIWS mechanisms in particular for Ivan and the resistance to missile damage for Noah), with a number of items that we need to improve being added to the backlog of items that need ongoing work.
These images come from another of Ivan’s sessions!
While these are from Noah’s (check out the test mode missile trails).
Meanwhile, in the art department, Mek is anxious to show of his beloved aircraft and has been planning tools to support players in getting the best out of the imagery, especially by manipulating the camera in the engine to show us coders why he wants certain shots (like the images below). I think it is safe to say we will get no real peace until there is a proper photo mode!
(note this particular F-15A ”Baz” is a work in progress)
Also in art land on the model making side you will have seen the new HH-3, F-4D, and f-5E in the last update. But the effort doesn’t stop there (having dabbled in 3D models myself, with a bunch of the Royal Navy models in Cold Waters DotMod being my work, it is astounding to see what Nils and Mek can achieve is the shortest time periods) with two new helicopters and a fighter in work for Mek and a new class of ships in work for Nils now he has finished converting the 707 to the E-3 AWACS (he say’s they are horrible to model as there are lots of fiddly bits). Watch this space for them being revealed in the next few weeks.
I have been hard at work on parts of the campaign system, here is a quick look at the overall interface as it sits at the moment, obviously very much Work in Progress! It does however highlight a few important items; particularly ports, airports, and patrolling units within their areas.
Patrol Areas are a way to let you abstract the slightly more repetitive deployments of units so you can focus on managing the overall campaign. They let you assign locations you can spawn patrols from, the types of units to spawn, and how many. For example the below SSBN patrol area accepts spawns from any of the known USN SSBN bases in the Atlantic (you’ll note one of our little placeholder images for the Belgian flag on Zeebrugge, that helps keep the game running in the event of missing images).
I’ll add a note of caution that everything you see here related to Patrol Areas remains in work and should not be considered representative of a final product!