Sea Power News

Hi everyone, welcome to another Sea Power Dev Update.

The biggest developments over the last weeks have got to go to our terrain team. Ian, Martin, Mek, and Nils have completed fantastic work on the terrain shaders, along with other systems. These improvements mean that you should see excellent lighting effects from cities, those lighting effects from cities impacting clouds, clouds casting shadows on terrain and a number of other cool features. Every time that Ian shows us an update on the autogen system in our chat we all think “Wow, that looks cool!”. To give you an idea of progress the first image below is what the autogen system looked like in its first throes at the end of October last year, the other images are all from the last two weeks.











We tend to work in multiple streams as a team, bringing our work together through what is called a Continuous Integration (or CI) stream on Steam (For those that are interested in technical info this means that we all have our own copy of the development build we work in. This this gets uploaded to our version control system, which is monitored by an automated build machine. The build machine creates the Steam version of the game, lets us know if it was successful, and if it was automatically uploads to our developer branch).

So while all the terrain work was going on around them Ivan and Danill have been working away hard on testing, fixing, and improving old systems. Plus adding new systems, most of these being revealed as Ivan primarily works on the AI tools. All this means that Ivan is probably the person with the most hours in playing Sea Power and he has graced us with these lovely shots below, from a mission called Gauntlet made by Danill, where you have to escort some cargo ships to Narvik while under combined arms attacks.



















There has been a fair amount of testing of the air defence mechanics too in the last few weeks (the CIWS mechanisms in particular for Ivan and the resistance to missile damage for Noah), with a number of items that we need to improve being added to the backlog of items that need ongoing work.

These images come from another of Ivan’s sessions!









While these are from Noah’s (check out the test mode missile trails).







Meanwhile, in the art department, Mek is anxious to show of his beloved aircraft and has been planning tools to support players in getting the best out of the imagery, especially by manipulating the camera in the engine to show us coders why he wants certain shots (like the images below). I think it is safe to say we will get no real peace until there is a proper photo mode!


(note this particular F-15A ”Baz” is a work in progress)













Also in art land on the model making side you will have seen the new HH-3, F-4D, and f-5E in the last update. But the effort doesn’t stop there (having dabbled in 3D models myself, with a bunch of the Royal Navy models in Cold Waters DotMod being my work, it is astounding to see what Nils and Mek can achieve is the shortest time periods) with two new helicopters and a fighter in work for Mek and a new class of ships in work for Nils now he has finished converting the 707 to the E-3 AWACS (he say’s they are horrible to model as there are lots of fiddly bits). Watch this space for them being revealed in the next few weeks.



I have been hard at work on parts of the campaign system, here is a quick look at the overall interface as it sits at the moment, obviously very much Work in Progress! It does however highlight a few important items; particularly ports, airports, and patrolling units within their areas.



Patrol Areas are a way to let you abstract the slightly more repetitive deployments of units so you can focus on managing the overall campaign. They let you assign locations you can spawn patrols from, the types of units to spawn, and how many. For example the below SSBN patrol area accepts spawns from any of the known USN SSBN bases in the Atlantic (you’ll note one of our little placeholder images for the Belgian flag on Zeebrugge, that helps keep the game running in the event of missing images).



I’ll add a note of caution that everything you see here related to Patrol Areas remains in work and should not be considered representative of a final product!

Hello once again everyone,

Apologies for the late update, in the time when I would normally write these I was in deepest, darkest Cornwall scuba diving on the Manacles (look it up, lots of wrecks and life). But now I am back so please enjoy our regularly scheduled but belated update.

You’ll remember from the previous update we talked about ejection mechanics, Ivan has been finalising the system to have variable chances of spawning pilots, to give them a survival chance on hitting the ground or the sea and to integrate more of Nils’ liferaft models. Alongside the liferafts Ivan has also reworked the flooding and sinking mechanisms associated with ships to make them feel better to play (or to explode!) And to try and prevent the explosions Danill has renewed the jamming systems and made them a little more effective in some situations based on descriptions of their use operationally from history texts.

On the mapping front Ben has added filtering tools to the Tactical Map, so that if a situation gets too cluttered you can focus on what really matters to you (of course, like in real life try not to filter too much, remember that not all innocent looking traffic is in Sea Power!). A big piece of work that Ben has also been working on is the plotting system, particularly the sensors. As we approach launching the game we are chasing performance more and more. Ben is looking at taking some of the more complex work off the main thread (for non programmers the main thread is what displays what you see and background or worker threads run independently in parallel).

Terrain continues to receive massive updates; with Martin, Nils, Mek and most importantly Ian working hard on it. We hope you agree that the autogen and lighting here is truly spectacular! There is a lot of work that goes into this stuff, from Autogen scenery LOD models that Nils and Mek create, to the code for the terrain that Martin has built to the placement system that Ian has crafted. It’s a complex system but one that we are really proud of!





I have been working on the campaign system some more, as the concepts start to become reality. We now have a more fixed UI concept that is congruous with the mission UI, while allowing the player to interact with facilities and units to task them. We are hoping to make this have a level of micromanagement that is acceptable, in reality as the commander of Atlantic Operations you wouldn’t do everything yourself in reality after all!

Nils and Mek have both been adding even more units into our inventory, with the Farragut (technically the Coontz-class) Destroyer joining the fray from Nils and the HH-3E and ASH-3D helicopters being released for active duty by Mek alongside the iconic F-5E. Nils also found time to add the F-4D Phantom to the game to spice up the airborne action.

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!)

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

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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