Hello Everyone, welcome to another Sea Power update. This one written while enjoying what feels like the first sunny week in months in the UK waiting for the wind to fill in for another day of yacht racing in Cowes Week.
As per our last update we are still focusing on some core functionality around save/load functionality while playing missions, and the campaign. I spent some time last week briefing other members of the team on the campaign and the aircraft flight physics so that we have a broader span of knowledge. This week I have done some updates to the GUI, giving the chance for flexible mission briefings (I am sure you will remember Cold Waters UI there!) driven by modern XAML UI Code which you can specify in a file associated with a mission. We will give you some templates but you will have the ability to do basically whatever you please in briefing people on the missions you create, from maps to pictures to potentially even videos! On the debrief side Ivan, Nils and Noah have been working out a scoring system for missions which should give you the tools to evaluate your performance at the end. I have been making the UI to support it around the racing at Cowes.
Victor has really got his teeth into the save/load system and is identifying areas where we have redundant code, a peril of having developed a bunch of systems in parallel, but a real benefit of having a fresh pair of eyes! This should help us move towards a more supportable code base which is really helpful!
Martin has been smashing out updates on the camera system, adding new modes, new camera tools, terrain collisions, and making sure that it is really slick. Alongside this he has been slowly transitioning us from the old Unity Input system to the new Unity Input System. Obviously this is a bit in the weeds for most people but the new system is a more modern and supportable tool that lets us activate and deactivate control sets, and hopefully in the future add some controller support (we’ve seen a lot of people playing Cold Waters on steam deck for example).
Danill has been developing new tools for the UI, really getting into the WPF format that we use. He is adding tools to let you see how much fuel and battery planes and diesel electric submarines have left. There has been some collaboration with Ivan here to add AI functions to make the enemy automatically Snorkel to recharge their batteries.
Mek has been heavily supporting the Microprose marketing team, there is some really cool stuff coming that we are aching to tell you guys about but cant yet!
And now … drumroll please … screenshots!
