Sim:WTF

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

—Tony Lovell

<video id="z6JRQauZvis" height="373" width="640" desc="Demo, August 2016" frame="true"/> With the Fleet will be a massively-multiplayer naval simulation with a first-person perspective set in the period 1890-1925. It is under active development and is currently in a demonstrable prototype form.

I would like to collaborate with talented 3D artists who are familiar with Unity3D.

What is the Status?

I have modeled an Acheron-class destroyer and demonstrated VOIP, speech recognition, and networked play on an architecture that will permit large scale battles with a thousand players across a hundred ships. It is coded in C# on Unity3D, which permits solid end-user builds on Windows and MacOS. The 4-in gun and torpedoes work. Progress is slow at the best of time, but we are at a point where occasional play-tests occur.

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. I have done a lot, but have much more ground to cover.

Design Principles

These are my general beliefs. Most are flexible, and some clearly written as a reversal of but they guide my decision-making.

• the pace will be slow – action will be momentous
• each player is a sailor, not a ship
• you see from your sailor's eyes, not from a voyeuristic ship-orbiting camera
• scant neon
• you will feel like part of a "band of brothers"
• you will learn something

See Also

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