Weekly update #5, 11th of August 2020.

Hi guys! As always, a weekly update. The worst so far. Once again, I’m a day late. My apologies for that.

Last week in U-Boat Sim...!

We did a ton of behind the scenes work last week. It seems that Marius is going to drop another fabulous update some time this week, but we're not quite there yet. Just to make sure you've seen it, we're working on making the change from the standard render pipeline (or legacy, as it's called) to the HDRP pipeline. There's a little video out already which you can see here. A lot of stuff needs to be recoded, retextured, reshadered, etc. What you can see from the video is also far from finished. It's going to look so much better still. I'm quite happy we got ahead of it before we started building more assets, as we're saving a lot of time there.

Modeling!

I would like to give a special thanks to our asset contributors, who have been building some beautiful assets for the game (pictures below). Apart from some others, last week we obtained the first drafts of the 'Spindkiste' (or bitty-box, as they're known in English) and an in-game version of E. Gröner's 'Taschebusch der Handelsflotte'. The Spindkiste was a small box that sailors would bring aboard to store their personal belongings. As we want this game to allow users to have a certain amount of customizability, turn it into a proper 'personal experience', well, you'll get your own Spindkiste at some point. I'll go in more detail about it that in further updates. Gröner's book is one of a couple of books that would be on board a U-Boat to help with the recognition of other ships and the like. Ah, I could go into much more detail on how that actually worked, but here's not the time or place...

Cut-off.

So, as I said before, this is the worst update so far, as we have decided on when we're going to cut you guys off from playing a free version. There's another side to that coin though, because it will make it a bit clearer as to what we're working on and what we're working towards. The main consideration here is that we're planning on quite some unique, special features that really sets U-Boat Sim apart from any other game in the genre. You've seen a couple of those already - the physics simulation, the level of detail in the engine compartments, the hands-on type of control and lastly, the full spherical world with proper curvature, bathymetry, etc. - No game has ever done anything even remotely close to that so far.

We have a lot more of those unique features coming up, but it would be rather silly of us, developmental wise, to just give that all away. We'd be throwing money out of the window that way, and in our case money means outsourcing tasks, speeding up development, bringing the definitive U-Boat experience to you as soon as is humanly possible...

Conversely, we don't want to be jerks about it either. Your support for the project means a great deal to us, so we figured it would be best to leave you with something playable before we go 'dark', so to speak. Dark meaning here: there will be no more demos available for free, but we will most definitely keep updating you on our progress, very regularly, through our Discord, our website and other media as well. If you have any question, doubts, or suggestions on how we're getting along (or how you think we should be getting along) send me a message! I'm always happy to answer. Really, never hold back on that.

The final free update (we're not there quite yet, but just so you know what to expect) will include:
- Everything you've seen so far.
- Full implementation of the HDRP.
- Full spherical world.
- Accurate bathymetry.
- Accurate topology.
- Fully networked (as in: you'll be able to play with your buddies).
- An inventory system (as in: books to read, coffee to make, pills to pop, music to play, some other things, perhaps? I'd welcome your suggestions as well...)
- Expanded hands-on control of the boat (think rudder, think engines, think compressor. Everything you need to keep the boat sailing.)
- Bug fixing. No bugs, no glitches, nothing. It'll be a clean release.
- Some other cool stuff I haven't listed here?

What it will not include though - I'm genuinely sorry to tell you - the ability to sink ships and everything associated with that part of the experience. In order to do so, we'd also have to give away our whole damage system, our TVRe design, models of ships, and well... you get the point.

Questions?

Bad news on this front today, I’m afraid! I'm sure you have tons of questions and I would love to go into more detail about all the why's and what's here, but hey, I can't make these updates too long either, because then no-one will read them anymore. Send me a message! I hope to bring better news next week. For the moment, thank you for all the support.