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 can demonstrate multiple player- and AI-actuated sailors walking the deck of a destroyer, using literal representations of the equipment on board and conversing via VOIP and speech recognition. That alone makes this unique. This networked experience occurs on an architecture designed to permit large scale battles with a thousand players across a hundred ships. It can run on Windows and MacOS, with other platforms being possible.

Anyone who feels they might be able to contribute artwork, coding, or other expertise are welcome to inquire to join a playtest. I have no doubt you'd sign on.

I have done a lot, but find I am constrained by my status as a nearly one-man shop. Your skills may be just the ones I need to push this along.

Design Principles

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

• each player is a sailor, not a ship
• you have a role – not every player is a peer
• you see from your sailor's eyes, not from a voyeuristic ship-orbiting camera
• there will be little neon of "HUDs"
• you will feel like you belong to a "band of brothers"
• you will learn something
• the pace will be slow – the action will be momentous

Bragging Points

There is a lot in place. What can be achieved from this basis depends largely on the contributions of talented modelers, artists and coders. Chat me up!

• a global game is possible. Ship positions are handled as 64 bit floating point values.
• super-scalable networking. The ships are clients to a world server. Players are clients to ship nodes.
• Voice-over-IP is built in, and treated literally. The player-sailors near you hear you – voicepipes and telephones to come
• Speech recognition support to allow you to speak in expressive fashion to AI sailors

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