Dev-Update 6/24
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.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
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.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]