Sim:WTF
<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
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.
- 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
