Dogs Of War Vu
Sim/Strategy/War => Games Discussion => Topic started by: Asid on December 19, 2020, 02:48:27 AM
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Crush Depth is a first-person type VII U-boat simulator. Experience operating and maintaining the U-boat’s complex systems, engaging enemy shipping, celestial navigation, survival mechanics, as well as the lighter side of life on the boat.
Home page (https://www.uboatsim.com/)
Steam (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1397630/Crush_Depth_UBoat_Simulator/)
Forum (https://steamcommunity.com/app/1397630/discussions/)
Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdbWT3rHV-jELQW_V6YkDRA/)
Single-player, MMO, Online PvP, Online Co-op, Online Multi-Player, Co-op, Online Co-op
Crush Depth early alpha footage
https://youtu.be/rM7VLSzzma8
About
Crush Depth aims to model historically accurate weather patterns including sea density, salinity, and temperature. These calculations influence the underlying physics model and affect vessel buoyancy and hydrodynamic and aerodynamic forces.
The physics model accurately simulates hydro-static, slamming, viscous resistance, hydrodynamic, and aerodynamic forces. Ship speed and turning rates are not scripted, they are based on real-time physics calculations. If your rudder is bent, the physics engine will accurately calculate the effects on movement in real-time.
Crush Depth: U-boat Simulator is a world-scale World War II naval simulator with unparalleled depth and realism; the definitive submarine simulation experience. Operate and maintain the U-boat’s complex machinery, engage enemy against enemy naval, land, and air assets, navigate by the stars, sustain your physical well-being, and enjoy the lighter sides of life on board in the most authentic re-creation of a U-boat experience ever imagined.
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Crush Depth is the continuing result of unrelenting research based on original construction plans and regulations, rare photos, contemporary sources, and the personal experiences of U-boat submariner Friedrich Grade, ex chief-engineer of U-96; the boat famously portrayed in the book 'Das Boot' and the 1981 film by the same name. By working closely with the Blueprint Archive, the Bundesarchiv, the National Archive (NARA), the Technisches Museum U-995 and many other sources, we've been able to recreate the type VII C U-boat in all of its complexity.
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Oblate Spheroid Earth model
A fully spherical gameworld recreates the horizon and travel times with accurate detail. The entire world is represented by a full bathymetric and heightmap model with 15 Arc-Seconds of fidelity.
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A variety of game modes will allow you to engage with the world as you choose. From short, single encounters based on actual historical events, to customizable patrols, to a perpetual PvP/PvE setting in which you can play for days on end and many more. Play cooperatively as one of the members of a crew of up to 18 players, or take complete control of your boat all by yourself.
Virtual Museum
Our Virtual Museum, built in consultation with a professional architect, offers an in-depth museum experience covering World War II maritime history in exquisite detail. Our curated experience brings history to life with rare photos, archival video footage, original blueprints, and much more.
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Multiple Units
Player controllable vehicles include PT boats, destroyers, merchants, and even planes.
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Intelligent AI
Intelligent AI ensures NPC units behave in a realistic and historically accurate manner. Units take time to recover from surprise attacks, weather effects sensors and visibility, radio communications can be used to triangulate your location, and more.
This is not just a simulator, this is history come to life.
Mature Content Description
The developers describe the content like this:
Crush Depth intends to depict the violent and horrifying nature of naval warfare as faithfully as possible to show what it was like during the war.
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https://uboatsim.s3.amazonaws.com/2020-07-08+11-29-27.mp4
https://uboatsim.s3.amazonaws.com/2020-07-08+13-10-35.mp4
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MMO Museum Lobby and more project info.
Wed, 30 December
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Hi guys!
New video out. In this one, our lead developer Marius will showcase some of the work that has been going into the MMO-Museum, as well as some discussion on where we want to take this project moving forward. I hope you enjoy it and am looking forward to your comments, suggestions, etc.
https://youtu.be/SgfpemaD-5k
Thank you all for the support and all the best to you and your loved ones in 2021!
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Partnership with 'Freundeskreis U-995'.
Sun, 17 January 2021
We are ecstatic to announce the official partnership between Crush Depth and U-995 (Marinekameradschaft Freundeskreis U 995 / Deutscher Marinebund). This natural partnership will reinforce our ability to work tirelessly to preserve history in both digital and physical form.
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Together with the Deutscher Marinebund e.V., the Freundeskreis U-995 takes care of the preservation of the last Type VIIc (U-995) submarine from the Second World War and helps with maintenance and restoration. If you ever have the opporunity to visit (which I would highly recommend), you can find more information on their wonderful work here:
Address: Strandstrasse 92, Laboe, Germany.
Telephone: +49 (0)4343-8755
Website: http://www.deutscher-marinebund.de
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January in Crush Depth
Thu, 4 February 2021
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Some highlighst of the development.
Hello everyone!
From here on out, I'm going to do a monthly update on some of the progress we've made in the previous month. It's a bit too much to cover all the stuff we've added to the project (lot of technical stuff as well), so I'll stick to the most tangible items. In no particular order:
Optimization on game models has started. Models are first refined into high poly meshes, enhanced via retopology, UVs are unwrapped, high quality textures are baked, and then are applied to lower poly versions with several LOD variants. This will help us increase FPS and optimize runtime performance. Example here is the treatment of the AA-gun.
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An independent launcher for the project is in development. Since we're working towards an MMO, this is extremely important. Yes, for the user itself it's nothing more than a little splash screen before you get into the game, but on the backside, in terms of networking and terms of how we can manage and store user data (such as your player character, preferences, etc.) and keeping the project updated this is very big step indeed.
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Modelling on the control room is moving forward nicely indeed. I cannot make any predictions on when this will be moved inside the project, as there are still a lot of steps to be taken after the modelling itself: optimizing, UV-unwrapping, texturing, coding, etc. It does make for some nice eye candy though. Don't get me wrong there though, it's not just some veneer. All those dials, valves and buttons will be fully functional, yours to interact with indeed.
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Then, let's move to the museum for a second for some fine additions to the radio room. Parts of these exhibit are already functional indeed. What you see in this screenshot are the Telefunken E437S (nicknamed 'the breadbox') and of course, the enigma machine. The first was used to receive messages from the BdU and the other well, to decrypt those messages. We're still working on this as well, but soon you will be able to listen to real, historical messages and decipher those as well. And also, we've added about three hours of music to the project as well.
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Something that we're still working on, so don't get thrown by the pictures here, is our character customization. The basic groundwork has been laid there to get the system functional. No, we don't want our characters to look like juvenile hooligans at all, but before we can make them look like something else, we have to make them look like something to start with. Work is underway to implement high resolution textures and of course, appropriate clothing.
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Also, we're ecstatic to announce the official partnership between Crush Depth and U-995 (Marinekameradschaft Freundeskreis U 995 / Deutscher Marinebund). This natural partnership will reinforce our ability to work tirelessly to preserve history in both digital and physical form. For more information on their work, please click here (https://deutscher-marinebund.de/marine-ehrenmal-u-995/technisches-museum-u-995/)
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So far a couple of highlights for this month. We hope you'll consider supporting our development by purchasing the tech demo. I'll hope to bring you more exciting stuff come the end of February!
Thanks for all the support.
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Tech demo launch!
Mon, February 8, 2021
Launching the tech demo, February 10th, 2021.
Hello everyone. With our technical demo launching the 10th of February, we thought it would be a good idea to show you what we've been working on in the last couple of months.
What you see in this video is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many more things we've added, worked on, modeled, researched, etc. It's just quite undoable to cram seven odd months of development in a four minute video, so we've (semi-randomly) selected some of the highlights.
Second of all, none of this would have been possible without your help and support. Just by being here, you've shown that our passion and ambition to achieve something amazing has not gone unnoticed, so thank you.
Lastly, we still have a tremendous amount of work to do indeed! The 10th of February, we're launching our technical demo through Steam and our own website, which I hope you'll consider purchasing as a way to support our project. Mind you that that is exactly what it is, a way to support our project, not a finished product. For now, I hope you'll enjoy the video and check out our tech demo.
https://youtu.be/Gu5iDObyn04
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1530920/Crush_Depth_TechDemo/
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Junkers air compressor is almost ready to fill your high pressure air flasks.
Work in progress
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I think the most compelling feature about the game is the MMO aspect. I used to steer clear of MMOs but I absolutely love pvp naval action, so if thats recreated in WWII uboats, this will be a hit. Clans forming wolfpacks with opposing clans in PTboats and destroyers trying to stop you from sinking convoys in a dynamic MMO world will be priceless.
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Clans forming wolfpacks with opposing clans in PTboats and destroyers trying to stop you from sinking convoys in a dynamic MMO world will be priceless.
:bitchslap
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Check out how the radio exhibit Telefunken short wave receiver E437S and Enigma machine is coming along!
This is early ALPHA footage!!
https://youtu.be/Wj8BvV96gZE
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Crush Depth
14Feb 2021
Version: 0.23.20 has been uploaded to itch.io alpha branch and to steam.
Patch Notes:
• Fixed inventory in sandbox (can now spawn bino/chrono again)
• Telefunken networking - power
• tuning,volume all networked
• Increased networking stability - session wait for complete level bootstrapping before starting ownership assignments
• Fixed UMA character (in museum
• you character avatar will now be the one you created)
• New Unity input module to enable future controller support
• A lot of under-the-hood refactoring renaming UBoatSim to CrushDepth in code
• Telefunken radio station update including deterministic playback
• Pause menu lock control bug fixes
• Updated museum text / colors
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Video update: February 2021.
Wed, 3 March 2021
Hi everyone,
In this short video update, we'll be covering some of the work we've done in February. It's much too much to cover everything we did in these short videos, so we've picked a couple of highlights instead. I hope you enjoy it.
https://youtu.be/pdO8KIU2r0E
Let us know what you think! We're always interested in your feedback. Feel free to reach out to us here on Steam, on Discord, or through our website at http://www.crushdepthgame.com
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Update on development
03 March 2021
Jammosito
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Two things that really set this project apart from any other title in the genre (or any other game for that matter) is that we're building a world-scale simulation. Our world is not only huge (as in, the same size as the actual planet we live on), but everything in an on that world is also simulated at a very high level of fidelity. Apart from that, we also want the game to look gorgeous as well.
This can be very, very heavy on a single machine. In fact, anyone not able to hit 60 frames per second on their machine at this moment is experiencing degraded physics and simulation accuracy leading to a lower quality experience than what everyone should enjoy. To address this and make this scalable to thousands of players at the same time, which is indeed what we are aiming for, we've introduced a core architecture component to offload simulation, physics, and AI to dedicated nodes that run on the MMO grid.
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This means that regardless of your PC capabilities, you will participate in and enjoy an industrial level of simulation. The only requirement here is an internet connection capable of streaming this data. If you are here, you most likely have the internet connection which is sufficient to handle that data load. In short, when you spawn you boat and turn a valve, fire a gun, flood a tank, turn on a light, - whatever - the multi-thousand FPS simulation loops will actually occur on the dedicated simulation nodes. Your PC will merely receive the results of that simulation and bypass having to crunch out an almost nauseating amount of calculations itself.
What you can access now through the project, the MMO World, is not only the first, but also one of the biggest steps towards getting us where we want to be: to that world scale simulation. It's not the easiest thing to do under normal circumstances, let alone on a fully spherical world which involves all sorts of fun maths as well. Over the next few weeks the plan is to get all of this synchronized and into the game engine, so we can start adding life to it indeed. I cannot stress enough what a huge step this is for the project: I hope you all like it! vb
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Crush Depth: U-Boat Simulator Spherical World Demo
https://youtu.be/cPXNeI5a33o
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Major update: switch to Unreal Engine and introducing Code Orchestra.
Fri, September 17, 2021
Hello everyone,
We are incredibly excited to announce that, after months of careful consideration and due diligence, we’ve decided to move forward with Unreal Engine. Please have a look at our release trailer below. Apart from that, we would like to introduce Code Orchestra, a brand new framework for combining C#, Rust, Python, and UE5. Further information about how we spent the last couple of weeks, as well as what to expect moving forward, can be found below.
https://youtu.be/0DdrZ6FhCPY
Unreal 5.
When Unreal Engine 5 dropped, it would be fair to say that it took the game development community by storm. The technology advancements in the engine, such as Nanite, Lumen and MetaHuman caused a tidal wave which we were swept up in. We were compelled to look further into the technology.
Our aspirations are grand, using the best technology that can cement us as the definitive U-Boat simulator for years to come means we need to use the best technology available. Unreal Engine 5 offers unparalleled revolutionary graphical fidelity easily ahead of all other engines.
When UE 5 features were announced, we developed a system similar to Unreal’s Nanite, attempting to enhance what we had to help us forgo a complete project refactor away from Unity. The example scene below shows fifty billion triangles being rendered using our dynamic mesh quantization technology in Unity HDRP.
https://youtu.be/MWYtoTNQjXw
To illustrate the significance, that scene contains 2500 times the triangles count we had in the entire museum scene of the Unity build. Even though this proof of concept worked, we ran into significant roadblocks in interleaving this subsystem with Unity HDRP (decals, DXR lights, etc) and the Unity Game Editor, due to the closed source nature of Unity. This sealed the door on Unity HDRP meeting Nanite-like performance without investment from Unity.
As a side note, over the last 12 months, we’ve also looked into Unigine, Lumberyard, and other options. Those exercises were short in nature since it became apparent quite early in the process they would not provide significant advantages over Unity HDRP.
Analysis.
During the analysis, our goal was to perform thorough due diligence to ensure we fully understood the cost, ramifications, and benefits of refactoring our project into Unreal Engine. A project refactor will set us back by at least half a year and will require significant re-training for the team. We wanted to ensure that we understood these costs well by going through the effort of attempting to port the project over while leveraging the features we were interested in (Nanite, Lumen, native 64-bit double-precision float support, Metahuman, and more). We also needed to ensure core systems such as weather, water, and physics were customizable enough to allow us to reach the quality and fidelity we aspire to.
Unreal Engine is an extremely capable Game Engine built on a core that was released in the late 90s. The core APIs are not as well documented as Unity’s and the core programming language is C++. We found it significantly more difficult to work with, from a programmatic perspective, than Unity, and it became clear we needed to address this.
Challenges.
Not being able to use .NET / C# / and Rust natively in Unreal Engine with native-level integration (such as debugging and API support) would cause a dramatic drop in productivity for our developers. Our simulation subsystems are incredibly complex and ensuring we can maintain a high level of throughput, code safety, iteration speed, and polyglot language support etc. is crucial for the project.
Solutions.
To solve this, we leveraged the open-source nature of Unreal Engine 5 and developed a revolutionary polyglot extension framework to allow us (and other devs) to write .NET C# code in Unreal Engine. We’re launching this capability as a separate product, direct to game developers. We’re calling it Code Orchestra!
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Code Orchestra
Code Orchestra is a holistic polyglot development solution for multi-framework development in Unreal Engine. Our goal is to bring multi-language and multi-framework support to Unreal Engine and enable game developers to leverage their existing skills in Unreal Engine.
Code Orchestra uses a novel, patent-pending approach (a combination of custom high-performing framework hooks, heavy code generation, IDE analyzers, and other mechanisms) to provide polyglot (.NET C#, Rust, Python) support for Unreal Engine.
Code Orchestra also supports high-performing Rust code for low latency high accuracy simulations and even allows you to use Python for quick and dirty prototypes (with more languages supported on an as-needed basis).
How will Code Orchestra help Crush Depth?
Code Orchestra will allow us to port over years of .NET libraries we’ve written in C#, will allow us to write our high fidelity, high accuracy, performant simulation code in Rust, and will enable us to quickly prototype new subsystems in Python. The end result will be accelerated project development velocity with the incredible Visual fidelity of Unreal Engine 5.
To learn more about Code Orchestra and to try out the beta for yourself, please visit: http://www.code-orchestra.com
Next steps:
Although we have made the decision to move over to Unreal, that transition is still far from over. We have a wonderful opportunity here to analyse and rethink some of the concepts we have developed over the past few years. If we were to just make a one-to-one copy of the current Unity build in Unreal, there would have been no reason to make the switch to start with; we would also be missing out on the opportunity to leverage the exciting new possibilities that Unreal has to offer. It would be a shame to let that opportunity go to waste.
The next couple of weeks will mostly be spent on further developing the frameworks we need to have in place in order to start creating the world we want to create, very much from the ground up. The downside to this is that it will take a while before we can get a first Unreal build out. The upside is that we expect that build to be of a much higher quality, higher visual fidelity, and more performant than what we were able to offer in Unity.
At this stage, we can't give a reasonable estimate of how long we think it will take us before we feel our first shiny new Unreal build is good enough for a wider release. We have some very exciting ideas there though, of which we will be updating you regularly through our Discord and other outlets. In the meanwhile, we will keep the current - now already outdated - Unity build up, so you are still more than welcome to hop in and explore some of our concepts.
Rest assured that we would not have arrived at this decision if there was a single shred of doubt that this was not the best decision for our project and our long term strategy. It is a very, very exciting time for all of us and we hope the subsim community ultimately recognizes the effort we are going to in order to realize our dreams of building the most realistic U-Boat simulator.
Ask-Me-Anything session on Oct 3, 2021.
As much as I would like it to be the case, I am quite aware that it's undoable to cover all of your questions that come with such a massive announcement. We are therefore hosting a live Ask-Me-Anything session on October the 3rd, 18h00 Berlin/09h00 Los Angeles, on our Discord. Should you have any questions in the meanwhile, or if you wish to submit a question for us to cover during that session, feel free to leave a message here.
As always, thank you for your tremendous support. We are extremely grateful and humbled by the support you have given us thus far and hope we provide you with enough reason to keep doing so. If not, please let us know what you think we can do to improve. Let's not forget that it is you who we make this for, so if you ever feel we should be doing something differently, have a question, or just want a chat, always feel free to send me or anyone else on our team a message.
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Did you buy into this asid ? I’ve been following this game too seems really interesting. Glad the finally got the engine squared away so they can move forward.
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Did you buy into this asid ? I’ve been following this game too seems really interesting. Glad the finally got the engine squared away so they can move forward.
Yes I did buddy.
When I first tried it there was not much there...It was more like a tech demo. It has been getting fleshed out. I do intend to go deeper :sifone with my coverage but time has been an issue for me for many months now. Hopefully that will change soon.
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Regular update #61: work on Code Orchestra, training vessel and the U-Boat.
Sat, October 23, 2021
Hello everyone!
I'll try to keep it a bit shorter this time, but no promises there. As you might have read in one of our previous updates, we've decided to split up - for lack of a better word - our workflow a bit in somewhat separate parts in order to be a bit more productive and help smooth our transition to Unreal. We've been working in this new way for about a week or two now and I must say, it's going quite well. Much in line with that, I'll do the updates in a similar fashion as well, so you all have a better overview of what is happening where and why. (edited)
First of all, there is the technical track. We have made great progress with the development of Code Orchestra. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it: Code Orchestra is a holistic polyglot development solution for multi-framework development in Unreal Engine. Our goal is to bring multi-language and multi-framework support to Unreal Engine to empower you to build your project in the language of your choice while retaining full IDE and editor integration with full runtime debugging support.
One of the most commonly cited reasons for people not to work with Unreal is that it only supports C++. We're coming from a Unity background ourselves and being able to use C# for our own project was one of the many reasons it took us so long to decide whether to switch over to Unreal. We've decided to approach that issue not by rewriting the entire thing in another language and working with that language from there on out, but by building a tool that will allow us to continue working in the language we want to work in, C#, instead. There are thousands of developers out there who face this exact same issue, so should you be interested in trying this out for yourself, contact us through:
https://www.crushdepthstudios.com/trycodeorchestra
A video showing what the current build is already capable of can be found here:
https://youtu.be/4wHzRgKhgH0
Time to move over to the game design and prototyping. As you might have read in a previous update, we're currently working on the development of a training vessel to allow everyone to get their hands on some actual gameplay soon again, as well as prototyping and developing those functions that will be needed all over the place in the world of Crush Depth. Walking around, interacting with other objects, interacting with other players, and the like. The very fundamental stuff. Unreal Engine is also offering us some other possibilities in the way materials, textures, and the like are organized and set up, allowing for much higher graphical fidelity than we had in Unity, at the same, or even better performance. It did mean however that we all had to wrap our heads around it a bit differently than we did in Unity.
All that being said, time for some pretty pictures. The modeling of the first version we want to roll out is as good as done. Texturing-wise, there is still some work to be done as we're not completely satisfied with the current set-up; I'll leave it to you though to judge for yourself. With the next update, I hope to talk a bit more about what you'll be able to do on this training vessel in the first couple of iterations of the new Unreal version. Don't expect too much there for the moment though: the first version will very likely not include more than those very fundamental things indeed. Walk around, steer the ship, and perhaps have some control over the speed of the vessel as well. From there on out though, the lion's share of the work is out of the way, so it's our expectation we can iterate on that in quite a rapid succession indeed.
(https://i.imgur.com/fw92ysA.png)
Overview with a lot
of texturing work still needing to be done.
(https://i.imgur.com/wCIdonG.png)
Detail of the bridge/wheelhouse. Also a work in progress.
Then the U-Boat itself. At this stage in the process, we're mostly spending our time 'translating' (for lack of a better word) the current models and textures we used in the Unity version to a structure and set-up that we can use in Unreal. Were taking a bit of time there, as simply 'moving it over would be a waste of the new and exciting opportunities that Unreal offers us as well, in terms of graphical fidelity, the complexity of the model, etc. Very simply put: we take a part of the U-Boat, we rework it (add detail, revamp the textures, and the like) and store it until we feel enough of the U-Boat, or a system of the U-Boat, is ready to make sense of it in terms of game-play as well. In the next couple of updates, I'll be going into more detail about that process, as well as which systems we're currently working on.
That will be it for now! Let me know if you have any questions or if there's anything you'd like to elaborate on, and as always, thank you all for your support.
Don't forget, Tomorrow, 23rd of October, 08h00 Los Angeles/17h00 Berlin, - Ask-me-Anything! - Join us in the Events channel on the Crush Depth Discord
.
https://discord.gg/T5WS2hb
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Update #62: first glance at our upcoming Unreal version.
Fri, November 5, 2021
Hi everyone! Time for a video update again. We hope you enjoy it and let us know if you have any questions. In short, we cover how our switch to Unreal is going, what we're working on at the moment as well as some of the reasoning behind that. Thank you all for your support!
https://youtu.be/XQO5QyM8cCc
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Regular update #63.
Thu, November 25, 2021
Hello everyone!
It has been a while since we did an update on our project, my apologies for that. It would be rather dishonest of me to say that everything is going exactly the way we want it to go. Our Patrons and those of you who already own a copy have been informed of this in more detail through our Discord. Should you be a Patron yourself and/or have purchased a copy through Steam, itch.io, or our own website, make sure to send me a DM and I'll make sure you get access to the channels where you can read all about it. It is a rather specific, technical issue and we don't believe it is in the best interest to disclose too much information about it at this stage. I do hope that over the course of the next couple of weeks, I will be at liberty to speak more freely about it in public.
Work on game-play ideation and the U-Boat itself is progressing quite nicely. We have been working on the clothing to get an accurate and also rather beautiful set of clothing for our player character. Not quite there yet, but we expect this to be finished somewhere in the next week.
(https://i.imgur.com/kFfOWBU.png)
Part of rethinking and redesigning some of our game-play ideas has led us to redesign our port area as well. Our first iteration felt rather 'empty', in the sense that there was little or no interaction between the vessels, no navigational challenges, etc. Another problem we encountered is that our port didn't allow for a combination of rather large vessels (such as our training ship), rather small vessels (such as the Italian motorboat), and everything in between (such as the U-Boat itself). We have therefore opted to redesign the port area in a way that does allow this, as well as creating natural pathways which should lead to more player interaction. If you have any questions about this, feel free to send me a DM. (edited)
Since this is about a one square kilometer area, it took quite some work as well texturing it and setting those textures up in a way that they both look good, and don't tank the performance.
(https://i.imgur.com/c9MfJ5h.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/Fd2GF0S.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/HSjEKE7.png)
More merchant ships are on the way as well. We've devised somewhat of a new methodology of creating these vessels, which should make it out to crank one out in a couple of days, tops. We're going to need a lot of these, of course, as it is rather uninteresting to encounter the same kind of ship over and over again. The model you see below here is not quite finished yet, but shouldn't take much longer. Once it's done (I expect in the next day or two), I'll put up some screens of the final product.
(https://i.imgur.com/x99R26H.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/wrbyUdD.png)
That's it for now! Thank you very much for your continued support and see you soon!
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0.27.7
Thu, December 16, 2021
Enhanced network synchronization.
Fixed player usable item bugs.
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0.27.13
Tue, December 21, 2021
Significant performance enhancements when inside of the U-Boat in the MMO. Logging monitor w user warning when errors detected.
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Regular update #65.
Fri, 24 December 2021
Hi everyone!
First of all, happy holidays to you, your loved ones, and all the best to you in 2022! Thank you for following our project this year and we hope you see you again on the other side of the festivities again!
The technical track.
As you might have noticed in the patch notes and this channel as well, a lot of work has been put in lately in optimizing the project, working on the netcode, and installing our new server as well. We still have a couple of fires to put out, but we expect to shift our focus more towards implementing some new and hopefully enjoyable game-play futures in the upcoming weeks. A lot of assets have been prepared over the last couple of weeks. One such group of items that took quite a bit of effort indeed is our upcoming firing system.
Firing system, part two.
In the last update, we already showcased a couple of models. I'm happy to let you know that they've almost all been textured and moved inside our project. It'll be a bit longer before you can get your hands on them as well, as we're still working on optimizing the U-Boat itself and preparing it for DenseLOD. For those of you who are unfamiliar with DenseLOD, check the previous update. Building it is a massive undertaking indeed, but an absolute game-changer in terms of what we'll be able to do.
Here are a couple of renders of what some of the equipment of the rather complex firing system will look like. How you will have to use them to get your torpedoes on target is something we'll be covering in-depth in the project itself through interactive tutorials, training missions, and the like.
(https://i.imgur.com/b1VYTRt.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/uim8uPH.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/3Qu9CZo.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/ENHXkav.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/DnUA4uv.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/oY2Njv8.png)
Ship models.
Another thing we really want to have in this project is a lively, diverse, densely populated world. One of my personal annoyances with almost every submarine simulator is that the amount of ships you encounter (in terms of how many different ships there are) is rather limited. Our workflow has been optimized to the extent that creating a merchant ship from scratch to a fully textured model with very basic functionality (it can float and move) takes about 1-2 days. Our latest creation is this here trawler.
(The last picture in the series to get a bit of a better idea of what these kinds of ships will look like in-game from a normal distance).
(https://i.imgur.com/CMI1tki.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/hqjZile.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/7wpDW5N.png)
There is little excitement to be had in only shooting at defenseless merchant ships, although some might disagree, so we've started on building our first adversaries as well. This model is still in its early stages. There is still a lot of work to be done indeed, but we're hoping to roll out this beauty in the next couple of weeks as well.
(https://i.imgur.com/Gwv51g5.png)
Once again, thank you all for your support! Enjoy the holidays, stay safe, and all the best to you and your loved ones. Should you have any questions, suggestions, feedback, always feel free to leave a message in the comments, or contact us on Discord, or through support@crushdepth.com
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0.27.16
Tue, December 28, 2021
MMO Fixes:
fixed camera change orbital target
fixed shift + 1/2/3 spawn target
fixed italian boat throttle control
fixed T2 tanker waypoint AI logic
fixed T2 tanker prefab
enhanced server side sync logic
fixed frame drop when firing flak
enhanced asynchronous logging logic
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0.27.18
Wed, December 29, 2021
NVidia DLSS
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0.28.2
Fri, December 31, 2021
Mission selection UI
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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:
https://youtu.be/HdQHfb0kqRc
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.
(https://i.ibb.co/64ZrYpH/packchen1.png)
(https://i.ibb.co/2FP5JkB/packchen2.png)
(https://i.ibb.co/LdVrxpn/packchen3.png)
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).
(https://i.ibb.co/ZLwDFWH/1.png)
(https://i.ibb.co/cgypd0L/3.png)
(https://i.ibb.co/BchLxqW/4.png)
(https://i.ibb.co/vjPCZWh/5.png)
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:
https://youtu.be/3vkg7rAwJnA
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
https://youtu.be/L7tHLl-VJ7A
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!
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0.28.15
Sun, January 16, 2022
Fix player sync to moving object
Fix player animation jitter when on a moving object
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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.
https://youtu.be/0RxZc26G-bw
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.
(https://i.imgur.com/vBQfwb1.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/UZ3fQQK.jpg)
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).
(https://i.imgur.com/TU27x8d.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/rWXzLLx.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/JIkBycq.png)
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.
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Regular update #68.
Tue, 15 March 2022
(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/1530920/ss_4539359ec8eb7f1c0da64d0a13f92da5df419a9b.jpg)
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.
(https://i.imgur.com/poliZBT.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/VEftopA.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/D2WTFJc.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/xniyucS.jpg)
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.
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Regular update #69.
Wed, 30 March 2022
(https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/1530920/ss_6baa84302616cb962e22416310ead30dcb993f74.jpg)
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).
https://youtu.be/Uj-SnbGGAlM
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.
https://youtu.be/JPrdk_5mj_g
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.
(https://i.imgur.com/UnaGTfN.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/i3rZzHw.jpg)
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.
(https://i.imgur.com/tEgQm2j.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/627s0wV.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/zF5jY5I.jpg)
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!
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0.29.0
Fri, 27 May 2022
(https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/1530920/ss_4539359ec8eb7f1c0da64d0a13f92da5df419a9b.jpg)
Added logic to allow immediate server ownership of newly instantiated prefabs
Fixed flak gun firing bug when in MMO
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Mid year 2022 update.
Wed, 1 June 2022
(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/1530920/ss_3003092fec068efeb1e506bf4199843c6b85a320.jpg)
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:
https://youtu.be/cwWvtukFQ34
As always, thanks for your continued support and should you have any questions or remarks, do let us know! More news to follow soon.
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Regular update #70.
Wed, 13 July 2022
(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/1530920/ss_8e9505a0f7b4e8702f5bb6cf39dbe55210f89137.jpg)
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.
https://youtu.be/8BGi_vVpjk0
https://youtu.be/hu0bAB5e8D0
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.
(https://i.imgur.com/71MexCS.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/JZrX4z0.png)
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.
(https://i.imgur.com/lIN6nlY.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/MNbEUJV.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/nbY4p2D.jpg)
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.
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Flatulence and other bodily expulsion
Sat, July 16, 2022
(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/1530920/ss_94407d15ca1088e600dcbbab756e1b7f77eaeccd.jpg)
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.
https://youtu.be/3eJK3ltVkyk
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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.
https://youtu.be/NLyvR8QsWlI