Sim:WTF

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Revision as of 19:52, 9 September 2020 by Tone (Talk | contribs) (Bragging Points)

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"Every successful video game is eventually reduced to an acronym in the popular lexicon."
—Tony Lovell
Demo, August 2016

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