Battleship Command: Scharnhorst

[Byron Angel]

Hi Byron!
Sorry for the late response!
Yes, I share your concern about the challenge in the complexity.
It will be a balance act to make it enjoyable while maintaining a high level of complexity.
So far I have made so that everything can be AI controlled, so that you can choose to just set waypoints on the map and point and click on the enemy you want to engage.
That gives you the possibility to take control over the various stations little by little as you get familiar with the sim.
My headache now is how to have a good situational awareness while for example controlling a fire director...

Hi Bracer,
I do appreciate how the a computer can be a powerful lure to plunge into deep complexity. Based upon my long experience as a war-gamer and rules writer (going back to pre-PC days) I have learned over time that pursuit of complexity has often not proven to be a wise idea. Assuming that command and control of a given ship is to rest in the hands of a single player, have you given thought as to exactly what roles (default and optional) are to be accessible to the player, and under what circumstances? I can visualize a lot of complicated "ins and outs" in play here.

B

[bracer]

Hi Byron!

Then I can imagine you have also struggled with game balancing, fun and gameplay mechanics!
Quite difficult task, but very stimulating.
It's far too easy to chase after more complexity and increase the scope unnecessary, but I've been strict on myself to only simulate mechanics that makes a difference for the player.

I have more thought in terms of stations instead of roles, and the stations are actually a few stations compressed into one.
For example the station where you control the main guns contains the fire control computer, radar, stereoscopic range finder, all in one interface.
Navigation and steering can be done in several ways, either by setting waypoints on a map or by using a compass/EOT in the first person perspective, or you can walk into the command bridge and press the rudder controls yourself.
You will also command a small fleet, that's done either in the map view or in a fleet management interface.

The engines and damage to systems are simulated with some complexity, but I havn't yet made any interface for damage control or for controlling the engines in detail.
I do for example simulate boilers with oil flow, water flow and air blowers, but the values are set automatically at the moment depending on which speed order you set.

All the best!
Daniel

[Steve Crandell]

The first thing that occurs to me is you are engrossed in firing at someone and torpedoes are sighted heading for your ship. Do you switch to the bridge and avoid the torpedoes or continue shooting? If you switch to the bridge, do the guns then stop shooting at the target?

I'm afraid there will be lots of those kinds of delimas.

[bracer]

Yes, I guess this relates to my situational awarness dilema.
Currently the plan is that AI can control anything you are not controlling.
So as a torpedo warning is announced, you could let the AI manouver and keep firing, or leave the guns to the AI and switch to the helm.

My goal is that you could play out a battle in one station the whole time.
So if you just want to man the guns, you could do that the whole battle and your crew would solve the rest.
Or if you just want to order headings, the AI would select targets and fire by itself depending on your ROE.
Or you can swap through the stations and multitask...

[bracer]

Hey everyone!
Finally time for a little update.
I have been hard at work with the ai and various controlls for the ship.
More importantly I've reached some big milestones regarding time compression, handling abstractions of ai ships and a custom mission editor.
The time compression allows for having missions set over large distances, large distances means many ships needs to be simulated.
That's why I have implemented a way to simulate ships far away in an abstract manner, cheaply, so that I can have hundreds of ships travelling the Atlantic.
With this done, I could start on my mission editor. And you can see I've been busy playing with it.
And here's a long gameplay video for y'all:


Cheers!

[bracer]

Hi everyone!

During early autumn I decided to tackle my old system for terrain generation which was rather slow and low resolution.
Instead of using Unitys built in terrains for rendering my heightdata I am now generating custom meshes where
I much easier can add some procedural noice to increase the terrain detail as well as higher resolution procedural textures.

The visuals, like the shader and textures still needs some love...
And also some variations in the different climate zones would be needed.

I also took the chance to develop a tree generation system for the new terrain. It's all very fast and
you can travel without any hickups at high time compression from Norway through the English channel down to Morocco.
With the new terrain generator in place, it's time to move on the another big project; getting the secondary guns working.
First step was to improve the models.
This is the SK C/28 guns in C/34 twin turrets. There was four of this twin turrets and four in single turrets.
This type of turret was developed from a cruiser turret, and for economic reasons they used the back plates from the old turrets.
Problem was that the new type of turret had different layout, so the door hatch in the back plate couldn't be used.
So they bolted it shut, placed a ladder on top of it and let the crew enter via the emergency roof hatch instead!

Cheers!

[RF]

The height of the deck above the waterline looks very low, I presume this is an optical illusion as in anything other than a flat calm water is going to be sloshing on to the decks and the base of the turrets.......

[bracer]

Hi RF!
That can totally be true, I have not tuned her depth in the water properly.
Here she is calmer waters:

[RF]

Going somewhat off thread, the KM around 1939 was in communication with the Dutch Navy over a proposal to construct battlecruisers for the Dutch using a modified Scharnhorst design, there is I believe a previous thread here from over ten years ago on these battlecruisers.

Consensus was that the designs represented a considerable improvement on the Scharnhorst which I think if you wanted to look at them would be easier for you to model on a format such as this, in particular there would have been a considerable improvement in sea keeping in rough weather.

The KM/Dutch Navy plans never got beyond the planning stage, they were scuppered by the start of WW2 and of course within a few months the Dutch Navy would be fighting the Germans

[bracer]

Hey!
I finally finished some heavy work on the AI and now I am doing some tests with a newly compiled build.
Seems to run just fine!

[RF]

Nice video, but I would suggest some refinements. Whilst we have a clear view of the command position I think some narrative or audio explanation of what is happening would be useful, such as identification of the other ships on view so that we have a better understanding of the action.

Perhaps not directly relevant I notice that there is a super large Moon in the sky, maybe an optical illusion.....

[bracer]

Thanks RF, good points!
Yes, there is various interfaces for situational awarness, like a map and a work in progress UI for information about spotted targets.
I will show it off as soon as it looks a little better!

Yeah, that's indeed a giant moon :-)
I have not spent time adjusting the weather asset yet, it is still quite far down the todo list...

Cheers!

[RF]

My comment on the Moon was just an aside, I was thinking that a Moon that size takes back some 300 to 400 million years ago when the Moon's orbit was a lot closer to Earth, and a teleported sea battle back in the time of the dinosaurs, maybe an ichyosaur might surface to see what's going on here....