Crush Depth: U-Boat Simulator

[Asid]

Regular update #68.
Tue, 15 March 2022



Hello everyone!

It has been a while since the last update. I am personally to blame for that as real-life issues (work, holidays, covid-infections, etc.) took out a big chunk of the time I have to work on this project. You have my apologies, but rest assured that we're still as motivated as always to see this through and wish to thank you all for your continued support.
Most of the work we're doing now is still on the purely technical side, pushing Unity to its limits to allow us to build the thing we want to build indeed. That being said though, the modeling and production of other assets have progressed as expected. One of the most eye-catching things we've been working on lately is a new showcase scene that will allow us to give everyone a better idea of the final game quality we're working towards. We'll have the museum on one side - accessible to everyone, for free, always - in which we hope to share some of the expertise and information we've brought into this project. Right now, we're also working towards building out the functionality of those items and having them live in our multiplayer environment.
For that, we're currently working on recreating U-Boat bunkers as you've seen in the previous update. It's coming along quite nicely, although there is still quite a lot of work to be done there. See the attached screens.









From here on out, I hope to pick up the pace again and keep you informed at least once every two weeks on the progress of Crush Depth. For the moment, thank you very much for your continued support, and once again, my apologies for not having been in touch for a while.
Let me know if there's anything else you'd like to know, simply by sending me a message directly or in our leaving one in the comments below.

[Asid]

Regular update #69.
Wed, 30 March 2022



Hello everyone!

A couple of days later than I would have wanted to, but here's the bi-weekly update (at least I'll try to get an update out every two weeks again from here on out). As before, most of the work is still going into the frameworks to make everything possible, but we're making some good progress there.

One of the things we have been working on (something we're working on constantly, to be honest) is how vessels interact with the water and also creating vessels in a way that we can have a multitude of high-quality assets in a scene without frying everyone's GPU. Here below, you find some footage inside the editor sort of showcasing them both: five highly detailed Schnellboote (using quite a bit of texture space) in a very big scene (the new port scene we're building consisting of a couple of hundred parts spread over four square kilometers).




One of the other things we've been working on is furthering the transition between a technical demo to something that actually feels like a game. Part of that is also less 'sexy' stuff like reworking the menus and other UI-elements so they have a nicer, more polished feel. This is still a work in progress, but let us know what you think of it.




Apart from that, modeling work for the exterior and interior of the U-Boat has carried on as well. We're not at the stage yet that we're willing to show what has been done there, but I hope we'll get there soon. When it comes to items inside the U-Boat though, our team members have lately been focused on creating (for lack of a better word) anti-drowning/suffocating equipment, which will play quite an important role in our project as well.





Here you see for instance the 'Kalipatrone' holders, which were used to filter out carbon dioxide (which, you know, makes you die if you inhale too much of it). If you wish more information on how these things worked connect with us on Discord where our team members are always available to tell you more.

Then, of course, the bags for the 'tauchretter' as well. These contain an escape set, which the crew could use to exit the U-Boat in case of emergencies. Well, that's what they were made for at least.







That's it for now!


Let me know what you think! Feel free to connect with us either through DM or by dropping a message in the comments below. As always, thanks for your continued support and I hope to see you all two weeks from now again!

[Asid]

0.29.0
Fri, 27 May 2022



    Added logic to allow immediate server ownership of newly instantiated prefabs
    Fixed flak gun firing bug when in MMO

[Asid]

Mid year 2022 update.
Wed, 1 June 2022



In case you've missed it, we've put out a video update detailing some of the work we've done in the past couple of months as well as our plans for the upcoming period. Please check out it here:



As always, thanks for your continued support and should you have any questions or remarks, do let us know! More news to follow soon.

[Asid]

Regular update #70.
Wed, 13 July 2022



Hello everyone!

In this update, I would like to take a moment to cover what we have been working on as of late and to explain why we have made the choices we made along the way. I hope you find this an interesting and informative progress update.

To recap, our goal is to deliver the most realistic U-Boat simulator possible; we have set the bar incredibly high for ourselves in order to achieve this goal and our approach is aligned to deliver on our vision.

Almost everything we are creating for this project is derived from original construction drawings or other contemporary information. This information must be acquired, researched, reverse engineered, well understood, and transposed to requirements, models, code, etc… Acquiring this information is not trivial nor is it cheap!

Along the way, we must also combat misinformation and competing information (even from authoritative sources). With our rigorous process, we’ve been able to help contribute by correcting inaccuracies that up until recently were widely published and claimed to be accurate. To point out one of the most eye-catching and ubiquitous misconceptions: red lights were generally not used on a U-Boat at all, except for a few bulbs near the hatch in the control room (with some exceptions in rare, individual cases).

Apart from that, our team has uncovered information that has not been touched for years, detailing the functionality of systems in their true complexity. One of the things we are currently working on is the implementation of the rather elaborate firing system of the U-Boat, which is far more complicated than you’ll find anywhere to date. We’ve also started preliminary work on the flood-drain-system of the U-Boat, with special thanks to our contributors Stosstrupp and TheEngineeringGuy for the groundbreaking work they have done researching these subjects.

This means that our project is not only working towards the most authentic digital recreating of a type VII U-Boat ever, but we’ve also been materially contributing to the broader corpus of U-Boat knowledge along the way.


I won’t revisit all of the progress we’ve made (if you are interested you can view all of our updates on our Discord or Steam page. Should you wish to have a look yourself, you can also download our free demo and support our project by either purchasing the tech-demo or considering becoming a patron of the project through Patreon.

What I want to focus on in this update are the three major challenges we are currently working through:

I) The game engine.

Out of the box, the Unity game engine does not supply us with the architectural underpinnings we need to be able to see this project achieve the lofty goals we have. To try and correct this, almost a year ago we investigated moving over Unreal Engine 5 by Epic Games. We went as far as developing a full proof of concept clone in UE 5 and had the engine communicating, side by side, with our back end MMO server topology. We were so sure of the game engine shift, we publicly announced our move 🤦 Hindsight being 20/20, we now know that it was a mistake.

Here is why!

While Unreal Engine 5 is superior to Unity in many ways (graphics fidelity, performance), it lags behind in several key areas that, as a team, we knew we had to address in order for the move to make sense. Why trade one set of problems for another?

Unity uses C#, a beloved and widely used language developed by Microsoft in the early 2000’s. It is widely accessible, offers incredible developer productivity supports, and is easy to use. UE on the other had relies on C++. We won’t go into detail why our developers, and legions of devs around the world, hate C++ but it should suffice to know that using C++ as our core dev language was a non-starter.

In order to fix this glaring drawback with UE, we created a tool we call Code Orchestra. This tool allows us to write C# and have it run inside of UE. Even better, it allows us to write Java, Rust, and almost and other OO language and have it run side by side with extremely interoperability between runtimes. This was a big deal not only for Crush Depth, but for millions of game developers and game studios; suddenly you can use one of the most beloved languages in one of the most technically advanced video game engines with almost no performance penalty!

Here are some videos which prove how well and how powerful Code Orchestra is inside of UE.






After our successful technical proof of concept of moving over to CD to UE was complete, and we announced the move officially, we quickly hit a wall we did not anticipate. Upon moving to release, we were met with Epic’s Draconian and unusual EULA. The EULA explicitly forces any dev creating tooling similar to Code Orchestra to open source their invention 🤨 (yes, free labor for the benefit of Epic Games).

We had calls with Epic Games where their tech staff signed off on our tooling, Miguel de Icaza who faced this exact issue years ago, and lawyers. Our goal was to get approval from Epic Games to move forward with Code Orchestra without being bound to a decade-old clause which is doing nothing but harming UE’s developer opportunities (why prevent your dev’s from using Rust, C#, and other tech in UE?).


After many calls, demos, and lots of $ invested on our end in lawyers pouring over every option we had available at our disposal, attempts at conveying our position to Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, and having him reconsider his posture on the matter via a petition ultimately failed. We accepted that we were backed into a corner and that our significant time and monetary investment in attempting to use UE to make Crush Depth the best it could be was being shot down by Tim and our only viable option was to move back to Unity.

So back to Unity, an inadequate game engine, it was! This meant we had to revisit the issues we had in the first place which prompted our move. First item on the list, addressing the slow HDRP rendering pipeline and the lack of support for modern features.

To address this, we have been working on a fully custom rendering pipeline we call CRP (cinematic rendering pipeline). CRP is written in the Rust programming language and makes use of DX12 API’s directly by foregoing Unity’s slow, outdated, and limited API catalog. CRP features ray tracing, a custom nanite like virtual geometry mesh format which allows us to dynamically, at runtime, swap out LOD clusters in complex meshes to optimize for performance with no visual fidelity loss (it goes one step further than UE nanite and supports runtime generated meshes), custom shader support, and much more. Essentially it replaces the entirety of the Unity rendering codebase with a custom modern and performant implementation targeted at modern DX12 API’s. We will eventually have lumen like global illumination support that will allow us to scale our visual fidelity significantly further than what HDRP would allow us to achieve.


II) The U-Boat interior.

Over the last couple of months, we’ve created a ton of new assets for inside the U-Boat itself. You can see some examples of those in our previous updates. Special thanks there to Kriegsmarinesammler who has recreated many of these models based on the real items themselves. Many of these items are for sale as well, so if you should be interested, make sure to have a look.
The main challenge we are facing in implementing these is that the model we currently have in place for the interior of the u-boat itself (walls, floors, etc…) was built with limited information. With our recent acquisition of plans and blueprints, we are rebuilding the interior to optimize accuracy and geometry. We have created a modeling pipeline that will allow us to implement a bare-bones version of the interior that will allow us to start implementing the firing system and other control of the U-Boat, while we keep working on the rest of the interior in parallel.






III) The U-Boat exterior.

The same goes for the U-Boat exterior. While we are not unhappy with the model we have in place, it is not quite up to the standard we want for this project. For this, we have partnered with Carlo Cestra who specializes in reconstructions and animations for archeological, historical, technical, and scientific topics and is currently working on recreating the exterior at the same level of detail and accuracy that we want for every item in our project. As you can see from the renders below, we’re making good progress there as well.







That’s it for now!

Thank you for tuning in once more and for your ongoing support. Should you have any questions, feedback, or if you just want to have a chat, always feel free to contact us.

[Asid]

Flatulence and other bodily expulsion
Sat, July 16, 2022



Life aboard a metal tube under the water was tough and unpleasant. In our latest patch, we discuss how we are slowly building up to offer an authentic interpretation of life aboard a U-Boat.

[Asid]

Crush Depth: U-Boat Simulator Version 0.30.9
Sat, 23 July 2022


Added granular object control (rotation and transform movement), object interactivity hints when interacting with or hovering over usable options, and more settings to turn off hints and labored breathing sounds.