Besiege News

Hello Everyone!

Today we’re going to talk about The Splintered Sea’s upcoming ocean themed campaign and sandbox.

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

The new campaign takes place in The Seas of Autilis, a territory occupied by seafaring people known as the Offlanders. Highly adept in the art of ship building, the Offlanders sail the sea around their islands in a variety of ships, some built for transport & trade, while others are built for war.


The Offlanders don’t just rely on floating defenses either, they also have a habit of mining their coastal waters and have built formidable defensive structures on their rocky island homes.


When it came to creating ocean environments, both for the campaign and sandbox, we wanted to make the areas beneath the surface just as interesting and interactive as those above it.
Beneath the waves you’ll find scenes featuring beautiful aquatic flora, marine life and the last remains of ancient beasts.


In addition to the campaign, The Splintered Sea also brings an ocean Sandbox level featuring several points of interest, including: A calm zone & circuit for racing high-speed craft, a powerful Galleon to fight and various ruins to explore & people to terrorize!



That's all for today, but we have also just posted an FAQ for the expansion on our Discord.

Just two more weeks until you'll be raiding settlements, drowning armies and burning fleets in The Splintered Sea! We hope you're as hyped as we are, can't wait to see what you guys get up to in this new water world!

Cheers,
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!

In this week’s post we’re going to talk about building for The Splintered Sea’s water environments, explaining new mechanics you’ll need to consider and showing you some new tools to help with machine building.

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

Building for water presents a more complex challenge than building machines for land or maybe even those that fly. We have worked to make aquatic machine building as accessible as possible, while maintaining the complexity of physics simulation you’ve all come to expect from Besiege.
With that said, we advise you to start simple and build your understanding of The Splintered Sea’s water mechanics as you go, before attempting large & complex creations.



With the introduction of water to Besiege, every physics object in the game (including blocks) now has a “buoyancy” value attached to it. The more buoyant a block is, the more mass or other external forces are needed to sink it.

Some blocks are more buoyant than others, like wooden blocks, but we’ve also added Barrel blocks whose buoyancy can be customized to much higher values than any other block. Conversely, the Ballast block can be used to increase a machine’s overall mass, or density of mass in a specific area to help balance it. This can be particularly useful when constructing large ships.



If you want to build a machine that floats, you need to ensure it's overall buoyancy exceeds it's overall mass. To make a submarine, something designed to be underwater by default, you'll need to balance it's mass & buoyancy, making it "neutrally buoyant". This will mean you're not constantly fighting against a rising or sinking force.


Just as each machine in Besiege has a “center of mass”, the same is true of buoyancy. Balancing your “center of buoyancy” is essential to ensuring your machine doesn’t become lopsided or even capsize.

Besiege already has a handy tool that displays a machine’s “center of mass” and to aid you with building for water we’ve added a “center of buoyancy” visualization to the same tool. The closer together your centers of mass & buoyancy are, the more stable and controllable your machine is likely to be. A machine’s “center of buoyancy” is only calculated using blocks that are submerged in water, so you’ll need to lower the hull of a ship beneath the surface in order to get useful information from it, for example.



A machine’s “center of mass” is indicated by the red orb and “center of buoyancy” by the blue orb, as shown above.

We’ve also added an orange arrow to the tool that shows the machine's “center of density”. This arrow shows the part of your ship that is most likely to sink first. In the image above for example: the machine’s rear has a significantly higher density than the front, therefore the orange arrow indicates this part of the machine will dip lower in the water. To remedy this, you'd either need to reduce the density of mass at the stern or increase buoyancy there.

Generally, keeping the “center of density” near the center of your machine will ensure it performs optimally, but when making ships you may wish to center it toward the vessel’s stern. This will make the machine’s front more buoyant (relatively) and naturally cause it to rise slightly, enabling the vessel to more easily crest large waves.



Although the aforementioned tools were created to help you build machines for water, they’re only part of the picture and it’s important not to hyper-focus on them. The practices discussed in this post are not applicable to every type of machine and the tool visualizations are not always perfectly accurate. We’re dealing with incredibly complex calculations here and we hope to continue refining these tools as we get more feedback from the community.


Another feature of The Splintered Sea’s water simulation system is “Shape Dependent Drag”, which is applied to blocks that are passing through water. This creates a realistic feel to your machines by causing resistance, as it attempts to push itself through the water.


The image above was taken in our debug mode and shows areas of a machine that are causing the most drag when it moves forward. The colours show the amount of relative drag each block is causing, with red blocks creating the most drag.
Considering the shape of your machine design will be important to ensure it’s able to move through the water easily and in a controllable manner.


In this post we’ve covered the basics of building in water and some best practices that will help when designing aquatic machines. If you’re an avid machine builder and looking to broaden your engineering knowledge with concepts of greater complexity, we’d encourage further reading.
Metacentres and Center of Floatation are topics which could be of interest, there’s also this article by Subhodeep Ghosh which does a good job illustrating these concepts.



That’s all for this week’s post, but we hope it’s given you a glimpse into the exciting new machine-building frontier that is The Splintered Sea! Next week we’ll be taking a look at the expansion’s campaign levels, environments & occupants…

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’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 and 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! :)