Sim:WTF

"Because every successful video game is eventually reduced to an acronym in the popular lexicon.

—Gratuitous profundity of Tony Lovell

<video id="z6JRQauZvis" height="373" width="640" desc="Demo, August 2016" frame="true"/> With the Fleet is to be a massively-multiplayer naval simulation with a first-person perspective set in the period 1890-1925. It is currently in prototype form. 3D artists and programmers who would like to collaborate and encouraged to contact me.

What it Will Be

With the Fleet will be a continuously-running massively multiplayer naval simulation in which players are the officers and men of the navies of the Dreadnought Era.

They will find themselves aboard a ship, able to walk the decks, use fairly literal representations of the weapons, searchlights, helms, etc, and converse with other sailors, whether they are player- or AI-actuated – voice-over-IP and speech recogition will see to it that "the other guy" knows what you are saying.

The pace of the action will be measured and methodical, promoting opportunities for socialization and drill with your crewmates. When they occur, battles will be memorable in a way that the frenetic lather-rinse-repeat pattern of most games could never permit.

Unlike other naval games and sims, your means of controlling the ships and formations will be limited and literal. You are not a ship, or a fleet. You are a sailor or officer. Only those people who can hear your voice (whether directly so, or via a convenient voice-pipe), read your flag hoist, or copy your wireless transmission will be able to act upon the information. Their own communications and actions will spell out the results from there. No control panels, no chat channels, no roving mouselook camera over your formation, and no jumping between ships or acting on information not realistically available to you. While it is impossible to guarantee complete delivery on the vision, that is the gist of what I am striving to achieve.

What it Has Been

In 2002-2006, I created a rough single-player simulation of the entire fire control system of a Royal Navy battlecruiser called Fleet Action Imminent. It was coded in Java, and used a defunct 3D visualization plug-in on Windows. FAI was coarse in appearance, but expansive in its content and rigor. I twice presented videos of its functionality to distinguished Royal Naval audiences in the UK, first at the Services Command and Staff College in 2005 and then at the gunnery training school H.M.S. Excellent in 2006.

What is the Status?

See our Blog for more information, but the quick take is presently that I have modeled one unarmed destroyer coarsely and demonstrated VOIP, speech recognition, and networked play on an architecture that should permit large scale battles. It is coded in C# on Unity3D, which permits solid end-user builds on Windows and MacOS.

My immediate goal is to make the destroyer more richly functional, and to demonstrate the basic gameplay premise more fully so that I can use the app to seek funding to complete a first edition software title.

See Also

• Developer's Blog
• Videos of Fleet Action Imminent, the "prequel"
• Slack for people developing Naval sims on Unity3D