Battleship Command

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Time to take a look at what's new:

[Hitman]

That's fantastic progress! Love the concept and the battle looks so involving

Looking forward to blowing ships from the arctic convoys, that has always been my favourite theater

And I guess the concept can be easily ported to control destroyers and other surface units.

One thing I see is not yet implemented is ship inertia, seems to almost instantñy come to sp4eed as well as turn, in real life such a big ship would certainly need much more time and room to change to a precise course.

[bracer]

Thanks Hitman!! I'm fairly excited myself, that I reached this far.
No, I have not worked alot on turn rates or inertia. I will for sure do it at some point!
I think you will help me out, because I'm looking at compiling a simple prototype demo and let people give it a spin...
I have a few problems to solve first just!
Cheers

[FightingSteel1]

This is looking pretty interesting, and I assume you're doing this all by yourself? You've made some great progress.

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Originally Posted by FightingSteel1

This is looking pretty interesting, and I assume you're doing this all by yourself? You've made some great progress.

Thanks FightingSteel!
Yes, it's my own little side project for now.
Who knows, if this prototype game/sim turns out well I might consider hiring someone to get some proper modern graphics and a better programer to optimize the code.

Currently I'm sketching out the campaign/mission module.
What you've seen so far is from the "battle mode" of the program.

Cheers!

[jenrick]

I saw you link over on SimHQ, figured I'd follow the main thread over here.

I'm really enjoying what you're doing and where it's going. I get the concept of combining the director and the range finder for usability, however as someone else noted I do like the authenticity of having them split. Range finding, particularly stereoscopic is hard to do in real life well and it's almost impossible to simulate on a monitor to the degree of fidelity needed for warfare. I would think having a rangefinder station that user can utilize as they prefer, but the main action being in the fire director. The FD is where a lot of the tactical versus technical decisions are made, which to me as the player is the interesting part.

I'll DL the tech demo you put together and give it a go. Keep up the great work!

-Jenrick

[bracer]

Originally Posted by jenrick

I saw you link over on SimHQ, figured I'd follow the main thread over here.

I'm really enjoying what you're doing and where it's going. I get the concept of combining the director and the range finder for usability, however as someone else noted I do like the authenticity of having them split. Range finding, particularly stereoscopic is hard to do in real life well and it's almost impossible to simulate on a monitor to the degree of fidelity needed for warfare. I would think having a rangefinder station that user can utilize as they prefer, but the main action being in the fire director. The FD is where a lot of the tactical versus technical decisions are made, which to me as the player is the interesting part.

I'll DL the tech demo you put together and give it a go. Keep up the great work!

-Jenrick

Good to see you here Jenrick!
Yes, there is a few dilemman to deal with regarding the rangefinder(RF).
As it is now, it's just a switch to turn on/off in the firedirector.
This is good while there is no AI crew to help you out. You would loose valueable time switching to a whole different station to input new distance data to the computer.
Try for example to use the radar for RF targets.
It will be a whole different story when I finishing programming AI crew that can help keeping the target in sight or do the RF for you.
As you say, it was a hard job on a real ship. And there were several RF-stations sending data to the computer. Firedirector didn't really have anything to do with it.
Second problem, is there any point to have a real stereoscopic RF?
Now the resolution is quite low, for performance reasons. This leads to the RF being useless above some 10k-12k distance, because the pixels are too big to see any change of focus...

In the AA-station I used an approach closer to what you see in the game, Destroyer Command. One ball is the target distance, move your ball there and you got your distance setting.
Maybe I will make something similar to the main battery aswell!

Luckily it is quite easy to change and modify! So expect different versions of RF to try over time!

Let me know how the trial went! Sank any ships? And how did you find their distance?

Cheers

[jenrick]

Alright, got that sorted out. I used the map and the radar to close at flank, until I located at least two ships steaming. As they shot back, escorts of some kind. I opened fire around 20,0000 (yards or meters? Not sure what the Kreigsmarine used). I tired to use the RF, but at that range the stereoscopic effect was too minor to be useful, instead I took my initial range cut from the radar. I laddered my ranges until I started getting brackets, not having a range clock, and range cuts, certainly makes that difficult. I some how got what I think was a hit at about 18,500 (extra bit of smoke, and missing a shell splash). I kept closing using just the fore turrets until around 14,250 I got another hit, again more smoke and a missing splash. I think I sunk the target actually as shortly after that I observed no more stack smoke, and the after a few minutes the ship was gone.

I hit escape to pause things, and when I hit return to game (I think, I may have hit the wrong option) it dumped me to the initial screen.

So far it's a neat project. I'm looking forward to where you can take it. There is a suprising bit of tension even in it's current state to get a visual sighting, and then to try and get hits. Personally I'd got after the range keeping, and bearing generation systems next, as they are the heart of the gunnery system.

-Jenrick

[MekStark]

looks great!

[bracer]

Thanks!

[pitti]

Hey Bracer, is there a map?

[bracer]

Hi Pitti!
Yes, there indeed is, but it's work in progress.
I'm currently working on a waypoint system for the AI to cross the map.
It's not a global map, but a part of the north atlantic.

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When you get bored of coding AI, then you work on the water representation.

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[Hitman]

Nice improvement