26 octombrie, 2018

New Feature: Remotely Control Your Ships!

Announcing a new "boating lake" feature!

You can now remotely pilot each ship in "model scale" upon the surface of a physically-responsive lake that reacts to ship movement. I've taken care to ensure each craft physically operates as much like a real-world version would, which was a challenge given current VR-rendering framerate requirements.

The ships are spread around the edges of the lake to keep performance high, and only two are allowed on its surface at once (one per controller). You just grab a ship with a controller (or "tractor-beam" it to your hand from across the lake) and toss it in to begin controlling it using Vive's touchpad or Rift's thumbstick.

I also added a few fun interactive elements on the lake, including a mini-game where you compete against a "ghost ship" to see who can ram the most buoys. Can you get all five?

Be advised: I adjusted a lot of the quality settings and don't have much to test on, so you may want to test which works best on your system. To do so, just press a number keys from 1 to 7. (7=highest, 3=default)

I changed and added a lot of code, and there's only so much testing one person can do, so if you find a bug kindly let me know in the discussion area how to reproduce it and I will fix it ASAP. Thanks!

Here's a full list of changes for this version:
- Added a boating lake, miniaturized all ships, and made them controllable when placed upon it!
- Changed SSN's propulsor model to more-accurately reflect what's publicly available.
- Added bow-spray to Iowa and Queen Mary.
- Reduced polygon count on Queen Mary, Iowa, and ABQAIQ.
- Changed propeller bubbles to better mimic cavitation patterns.
- Reduced flicker and improved shadows, but they are now disabled in "default" quality. (You'll need better than a GTX 970 to use them and maintain 90FPS.)
- Better reflections when viewing underwater.
- Improved numerous materials and textures.
- Reduced size of player collider and limited it to just the camera.
- SSN's hull now gets wet when immersed.
- Added stabilizers to Queen Mary that rotate to counteract roll.
- Made Iowa's radar rotate.
- Adjusted buoyancy of ships to react faster to wave changes.(Works better with larger waves now.)
- Weather changes are now random outside of the six hourly "presets" for each ship.
- Compiled using IL2CPP runtime with Unity v2018.2.14f1.

2 septembrie, 2018

Sneak Peek: Upcoming Feature

Progress continues on a new feature. Not ready to discuss details, but here's a teaser. Did I forget anything obvious?