It's been 9 years...

[Sonarman]

Beginning to look great EAST, looks like a 30's era turbine steamer there, was she modelled after a particular real world vessel? Your feature list looks great hope you get to achieve it all in time.

[EAST]

Originally Posted by Sonarman

Beginning to look great EAST, looks like a 30's era turbine steamer there, was she modelled after a particular real world vessel? Your feature list looks great hope you get to achieve it all in time.

It's a borrowed model - not much info on it except it's a dual diesel, single prop merchant. I like the model and it's not too poly heavy so I'll likely license it. Still no community artists on board...

Taking a short break from 3d transforms now that I FINALLY get them. Ship operation state machines are done, implementing them for server side authority now. Also spending some time learning about shaders. Implemented a nice GPU exhaust shader that varies with throttle setting and engine load. First shell impact shader done...needs work, but I'm getting it.

I have a chat system done, pretty pleased with that. Getting the IW text color by faction down. Chat does global, faction only, faction with allies and player to player. When I go back to working on the chat I'll see about a squadron/group feature. I put together a for faction alliances since there's going to be a AI faction that's the big dog in the world. That and a Privateer faction.

I know this is all really ambitious and I've still got a lot to learn, but I've always wanted to make this game so this time I'm going to try not to compromise on it. I am however sticking to a minimum viable product model: First level is just getting everything working and not worrying too much about overall looks fine tuning. My core focus is to make sure the multiplayer works great. Everything else takes a back seat to multiplayer.

Thanks for weighing in!

[Sonarman]

Thanks EAST, I think its looking great so far and the sub vs destroyer multiplayer element has always been very high on everyone's wishlist.

I hope some 3D modellers get on board to help you out soon, it would be great to see the project come to fruition, shame it didn't happen for ERT after all of the effort yourself and the others at Tesseraction put in. It was great that you released ERT as freeware at the end of its days though, hopefully all those who have enjoyed ERT over the years will support your latest endeavour.

Your feature list looks great, I think ERT maybe suffered a little from not having separate stations for everything (expectation wise) though the MO-Board style approach you took actually makes more sense from a 'real world' command perspective and was in many ways what today's games do (with everything on one screen). But I think a lot of naval sim guys prefer the 'old school' bells and whistles approach where you have a separate sonar/chart screen etc and can hop between all of the various devices etc. Destroyer the UBoat Hunter made a great return to that last year so its great to see that's in the plan and the gameplay elements with ports, berthing, logistics etc look great.