Quick question if I may. I, like the others have stated, have been dreaming of something like this for quite some time. Thanks to Beach for posting this article, that I immediately backed this program.
Sadly though, I received an email from the crowd funding site that the financial goal had not been met. My not so quick question is/will development still continue with this and potentially another crowd fund started? I believe the interest is certainly there, however, I think the word needed more spreading.
Some additional info about the campaign was posted to their blog: HERE!
CAP2’s dynamic campaign seems to have piqued the interest of a few people so I thought it was time to post some information about it.
A basic feature of CAP2’s dynamic campaign is persistent world state between missions. This state includes unit positions, orders, armament levels, damage, fleet waypoints etc and is saved after each mission.
A major feature of the campaign is dynamic mission generation. This is reactive to enemy actions, previous mission results and your overall strategy, e.g. if you move your fleet closer to the Strait to be closer to the action then more of your missions will involve fleet protection from air and surface attacks. In addition to the dynamic campaign missions there are predefined missions which are ‘blended’ into the mission cycle.
Before each mission you can access the mission planner which allows you to adjust the number of aircraft in the mission package, weapon loads and the auto generated aircraft waypoints. You can also alter your persistent fleet waypoints. This includes assignments to individual ships so if you want to send a couple of frigates out as ‘radar pickets’ or take part in a combined air and sea bombardment of an island then you have that capability.
You can see the merchant maritime traffic following sea lanes through the Straits. You must protect these throughout the campaign. If you cannot protect them and declare the Straits closed this will count towards campaign failure.
There are numerous strategies you can follow within the campaign which leads to a significant amount of replayability(is that a word?). So, do you close the Straits on day one? Focus on the islands? Send the fleet to the Straits? Keep the fleet together? It’s up to you.
Another development update has been posted on the CAP2 blog:
Apologies it’s been a while since my last post but I’ve been locked away in a small, dark room converting the ~90k lines of the CAP2 codebase.
Previously CAP2 was XNA based, written in C# and using a DX9 level graphics API. By converting to C++ and using DX11 we get a slight CPU performance bump and a major graphics performance boost through efficient graphics buffer reuse and improved shader capabilities. Basically we can eliminate some duplicated draw calls and shader workarounds we’d previously employed.
The other major benefit to the conversion is much simpler and more efficient integration with API’s such as:
We’ll release to Early Access with TrackIR, Steam integration and FMOD. Oculus then multiplayer will follow.
As for release dates I’ve been burned a couple of times in the past with those so we’ll give one when we have a release build in hand with just marketing & Steam store tasks to complete. I won’t be adding any new features before then, so no Zeppelins or other crazy requests to delay things
So, having taken a bit of pain with the time taken for the conversion it puts us in much better shape for the future with improved performance and API integration.
Hi Guys, We are pleased to say the dx11 c++ conversion is complete and we are now moving on to steam integration, TrackIR support and gameplay polishing and tweaking. Thanks for your continued patience. The conversion has increased performance noticeably and we have it running well on our in house testing laptop. So we are confident it’s going to be a smooth experience, even if you don’t have a top end gaming machine.
Did the flight model look a little off to anyone else? It might have been the exaggerated terrain, but it looked like he wasn’t shedding altitude quick enough when he was nose low. It looked odd to me.
Still, I’m glad to see work is keeping up on this one.
“We’ve completed our (unexpectedly long!) C++/DX11 conversion so we’re looking at a late March release. We’ll post a specific date in a couple of weeks.”
I agree the render colors make it look really stylized, and the shaders are contrast set to 11 which gives it a bleached out look so far. The island seems pretty brown and volcanic, although in the video that makes the color MFD’s really pop out. Could do with some green.
If the frame rate is good, it might make an excellent VR title as well, as the systems sim side looks pretty simple but the low-level flying and cockpit details seem ideal.
It won’t really bother me to be honest. I mean…there are some other titles out there that have some funky shader effects that don’t bother me too much. I’ll just think of it as an action movie sim rather than a true to life sim. Besides, I’ve found most sims don’t really get the color and palette of flying right anyway. 80% of the time things are very washed out and kind of dull looking…but you rarely ever see that in a sim. CAP doesn’t look right either…I’m just saying that rarely do sims get the haze right…
