Hello there Muddies!
A little update, with a few things I forgot to include in the last heads-up, actually…
So, what have we been doing?
Larger part of the late Fall - early Winder was dedicated to AI work in order to solve a long-lasting issue with the naval simulations, that is friendly (or enemy) AI not being able to foresee trajectories when maneuvering, to the point of looking a bit ridiculous. The ancestors shouldn’t be blamed, it really is hard to find a satisfying answer to the problem. Hopefully after some new thinking and a lot of sweat, our Dev JB seems to have overcome the larger difficulty. We’ve been making some stress tests all around to check for weaknesses, but so far so good. The ships depicted in the media below are all asked to swap stations within the Task Force on opposite sides of it - the kind of things you don’t do, except for science. Fortunately, worked well-enough so far.
And here, you have a destroyer being overtaken by a carrier - again, not the sort of things that happens everyday, but when operating in close quarters (for instance as a plane guard) you gotta make sure that these situations will not break the whole system. So far so good.
Ah yeah, right, the other big news is the formation editor, which we use during the game, and when making scenarios too. It is one of four planned modes for the fleet board / maneuvering board you see on the right of the main command console. It was not easy there again, because as always human brains for these are much better than the AI or any sort of automated system, but I think the final result will allow you to reasonably make most of the formations you’d expect for the era.
We also went into GUI territory outside of the gameplay proper - here’s our prototype for the single scenario menu (although our single scenarios can last a week, as you can see - so I start to wonder if I shouldn’t be selling that under another name so that nobody bothers me with campaigns this or campaigns that for the time being… anyway ^^). Good news is that work progressing along the very same lines, it will look 1:1 in-game if we don’t encounter any technical issue during production.
And some Pearl Harbor art to finish? Enterprise leaving port, December 9th, after her quick pit stop while Pearl Harbor is still burning in the background - by our artist Julien.
Here it is, reporting done! Hope you enjoyed the few sneak peeks. Getting a bit closer to the end everyday, but good things sure take time…
(PS: some new clouds too, more on these in a few weeks I guess ^^)
