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Dev-Update 5/24

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?

Dev-Update 4/24

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!

Dev-Update 3/24

Hi all!

Another short update with some more screenshots from our dev pipeline showing continuous work on aircraft but also on ground units.

Sampans around Đồng Hới, with Oklahoma City CLG-5 in the background.
April 19th, 1972



A-7E scoring almost vertical Sidewinder kill on 921st Regiment's Fresco, more Frescos with proper Fighter Regiments liveries.



B-13 130mm / 5.1" coastal artillery positions, with Chinese-made Cross Slot coastal defense early warning radar.



Dev-Update 2/24

Dear readers!

Another small update about what was going on the last two weeks.

We had a visit from Frazer (MicroProse) and came together with Nils and me (Martin) in Munich to show our game to Fritz and Alex from GameStar:



We also started some internal (closed) beta so things are coming along nicely. Still some way to go but we're getting closer!

Quite some work was done regarding aircraft, here the MiG-21 Fishbed:



And land based installations, KS-19 and S-60 flak over Thanh Hóa province claimed another Corsair:



Vietnam war era dogfighting:



That's it for this time. We're preparing some more footage as well as game play videos and new trailers within the coming weeks.

/Martin

Dev-Update 1/24

As already announced in our happy new year news we want to show more stuff on a regular base. Mainly screenshots but also videos will come soon. And of course there will be another dev diary which is already in progress!

This dev update will be aircraft related. We recently added the B-52G, here showing some weapon launches:



Defenders. Attackers. Depends which side of reticle you find yourself on.
MD500 family WIP - right now manned by brave ubiquitous soviet heli pilots, awaiting proper crew and more detailing:



Tale spin: We worked on quite some aircraft AI, having contrails and finally some action:



And finally some (boring) stats of our game. Beside all those shiny screenshots here are some nerdy numbers (yes I love numbers). Our project grew quite large over time... Above 400k lines of code so far. Those values for estimated costs are using some formula based on the complexity, I could look them up if someone is interested.
Just to clarify: Those are NOT our real costs. They are just estimates done by some (not our) algorithm:



That's it for today, y'all have a great start into this week!

/Martin