Sea Power News

Here's a recording of our developer live stream session on Discord made on 25th of June 2024:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We did run into some issues on the live stream, so please pardon our progress!

Due to high compression on discord streams, as well the stream being setup for 720p, the recording quality has been degraded. Streaming, playing the game, and recording simultaneously is difficult on our machines.

Going forward we will plan on recording better quality footage for the channel. You can attend the next stream on the microprose discord server: https://discord.gg/xyWqGak

Hello everyone!

Welcome to another Sea Power update slightly later than I intended, I lost a week somewhere, careless of me I know. The last few weeks have seen good progress on the game and other related areas, but a lot of it is bugfixing, system improvements or preparatory work, so please excuse us for a slightly less art heavy update.

We’ve seen some updates to the air defence system go into the game, with Mek tweaking the flak for balance and adding some more powerful land based air defences for the Soviet side.







Mek has revealed two of the things I mentioned he was working on in the last Update. Here you can see the behind the scenes of our F1 coming together, first in the modelling software Mek favours, then to UVW Mapping, and then in combat firing an Exocet Anti Ship Missile (AShM).







Of course the F1 is not the only aircraft that can carry the Exocet, it is slightly unusual to see but the Super Frelon (another one of Mek’s new models) can also carry it. Seen here in Iraqi colours.



Once again Mek and Nils’ output astounds me, here is what Nils has been up to since the last update. Taking the US Navy’s Tarawa-class Landing Helicopter Assault (LHA) from a mere grey box to a fully fleshed out ship floating in game. I think we were all a little surprised to see quite how big the Tarawa is, it dwarfs a lot of other platforms, and is bigger than the Kiev!









On the campaign front I have been working on getting the land invasion system working, it’s nice to see little tanks moving across the map. I’ve also got chained missions working out for the enemy so that logical sets of events occur together. In this case Iceland is a handy test point as it lets me experiment in small scale!



Ivan has put together a mission to really help test us some of the features of the game, it is called “Breakthrough” and features a Soviet group based around an Orel-class carrier trying to break through the straights of Gibraltar. I even managed to get a chance to play this one (which has lead to me doing a bit of alterations to the aircraft flight model!) Here a er a collection of images from various people having a go.

NATO forces conduct air patrols from the base on Gibraltar. Here my mighty MiG-23s have managed to get a F-15 into the wrong place.



Mek has added a new NATO style radar installation to help with the mission.



And there are more of those to come!



And finally! Just some of the extra screenshots from the updated camera tools that Mek has been enjoying!

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: