Sea Power News

Good Morning/Evening/Time is an Illusion Everyone!

Welcome to another Sea Power update blog. You join us as we work hard to finish the remaining core components of the game, improve performance on core features, and support Microprose’s marketing team in preparing fun things (keep your eyes open for us popping up here and there in the near future).

The biggest core parts of our work at present are: the save/load functionality while playing missions, and the campaign. However, as always bug fixes and improvements abound (though I think Nils will insist we stop adding new features to break unless they involve the campaign in the very near future).

Victor, supported by Ivan’s extensive knowledge and capricious memory, has been getting acquainted with the code base over the last two weeks and has been tightening up the INI file handling systems. I think it has been said before, but Sea Power is highly modifiable with all the features controlled through INI files that you as the player will be able to modify. We have stuck to this format rather than switching to the more common JSON as we feel it is easier to read for players and hopefully makes new features more accessible. Ivan has also been really focused on setting up new units, especially airfield variants, and ground units. After all Close Air Support is no fun without things to explode!

Speaking of new features be aware that we do read all the messages on the Discord, Steam Forums, and elsewhere. So, if you are really interested in any particular feature there is a good chance we have it logged away in our fan suggestions box, and at least a few have been included already! We really want to make sure that this game is a success, and we have a serious plan for making sure that it has longevity!

In the art team Mek and Nils continue to generate new models, variants, and improve our existing work with little features like unique serial numbers for aircraft (I’m not sure how they managed to get us to program that one in!). In line with the survey we are not releasing as much info on new models as that was not seen as a point of focus. However, Steam, you guys have let the side down here; Discord is far outstripping you on replies!





I’ve spent most of the last few weeks focused on my day job, but also on aircraft, improving the flight models to be a little more natural, along with (this week) making some updates to formation flying. I’m hoping that we can add the ability for you as a player to “Assume Direct Control” of the aircraft and really let loose.





On the campaign front I have been integrating the way that background data like cities and airfields is displayed into the Mission Editor, and hopefully into the live missions so that your scenarios can have realistic background traffic in them. Danill (who had a lovely holiday) and Martin will be joining me in working on this in the next week or so. This should let us really parcel out the work packages and ensure that we chunk through what remains to be done.



In the midst of this Noah has been hard at work testing and stress testing all of our fixes, he does want to remind you what happens when people touch America’s boats though!



Thanks for visiting, we really appreciate your comments and support! Enjoy some extra screenshots!











And some 1980s inspired post-processing







And here is one that Nils found from very early in development, before most of the systems even existed! But you can see even then how much wizardry the art team is able to get out of these!

Hello again everyone, welcome to another Sea Power update. This is our first update under a new automated system working with our publisher MicroProse, what this means is that updates should be more broadly shared across social media platforms to help spread the news of the game we have been working so hard on. In any case on to the game and the team!

This week we have a new joiner, Victor, who comes to us from the Task Force Admiral team, he has been working hard on their save/load system and will be bringing his expertise to our team too. Welcome Victor!

Hopefully you have seen the developer stream we did recently. It wasn’t without issues, but it was really positive to see over 200 people turn up to watch at such short notice. We will do a few more of these in the future but with more notice and working with MicroProse’s marketing team to get better quality and more focused sessions. To aid with that thank you those of you who have answered our survey, there are some really interesting trends coming out (we’ve had over 500 responses) some of which we expected, some of which we didn’t.

Onto our various updates. Nils and Mek continue to churn out some absolutely spectacular work in the modelling department. Those of you that follow our Discord will have already seen these but here are a few more images of the AV-8A onboard the Tarawa-class that was featured last update. I am sure that you can make some well educated guesses about what they might be working on next, though I am sure that Mek will find some time to do more of his beloved fast patrol craft though in the last two weeks it was minesweeper time, featuring the T43, T43K and Kondor classes!













Martin has been spending some time contributing towards Silent Depth 2: Pacific, an exciting PC launch of his previous game. But around that he has made some significant improvements to the line of sight systems that are used to determine if sensors can see other things. In Sea Power this is dependent on both relative position and terrain data. He’s spending some time in the near future working on getting the pathfinding system for units integrated into the terrain system too.

Ben has taken a little trip to a conference and managed to bump into Nils in person in Sweden and Martin in Germany. Somehow while he is there in and around being shown around he has found time to start adding additional plotting tools like rulers to the map. We’re looking forwards to seeing these come to life.

I have been spending some time reworking aspects of the aircraft flight model to make the manoeuvring feel a little more natural, as well as adding some more UI elements to the game. All of this has been a break from the campaign which I will get back to soon, also bringing in Danill when he comes back from holiday with his family.

Ivan has been taking maximum advantage of the cooler temperatures at night and has (we think) become fully nocturnal. He has been fixing a lot of little bugs, and really tightening up bits and pieces that have been missed by others. Noah has been helping him and together with Martin they will get our bug reporting tool under control. We hope to have some integration into the game to help allow for automated error reporting so that we can improve any issues more rapidly on release.

And now some more of our favourite screenshots from this week!



Ivan’s famous “Red Text” annotations continue to amuse us.



Mek has been experimenting with effects, he hopes to be able to bring you star shells (no promises!)





I think you can tell that we like night missions!







But as daytime is OK too, here’s a shot of Type 148 Tiger Fast Attack Craft making it’s first appearance in game.

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!