Boat Crew
Second Wave of Closed Beta!
As we approach the day of release, we're starting a second and final wave of Closed Beta access. Our Closed Beta is due to receive a major update in anticipation of our release, in which three PT boats will be playable among a nice variety of weapons that range from outdated, to mundane, and to experimental. Several challenge missions are available to get acclimated to the game in anticipation of the grand campaign. We're quite proud of our progress and the shape Boat Crew is taking as she matures, and so we'd like to invite you to the second wave of our Closed Beta to both show you a preview of our game and to enlist your help in figuring out bugs and other problems that may have avoided our attention, as well to hear your suggestions out. It's a good opportunity to participate in the evolution of Boat Crew, and we feel that it will help us make Boat Crew the best she can be at the time of release.
For admission to the closed beta, we'd like to ask you some basic questions to better understand your enthusiasm for Boat Crew and her closed beta:
1. How did you find Boat Crew?
2. How do you feel about what you've seen so far regarding Boat Crew?
3. What excites you the most about Boat Crew?
4. Did you play the demo?
5. If there was one setting appropriate ship, weapon, location or equipment you could add to the game, what would it be?
All you need to do in order to join our Closed Beta is to answer these questions; either by mailing tabbingtabby@gmail.com or by DM'ing either of the developers (Cotanius/Darky) on our Discord server.
https://discord.gg/ZgbuKrge8K
We'll return to you shortly and assign you a Closed Beta key.
Looking forward to seeing you join the war effort, Captain.
That will be all,
T.T.
An Open World: The Setup
The Open World
It's finally time to create the open world for Boat Crew's campaign! Today we will be reviewing the preliminary design, major issues that were glaring from it, and the reorientations to prevent them. The design would actually have been fine if we focused on creating a cute and simple boat game. but Boat Crew has extended past the scope and quality we intended when we set out a year ago, the embryonic direction is starting to become incompatible with what we now want to achieve.
The Original Design
The campaign was originally planned to take place in an always physically simulated scene, where objects spawned or disappeared off the horizon as you moved around, cuts and jumps only occurring when a mission was engaged or your PT boat was docked to a tender. The tenders serving as bases for repairs, recruitment, customization, fast travel across each other, etc. There was going to be a sector based map where you sail mission to mission, facing random encounters off duty. The map would have been more or less fictional with 10-15 2x2km islands to roam in between, placed in a way that keeps empty ocean sailing to a bearable amount. Completing the mission batch of a sector would reduce enemy activity in the neighboring ones, grant a new tender location, and ultimately let you get to the later missions without being overwhelmed.
This approach felt very straightforward at the time (March 2021) and gave confidence for a Q3-Q4 2021 release, with ~8 months of development. Every initially planned feature except the campaign was experimented by then. Yet, the feedback during Steam Next, observations of Youtubers, and encouragements from certain individuals lead us to reconsider wrapping up the game in the state that it existed. With the closed beta and its challenge levels, we kept at iterating the game instead.
Enlightenment
During this extended development we naturally stacked up a lot of knowledge on what happened in the Solomon's, eventually leading us to want to use the real world map itself, which is incompatible with the preliminary map design structure, which was supposed to be fictional. No matter how the real world is scaled, unless the long stretched islands become single digit kilometers in length, it always has a massive amount of open sea to wander around with nothing in sight. Not only that, the amount of coastal area is immense and would feel empty with the limited resources we have to throw at it, whether content creation ended up being by hand or procedural.
After these considerations, it becomes clear the a fully open and simulated world isn't the best way to proceed. We found the solution by separating open world traversal from combat, where combat is initiated based on what you encounter during traversal. This means we are moving more towards a Mount and Blade or Highfleet style campaign, in contrast to the likes of Metal Gear Solid V or Grand Theft Auto V.
The Setup
The traversal layer of the campaign will be removing a massive amount of work that would've needed to be done for a realistic map. Together with the abstraction medium it provides, it allows us to implement some features we previously thought were unfeasible. You will be able to move around as a squadron rather than a single PT, fast forward on the move, interact with nearby units, and more.
Traversal will be a game on its own, your stealth and timing will determine successful engagements. Radio and radar activity will have consequences on exposure. The more you meddle with the enemy's operations, the more the AI will work to track down and corner you.
Technical
We've already started setting up the world and rendering it. The GEBCO Grid was used to import the heightmap of the area related to the Solomon Islands. Some defects are noticeable if compared with google maps, if there is an notable small island missing we can hand paint it into the heightmap.
A custom shader is used to create carefully adjusted contours on the heightmap, overlaid on a paper texture. With some tinkering we made it possible to curve text to give an atlas like feel.
The shader scales seamlessly to render at all zoom levels. Note, you should be able to view these images better by opening them in a new tab.
The map reveals a preview of the area that is zoomed into.
Thanks for reading! This should evolve into a series soon.
-Cotanius
Retouched Physics, Controls, Waves, and More
News
We've been quite silent for a long time outside our discord server. After someone noticed and brought up the Q1->Q2 delay in the discussions, it's probably best we try to post more content here to stay in touch. Speaking of the delay, it was necessary due to some factors regarding vision, opportunity, and keeping an enjoyable development experience that should help the game develop substance. We keep expanding our vision as we better understand what we are actually trying to make, to deliver with higher quality, thus such delays.
The Update
Now for the actual subject. When I was prototyping Boat Crew two years ago, being a physics student, I wanted to achieve the best physics results possible for this water based game. I've iterated multiple times, starting from my own custom GPU water simulation experiments to scraping it all in favor of the Crest Ocean System, iterating on it many times with newly found ways to exploit it for the best PT boat experience. Yet, with the development and adjustments of everything else, it has come to me that many things surrounding the boat had greatly devolved into something lackluster. The current way the boat is simulated is not at all what was envisioned. Interaction with water is weak, particle effects are uncalibrated, and most importantly it's not responsive enough to make threats of bombardments and strafes avoidable, like it should be in this fast paced game. Below is a comparison of what used to be and what will be.
To help with responsiveness, the rudder receives an impulse every time you change direction. This effect will either be an activated captain ability or be tied to a captain's personal level in the future.
Water interaction has been tuned to represent the wakes that PT's are known for.
The "rudder" was mentioned above, they are actually visible now, along with propellers.
Technical
Starting with the floating physics, the equations were changed to make waves push and tilt the boat around more aggressively, while also fixing a problem where a part of the deck temporarily goes well below water at high speeds and waves due to weak depth to force scaling. It used to be hard to balance that scale due to large torque created with higher scales, depth probes placed at the very edges of the hull were the biggest culprit. This was fixed with local positional offsets to the forces generated by the probes, so that they are closer to the center of mass. With this extra step, an excessive angular drag to keep the boat stable was no longer necessary, allowing improvements to controls.
Directional drag forces used to be a thing but ended up diminishing and eventually gone completely after an attempt to fix boats being mysteriously skimmed across water when they were capsized, this bug has made an appearance recently in a closed beta playthrough by Raptor due to an outdated build reaching him. The purpose of it was to stop the boat from drifting, which it does a lot in the current builds. It was reimplemented with a better formula, this time it aims to make the boat feel like its actually being guided by the water and rudder, in other words a sharper drift reduction implementation.
The rudder had also lost it's effect with tunings elsewhere. This was also reimplemented. It's tuned to lose effectiveness as the boat becomes stationary or has no engine output.
As for wake generation, different techniques such as rendering waves by texture, which seems to be the case in War Thunder, or spraying of wave particles were considered but were found unnecessary in the current setup. The setup was instead improved with very wide interaction pads (invisible) and parameter adjustments to Crest systems. Particle effects were tuned to line up with the wake lines.
The game is mostly set so hopefully there won't be any regressions on these features again. Some open world mechanics, customization options, and the introduction of two other boats shouldn't interfere with anything. Changes may make it into the demo within a week.
Thanks for reading! Please share with those that may be interested...
- Cotanius
Boat Crew - Closed Beta Seat Offer Coming to an end!
As we've previously let you know, our early followers who joined us in our budding Discord community have received access to our Closed Beta, which has been progressing well with frequent updates. At this point, we must announce that the offer of Closed Beta seats is due to expire at the beginning of the New Year, so hop aboard and get on the deck while you still can!
We hope you all had a great Christmas, and wish you a happy New Year in advance!
That will be all,
Fair winds, Captain.
Boat Crew - Closed Beta, Offering Seats!
We are quite excited to let you know that our Closed Beta has been released last week, giving some of you the chance to take on Challenges, which are the set of individual missions that will be the shorter alternative to the Campaign mode in the release version.
We consider Challenges to be the ideal way to showcase existing game content in bite-sized pieces, offering a set of scenarios where players can test the weapons, tactics, enemies, and most importantly, their skill out, and so our Closed Beta consists of the Tutorial, plus Challenges to get players familiar with Boat Crew.
To this end, we'd like to invite you to our Closed Beta, which still has a limited number of seats available. It's on a first-come-first-serve basis, and keys are offered on our Discord Server. Boat Crew Closed Beta receives weekly updates with new content and fixes, and if you'd like to be a part of this period of intense development, don't hesitate to join while you can!
That will be all,
Fair winds, Captain.