26 października

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 Seawolf'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. (i.e. won't run on a GTX 970)
- Better reflections when viewing underwater.
- Improved numerous materials and textures.
- Reduced size of player collider and limited it to just the camera.
- Added stabilizers to Queen Mary 2 that rotate to counteract roll.
- Submarine's hull now gets wet when immersed.
- Adjusted buoyancy of ships to react faster to wave changes. (Works better when waves are larger now.)
- Weather changes are now random outside of the six hourly "presets" for each ship.
- Compiled using IL2CPP runtime with Unity v2018.2.14f1.

28 czerwca

Steam Trading Cards!

I didn't particularly care for Steam's Trading Cards until playing-around with them this weekend. Turns out they're kind of fun!

So, I just had to make some for both volumes of Magnificent Ships!

I'm happy to report that they are now live on Steam! Enjoy!