Captains!
In February, our developers took part in a special Q&A session on our official Discord server on the topic of ship modeling and design in World of Warships. We’re here to deliver the results!
| General design and Technique ● Research ● Ship-Specific Questions ● Miscellaneous |
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General design and Technique
1. What software do you use for modeling ships?
The exact set of programs depends on the particular team and task, but our "go-to kit" is Autodesk Maya, Adobe Photoshop, and Substance Painter.
2. To what extent is physics involved in the ship design process?
We have a professional team of constructors, most of whom have solid experience working in shipyards and designing real ships. Virtual ships are designed on the same principles as real ships.
Since the designing of a whole ship from keel to mast is a topic worthy of a separate publication, we will only look at the example of designing the hull:
During the early stages of the design process, we accommodate the key equipment on board the ship: the main and auxiliary propulsion plants, armament and magazine sections, armor layout, aircraft hangars, catapults, lifeboats, etc. To do that, we create sketch plans for the ship's decks, holds, superstructures, and inboard profile. Those sketch plans are subsequently supplemented and finalized to be later used as the basis for final plans and drawings.
We need to do this in order to ensure that all the equipment fits within the hull we've designed. For that purpose, we calculate mass loads and verify the correspondence between the weight of the equipment and the water displacement of the hull.
The ship's hull is designed taking into account all the equipment to be placed within it. If the data doesn’t match, we either make changes to the composition of the ship's equipment and its characteristics or, if that’s not the best available option, we change the hull.
In the case of aircraft carrier Hakuryū, for example, we had to make the ship 20 m longer and 5 m wider compared to her prototype, G-15, so that the carrier could, in fact, "carry" her entire air group. The resulting increase in water displacement forced us to adopt a different propulsion plant—one that we had to find.
We figure out the seafaring characteristics of the ship's hull, its water displacement, the position of the center of buoyancy, and other hydrostatic parameters.
3. When creating new Tech Tree ships, is there some sort of "budget" related to the modeling of historical ships? Like, "this upcoming Tech Tree should have this number of historical ships at the very least."
We have no such "budget," but there is a general rule of giving priority to historical ships if they fit the planned gameplay of the branch.
4. When modeling obscure "paper" ships or even fantasy ones, do you put any thought into how their superstructure model will affect their turret angles and, subsequently, their future state of balance?
When designing a ship, there are many factors that affect gun angles and gun placement. The key ones are the requirements for ship balance from our game designers and the prototype designs on which the ship is based on.
We never intentionally make a ship worse in terms of angles, quite the contrary; however, this is always a back-and-forth process and a search for compromises.
For example, Plymouth: This is the original version of the improved Town class. She is, in fact, a Town-class ship with quadruple-gun turrets, which were developed for that specific ship. By installing a larger turret on an existing ship with set superstructure dimensions, you automatically get cut horizontal aiming angles. In this case, we chose the most optimal design because there were other variants that had even worse aiming angles.
5. When you design your own ships from scratch such as Celebes and Haarlem, why is there no system in place to ensure the designs are not without cases of missing directors or directors without guns to direct? And why aren’t they fixed?
On Celebes, the number and type of directors are inspired by De Ruyter's. Additionally, a director was added in front of the bow superstructure to control the АA guns located on the platform between the funnels.
About Haarlem: She has the original Dutch gun fire-control system, and it is assumed that it was modified for the German main battery guns. As for AA gunnery, while working on the ship, we considered the fate of HNLMS "Willem van der Zaan." Upon arrival to Britain, this ship had her Bofors guns and Hazemeyer gun mounts with their fire-control system removed for study, and they were replaced with British pom-poms. Haarlem (in her version of the story) got the Bofors back, but there was no way to get a new fire-control system from the occupied Netherlands.
6. Roughly how much effort is required for the various types of ship models? For instance, a battleship is large and complex with many animated features like AA guns, while a submarine is just a cylinder. Is there a rough ratio for design time/effort for carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines?
Submarine, destroyer, cruiser, battleship, aircraft carrier, hybrid ship—the design time increases exponentially in that order. The more complex the ship in terms of structure, the more time it takes to design her. Hybrids are the most complex. On average, it takes 3 to 6 months to design a ship.
Research
7. Where do you get ship plans from?
We’ve collected blueprints and photos from archives and museums around the world. For this purpose, we organized research expeditions, the purpose of which was to collect materials that in the future could be used to create several branches of specific nations. During such trips, we would visit museum ships, archives, and naval museums; order and copy drawings and photos; and purchase professional and academic literature. We are constantly working to find and purchase the latest publications on naval history and updating our database with contact details of private collectors. A few years of isolation due to the pandemic, of course, forced some changes: We had to reduce the number of trips and shift to working more with local professional historians. In addition, every year, archives provide more and more exhaustive lists of services to order materials remotely.
In previous years, we organized expeditions to the USA, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Great Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands. We cannot list all of our sources, but as a notable example, it is worth mentioning the Bundesarchiv in Germany, which we regularly order materials from. The Ship Modeling Society of Bologna also helped us a lot with excellent quality blueprints during the collection of materials for the Italian branches. We are very grateful to the staff of archives and museums for their help and extremely friendly attitude to our inquiries.
8. To what extent is research done on the naval philosophies and design tendencies of the country of origin in order to determine themes for a custom ship, retrofit, mechanics (e.g., Airstrike), or the overall flow of a researchable Tech Tree line?
Any ship of any nation is designed with the general trends of the nation's shipbuilding school in mind. Accordingly, research is done in full, and trends are taken into account in the whole model's appearance. However, gameplay mechanics can be designed and developed independently of the creation of the ship model itself.
9. Where did the idea come from to model the funnels of Eendracht, Haarlem, Johan de Witt, and Gouden Leeuw into more rounded shapes, as well as to remove Gouden Leeuw's forward superstructure and introduce Celebes' "forehead"?
This shape was chosen because a lot of actual Dutch ships also had a rounded funnel shape.
As for Gouden Leeuw's superstructure, the ship was based on Project 1047, which was abandoned before the superstructure design phase began. So, we applied our own superstructure design. In such cases, we create designs based on actual ships of the period or at least viable blueprints.
About Celebes: The German roots of the project influenced the design and architecture of the ship. The original plan was to have a superstructure of the type later realized on De Ruyter, but as a tribute to her roots, she was designed with some influence from the German school—in particular, the Deutschland class.
Ship-Specific Questions
10. Are there any plans to remodel older lines in a similar fashion to the remodeling of the American destroyers that happened in 2022?
There will be no major ship model updates this year. In the future, we will most likely look at doing this, but we will focus on individual ships rather than whole branches at once.
11. Is there a reason why the Japanese Premium ships (except Mikasa) don't get a nameplate on their aft like the other nations' Premiums?
These ships were added to the game in the early days of our project. Back then, we had a rule—add a nameplate only if it was present on the ship in reality; however, very few photos of Japanese ships from the period have survived, so at the time we did not know if name plates were placed on certain Japanese ships. Our processes have changed since then and we now add nameplates to most Premium ships if nameplates were present on them at least in some historical period.
12. Would it be possible to enable the rotating funnel on the A Hull of Richelieu, Alsace, and République?
This feature is in development right now. In fact, we already made some tech changes in the game code to support this functionality, but there's still work to be done.
13. What determines the number of benches added to a French ship design and why doesn't Jean Bart have any benches on her?
On real ships, the benches are installed based on historical references, such as photographs. For paper ships, we install benches of our own taste as a kind of "signature" of the nation. In the case of Jean Bart, there were no benches in her photos, so there are none in our game.
14. Why did De Ruyter get fictional AA guns that weren't in use by the Dutch navy?
This was done for balance reasons. In our game, we sometimes change the armament for the researchable ship to be more appropriate to its gameplay and tier, even if it is not exactly historical.
15. Why is the superstructure of Zieten so extremely ugly and completely out of line compared to the other German battlecruisers?
For Zieten, we used an adapted version of the superstructure from pocket battleships. From a design point of view, it was quite suitable for this ship.
16. On Tokachi, what was the reasoning behind modeling the ship with 127 mm guns instead of the 140 mm guns from the original scout cruiser design?
Tokachi was not based on any real scout cruiser designs. It is our interpretation of a rearmed version of Furutaka; the caliber of the guns was chosen for gameplay reasons.
17. What was the thought process in using Nakhimov, a what-if conversion for a Sovetsky Soyuz hull, as the Tier X Soviet carrier instead of basing the Tier X off of Project Konstrominov or one of the many different designs of the era?
The main problem with most of those designs that have survived to this day is that they are extremely incomplete, which makes it difficult to create an entire ship based on them. So, we decided to use current Nakhimov's design, which perfectly suits the general progression of the branch.
Miscellaneous
18. Will you be releasing more models adapted for 3D printing on Printables like you did for St. Louis?
So far, there are no such plans; however, if there is big interest from the community on this topic, we will consider the idea.
19. Where do the plane models come from? Are they coming straight out of World of Warplanes or are they custom-made for World of Warships?
We make our own planes for World of Warships, since our game contains mostly carrier-based aircraft.
20. What are the criteria for ships to receive Easter eggs? If a decision is made to add a little fun reference within a ship model, when does that happen? Is it at the beginning or end of the modeling process?
We have no clear criteria. It's just that sometimes while designing a ship, someone on the team will come up with an idea for a little joke to please the curious players. Then it is coordinated between colleagues and brought to life.
21. Will you animate the lifts of other aircraft carriers or will Béarn be the only one to have this?
We have the ability to add animations like this, so we may do so in the future; however, right now, we cannot tell you if and when it will happen.
22. Are there any plans to add unique ASW animations and models for ships that have a helipad on them, like Petropavlovsk?
Are the anchor chains modeled as part of the ship mesh or can they be moved without affecting the rest of the ship? It would be very very cool to have your ships with a dropped anchor while they're in Port.
We do not have such plans, but it is quite possible that we will implement something similar in the future.
23. How do you determine when and whether to do a line split? We now have the 3rd American battleship line and, as an example, no Japanese battleship or American destroyer line split. Does the popularity of a line/nation have an impact on when to do a line split?
When choosing a new branch to develop, our main priority is to maintain the variety of nations and ship types. At the same time, there are already a lot of nations in the game, but the number of branches we release per year is limited. So, situations like the one described in the question may sometimes arise.
Nevertheless, if we see that a certain ship type or a certain nation is lacking ships, it's more likely that a new branch may appear there in the future. At the same time, the presence or absence of splits in a branch is not a priority factor. For example, in the case of American battleships, we wanted to add researchable hybrid ships to the game, and among several candidates for the branch, the American battleships were the most convenient to refit into hybrid battleships and versatile in terms of gameplay, which made them a good choice among other branches.