Forum > Games Discussion
Crush Depth: U-Boat Simulator
Asid:
0.27.18
Wed, December 29, 2021
NVidia DLSS
Asid:
0.28.2
Fri, December 31, 2021
Mission selection UI
Asid:
Regular update #66.
Mon, 10 January 2022
Hello everyone,
If you haven’t received our best wishes for 2022 yet, here you go! All the best from the Crush Depth team to you and your loved ones! We’ve been extremely busy over the past few weeks and have some very exciting things to share with you in this update.
The U-Boat.
We’re continuing to make good progress on importing and implementing the components of the firing system, as well as the rest of the U-Boat interior. We’re moving away from the proof of concept version you can try out in the current state of the game, and transitioning more towards a ‘final’ version of the U-Boat itself. I have to say that ‘final’ never really is final, as it’s always possible that new information comes to light and/or we develop technologies that will help us make things look better, function better, etc. What I mean by ‘final’ in this stage is that we’re planning to get those models to a point where they won’t need any updates or changes for quite a while to come. At the moment, we’re mostly working on the structural components of the U-Boat (the walls, the floors, the manholes, ladders, etc.) and the components of the firing system. I hope to be able to share some in-game screenshots there soon as well.
DenseLOD.
The main reason for the interior screenshots not being available at the moment is that we’re working extremely hard on DenseLOD. We’ve made amazing progress over the holiday period on the new custom rendering system. The newest iteration uses vertex cluster rendering to render the entire scene in a single draw-call regardless of complexity. Clusters are culled individually which results in a greater culling performance and therefore greater performance in general. It also now uses virtual textures which are streamed efficiently to the GPU to minimize VRAM usage and keep it constant regardless of scene complexity. This means we are moving away from out-of-the-box Unity HDRP rendering to our own custom rendering technology aimed to support the scope, scale, and complexity of Crush Depth. For a preview of our progress, please check out the video here:
This system is quite crucial for having the rather enormous amount of different parts we need to have in our U-Boat and the rather detailed textures we're using there as well.
U-Boat Päckchen.
A while ago, we implemented the standard dress blues in our project. Next up is the U-Boat Päckchen, the quintessential onboard dress for U-Boat sailors of all ranks.
Flower.
Another model we’ve just wrapped up is this Flower-class corvette. Around 300 of these vessels saw active service in the Second World War and were quite the quintessential anti-U-Boat ship for a big part of the war. In case someone is wondering, this model hasn’t been modeled after a specific flower (say the Bergamot or the Kamsack or whichever you were thinking of) but has been painted very much in accordance with the (standard) camouflage patterns for the Atlantic. She’s a bit rusty, as we wanted to experiment and learn a bit more about how to create good-looking rust effects (and I’ll leave it up to you to judge if we’ve succeeded there).
The Joy of Blender!
Tomorrow, we’re also having a little event on our Discord which you can join by, well, just simply joining. All information can be found in the event description here, but should you have any further questions, feel send us a DM on Discord.
https://discord.gg/nPVsjrpx?event=928466593732767774
New Compute Node.
We just racked our new compute node in our Datacenter last Saturday. The compute node is responsible for running all of the background on-demand physics, hydrostatic, hydrodynamic, electrical, hydraulic, and other simulation subsystem logic on the MMO. It is multi-homed and connected directly to our main proxy nodes. For a refresher on how our simulation subsystems work and what our compute-nodes do, please visit:
For those technically included, here are the specs of our new node:
CPU’s: Dual Intel Xeon Gold 6154 CPU’s (36 core, 72 threads, 3GHz)
Memory: 192GB DDR4 2666 PC 21300 ECC Ram
GPU’s: Dual Nvidia Tesla P100 datacenter accelerator cards
Main Storage: Dual NVME U.2 4TB Enterprise drives
Secondary Storage: 18TB high-density Enterprise drive
That's it for now!
Thank you all for stopping by and thanks for your support of our project! Once again, all the best to you and your loved ones in 2022 and we hope to see you again soon!
Asid:
0.28.15
Sun, January 16, 2022
Fix player sync to moving object
Fix player animation jitter when on a moving object
Asid:
Regular update #67.
Mon, January 24, 2022
Hello everyone!
Go shoot stuff!
We're very excited to bring you this new update. As work on the frameworks is progressing nicely, we're transitioning towards creating some proper game-play elements. Apart from the MMO-setting itself, it has always been our goal to create other game modes as well, for a multitude of purposes. One of the big questions in game design is how to give players a fun, engaging experience if they only have ten minutes to invest as well as if they have a couple of hours to invest in a single session. Since we're building an MMO as well, how can we create safe environments for people to mess around, learn new things, experiment, etc. without that having a (possible) negative effect on what is happening with their player character in the MMO environment?
As one of the answers there, we're creating a whole set of interactive tutorials, challenges, training missions, etc. We have revamped the flak-gun challenge quite a bit, in the hopes of it being more fun, more immersive, and more representative of what you will be able to expect from the MMO world. Below is a small video of a couple of minutes of game-play. As you can see from this video, this footage has been taken from running the scene through the Unity editor itself, which has some negative effects on the performance. The performance in-game is expected to be better indeed. That being said, it runs quite smoothly in that environment as well, so we're very happy with the results.
I have to point out that we still have a lot of work to do there in terms of dressing up the scene a bit more, the damage model of the airplanes, the UI work, etc., etc. Expect a lot of changes to be made in the upcoming weeks and other challenges to be added as well. That being said, the guns work, the boat is fully controllable, so hop in with your buddies (best enjoyed in a small group) and let us know how you get along!
On a technical note, a big milestone for our project here is the addition of 'lobbies' (for lack of a better word) to our network infrastructure. Apart from the persistent MMO-world, we are now able to let players create their own instances of these smaller sessions, separately from what is happening in the MMO-world indeed. Quite crucial indeed.
Historical material.
One of our team members has obtained 25 original, building and electrical plans of all systems of the type VII, as well as many new instruction manuals for the systems on board. One item we're very excited about is the special building regulation which has information on every pipe and its diameter and the exact layout.
Further work on U-Boat assets.
For those of you who have followed the previous updates, we've done quite a lot of work on creating the assets for the firing system of the U-Boat. Next up are all those items that have to do with the control of the boat itself, tachometers, rudder boxes, compasses, etc. Although a lot of those items are finished already, we're rechecking the texturing work to make sure they meet our standards when it comes to quality, consistency of style, historical correctness, etc., as well as creating some possible variations there.
(Yes, these things would be marked with an X if no paint had been applied yet).
That's it for now!
As always, thank you all for your support and until the next time! Should you have any comments, suggestions, or if you'd like to know more about his project, feel free to leave a comment below and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page