Sea Power - naval combat in the missile age

[Xaron]

Hi all,

Just wanted to share what I currently work at together with two very talented artists. It will be a naval game playing in the cold war era.

Some screens may tell more than a lot of text, so here are some first impressions (no mockups actually, those are in game shots):

[Derron]

Looks good - do not be "over-ambitionous" to avoid locking yourself into something never finishable in a foreseeable amount of time.


bye
Ron

[Steve Elliott]

It looks fantastic, well done.

do not be "over-ambitionous" to avoid locking yourself into something never finishable in a foreseeable amount of time.

Nonsense - go for it!...You could always take a break and knock out a small game to recover some energy if you required it, or push on and see daily progress on the main project.

[Kris]

Very cool! What engine powers this beauty? What minimum system requirements are you aiming for?

[Amon.]

Nice. I'm betting unity is the culprit here.....

[Naughty Alien]

..looks very nice..keep it up, it looks fantastic...is this online , like WOW?

[Xaron]

Thanks for your kind words. Yes it's Unity and it will be mainly single player with optional multiplayer. It will be just for PC/Mac as the requirements would be too much for mobile devices also due to the underlying terrain streaming stuff (using DEM data).

Actually I go all in with this one, meaning I'm leaving my well paid job and take the bite going full time.

[iWasAdam]

Holy Crap Batman 
Go for it, it look amazing!

[Xaron]

Thanks, will definitely keep you posted. The main idea is that you have your battle group (task force) and be more the commander of the entire group while you always have the ability to take over every single of your vessels/aircraft if you think you can do better than the AI. 

[Flanker]

That looks amazing ! Will definitely buy it. What is the level of simulation ?
Anyway if you need help with sonar technology I can help you.

[3DzForMe]

Great looking work

[Xaron]

Thanks guys!

@Flanker: It will be kind of a real simulation with quite some realism. think of a modern Fleet Command. I'm a former radar operator and did ultrasound development over years. What did you do in terms of sonar stuff? I'm seriously interested.

Some more (in game) shots:

[Kris]

Impressive! Just like with the first screenshots I love the water. Of course the models look excellent and I really like the overall lighting of the scenes. If you create an intuitive UI that puts the player in control in a slick and elegant way, and the game mechanics, missions also follow a no nonsense design philosophy, can't see why this game wouldn't be a success. Graphics are great already!

I think the next big task graphics, animation wise where things can go wrong is the destruction of the models. The way they explode, get damaged, flying objects hit the water, sink etc. Can add and also takeaway a lot from the overall feel. But if you nail that, people would buy this as long as they can shoot with something just to randomly destroy cool looking units in a cool looking environment.

[Flanker]

@Xaron
Nice, I don't know if you know the subsim forums ? There is a whole community waiting since a decade for a recent simulation about modern underwater warfare to replace "Dangerous Waters". Price wouldn't be a matter, really... Recently the game "Cold Waters" was promising but not simulation enough for that community.

My father was a sonar operator in the french navy, he showed me how to play to "688 Hunter Killer" and "Sub Command" back in the days, then I played a lot to "Dangerous Waters" and the "Silent Hunter" serie. Since then I have consider to develop a modern underwater warfare simulation, so I've been documenting myself about sonar stuff for at least a decade. For example I wrote a little software to raytrace the propagation of sound underwater based on bathythermy, it's fast enough to be used realtime in a separate process (thread). I planned to use Eigenrays to be even faster but didn't take the time to dig into that so far. I know a few sources to get real sound speed profiles based on location on earth and seasons.

I also have a good understanding about beamforming, different types of sonar arrays (cylindrical, linear towed array, variable depth sonar...), useful frequencies, doppler effect, sound to noise ratio, how to defeat a sonar, torpedoes guidance etc... So I can probably answer a few questions ^^

Anyway I'm looking forward for your project !

[Xaron]

@Kris
Thank you! We currently work on that UI stuff. There are so many ways of doing that wrong actually...

@Flanker
Yeah I already know it and I'm quite active there. Actually we already have an own sub forum for Sea Power there thanks to Uncle Neal. And Cold Waters, I know it, quite a cool game. I teamed up with the guys who created it (minus the programmer who I am now).

You sonar experience sounds fascinating. We're likely to approximate all that stuff but I once thought about creating a real submarine simulator in just 2d as usually you won't see any outside world anyway. So just sonar and the stations. But yeah that might be even more a niche within a niche...
Plus it's pretty difficult to get real world data for those modern subs.