Sea Power News

Hello once again everyone,

Here’s a window into what we have been up to over the last two weeks.

Noah has been learning how to set up airbases from Ivan, hopefully increasing our abilities to add more content, especially with the custom models that Mek has provided for various places. Here are some examples of new airfields (including testing Reykjavik with a mysterious absence of Iceland). Mek has also been doing some extra work on ground units and tweaking some effects while Ivan continues to work on the AI systems.









Ivan and Nils have also been adding a bit more life to our world together. Nils has made and textured life rafts, pilots, ejection seats, and parachutes which Ivan has then chained together. Now if you shoot an aircraft down its crew might eject, and if they get into the sea use their life raft. The same goes for ships, sink them and the crew will abandon to life rafts. Alongside these they have also been setting up commando raiding craft ready to support special forces. Nils is still working on more models, so the game’s content continues to grow.











Danill has been doing some more work on the mission editor, adding the functionality to allow you to spawn aircraft on the map from the units you deploy.

Ben is working on nailing down the performance of the map system, he’s already massively improved the rendering time of the map tiles with the support of Martin’s compressed terrain system and is now tackling performance optimisations with the help of Unity’s multi-threading tools.

Ian has been hard at work adding more to the autogen system, especially around lighting and integrating into the river and water systems. The nighttime shots look really cool now! Martin has been looking at making sure that manually placed object interact properly with the automatically spawned terrain too.

Martin has been working to improving the terrain system some more, fixing bugs and optimising it. Plus adding a few tools for us to use to make sure that it integrates properly with the other systems we use.

I (Matt) have been working on the Campaign systems for the last few weeks, this time around I have got a lot of background systems set up, and am now working at getting our player units under control (and the UI that goes with that). In the immediate future I am going to have to start getting missions really operating on top of the background traffic systems, and continue to refine the navigation network that I have chosen to use for now.

As a bit of a joke I ran our meeting notes into ChatGPT to see what it would give us. The suggestions of a log starting with ”Ahoy, Captains!” and containing the phrases “Dot's Deck”, “Noah's Nautical Necessities”, and “Julhelm's Helm” was vetoed quickly.

Now please have some screenshots! In this set Ivan shows us the chaos of combat, and quite how much can be going on, with major missile attacks and combined arms operations.













We are always happy to see that people enjoy these updates, I thought that /u/Armo100’s work on reddit here was particularly cool:

Hello everyone,

Welcome to another Sea Power update. The weeks are just flying by at the moment, I swear it was only yesterday that I was writing the last one of these, but then a couple of rather busy weeks have happened since then.

GameStar Magazine have published an exclusive look at the game’s progress (Echtzeit-Schlachten mit Flugzeugträgern, Kampfjets & U-Booten - Sea Power lässt es krachen!)

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It is in German but the English subtitles give a decent overview and there is a lot of footage to take a look at that you will not see elsewhere. In game related news the last two weeks have brought us more of the same, there is nothing really momentous to report apart from good steady progress on the game. And that late at night we sometimes sit and watch it going “this is really cool!”, we look forwards to when you get to see what we see.

In the coding team we are focusing on a few things in the next couple of weeks, primarily Campaign and AI. These are the two big job that need to get done before we can begin to go into the final stages pre-launch.

The campaign, as I am sure you have heard, shifted from being a turn based strategy system to something more akin to Cold Water’s real time mode (I have to say I aspire to reach the heady heights of what Falcon 4.0 managed, but that will be a big job, check out this interview with its creator (Interviewing the Falcon 4 Dynamic Campaign Creator, 25+ Years Later - A Retrospective):

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We are setting up a system that is going to be globally flexible, which will allow you to create new campaigns as you please across theatres of operations of all sizes. You might have spotted some testing of the background civilian traffic system in the GameStar video, we are attempting to create a world that feels very much alive so that you can build your own stories.

AI is another monster, Ivan has taken the lead on this with Nils, between them they have been creating realistic doctrines and approaches to combat so that both enemy assets, and player assets that you are not directly controlling behave in a believable manner. This is a pretty massive thing for us to try and get right, we want the game to be a challenge, but not in the traditional RPG “Bullet Sponge” way. Enemy units will try and react to their surroundings to get the best of you, and you will definitely have to be careful to make sure that you do not suffer from an unexpected defeat.

Don’t worry though, there is still going to be the option to sail around in a custom mission blasting everything with the 16” Naval Guns on the Iowa though. That is pretty satisfying.

Outside of the core coding work more UI work is in development, obviously to support the campaign, but also to polish up tools that we have previously created. And to finalise systems that were still in development. Danill has been majoring on this, with overall art direction from Nils.

We are staying invested in improving resilience and performance too, Ben has been leading the way on this, fixing bugs, adding catch mechanisms to systems that fail to load due to background file errors, and generally making the overall systems work better. Ben has been leading the way on moving systems to the new Unity Jobs system, which allows us to truly take advantage of the performance of modern multi-cored machines.

Noah has really stepped up to the plate (a baseball reference slid in seamlessly, though I am not sure why Americans call rounders that and why it is quite so popular?) and is learning to modify the ini system to help Mek get some new airports set up, and has started writing the first of the tutorials based on his experience of learning the game.

The art team never sleep (it seems like it sometimes!) either, Mek and Ian have been touching up the environments, they are looking really cool, if I say so myself! Especially the autogen! Nils has been making even more brand new ship models too (there is another custom warship in progress) while leading the direction to try and keep us on task and coherent.

That concludes this week’s update, please have some screenshots!










Examples of the autogen system, showing off the emissive light system used at night. As Nils says “moody!”




Suddenly! A new airbase layout, we have had these almost ready to go for ages but now they are happening.




The new Snøgg class missile boat emerges from the shed to join the fleet.


Sometimes you get something slightly wrong, this aircraft has perfected the new amphibious fast taxi technique.

Hello everyone,

We hope you enjoy another quick update on the progress of Sea Power in the last couple of weeks. This one comes slightly later in the week than normal after some hectic few days for me in my day job, but I’m looking forward to some time away for a friend’s wedding over the Easter Holidays.

It’s been a tough couple of weeks with illness going around the team but we push on regardless, in the art department Nils and Mek are still hard at work. Mek has been prototyping more interesting fast attack craft and Nils has been expanding our global traffic with new Oil tankers, Fishing boats (some you might recognise as old Cold Waters friends given an update) and RORO ferries.

The coding team is as always busy too, as always hunting down bugs is our sniper Ivan. He found a particularly tricky one this week that was costing us 20 FPS in certain random situations.

While he’s not bugfixing Ivan has added a nice new feature that planing hulls and hydrofoils are now fully supported (There are two main types of hull, a ship is a displacement hull, as it goes faster it just displaces, or pushes out the way more water. A planing hull is a vessel that can ride the waves it generates to get extra speed. A hydrofoil is a vessel that flies above the waves altogether for incredible speed). As a part of this feature we have also been able to add variable draught (the depth a ships hull goes down to) based on cargo loads to the game.

Ian has got the autogen to a stable state awaiting new models and is taking a few days off, as well as pursuing his degree. He’s not the only one big on learning as Ben achieved his doctorate earlier on in the dev cycle. I (Matt) am working on some things that aren’t ready to show or talk on yet, but I am taking my laptop away on holiday from my day job.

The big shift this week that we haven’t spoken about yet is an internal update in the version of Unity Engine we utilise, to improve performance, stability, and to start looking at really optimising the use of multithreaded processing we have migrated to the 2022 LTS variant. Noah (who has a new working PC! Hooray!), Ben, Ivan, and Martin have got this working admirably. Our first version port a year ago was all pain, this one felt like a breeze to me (I will note I was sat in the office sneaking peaks at our private dev chat rather than helping).

And now you’ve read my waffle, please have some media!

The first of our hydrofoil classes breaks the surface!





Nils is working on more, here’s how the Pegasus-class developed over a few days.







Mek’s Helicopter was stung by a bee!



More in the works too!





We’ve also updated some of the shootdown effects for aircraft.

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[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Hi all,

Just another quick update on what we have been up to in the last two weeks.

Mek and Nils have been busily texturing and modeling, using the time the coders need to add more assets to the game. At current count we have approximately 50 different types of aircraft (military and civilian), 130 types of ships and submarines, and 35 types of land units with more getting added every week. This week I persuaded Nils that we should have some more fishing boats to really add to the life in the Barents Sea so he has also set off to update some more of his old Cold Waters models, after finishing up some lovely updates of the Skipjack-class SSN. Those of you who remember that game look out for some old friends!

The coding team have been hard at work as well, with a big push at the moment being the behaviours of friendly and enemy units. Ivan has been rapidly working through the reactions that vessels need to make in Anti-Submarine Warfare this week, be afraid of the ASROC if you are playing as the Soviets, though I would argue that the helicopter is potentially even more deadly. Daniil has been really polishing up the MIssion Editor tool, with conditional triggers and events added as a capability, so you can start to create some really special hand crafted scenarios. Our own early scenarios were made entirely through Notepad (Notepad++, we’re cultured!) but the Mission Editor is a much more accessible tool. Ian has been smashing out the autogen city technology for us, with significant performance improvements we hope that it is really going to look nice! Ben has been all about performance too, giving us some incredible gains in unit spawning. Martin has finished his river editor and Mek and Nils are using it, as well as fixing some terrain bugs, and Matt has been working away at implementing the updated UI concept that Nils developed a couple of months ago.

Noah in the QA department has had a bad week already, his PC deciding to die on Monday (F) but should be back up and running too. It has been suggested that one of the coders deliberately sabotaged him but I am sure this isn’t true (says the coder).

And now to our regularly scheduled screenshots!

An unspectular shot of that river/lake editing tool


Ivan implements disguised spy ships


The Permit-class SSN joins the USN fleet


Mek introduces us to more of his biome work, this is Desert (Dry) and Desert (Wet)


The Z-class Destroyer nears completion, seen here in the 3D modeling software that the team uses


So too does a new fleet tanker (technically an A-OT)


Ivan shows us some ASuW action in the small patrol boats the Warsaw Pact loves


And finally….one of the team achieves mutually assured destruction during a scenario. Who was it and what scenario were they playing?

Hi all,

Just another quick update on what we have been up to in the last two weeks.

The art department (Mek and Nils) have been fixing some performance issues with the vegetation, adding base city textures and a few other tweaks to really make the game look great. Mek has given urban areas their unique per-biome textures. Nils has also been busy adding more variety to the existing vessel inventory with new versions of the Adams-class destroyer while keeping us busy with UI concepts.

The coding team (Martin, Ivan, Ben, Ian, Danill, and Matt) have been hard at work too. Ivan, Ben, and Danill have been hard at work improving the AI systems. Ian has been focusing on getting the Autogen for cities working to really sell that low-altitude work. Matt has been busy implementing Nil’ UI concepts and Martin has been helping out by making a utility tool to allow some really nicely detailed river masks on top of our normal terrain system.

Our newest team member, Noah, joins us in a QA role, keeping us coders on the straight and narrow, and helping make sure that the game performs as well as it possibly can.

And now to our regularly scheduled screenshots!

Mek takes us on a little sightseeing tour of his new work, checking out the cities of Tokyo, Haiphong and Odessa.



Mek also brings us some updated fire effects. Here a Galveston-class is suffering after a dusk attack.



The Kilauea-class ammunition ship USS Flint suffers a rocket attack (those shells are scary!)



The Mission Editor and Instant Action UI have both had some updates, we thing they look really nice and clean now!



The biome and season system is starting to really come together, showing off the different colour schemes for Winter, Spring, and Autumn.



Ivan has been taking us through some engagements, showing off quite how quickly things can get really chaotic!



That's it for today! Thank you for reading!