News
We've been quite silent for a long time outside our discord server. After someone noticed and brought up the Q1->Q2 delay in the discussions, it's probably best we try to post more content here to stay in touch. Speaking of the delay, it was necessary due to some factors regarding vision, opportunity, and keeping an enjoyable development experience that should help the game develop substance. We keep expanding our vision as we better understand what we are actually trying to make, to deliver with higher quality, thus such delays.
The Update
Now for the actual subject. When I was prototyping Boat Crew two years ago, being a physics student, I wanted to achieve the best physics results possible for this water based game. I've iterated multiple times, starting from my own custom GPU water simulation experiments to scraping it all in favor of the Crest Ocean System, iterating on it many times with newly found ways to exploit it for the best PT boat experience. Yet, with the development and adjustments of everything else, it has come to me that many things surrounding the boat had greatly devolved into something lackluster. The current way the boat is simulated is not at all what was envisioned. Interaction with water is weak, particle effects are uncalibrated, and most importantly it's not responsive enough to make threats of bombardments and strafes avoidable, like it should be in this fast paced game. Below is a comparison of what used to be and what will be.
To help with responsiveness, the rudder receives an impulse every time you change direction. This effect will either be an activated captain ability or be tied to a captain's personal level in the future.
Water interaction has been tuned to represent the wakes that PT's are known for.
The "rudder" was mentioned above, they are actually visible now, along with propellers.
Technical
Starting with the floating physics, the equations were changed to make waves push and tilt the boat around more aggressively, while also fixing a problem where a part of the deck temporarily goes well below water at high speeds and waves due to weak depth to force scaling. It used to be hard to balance that scale due to large torque created with higher scales, depth probes placed at the very edges of the hull were the biggest culprit. This was fixed with local positional offsets to the forces generated by the probes, so that they are closer to the center of mass. With this extra step, an excessive angular drag to keep the boat stable was no longer necessary, allowing improvements to controls.
Directional drag forces used to be a thing but ended up diminishing and eventually gone completely after an attempt to fix boats being mysteriously skimmed across water when they were capsized, this bug has made an appearance recently in a closed beta playthrough by Raptor due to an outdated build reaching him. The purpose of it was to stop the boat from drifting, which it does a lot in the current builds. It was reimplemented with a better formula, this time it aims to make the boat feel like its actually being guided by the water and rudder, in other words a sharper drift reduction implementation.
The rudder had also lost it's effect with tunings elsewhere. This was also reimplemented. It's tuned to lose effectiveness as the boat becomes stationary or has no engine output.
As for wake generation, different techniques such as rendering waves by texture, which seems to be the case in War Thunder, or spraying of wave particles were considered but were found unnecessary in the current setup. The setup was instead improved with very wide interaction pads (invisible) and parameter adjustments to Crest systems. Particle effects were tuned to line up with the wake lines.
The game is mostly set so hopefully there won't be any regressions on these features again. Some open world mechanics, customization options, and the introduction of two other boats shouldn't interfere with anything. Changes may make it into the demo within a week.
Thanks for reading! Please share with those that may be interested...
- Cotanius