Besiege News

Hello Everyone,

We’re continuing our deep dive into The Splintered Sea expansion today, with a look at the new aquatic blocks and how they work!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2165710/Besiege_The_Splintered_Sea/

The Splintered Sea introduces 8 new blocks to the game, all designed to help you construct machines that can traverse water and navigate the challenges of an ocean themed campaign.




To help you move your machines through water, we’ve created three new blocks that each employ a different method of propulsion; the Sail Panel, Aquatic Screw and Paddle.



The Sail Panel provides you with a retractable sail that harnesses wind in order to propel your machine across the ocean’s surface. Retracting the sail while in simulation will slowly bring your machine to a stop.

When the sail block comes in contact with water it becomes wet and ceases to provide propulsion, but regains normal behavior shortly after exiting the water. While underwater, sails also create significantly more drag which can negatively affect the controllability of your machine.



The Aquatic Screw works the same way as a ship’s propeller, providing either forward or reverse propulsion. Aquatic Screws can be stacked together, forming one continuous unit that spins in unison. Modifying one Aquatic Screw with the Keymapper Tool, modifies any other screw that’s stacked together with it.



Due to their shape, Aquatic Screws also function as worm gears that interact with the grooves on Small & Large Cogs, causing them to rotate.



The Paddle block can be used to create oars for rowing or attached to wheels, turning them into “Paddle Wheels” (a method of propulsion used by early Steam Ships). The Paddle can also be placed on the sides of your machine, acting as a lateral dampener to help keep your machine moving in a straight line.




While many blocks in Besiege provide some degree of buoyancy, the Small & Large Barrel block’s buoyancy is customizable and has an upper limit that’s much higher than any other block. Placing and customizing their values allows you to finetune your machine’s overall buoyancy, whether it’s to support heavy cannons or balance a submarine.



While in simulation, you can use hotkeys to apply a “rise” or “sink” force to the Barrels that’ll help you control submersible machines like submarines. The amount of force applied can also be customized using the Keymapper tool.


To help you steer your aquatic machines we’ve created a Rudder block, which simulates a lateral force and provides more effective steering in water. You can of course create your own steering methods and even rudders out of existing blocks, but we wanted to ensure there was a block specifically designed for use in water as well.




The Harpoon Launcher has been a long requested addition for Besiege and what better place for it than as part of an ocean themed expansion! The block fires a devastating spear bolt attached to a rope, which can be detached or reeled back in at the press of a button. You can use it to pull enemy vessels along, winch your machine toward a target or maybe even do some fishing…



That’s it for today’s post, but fear not, there’s plenty more to talk about in the lead up to launch! In next week’s post we’ll take a deeper dive into building for water, discussing some engineering principles to consider, and demonstrating some tools we’ve created to help you build ocean faring machines.

See you next week!
Von

If you haven't already, please consider wishlisting the expansion and check out The Splintered Sea’s steam page for more information! :)

Hello Everyone!

We hope you’re as excited as we are about the upcoming Splintered Sea expansion! Today we’re going to talk about the expansion’s water simulation & some of its features.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2165710/Besiege_The_Splintered_Sea/

It’s always been important to us that if we ever added water to Besiege, it would need to be a more interactive & impactful experience for the player than simply a flat plane to sail a ship across. With that in mind, throughout the development of the Splintered Sea expansion we have tweaked and refined the water simulation to make it as fun, challenging and immersive as possible.

The Splintered Sea’s ocean features large waves that physically batter your ship about, making navigation challenging and causing ill-balanced machines to capsize. Constructing an aquatic machine presents different challenges to those faced on land and we’ll talk more about Building for Water in an upcoming post.



Ensuring immersive and satisfying interaction between player creations and the ocean was also very important to us. We wanted the water to react to your presence, creating a rippling wake-like effect as your machine moves and splashing when parts of your ship impact the surface. Splashes and spray are proportional to the magnitude of an impact, so striking the water with a large heavy object at high speed creates a much larger effect than something smaller and lighter at a slower speed.



Now, Besiege wouldn’t be Besiege without awesome explosions, so we wanted to give special attention to them in water as well!

• Bombs & Mines are powerful enough to physically impact water both above and below the surface. Above the ocean large explosions force the water downward, creating a temporary depression in its surface.
  
• Large explosions underwater create a big bubble that forces water (and anything caught in it’s wake) away from the explosion’s epicenter and then sucks anything nearby back in as the bubble collapses. This makes submarine warfare especially satisfying and immersive!
  
• Underwater explosions also thrust water upward, creating huge bulges on the ocean’s surface that cause damage to vessels caught in them.
  

That's all for today, but next week we'll be taking a deeper dive into The Splintered Sea's aquatic blocks and how they'll help you take on Besiege's formidable ocean!

Cheers everyone,
Von

If you haven't already, please consider wishlisting the expansion and check out the expansion's steam page for more information! :)