- Added new 'in development' room to museum with in-flight models
- Added models to bunker scene
Crush Depth: U-Boat Simulator
0.29.1
0.29.0
- Added logic to allow immediate server ownership of newly instantiated prefabs
- Fixed flak gun firing bug when in MMO
0.28.30
- Extended respawn time after falling into water to 30 seconds from 5 seconds
- Added initial swim logic to let player swim underwater
- Player slowly sinks when underwater, must surface to float
- After starting to swim, will notify player of respawn via text, including name of respawn point
- Upgrade to Crest 4.15.2
- Update to Unity 2021.3.3f1
Bug fixes
- Error when swimming into U-boat, would teleport you back into U-boat (no collider)
- Error when swimming, would not reset back into boat when you've fallen off (screen would flicker)
- Fixed underwater post-processing effect for first-person perspective, now when swimming you can see fog
- Player after falling into water can respawn onto port or boat
- Can shift+3 to respawn onto port again
- Fixed UZO and periscope overlays (will scale with resolution ratio)
Regular update #69.
A couple of days later than I would have wanted to, but here's the bi-weekly update (at least I'll try to get an update out every two weeks again from here on out). As before, most of the work is still going into the frameworks to make everything possible, but we're making some good progress there.
One of the things we have been working on (something we're working on constantly, to be honest) is how vessels interact with the water and also creating vessels in a way that we can have a multitude of high-quality assets in a scene without frying everyone's GPU. Here below, you find some footage inside the editor sort of showcasing them both: five highly detailed Schnellboote (using quite a bit of texture space) in a very big scene (the new port scene we're building consisting of a couple of hundred parts spread over four square kilometers).
[previewyoutube="Uj-SnbGGAlM;full"]
One of the other things we've been working on is furthering the transition between a technical demo to something that actually feels like a game. Part of that is also less 'sexy' stuff like reworking the menus and other UI-elements so they have a nicer, more polished feel. This is still a work in progress, but let us know what you think of it.
[previewyoutube="JPrdk_5mj_g;full"]
Apart from that, modeling work for the exterior and interior of the U-Boat has carried on as well. We're not at the stage yet that we're willing to show what has been done there, but I hope we'll get there soon. When it comes to items inside the U-Boat though, our team members have lately been focused on creating (for lack of a better word) anti-drowning/suffocating equipment, which will play quite an important role in our project as well.
Here you see for instance the 'Kalipatrone' holders, which were used to filter out carbon dioxide (which, you know, makes you die if you inhale too much of it). If you wish more information on how these things worked connect with us on Discord where our team members are always available to tell you more.
Then, of course, the bags for the 'tauchretter' as well. These contain an escape set, which the crew could use to exit the U-Boat in case of emergencies. Well, that's what they were made for at least.
That's it for now!
Let me know what you think! Feel free to connect with us either through DM or by dropping a message in the comments below. As always, thanks for your continued support and I hope to see you all two weeks from now again!
Regular update #68.
It has been a while since the last update. I am personally to blame for that as real-life issues (work, holidays, covid-infections, etc.) took out a big chunk of the time I have to work on this project. You have my apologies, but rest assured that we're still as motivated as always to see this through and wish to thank you all for your continued support.
Most of the work we're doing now is still on the purely technical side, pushing Unity to its limits to allow us to build the thing we want to build indeed. That being said though, the modeling and production of other assets have progressed as expected. One of the most eye-catching things we've been working on lately is a new showcase scene that will allow us to give everyone a better idea of the final game quality we're working towards. We'll have the museum on one side - accessible to everyone, for free, always - in which we hope to share some of the expertise and information we've brought into this project. Right now, we're also working towards building out the functionality of those items and having them live in our multiplayer environment.
For that, we're currently working on recreating U-Boat bunkers as you've seen in the previous update. It's coming along quite nicely, although there is still quite a lot of work to be done there. See the attached screens.
From here on out, I hope to pick up the pace again and keep you informed at least once every two weeks on the progress of Crush Depth. For the moment, thank you very much for your continued support, and once again, my apologies for not having been in touch for a while.
Let me know if there's anything else you'd like to know, simply by sending me a message directly or in our leaving one in the comments below.
Regular update #67.
Go shoot stuff!
We're very excited to bring you this new update. As work on the frameworks is progressing nicely, we're transitioning towards creating some proper game-play elements. Apart from the MMO-setting itself, it has always been our goal to create other game modes as well, for a multitude of purposes. One of the big questions in game design is how to give players a fun, engaging experience if they only have ten minutes to invest as well as if they have a couple of hours to invest in a single session. Since we're building an MMO as well, how can we create safe environments for people to mess around, learn new things, experiment, etc. without that having a (possible) negative effect on what is happening with their player character in the MMO environment?
As one of the answers there, we're creating a whole set of interactive tutorials, challenges, training missions, etc. We have revamped the flak-gun challenge quite a bit, in the hopes of it being more fun, more immersive, and more representative of what you will be able to expect from the MMO world. Below is a small video of a couple of minutes of game-play. As you can see from this video, this footage has been taken from running the scene through the Unity editor itself, which has some negative effects on the performance. The performance in-game is expected to be better indeed. That being said, it runs quite smoothly in that environment as well, so we're very happy with the results.
[previewyoutube="26bDa8G1EcU;full"]
I have to point out that we still have a lot of work to do there in terms of dressing up the scene a bit more, the damage model of the airplanes, the UI work, etc., etc. Expect a lot of changes to be made in the upcoming weeks and other challenges to be added as well. That being said, the guns work, the boat is fully controllable, so hop in with your buddies (best enjoyed in a small group) and let us know how you get along!
On a technical note, a big milestone for our project here is the addition of 'lobbies' (for lack of a better word) to our network infrastructure. Apart from the persistent MMO-world, we are now able to let players create their own instances of these smaller sessions, separately from what is happening in the MMO-world indeed. Quite crucial indeed.
Historical material.
One of our team members has obtained 25 original, building and electrical plans of all systems of the type VII, as well as many new instruction manuals for the systems on board. One item we're very excited about is the special building regulation which has information on every pipe and its diameter and the exact layout.
Further work on U-Boat assets.
For those of you who have followed the previous updates, we've done quite a lot of work on creating the assets for the firing system of the U-Boat. Next up are all those items that have to do with the control of the boat itself, tachometers, rudder boxes, compasses, etc. Although a lot of those items are finished already, we're rechecking the texturing work to make sure they meet our standards when it comes to quality, consistency of style, historical correctness, etc., as well as creating some possible variations there.
(Yes, these things would be marked with an X if no paint had been applied yet).
That's it for now!
As always, thank you all for your support and until the next time! Should you have any comments, suggestions, or if you'd like to know more about his project, feel free to leave a comment below and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.
0.28.15
Fix player animation jitter when on a moving object
New optimizations: please try running the benchmark again.
A short message here: we have made a couple of optimizations and changed the way our testing (to check if your computer is powerful enough to run our project) is set up. If you have tried running the in-game benchmark - for the demo version in particular - in the past couple of weeks, please try again and let us know if you notice any difference in the results. Thank you for your time!