Sea Power : Naval Combat in the Missile Age

[Asid]

From the lead designer of Cold Waters, Sea Power lets you control NATO and Warsaw Pact forces in modern naval conflict campaigns. Use your advanced naval weaponry and sensors to respect rules of engagement and defeat the enemy forces in a tense fight for initiative and air/naval supremacy.

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Sea Power Announcement Teaser





About

After hostilities have broken out in Central Europe, the race is on as a pressured US Navy escort force battle off Soviet bomber and submarine attacks on a perilous quest to reinforce NATO defenders in Europe. Meanwhile, in the Persian Gulf, the conflict between Iran and Iraq risks escalating into a larger confrontation between superpowers as both sides indiscriminately attack neutral merchant shipping. And in the Norwegian Sea, an outnumbered Soviet surface force challenges the might of a massive US Navy amphibious force bound for occupied Norway...
 


Brought to you by the lead designer of Cold Waters, Sea Power lets you control NATO and Warsaw Pact forces in a modern naval conflict. Whether it's gunning it out with Boghammars in a surface duel, fighting off aerial attackers armed with long-range missiles, or hunting for enemy submarines with aircraft and surface ships, advanced weaponry and sensors are at your disposal. Can you successfully hide your forces while detecting and tracking theirs? It is up to you to play an advanced game of cat and mouse on the high seas, to seize the initiative and attack with the advantage of surprise on your side. And at all times, you have to observe rules of engagement and take care not to cause an unnecessary incident that could lead to escalation. After all, you cannot really be sure just who that radar contact at 30.000 feet is, can you?




Features List

•   Cold war era between the '60s and '80s
•   Theatres including North Atlantic, Persian Gulf, Gulf of Tonkin and Mediterranean Area
•   Dynamic campaign - theatre scale
•   Historical and fictional single scenarios
•   Dynamic time of day and weather per engagement
•   Dynamic soundtrack
•   Realtime combat
•   Advanced flight and ship physics
•   Scalable realism such as weapons malfunctions, advanced sensor modeling
•   Pausable real-time, time compression
•   Full user scenario editor and quick mission builder
•   Advanced in-game tutorial
•   Save games everywhere/every time
•   Detailed and accurate 3D graphics
•   Over 50 original ships and more than 30 original aircraft
•   Land facilities and real-world terrain
•   Post-battle replay

[Asid]

Frequently Asked Questions


What is Sea Power?
Sea Power is a cinematic tactical and strategic naval simulation game set in the Cold War era. You will take command of NATO or Warsaw Pact forces in a modern naval conflict. The scope and gameplay is inspired by games like Jane's Fleet Command and EA's Strike Fleet.

When is the release date?
This has to be determined. Sea Power is still in development, a release date will be announced as soon as we are happy with the quality of the game.

How much will it cost?
Pricing has not been defined yet.

Is Sea Power a real-time simulation game like Cold Waters?
Yes, Sea Power is a pausable real-time simulation game with a dynamic campaign.

Which factions are playable?
You can control forces from the NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

Can I control single units like submarines, ships and aircraft?
You can give orders for single or multiple units or - if you like - take over control of every single unit like ships, submarines and aircraft.

Will there be a scenario editor?
Yes. The scenario editor is an important element of the game. Scenarios can be exported and exchanged between players.

Can Sea Power be modded?
Modding is a very important aspect of Sea Power and so it will be heavily modable. All ingame objects like models, textures, sounds, etc can be replaced or even added. We use so called asset bundles for that and will provide tutorials and templates for you to guide you through this. Behavior and AI will be scriptable. Additionally there are data files which describe every single unit so you can not only alter the visual things but also the physics and behavior. All text messages are exposed in files as well so the language can be changed too.

Will multiplayer be available, either PvP or Co-Op?
Not initially with the release. But we want to add it with an update depending on how well Sea Power is received by the community and how much interest for multiplayer is there.

[Asid]

Dev Diary #4 - Widened Horizons
Thu, 4 February 2021



The global vistas of Sea Power

Originally we had designed the game around a compressed-distance concept where 1nm = 1km. While the intent was for faster gameplay, we quickly found some issues particularily pertaining to the speed with which engagements happen at modern speeds. This approach also necessitated some internal recalculations particularily as we use a global world with longitude/latitude coordinates for reference, and generally became rather confusing, so the decision was made to scrap distance compression altogether and simply make the world 1:1 scale. We originally had a rather short draw distance, and this had the unintended side-effect of making our environments look a lot more bland due to the fact that terrain features are now spread out over twice the distance. The solution was to increase draw distance two-fold, and it became necessary to rethink the way we approach our terrain.



As previously mentioned in the very first dev diary, we use publicly available Digital Elevation Data that comes in 30 arc second resolution, which works out to about 1km per pixel. There is a 90m per pixel SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topology Mission) available, but this dataset is known to be noisy, doesn't cover the polar regions at all, and would severely increase the size of the game on disc. One of the issues with the raw data is that coastlines end up jagged, and very low coastal areas end up a mess of artefacts. Again, maybe acceptable through a periscope, but awful when seen from high altitude:



Nils and Martin tried several code-based approaches to fix the coastlines, but in the end the solution turned out to be some manual editing of the raw data in photoshop and a much better interpolation function:



To solve the problem with featureless scenery, we elected to use publicly available landclass data employed as per-tile splat maps, with elevation being used to determine onset of permanent snow and the upper tree line – which is also modified by latitude, so you will find that in Norway, mountains show snowcaps and vegetation ends much lower than in the Vietnamese highlands, which are forest-covered. The farmland and vegetation differ between regions, and Przemek has been painting some really nice fields to fly over, and the vegetation system was adapted to differentiate between 'wild' vegetation and agricultural areas, so where there is farmland we can now have nice hedgerow landscapes where appropriate:







The final features to be added to the scenery are waterbodies such as lakes and rivers, and cloud shadows on the terrain. We'd like to think the final result looks better than what we had before:



We also took the step to implement ingame terrain and scenery editing tools. These allow us (and you!) to edit the terrain heightmap and place scenery objects at runtime, aiming for what you see is what you get. Note that the editor UI will be reworked in the style of the game UI prior to release:



But that's not all, folks!

We've also implemented our radar model, and I will let Martin take over from here on:

Being a former radar operator who worked both with Soviet search radars (P-35) and later RRP 117 (a variant of the US AN/FPS-117 Long Range Solid-State Radar) this felt like coming home!

Proper sensor modelling is one of the most important topics for any war game as it makes the difference between survival or loss of your own units. As real sensor computation is pretty time consuming we decided to go with a model using so called RCS values (Radar Cross-Section). Those RCS values basically measure how detectable an object is by radar. It depends mainly on factors like material, the size of the target and the angle to the radar transmitter plus some other things I don't want to go into detail here. Every object in game will have such a RCS value.

Radar image creation

So how is that radar image created using RCS?
For every search radar on any vessel/aircraft we collect all RCS values of objects which are in range. In range means here the radar horizon based on the height of the radar plus the height of the target plus minimum and maximum reachable height values for the radar itself.

These raw RCS values are now altered depending on the distance to the target where the reflected energy is multiplied with 1/distance². Additionally the heading of the target in relation to the radar transmitter is taken into account - the so called target aspect. Meaning that a broadside ship will reflect more than a bow/stern angled one. The used frequency band is another factor taken into account, especially when it comes to things like OTH (over the horizon) radars which use low frequencies which obviously comes at the cost of accuracy.

Now all these radar echoes are filtered in a way that the radar resolution is taken into account. There are two main factors:
a) the beam width which is responsible for the angular/lateral resolution
b) the pulse length which is responsible for the range/axial resolution

The axial resolution will be always the same, no matter how close the target is while the lateral resolution depends on the distance as well due to the beam width. At larger distances the lateral resolution becomes worse.



Using that information the previously collected radar echoes are now clustered/merged into "real" radar echoes that each particular radar system would see. That means that it's very possible that your radar just shows one new contact where there are actually a cluster of 2 or 3 real contacts. Launching a Harpoon at that contact could lead to the situation where the active radar seeker of the Harpoon suddenly sees more than just one contact when closing the range. In that case it will use the brightest echo as the target which might not be the one you actually wanted to hit!

Data link

In your task force you will have data links so all sensor imagery of all your taskforce units will be combined into one sensor image. This has the big advantage for you as some of your units could be within the radar resolution to distinguish between close together contacts, so the limitations of just one radar will be resolved that way. This is done automatically for you so you will always see the best possible sensor image of your entire task force - of course based on your EMCON settings. Yet it could very well be that you cannot resolve all real targets or even see all of them.

Here's an example of how you will see contacts on the minimap. You can see two contacts initially and then a third one appears which actually was there all the time but too close to the right one.



As you can see as soon as the new contact moves close to the left one it is now recognized as just one. But as there already was a known contact it's now visualized in grey and the last movement is extrapolated for another 30 seconds. If it doesn't re-appear after that time, that contact is considered to be lost.

Outlook

That’s it from the active radar side. Active sonar will be handled kind of similar, even though there are some different parameters like speed of sound and thermal layers. Passive radar and sonar will play an important role as well as ECM to jam your enemy.

Thanks for reading, more to come soon!

[Asid]

Dev Diary #5 - Silent threats and measures against them
Sat, 16 October 2021



...and lets not forget the sounds!

Dear readers, first sorry for the long pause between the dev diaries. We know it's been a while and it's overdue. This time we want to cover anti-submarine warfare and sound effects more in general and this time with some more video footage instead of too much text. Enjoy!

Anti submarine warfare

Let's start with submarines which are a major threat for every task force. Since WWII many weapon systems have been developed to attack that hidden danger. One of the successors of the quite successful hedgehog (a forward-throwing-anti-submarine weapon) was the RBU-6000 (Реактивно-Бомбовая Установка) which is a Soviet anti-submarine rocket launcher. It fires salvos of up to 12 unguided depth charges in a horseshoe-shaped pattern to maximize the probability of a hit.

Here you see a Kresta 2 class cruiser attacking a Sturgeon class submarine:



Those rocket propelled depth charges are quite effective having a hit ratio of about 80%. Beside classic torpedoes there is another interesting option to attack submarines: torpedoes which are fired using a missile launch. One famous example is the ASROC (which stands for Anti-Submarine ROCket), here on a Spruance class destroyer. The attached MK 46 torpedo will start a spiral search after entering the water, going up and down within its search window to actively seek for a submarine:




Sound effects

To create a convincing atmosphere for the entire environment it's crucial to add proper sound effects and music. Propagation of sound is a quite complex matter, there are doppler effects, sonic absorbtions and reflections, different dampening parameters for different frequencies based on the distance to the source of sound and even more.

For our game Sea Power we want to create an environment that feels realistic. The Unity implementation of the sound engine already allows for some basic behavior, like simple volume fading of a sound source based on distance as well as some filters and doppler effects. But we wanted more! Take an aircraft with a jet engine for instance. Depending on your observer position such an aircraft will sound different from the engine intake than from the engine exhaust. To show that effect, here's a short video about how that will sound in Sea Power for a jet engine...




...and a turbo prop engine...




So far so good but there's another aspect of sound for such aircraft. You know how it sounds when there's an aircraft far away. More often than not you can hear its kind of growling sound but cannot see it.
As you can see, our own sound system allows for aspect sound effects additionally to the already pretty nice Unity sound features. Combined for an aircraft it looks and sounds like that:






A good usage for filters is the water itself, you already heard it in the video above where the submarines were attacked.

That's it for now. Actually or plan is to roll out more dev diaries with interesting topics in a shorter interval to not let you wait for too long! So this shouldn't become another months break till the next one!

/Martin

[Asid]

Dev Diary #6 - Torpedoes and counter measures
Sat, 29 January 2022

Hello, everyone!

In this part of the dev diary we’re diving deep into the underwater realm to look at new additions regarding torpedoes and acoustic countermeasures in Sea Power made recently.

First, let’s discuss the torpedoes. In Sea Power, a torpedo can use both passive and active sonar seekers, detecting targets using our acoustic model. Torpedo acoustic detection is modeled just as other types of sonar in the game are, considering how much noise a target makes, how that noise is transmitted to the torpedo, and the torpedo’s own ability to detect said noise. Noise produced or reflected off of a target is dependent on the aspect and distance to the target, as well as the target’s type and class. Transmission then depends on the local speed sound profile (SSP), alongside layer and surface duct effects, controlling how much of the generated noise can get to the torpedo’s position. Finally, each torpedo has its own detection threshold. Wake homing torpedo guidance, as originally developed by the Soviets in the 1960’s, is to come soon.



Active and passive torpedoes use proportional navigation guidance to intercept a target detected by their sensors, allowing them to efficiently close with a target faster than a pure-pursuit approach would. This is particularly important in crossing or head-on engagements, where simple guidance requires torpedoes to engage in time (and fuel!) consuming stern chases, improving effectiveness.



With these newly en-lethalized torpedoes, one might hypothesize that submarines and surface ships are dead meat. Not so! Submarine and surface ship skippers in Sea Power will be able to exploit the very same acoustic model as a defense via sonar countermeasures, producing false targets to defend themselves against torpedo threats.

Countermeasures against acoustic homing go back as far as acoustic homing itself. The development of acoustic self-guided torpedoes by Germany in WW2 went hand in hand with the invention of the first acoustic countermeasures, such noisemakers and towed false targets. Post-war, and beginning in the 1960s, a new kind of sonar countermeasures, the self-propelled torpedo-like decoys was developed. Based on the ideas started with the WW2 era “Sieglinde” German noisemaker, these were equipped with a small electric motor allowing them to present a more realistic acoustic and motion profile to an attacking torpedo.

Even simple noisemakers evolved considerably since the end of the war. Originally, noisemakers were devices filled with chemical compounds that, on contact with sea water, react to produce tons of bubbles and noise. This air and sound creates both a plausible active and passive target for the simple acoustic homing torpedoes of the time - but as acoustic homing technology improved, so too did the countermeasures. Modern noisemakers now produce mechanical noise and even can jam active sonar with false high frequency acoustic pulse. These are relatively compact but short-lived devices that can be launched either from small torpedo tubes on a submarine (usually positioned aboard the hull) or from on deck countermeasure launchers on a surface ship.





Self-propelled decoys exist in Sea Power as well: decoys such as the MG-44 are essentially torpedoes with no warhead and reduced speed, substituted for equipment designed to imitate a submarine. Using narrow and broadband noise emitters, preprogrammed movement patterns, and even active sonar jamming, these decoys provide an even more realistic false target than their unpowered brethren. Today, Sea Power implements these as mobile noisemakers, using the aforementioned logic, but we plan to expand on this further.



In Sea Power the noisemakers have high noise and active sonar reflection parameters assigned to them, usually greater than can be expected from a real target, thereby presenting a torpedo with a shiny big acoustic signature to home on. Counteracting this, each torpedo also has a chance to recognize the false target and reject it based on the respective tech level parameter. The more modern and sophisticated the torpedo is, the higher its level of countermeasure rejection is, but each countermeasure also has a countervailing tech level. Thus, the electronic protect versus electronic attack continues the age-old shell and armor struggle in Sea Power.

[Asid]

Dev Diary #8 - Flight Model
Fri, 31 March 2023



Intro

Hello Everyone!

We’re trying to be better at dev diaries and we hope you appreciate the info. Today we will be talking about aircraft in Sea Power and how they work behind the scenes.

The first thing to say is that Sea Power is not a flight simulator, it is focused around Naval Warfare in the Missile Age, but aircraft are a vital component of that. Because of that Sea Power does not give you direct control of flying individual aircraft like DCS or Flight Simulator but instead allows you to task single aircraft or formations to complete objectives and the pilots and squadron leaders will sort that out for you. Because Sea Power isn’t a traditional flight simulator we are able to play a little bit fast and loose with the physics of the aircraft that you see in the sky, which is sorely needed given the number you might have!

Flight Model

A traditional flight simulator implements a flight model with normally 6 degrees of freedom and will use complex analysis methodologies like the Blade Element Model (X-Plane famously uses this method) which I barely remember from University. These methods produce reliable and interesting flight dynamics but are computationally quite intense! Here for example we can see the model for a single element of a blade, imagine doing this for 40 to 50 elements per aircraft!



To save your computers from a fiery death Sea Power instead mainly (but more on that in a moment) implements a 3 Degree of Freedom model. Happily in the team we have access to people who have been trained in both Physics and Air Vehicle Systems, if you saw our interview with Subsim a number of weeks back we mentioned how nice it was to have a variety of backgrounds in the team and this is one of the places where this really really helps!

The model itself is based on the one described in this paper by Dr. Lesley A. Weitz and allows us to have a simple but rapid simulation for most of the flight envelope. The model allows us to provide control inputs based solely on Altitude, Heading, and Velocity values which means we can skip the weightier implementations using Unity’s physics system.



Additionally, as Dr Weitz has been kind enough to provide us with a set of control laws and dynamics in a set of pseudo-code algorithms a lot of the significant work is done for us, this gives us a solid base on which to build.

Part of that building has been implementing semi-realistic thrust and lift modelling to our model, at the very core of this is a model of the atmosphere. Sea Power makes use of the International Standard Atmosphere (ISA) as defined in this resource kindly provided by NASA. The ISA defines how the atmosphere changes around us and helps explain why the outside air temperature at 30,000 ft is significantly below 0C.





Alongside the temperature the pressure of the atmosphere significantly reduces with altitude, dropping from approximately 101.3 kPa at sea level to near 0 kPa at 30000m. Because the atmosphere nearly follows the ideal gas laws the density of the air reduces at the same time, this allows us to model the impact of altitude upon our aircraft.

Now for those of you that are familiar with this stuff I apologise but for those that aren’t welcome to the wonderful world of aerodynamics, operational analysis and propulsion physics. It almost makes me nostalgic for University again. Density has an important impact on our aircraft in two primary ways.

The first way is Dynamic Pressure, dynamic pressure is a measure of the energy in the air that impacts upon something, the force you feel pushing against your hand out the window of a moving car is Dynamic Pressure. We calculate it as `dynamicPressure = 0.5 * density * velocity * velocity` and it is important as both the Lift and the Drag of an aircraft depend on the product of dynamic pressure and lift and drag coefficient respectively. Fundamentally what this means is that the faster you go and the higher the air density the more lift and drag you get out of an aircraft.

The second way drag impacts an aircraft is in the amount of thrust you can get out of its engine. Propulsion was one of my favourite modules at university and I have dug into my university notes to provide you these charming (yes that is my handwriting, can you tell why I am an engineer?) diagrams of the sections of a turbojet engine and a turbojet engine with reheat.





We use diagrams like this to visualise the propulsion cycle of the engine, shown in this diagram from NASA, which allows us to do a load of fancy derivations to arrive at a really simple equation for the thrust of an engine `T = massFlowRate * (exhaustVelocity – inletVelocity)` if we make a bunch of assumptions about the nature of life, the universe, and everything we can say that the Mass Flow Rate is the product of the inlet area, the velocity of the aircraft, and the air density. This means that thrust is directly linked to altitude! The equations get more complicated as we go to different engine types but the core of the problem is the same, `Force = mass * acceleration`, Isaac Newton to the rescue!



All of this leads us to something that looks pretty good and is computationally fairly simple (which is good as we can check the values with hand calculations) which we use for the majority of the life of an aircraft.

The details above allow us to force our aircraft to generate contrails, engine smoke, and tip vortices based upon the performance that you are demanding from them at a given moment.


Different States

However this doesn’t cover all scenarios, while the aircraft is not airborne we use a different controller for motion.The ground based controller is a really simple Newtonian system based upon the good old equation F=ma. We tend to ignore a lot of the realities on the ground in favour of getting you in the air quickly!

However the simple formula Isaac Newton gave us does not cover such trivial realities as navigating your way around an airbase, for that we use defined taxiways to allow you to watch your aircraft drive around on their way to the runway.






The same also applies to aircraft carriers, where the taxi paths are described in such a way as to allow unlimited possibilities (I know someone is already planning to launch their Vipers from the Battlestar Galactica). We have made sure to include details like opening and extending hangars and even oddities like the vertical elevators on the Moskva
-class Helicopter Cruiser.



Takeoff is another situation where the normal flight model does not apply. Seapower supports, at present, 5 different types of takeoff: Normal, Catapult, Skijump, VTOL, and Helicopters. Each of these methods has its own system that allows us to provide realistic looking behaviour without risking the flight model getting horribly confused and smashing all of your shiny F-14s into a thousand tiny pieces.



These unique states exist throughout the flight control system and allow the aircraft to behave in a manner that is appropriate to the moment that they are in.


State Machines

A moment ago I referred to something called “states” this leads us to a really important concept for Seapower, and lots of games in general! This is the “Finite State Machine”. A State Machine is a way of creating a system that transitions through behaviour in a repeatable and reliable way when certain conditions are satisfied.

FSMs are used throughout Seapower to drive systems across a range from torpedo homing to aircraft landing, they are an incredible tool, if you want to learn more I recommend this video: Unity Bots with State Machines - Extensible State Machine / FSM - YouTube


Conclusion

At this point my ramblings have hit about 7 pages in Word so I think I better stop and get back to coding. We are really looking forward to getting this game to everyone who is out there waiting for it. We really can't wait for you to see the effort and dedication that has gone into this across the last few years.

Here are two more videos showing landings on a carrier and on an airfield:

[Asid]

Happy new year!
Mon, 1 January 2024



...the year of release...


Dear all!

The entire team of Triassic Games wishes you a fantastic start into the year 2024 also on behalf of the crew of this Orel carrier:



Here some screenshots from the Kiev airgroup attacking a small US escort group:




















We want to do some more regular screenshot and video updates of the progress of what we're doing and apparently "News" are the most appropriate way of doing so as we cannot embed screenshots in forum postings as it seems.

There will be more dev diaries coming as well but we want to push some news with less text and more screens as well! Hope you like it!

/Martin

[Asid]

Dev-Update 2/24
Wed, 31 January 2024



Dear readers!

Another small update about what was going on the last two weeks.

We had a visit from Frazer (MicroProse) and came together with Nils and me (Martin) in Munich to show our game to Fritz and Alex from GameStar:






We also started some internal (closed) beta so things are coming along nicely. Still some way to go but we're getting closer!

Quite some work was done regarding aircraft, here the MiG-21 Fishbed:








And land based installations, KS-19 and S-60 flak over Thanh Hóa province claimed another Corsair:






Vietnam war era dogfighting:








That's it for this time. We're preparing some more footage as well as game play videos and new trailers within the coming weeks.

/Martin

[Asid]

Dev-Update 4/24
Sun, 3 March 2024



Hi all,

Just another quick update on what we have been up to in the last two weeks.


The art department (Mek and Nils) have been fixing some performance issues with the vegetation, adding base city textures and a few other tweaks to really make the game look great. Mek has given urban areas their unique per-biome textures. Nils has also been busy adding more variety to the existing vessel inventory with new versions of the Adams-class destroyer while keeping us busy with UI concepts.

The coding team (Martin, Ivan, Ben, Ian, Danill, and Matt) have been hard at work too. Ivan, Ben, and Danill have been hard at work improving the AI systems. Ian has been focusing on getting the Autogen for cities working to really sell that low-altitude work. Matt has been busy implementing Nil’ UI concepts and Martin has been helping out by making a utility tool to allow some really nicely detailed river masks on top of our normal terrain system.

Our newest team member, Noah, joins us in a QA role, keeping us coders on the straight and narrow, and helping make sure that the game performs as well as it possibly can.


And now to our regularly scheduled screenshots!

Mek takes us on a little sightseeing tour of his new work, checking out the cities of Tokyo, Haiphong and Odessa.








Mek also brings us some updated fire effects. Here a Galveston-class is suffering after a dusk attack.





The Kilauea-class ammunition ship USS Flint suffers a rocket attack (those shells are scary!)






The Mission Editor and Instant Action UI have both had some updates, we thing they look really nice and clean now!






The biome and season system is starting to really come together, showing off the different colour schemes for Winter, Spring, and Autumn.








Ivan has been taking us through some engagements, showing off quite how quickly things can get really chaotic!









That's it for today! Thank you for reading!

[Asid]

Dev-Update 6/24
Mon, 1 April 2024




Hello everyone,

We hope you enjoy another quick update on the progress of Sea Power in the last couple of weeks. This one comes slightly later in the week than normal after some hectic few days for me in my day job, but I’m looking forward to some time away for a friend’s wedding over the Easter Holidays.

It’s been a tough couple of weeks with illness going around the team but we push on regardless, in the art department Nils and Mek are still hard at work. Mek has been prototyping more interesting fast attack craft and Nils has been expanding our global traffic with new Oil tankers, Fishing boats (some you might recognise as old Cold Waters friends given an update) and RORO ferries.

The coding team is as always busy too, as always hunting down bugs is our sniper Ivan. He found a particularly tricky one this week that was costing us 20 FPS in certain random situations.

While he’s not bugfixing Ivan has added a nice new feature that planing hulls and hydrofoils are now fully supported (There are two main types of hull, a ship is a displacement hull, as it goes faster it just displaces, or pushes out the way more water. A planing hull is a vessel that can ride the waves it generates to get extra speed. A hydrofoil is a vessel that flies above the waves altogether for incredible speed). As a part of this feature we have also been able to add variable draught (the depth a ships hull goes down to) based on cargo loads to the game.

Ian has got the autogen to a stable state awaiting new models and is taking a few days off, as well as pursuing his degree. He’s not the only one big on learning as Ben achieved his doctorate earlier on in the dev cycle. I (Matt) am working on some things that aren’t ready to show or talk on yet, but I am taking my laptop away on holiday from my day job.

The big shift this week that we haven’t spoken about yet is an internal update in the version of Unity Engine we utilise, to improve performance, stability, and to start looking at really optimising the use of multithreaded processing we have migrated to the 2022 LTS variant. Noah (who has a new working PC! Hooray!), Ben, Ivan, and Martin have got this working admirably. Our first version port a year ago was all pain, this one felt like a breeze to me (I will note I was sat in the office sneaking peaks at our private dev chat rather than helping).

And now you’ve read my waffle, please have some media!

The first of our hydrofoil classes breaks the surface!





Nils is working on more, here’s how the Pegasus-class developed over a few days.

Read on...

[Asid]

Dev-Update 7/24
Thu, 18 April 2024



Hello everyone,

Welcome to another Sea Power update. The weeks are just flying by at the moment, I swear it was only yesterday that I was writing the last one of these, but then a couple of rather busy weeks have happened since then.

GameStar Magazine have published an exclusive look at the game’s progress (Echtzeit-Schlachten mit Flugzeugträgern, Kampfjets & U-Booten - Sea Power lässt es krachen!)




It is in German but the English subtitles give a decent overview and there is a lot of footage to take a look at that you will not see elsewhere. In game related news the last two weeks have brought us more of the same, there is nothing really momentous to report apart from good steady progress on the game. And that late at night we sometimes sit and watch it going “this is really cool!”, we look forwards to when you get to see what we see.

In the coding team we are focusing on a few things in the next couple of weeks, primarily Campaign and AI. These are the two big job that need to get done before we can begin to go into the final stages pre-launch.

The campaign, as I am sure you have heard, shifted from being a turn based strategy system to something more akin to Cold Water’s real time mode (I have to say I aspire to reach the heady heights of what Falcon 4.0 managed, but that will be a big job, check out this interview with its creator (Interviewing the Falcon 4 Dynamic Campaign Creator, 25+ Years Later - A Retrospective):




We are setting up a system that is going to be globally flexible, which will allow you to create new campaigns as you please across theatres of operations of all sizes. You might have spotted some testing of the background civilian traffic system in the GameStar video, we are attempting to create a world that feels very much alive so that you can build your own stories.

AI is another monster, Ivan has taken the lead on this with Nils, between them they have been creating realistic doctrines and approaches to combat so that both enemy assets, and player assets that you are not directly controlling behave in a believable manner. This is a pretty massive thing for us to try and get right, we want the game to be a challenge, but not in the traditional RPG “Bullet Sponge” way. Enemy units will try and react to their surroundings to get the best of you, and you will definitely have to be careful to make sure that you do not suffer from an unexpected defeat.

Don’t worry though, there is still going to be the option to sail around in a custom mission blasting everything with the 16” Naval Guns on the Iowa though. That is pretty satisfying.

Outside of the core coding work more UI work is in development, obviously to support the campaign, but also to polish up tools that we have previously created. And to finalise systems that were still in development. Danill has been majoring on this, with overall art direction from Nils.

We are staying invested in improving resilience and performance too, Ben has been leading the way on this, fixing bugs, adding catch mechanisms to systems that fail to load due to background file errors, and generally making the overall systems work better. Ben has been leading the way on moving systems to the new Unity Jobs system, which allows us to truly take advantage of the performance of modern multi-cored machines.

Noah has really stepped up to the plate (a baseball reference slid in seamlessly, though I am not sure why Americans call rounders that and why it is quite so popular?) and is learning to modify the ini system to help Mek get some new airports set up, and has started writing the first of the tutorials based on his experience of learning the game.

The art team never sleep (it seems like it sometimes!) either, Mek and Ian have been touching up the environments, they are looking really cool, if I say so myself! Especially the autogen! Nils has been making even more brand new ship models too (there is another custom warship in progress) while leading the direction to try and keep us on task and coherent.

That concludes this week’s update, please have some screenshots!











Examples of the autogen system, showing off the emissive light system used at night. As Nils says “moody!”




Suddenly! A new airbase layout, we have had these almost ready to go for ages but now they are happening.




The new Snøgg class missile boat emerges from the shed to join the fleet.


Sometimes you get something slightly wrong, this aircraft has perfected the new amphibious fast taxi technique.

[Asid]

Dev-Update 16/24
Thu, 5 September 2024



Hello Everyone, welcome to another Sea Power Dev Update. This week I join you from a suddenly autumnal UK as we gear up for September.

In a nod to summer being over Victor rejoins us from his holidays. The French really have that nailed down! Speaking for France I hope you are checking out the Paralympics, some astounding records have been broken, and a family friend of mine has picked up 3 medals so far.

One of our major focuses over the last few weeks has been finalising some exciting announcement plans with MicroProse. That kicked off this week so keep your eyes peeled over the coming weeks for the results of that! This has kept Nils, Mek, Martin and Aleksi (our fantastic music composer) amongst others really busy.

Speaking of Mek he really got his teeth into ports, two weeks ago we had 6 unique ports in two countries, those numbers are significantly higher and spread significantly further now! The ports are used by background data files to populate the world, spawn civilians, and generally make it so that the world of Sea Power feels more alive than you might have seen before.








Along similar lines Ivan and Danill have been digging their teeth into the campaign, really rationalising the stuff I started. They have the mission generation system kicking in and are going to link up with Victor for the mission finalisation and saving back to the campaign. A lot of work to do still but things are progressing.

I have been focused on UI updates, along with Ben, and also on aircraft, slowly bringing old and new systems to a good state that is pretty solid. Along the way we have updated a lot of infrastructure and got a few bugs smashed.

While we were all too busy to notice Ivan also managed to get mobile land units working. And then promptly managed to make them player controllable as well. I am not sure if that function will make it to release but I think it means that we can have moving convoys available as mission targets, which is really great news.



Then Nils got in on the act too, deciding that there really is no kill like overkill and added some custom modifications to this oil tanker. While we know it is pretty silly I think it hopefully showcases the flexibility of the vessel system and give you some ideas on the potential moddability (is that a word? Spellcheck says no) of the game.





That’s all for this week, hopefully we see you again soon in a few weeks time with lots of exciting updates!
 

[Asid]

Sea Power Early Access Release
Mon, 16 September 2024



Hi Everyone,
You join us on an extremely exciting day! We are thrilled to end the speculation and confirm that Sea Power will be launching in Early Access this November (2024 if you have tried to block the year from your mind like me).

We really need to thank all of you for your incredible passion and support for what has become a massive project over the last few years. We know the wait has been longer than you anticipated, it’s been a long time coming for us too! Thank you for sticking with us and we can’t wait to get the game into your hands very soon!

To celebrate today’s announcement of the November 2024 release, we have partnered with the incredibly talented J.P. Ferré (after obsessively watching his DCS content) to prepare this all new ‘Release Announcement trailer’. All the footage is recorded in the game, and we hope after the little teaser last month it is a fun sneak peek of what’s around the corner.




Early Access Approach

Sea Power will be entering Early Access with a broad amount of content, namely:

    • Over 20 Scenarios: Including both historical and fictional encounters
    • Dynamic Campaign (Alpha): An evolving theatre-scale campaign that will grow throughout our Early Access development.
    • Mission Editor: An intuitive and flexible tool to recreate any conflict of the 60’s to 80’s Cold War era around the entire globe.
    • Massive Cold War Arsenal: over 150 naval units, more than 60 aircraft, 130 weapon systems, and 50 different ground objects




We thought long and hard about Early Access, but we hope that it will allow us to foster continuous improvement together with you in this amazing community, with regular development updates and community feedback shaping the games' future.

It would really support us if you could wishlist us on Steam and if you want more informal updates, come and join us on MicroProse’s official Discord. We tend to chat on a less formal basis there, and some of you might enjoy the nerdy places the history corner explores.

It’s been massively important for us to ensure a stable and content-rich experience from Day 1 of Early Access. We really hope that the Mission Editor in particular allows your creativity to go wild (Steam Workshop integration is a planned feature, we want you guys to share your missions!). You’ll be able to create your own ‘take’ on historical Cold War era encounters or simply recreate famous battles from beloved Hollywood blockbusters. One Ping Only Pleash Vashilly!


We will have a wide array of pre-made historical and fictional Scenarios to dive into this November, with an early ‘Alpha’ version of the Dynamic Campaign also available for early playtesting and ongoing feedback.

November Roadmap

On day 1 of Early Access launch, we are going to share a production roadmap which will outline upcoming features and content for the Early Access period. It will cover off both short-term, mid, and longer-range plans. Our ongoing development will incorporate your ongoing feedback, while driving towards our intended feature goals.




Game Recap for Newcomers - Dynamic Campaign, Strategic Depth, and Immersive Cold War Realism


For new players who have recently joined our community, we thought it useful to give a quick recap on the scope of Sea Power: Naval Combat in the Missile Age.


The game brings a mix of strategic and tactical depth in realistic naval engagements across multiple global theatres including the North Atlantic, Persian Gulf, Gulf of Tonkin and the Mediterranean. Players will control ships, submarines, and aircraft; balancing the needs of local tactical combat missions and strategic theatre-scale operations.

The game’s attention to detail and historical authenticity includes advanced ship and weapon physics, sensor modelling and dynamic weather systems, all combined with richly detailed 3D graphics that bring the Cold War atmosphere to life. The entire planet is your combat playground – so our hope is to provide you with a near-endlessly replayable experience for many
years to come.

Our small but super hard-working team have accumulated many years of naval simulation game experience. Our experience with designing the core gameplay of Cold Waters (and modding it until it very much broke!) has heavily influenced how seriously we take the quality and polish of Sea Power.

Get ready for an adrenaline-fueled Cold War experience and thanks for joining us on this journey!

The Triassic Team (Nils, Martin, Mek, Ivan, Daniell, Ben, Matt, Noah, Victor and Ian)

[Asid]

Sea Power | Early Access Roadmap
Tue, 29 October 2024



Hello Again Everyone! It has been a busy few weeks for us at Triassic as we get closer and closer to the Early Access launch date of Sea Power: Naval Combat in the Missile Age. We hope that you have been enjoying the content that has been produced to date and that it is inspiring you to think about missions to create!

The great news on that is that Steam Workshop is integrated into the game already, and mission sharing will be possible on day one. With a little bit of creativity and some simple (ish) INI file edits you should be creating your own mission packs and linear story missions in no time!

With just two weeks left to go we thought that we should begin to introduce you to our roadmap. Here it is in all its glory:



As you can see we have a couple of biggies on our list for the near future! Save/Load is very much nearing final development and should be coming to you shortly after release. We are making sure that this is integrated into Steam?s Cloud Save system. Steam Workshop integration will be rolled out to kit-bash models too, with full model import coming later (this is more significant work on the loading side internally).

We will be continually refining and enhancing the AI, as requested in a few of the various online videos covering the game. Our plan is to update this as we go, especially to reduce the micro-management of aircraft that a number of people have commented on.

The big piece that a lot of you are wondering about is the dynamic campaign of course! We are implementing a flexible dynamic system, which will allow campaigns at almost any scale anywhere in the world. We are looking really heavily towards the way that the old MicroProse Classic, Falcon 4.0?s campaign worked for inspiration here.

As for more units, our art team continue to work their magic! These two units have gone into the development build in the last few weeks.



And this one is coming soon!



We look forward to seeing you playing our labour of love soon! See you in two weeks!

The Triassic Team (Nils, Martin, Mek, Ivan, Daniil, Ben, Matt, Noah, Victor and Ian)

[Asid]

Sea Power | Upcoming launch tomorrow
Mon, 11 November 2024



Here are the times around the world

Hello Again Everyone, all 27,234 of you who have followed the game, only 19 places outside of the top 100 wishlists, can we make it? Fingers crossed that the Steam algorithm is benevolent and gives us a front page slot tomorrow!

Sea Power: Naval Combat in the Missile Age is scheduled to release into early access at 1000 UTC on the 12th November 2024, also available as an additional purchase on the first day will be the soundtrack. This has been lovingly put together by Aleksi Aubry-Carlson and Jonathan Figoli, sales of the soundtrack go direct to them, please show your support if you can!

As a thankyou from us, for your support the first two weeks after EA launch will have a 10% discount applied to the price (which will use Steam?s regional pricing feature). Please do remember that this is an Early Access game, it will not be perfect, it will break, but it will improve! We hope that you love exploring that along with us.

During Early Access we expect to release a regular weekly or bi-weekly update to the stable branch that you will have access to. Where we find more terminal bugs we will push updates more rapidly. You will find new bug reporting areas on Steam and Discord, please help us out by using them if you find something wrong!

As for what we have been up to in the last couple of weeks ? some things are not so obvious, like Mission Editor now supports localisation for whatever you might create without having to hand edit INI files (phew!). We have also added some really important background tooling, what we are calling ?virtual? INI files that allow us to create single databases of truth from multiple locations on disk controlled through a load order (see where this is going?).

There is a really good chance that Save/Load functionality will be going in properly in the next few days (well done Victor! You are smashing it!) so that should be available either on release or very shortly after. Saves in the default folder will be synced to Steam Cloud so you can keep track of them across multiple devices. On the subject of Steam Cloud we have also included a ?user? folder in the file system that will also be synced. This is so that you can share your own creations across multiple sessions and devices.

Localisation has been a massive piece of work too, we have been going through the game stripping out anything hardcoded that we find is still in there and redirecting it to the Language files in the system. Hopefully we haven?t missed any!



On the visual side tweaks and new additions continue, last week this Haze was only a model, now it is an ASW Hunter in game, adding to the threats the Soviets can provide!

New things continue too, Nils and I spent a nice couple of hours (it?s always at midnight for some reason!) looking at models and pictures of classic cruise ships. This is the Ivan Franko-class liner, a handsome ship I am sure you will agree!



Five of these ships were built by the Soviets and if you are a SCUBA diver and take a visit to New Zealand you can visit the 5th ship, the Mikhail Lermontov where she lies on the bottom in 38m of water after a baffling accident, check out this fascinating article. I might have to pay a visit after I finish my advanced decompression diving course.



Mek has reverted to type (sorry Mek you know it is true) and started making armed speedboats again, this one is pretty special, it?s the Polish design Project 664 "Wisla". It has a top speed of nearly 50 knots because it's a CODAG (Combined Diesel and Gas Turbine). I always love to include these images of the ships being worked on as it lets you see the process that our artists go through.



Also, some new ground assets by Mek, like MIM-23 Hawk, T-55 and ZSU-57-2 made their way into build. I hope that keeps your appetite whetted, see you all tomorrow when you have your hands on the game. Please try not to kill our bug reporting server!

The Triassic Team (Nils, Martin, Mek, Ivan, Daniil, Ben, Matt, Noah, Victor and Ian)