BYOBattleship: naval combat sim + ship designer

[Derakon]

A lot of things that weren't really screenshot-worthy happened in the last week, but I also replaced my ocean and sky:



The ocean's probably still due for a replacement or at least some tweaking (that jagged horizon is somewhat suboptimal), but I'm pretty happy with the sky shader.

[DrWho42]

looking good!

[Derakon]

Last week was even more work on shader effects:

https://i.imgur.com/NWJzHfU.mp4

And today I threw together the basics of a dialog system:

https://i.imgur.com/mMQOobk.mp4

It's important to know your strengths as a game developer. For example, I am a peerless portraiture artist.

Quick reminder that I also post updates under @byobattleship on Twitter.

[Pete Mack]

Do the waves cause pitch, roll, and yaw? I would *love* to play a naval game with reasonable dynamics, not just blasting away point blank, or yardarm to yardarm, as it were.

[Derakon]

I'm sorry to report that he waves are purely aesthetic. The ship has a completely artificial rolling motion to it (which is currently highly exaggerated). The guns have logic to compensate for the rolling motion, which means that the rolling is also almost entirely cosmetic.

That said, this game is really not a game about being reasonable. Here's some concept art I did for a boss I have planned, that involves turning a volcano into a gigantic cannon so that the Bad Guys can shell the continental USA from Hawaii:

[Gauss]

How is the ballistic system?
IRL you have to account bullet drop, coriolis, earth curvature, humidity, wind speed and direction etc...

[Derakon]

Ballistics automatically account for movement and instability of the platform, movement of the target, velocity of the shell, and gravity. There's no air resistance or wind, and the world is flat. Multiple guns firing also don't interfere with each other in the slightest (in real life your spotters would have trouble figuring out which splashes correspond to which guns, making refining of aim harder).

Games routinely simplify a lot in the name of getting completed. Considering the overall complexity of this project and the fact that I'm working solo, I have to pick and choose my battles, and detailed combat mechanics is something I decided wasn't worth focusing on. The main issue I had is that I felt like if you get detailed in one area, it becomes hard to justify not being detailed in other areas, and there are a lot of things you can be detailed about. Stuff like modeling armor penetration based on where the target ship is hit, at what angle, and the specific armor details of that ship (how heavily did they armor their turrets? Superstructure? Main belt?). Modeling how likely an ammo dump is to explode if part of the ship nearby catches on fire. Modeling the dangers of having torpedo launchers on-deck (because they might explode if hit by enemy fire). Modeling crew movement, injuries, men overboard...and because my game includes a ship designer, where to put all those crew, and the galley, bathrooms, brig, etc.

So yeah, this is a very sim-light, arcade-style game with easy controls and a lot of automation.

[Gauss]

Did you code the engine from scratch?
Thats a lot of work IMO.

[Derakon]

I'm using Unity. I've tried coding "from scratch" (relying only on relatively low-level libraries like SDL and OpenGL) in the past, and there's no way I'd be anywhere near this far along if I were taking that approach with this project. Indeed, if I didn't have Unity or Unreal Engine available, I wouldn't have even started; there's a huge amount of work that goes into basic tooling that I have very little interest in doing myself.

Even with Unity taking care of little things like "setting up cameras" and "detecting collisions" for me, this game is still going to be a lot of work.

[Derakon]

I'm participating in "devtober", which is a challenge in the indie dev community to do something concrete on your game every day for October. It's similar to Inktober, NaNoWriMo, etc.

Today's primary contribution is adding my first sound effects.

[Derakon]

Added torpedo launchers today. That includes modeling the torpedo and its launcher, mixing up a sound effect from some stock sounds I purchased, teaching the gun code how to aim them and the projectile code how they travel, and adding new reload logic so that the launcher ripple-fires and reloads each tube individually.

Here's a launcher in action: https://i.imgur.com/t9dW3HQ.mp4

[Derakon]

I've started working on the tech tree. I don't really have enough parts yet to support a realistic tech tree, so the connections in this one are kind of dubious (going straight from a 4" single-barreled gun to a 12" double-barreled gun), but it's enough to get the basic mechanics working.

https://twitter.com/byobattleship/status/1181713685930070017

[Derakon]

Continuing on the topic of techs, I figured I ought to flesh out what exactly the player will be able to unlock. Here's my list so far; do any of you see any omissions that I should correct?

Anti-submarine warfare
- Depth charges
- Hedgehog
- Limbo (treat as faster-firing Squid)
- Squid
- ASW torpedoes
- ASW missiles

Armor
- Riveted vs. welded?
- metallurgical advances?

Bridges/superstructure
- One bridge per hull. One aft bridge per if available.
- Various block shapes for generic superstructure.

Hulls
- At least 4 each of US/UK/JP/DE in DD/CA/BB classes.

Main guns
- 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 28, 32, 36 inches
- 1-3 barrels available depending on size. 4 barrels an option for the 14"
(reference the Dunkerque quad turret)
- Railguns

Point defense (machineguns and autocannons)
- Machineguns
- High-angle guns
- Pom-pom guns
- Gatling guns?
- CIWS

Power generation
- Coal-fire boiler
- Pulverised coal boiler
- Oil boiler
- Diesel-electric generator
- Nuclear reactor

Propulsion
- Various sizes/efficiencies of drive screws

Rockets/missiles (self-propelled projectiles)
- Anti-air missiles
- Cruise missiles
- VLS systems

Secondary systems (take up spare volume):
- Ammunition storage
- Automatic firefighting systems
- Autoloaders (improve rate of fire for main guns)
- Damage control systems (firefighting, flood control, engine/rudder damage)
- Fire control systems
- Radar
- Sonar

Torpedoes
- Various sizes of dumb torpedoes
- Loading crane (improves fire rate)
- Guided torpedoes
- LOX torpedoes
- Supercavitating torpedoes

[Derakon]

I made a bunch of guns today.

[wobbly]

I made a bunch of guns today.

Welcome to the terrorist watch list.

Any time-frime on something playable?