UBOAT News

Dear skippers,

After a few weeks of intensive work on version B128, we feel that it's now shaped up and is ready for a stable release. With the help of the community we managed to squash hundreds of bugs and improve on all the newly added features.

Full changelog of version B128:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/494840/discussions/0/2935742047979357314

Notice: This version is not compatible in terms of saved game states with the older releases. If your intention is to continue an ongoing campaign, please enter the game properties on Steam, click the BETA tab and switch to version B127.


Let's remind the two main features of this release:

[h2]Map[/h2]
This is probably the most exciting change in this version. The new map contains dynamic country borders that reflect most historical events of World War II. There are also major battles marked in on the map. We hope that you will enjoy this change as much as we do!



[h2]Tutorial[/h2]
In this version we added 7 tutorial missions into the game. They explain most topics needed to successfully proceed with your career through the game. These missions can be started at any time from any port in the game.

Aside from that, each in-game interface now has a dedicated help system that can be toggled by pressing the question mark icon in the upper right part of the screen.




Aside from the initially announced features, we added much more smaller improvements during the unstable version testing. The most important changes are:

[h2]Sandbox[/h2]
- Unescorted trade ships are becoming less common over the course of war and by the end of the war most of them travel in convoys.
- Convoy escort composition is now more varied and some more historically accurate. More countries will participate in the escort duties.
- Escort carriers, battleships and cruisers are now always hidden inside the formation and don't act as an anti-submarine escort.



[h2]Crew management[/h2]
- New action: Emergency ballast tank blowing, that helps to surface the ship at any cost.
- New action: Ballast adjustment, to compensate negative buoyancy from the leaks, by blowing some ballast from the tanks.
- New action: Preheat and load torpedo task was added to the crew schedules UI.
- Officers now become tired when their energy reaches zero and they start to rest. They won't take orders until they recover at least 40% of the energy or there is any emergency on board (alarm, leaks, wounded crew or panicking characters).
- Added many new backstories for the recruits written by the community.
- Crew now makes noise detectable to the enemy. Switch light to red or blue to let them know to be quiet.
- Torpedo loading and preheating now also makes noise.



[h2]AI & naval simulation[/h2]
- Added Huff-Duff devices on the enemy surface vessels. They are installed starting with 1941 and allow enemies to locate radio transmissions at a range of up to 24 km. Early Huff-Duffs don't allow to pinpoint position, but instead only tell that the radio transmission is originating dangerously close. If enemies detect your radio transmission with an early Huff-Duff, they won't know your position, but only know that you are nearby. Better Huff-Duffs will direct enemies directly at your ship.
- NPC ships are now much better at avoiding the coast and port structures.
- Enemy escorts are much better at deducing possible u-boat position after a torpedo hit, especially at high AI difficulties.



[h2]Economy overhaul[/h2]
- Basic T1 torpedoes, bread and potatoes are now free to ensure that the u-boat will always be able to continue the duty. Only one free type of food is allowed in the warehouse at a time, to disallow gaining discipline bonuses for free.
- Decreased prices of other types of torpedoes to match the new approach. All rewards for assignments and sinking ships were considerably decreased.



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We will now focus on the next major update - B129. Feel free to post your requests and suggestions to participate in the further development.

Please take a look at the initial announcement to read more about all the major features introduced this release:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/494840/announcements/detail/2877195252819396742

Yours,
Deep Water Studio

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Kind regards,
PlayWay Team

Hello skippers!

We are back with the next major update to UBOAT. We feel that this update is an important milestone towards the full release and we put a lot of effort to make it happen.

We secured additional funding from the publisher to put additional work into the game. For this reason, we decided to deviate for a moment from the original roadmap and put work into the areas of the game that are important, but were somewhat left behind before, like the in-game map. These changes were often requested by you on the game forum.

Considering the above, we now expect to release the full version of the game in January, rather than a fourth quarter of this year. We hope for your patience and understanding as it's for the greater good in the end!

Without further introductions, let's move on and explain what can you expect from this new update!


This is probably the most exciting change in this version. The new map contains dynamic country borders that reflect most historical events of World War II. There are also major battles marked in on the map. We hope that you will enjoy this change as much as we do!




In this version we added 7 tutorial missions into the game. They explain most topics needed to successfully proceed with your career through the game. These missions can be started at any time from any port in the game.

Aside from that, each in-game interface now has a dedicated help system that can be toggled by pressing the question mark icon in the upper right part of the screen.




[h2]Realism settings[/h2]
There are two new realism settings: AI difficulty and economic difficulty.

AI difficulty affects how good enemy crews are at detecting your u-boat, which directly affects the combat difficulty of the game.

Economic difficulty on the other hand, affects the cost and availability of various goods in the ports. In this version, we introduced resource shortages in Germany at the last stages of the war and high economic difficulties make them quite dramatic and more realistic. Besieged ports like La Rochelle may often lack most of the goods needed to sustain your ship.



[h2]Pathfinding improvements[/h2]
It's no longer necessary to plot paths in ports manually as they are computed automatically around the port structures. Aside from that, there were numerous other improvements in this area, for example NPC ships can now effectively avoid collisions with each other even in tight formations and it's much easier to avoid entering coastal areas by accident as the new paths avoid them automatically whenever possible.



[h2]Hunt-class destroyers[/h2]
These destroyers along with River-class frigates, which also started to appear in this version, are used by Royal Navy and many new navies introduced in this update:

• Polish Navy
  
• Free French Navy
  
• Royal Norwegian Navy
  
• Royal Netherlands Navy
  
• Free Belgian Navy
  
• Royal Hellenic Navy
  

[h2]Body shape variations[/h2]
Each sailor now has a different body shape. It may be adjusted at the customization screen.



[h2]Patrol changes[/h2]
Patrols are now performed on smaller Kriegsmarine grid squares, which were implemented in this version. We always felt that previously patrol areas were too undefined and large.



[h2]Simulation improvements[/h2]
Most of the Royal Navy escort ships are now equipped with ASDIC devices since the beginning of the war, which are later upgraded to newer, historically correct types. By the end of war, many of the enemy escort ships are also equipped with radars.

Enemy hydrophone operators are much better at detecting u-boats. We felt that they were lacking a lot since B127, as the enemy convoys started to be much more spread out since then, while escort ships balance wasn't adjusted for that change. It's now going to be again, much harder to stay undetected while sneaking into convoys.


[h2]Contact shadows[/h2]
UBOAT is an open world game with vast open scenes. Such conditions are not ideal for the common shadowing techniques that were producing blurry results at times. We decided to implement raycasted contact shadowing technique for that reason. It's commonly used in the games from this year and now UBOAT also joins that party.



[h2]Screen-space reflections[/h2]
Previous implementation of the screen space reflections (SSR) effect in the game was quite outdated and was affecting performance on the high screen resolutions. We updated it using the latest Unity implementation as a reference and optimized for the specific use case of our game (mostly water).

This new version is both faster and more precise, producing reflections where previous implementation was failing to do so.



[h2]8K interior textures[/h2]
Most u-boat interior textures are now present in the highest resolution and use better BC7 compression that fixes various colouring artifacts that were previously visible especially on gray surfaces. This shouldn't affect overall VRAM usage as textures are loaded to fit a set limit, but please let us know in case of problems.



[h2]Optimizations[/h2]
We are optimizing the game at each occasion and this time we optimized it quite a lot! While the game may run a bit slower than before after you run it, if you disable the newly added graphic effects, it should almost certainly run faster than before and use less memory.

We also updated the engine UBOAT is built on to the latest version: from Unity 2018.3.4 to 2019.4.11. Despite the numeration pointing to a one year, it's actually two years of progress from the engine developer as the newer version was released just two weeks ago.

[h2]Save system[/h2]
Saved game state files should be at least 30% smaller since this version, while both saving and loading should be faster.

We fixed the infinite loading screen issue that was still there in B127 despite our earlier effort. If this would happen again, please remember to drop us a save and a log file and it will be our top priority.

[h2]Warning[/h2]
This version is currently present on the unstable branches on Steam and GOG. It may still need some polish and there may be leftover issues from the work done.

Mods may need an update to work well with this update as most aspects of the game were modified. We will do our best to help mod authors. Please come by to the B128 discussion thread on the forum, if your mod was affected.

With your help, we are hoping to release this version on the stable branch as soon as possible.

Yours,
Deep Water Studio

Hello!

A fourth hotfix for version B127 is now complete. It fixes the last issues in the game that could cause an infinite loading of saved game states, where the loading wheel was animating indefinitely.

It's fully compatible in regards of saved game states with the previous version.

We are going to focus mostly on the next major release now, namely B128. We will post more details about this update as soon as we become sure about its final shape and complete more of the work ahead.


[h2]Fixes:[/h2]
- Infinite loading issue fixes based on the bug reports.

Yours,
DWS

Hello!

A third hotfix for B127 is now ready. We implemented the common request to stop the time compression whenever a group of units is detected and made a few other fixes as well.

It's fully compatible in regards of saved game states with the previous version.


[h2]Improvements:[/h2]
- Detections of NPC groups now instantly stop the time compression.

[h2]Fixes:[/h2]
- Fixed odd ship behaviour in Wilhelmshaven with ships travelling sideways in some cases.

- Vacation UI items were overlapping with each other, if UI scale in the settings was set lower than 100%.

- Fixes to a few code exceptions from the received log files.

Yours,
DWS