[Xeidos2]

I thought I'd drop in and let you guys know how close you came to having some serious competition for making a WW1 submarine sim.

I used to work for Aspect Simulations, the developer of a WW1 flight sim, Knights Over Europe, that was suppose to be published by Destineer back in 2004. I was their one-man art department.

Destineer broke their contract with us and Aspect had to shut down in May of 2004. In order to try an salvage KOE we came up with a plan of making a simple WW1 submarine game in about 8 months. We'd sell the game ourselves over the internet and while I made additional content for an add-on to the sub game, the programmers would go back and fix the problems with the airplane game.

We picked submarines because it was the favorite subject of one of the programmers (he'd worked on Aces of the Deep) and we picked WW1 because we had just been working on a WW1 flight sim.

Our player sub was the U-87. We picked it because it sailed during a time when there was both restricted and un-restricted submarine action and it had enough torpedoes to keep the average game player interested.

We didn't find out about the Imperial U-Flotilla project until we had already been at work on our own for 12 months. After reading all the posts on this forum we realized that we had a very different game from the one Deamon was designing.

Well our 8 month project stretch out to 18 months. With only a few weeks of work left for the artwork, the programmer decided that he couldn't work with me anymore. Game over. It's another classic game developer soap opera with no happy ending.

Anyway, I thought you guys would enjoy seeing the artwork I made for a WW1 sub game that'll never be. Here's the link to the pages in my web portfolio.

http://www.angelfire.com/oh5/3d_flightsim/Project25index.html

[Deamon]

Bump!

Holly mother of Allah! :dead:

And i even showed you my interiour artwork, of course via pm to make sure no competitive project will get them lol

I hope they were of a good use for you LAMO

And now you tell me the project is canceled. Isn't this ironical ?

And in this context: I swear to you that approximate two years ago i started to feel that soon i will be not the only one who is working on a WWI subsim. This feeling grew stronger and stronger during the last two years and now you pop up and tell me that you have worked for 18 months on a WWI subsim. Even the name of it is almost the same as that that i wanted to use for my sim! Now how odd is that ?

But i still feel that i made the right chooise. I still feel it will go well

Nevertless i feel damn sorry for you guys that you cannot accomplish your project

It would have been interesting for me to see how well such a sim would have been received and how well others could tread this subject.

[Xeidos2]

I think you have me confused with someone else. I don't remember ever getting any PM from you except when I got involved in a discussion about parrafin engines.

Anyway. I'll try and answer your questions, but it'll probably take more than one big long post.

I'll start with the least important one. The bomb thrower.
We got our references for weapons on the Q-ships from this site.

http://www.battleships-cruisers.co.uk/q_-_ships.htm

There are images of the pop-up deck gun as well as the bomb thrower.

At first I thought the big round object in the muzzle of the bomb thrower was part of the explosive shell. But then I found an article about different types of depth charges used by the British in WW1 and I discover the type that was used in the bomb throwers. Taking a closer at the bomb thrower photo, you'll notice a crew member holding a shell and standing straight up. If that big bulb was filled with explosive, then it would be too heavy for one man to hold so easily. But, I suspect the big bulb is really a float. The whole device was really a combination of float, line and explosive. It was fired at the sub. The float would stay on the surface while the explosive sunk down, attached to the float with a line. When the explosive sunk to a point where it reached the end of the line, it would pull a trigger and the explosive would go off at a pre-determined depth.

Our game engine.
Not being a programmer I can't give you much detail. We were using an original engine that had been developed for Knights Over Europe. That was part of our problem. The terrain system in KOE was broke. So we had no real terrain system for our sub game either. For the inital release, all the missions would have taken place out at sea. Fixing the terrain system and having ports to go in and out would have been addressed in future add-ons.

Give me a minute and I'll dig up a copy of the plans we used for the U-87.

[Xeidos2]

Here's an image of the drawings we were using for the U-87




Here's a close up of the conning tower area.



As you can see, we didn't have much to go on.
We knew we couldn't make it accurate, so we tried to make it believeable. Also, we limited the player to just being in the conning tower. We knew that a lot of the controls were actually down in the control room, so what we tried to have were things that were status indicators more than they were controls. So the player had control over ballast tanks, trim tanks, hatches and vents and the engines and rudder. We had easy and normal modes. In easy mode, the player hit just one or two keys to dive and the AI would handle all of the details. In normal mode you'd have to do all the work yourself.

[Deamon]

[Deamon]

[Xeidos2]

Some more answers to your questions.

The exterior model of the u87 was about 30,000 faces. This isn't counting crew figures.

The interior model of the u87 had 90,000 faces.

An average merchant ship was about 18,000 faces without crew.

A crew member was usually 800 faces. We had different states for the crew figures. The AI would determine what state the ship was in, and different groups of figures would be turned on and off accordingly.

How close were we to being finished?

8 more days and all of the ships would have been game-ready. The only art needed after that was special effects (water explosions, fire, etc.) The programmer said he'd need about 30 days after he got all of the art to put all of the parts together.

The programmer kept promising to give me a copy of the game so that I could see the ship models in the game world, but he never delivered.

The programmer has all of the code. Finding another coder would do me no good.

Funding. We had none. The programmer was living off of returns on investments and inheritance money. I was living off of money borrowed from credit cards.

I was putting in a minimum of 60 hours a week for 18 months.

We were hopeing to sell about 3,000 copies at $25US a copy. After I added up all of my hours I realized that even if we had made our sales goal, I would have only been making about $7 an hour.

What caused the project to stretch from 8 to 18 months.
The main thing was that the programmer had to re-think the game play issues after working on the game for about 4 months. Originally he thought that the challenge of the intercept would give the player enough interesting things to do to give the game a decent re-play factor. But he discovered that in the case of intercepting surface ships, either you did or you couldn't. Not much variety in that. So to give variety to the player's experience, we needed a lot of different kinds of ships to intercept. This pretty much tripled the model building workload.

Another thing was that I had to learn how to build and texture all of the models in Maya. All of my previous modeling experience had been in 3dStudio Max. When converting Max models to Maya, there were imperfections introduced into the models that drove us both mad, especially in the area of vertex normals. We had to use Maya because the plug-in that had been written for importing the models into the game only worked in Maya.

Another thing that added to the delay was that some of the models had to be done over and over. The interior of the conning tower was a good example of this. Since we had little or no reference material to go by, we had to design a lot of things on our own. The programmer had an engineering degree and I didn't so every time I made a control or instrument he'd find a reason or two as to why it wouldn't work and I'd have to do it over. Then there were issues in getting the model to work with the code. The groups and parts had to be named in a very specific way and the axis on the groups that made up the instruments had to be set a specific way and it took a couple of trys before I understood what the programmer was talking about. To get all of this worked out required time.

[2019]

[Deamon]

[Xeidos2]

We were using DE for our file conversions. It worked OK when we were building aircraft and ground objects for Knights Over Europe, but when we started making ships, the problems started showing up.

There were two 3d modelers who worked on KOE before I arrived on the team. They were Maya users, which is why the plug-in for importing shapes into the game was originally written for Maya. One of these artist set-up a base file which was used for all other files that were made for the games. It established scale and orientation and cameras, etc. There might have been something hidden in this base file that caused our problems when importing Max models, but we were never able to find it. Both of these modelers had left the team long before I arrived.

Even with DE, we had to rotate and scale the Max model before we could do the file conversion in order to have the model open in Maya properly.

The biggest problem with bringing a Max model into Maya was normals. The two programs handle smoothing and shading quite differently. It made for quite a headache. Big enough to make it worth while to learn how to build from scratch in Maya.

[CB..]

arghh--not again---lol--ok you know what to do now then--and it's about time somebody had a go at it---

a WW1 flightsim set at sea---

base the player on one of the many seaplane carriers/tenders--and task them with anti submarine work around the coast

far more interesting aircraft--far more interesting flying--fascinating search and destroy gameplay--lot's of naval fans would enjoy it for the ships and sea scapes-- flight simmers would love the aircraft and un-usual semi carrier mobile home base scenario--the seaplane carrier being able to steam any where it was needed---Gallipoli for example-- for alternate over the trenches combat--torpedo runs on shipping all sorts of scenarios- i believe there were a couple of seaplane tenders involved in spotting for the gunners at Jutland etc etc --steaming into Scapa flow would be a nice moment-- those WW1 ships sure look great--all with the ability to travel the world on your hopefully wonderfully modelled seaplane tender---watching the sun set arrhhh wonderfull stuff

enjoyed browsing the site thanks for the link--

sigh -apologies for the interuption but not often you get the chance etc etc--

[Xeidos2]

some more answers:

What am I doing now?
Now that I've finally gotten my portfolio updated and online, I'm sending job applications to a few game companies. My choices are limited in that I want to re-locate to someplace that is within driving distance of my hometown. If I don't find work in 30 days I'll be moving back there anyway and look for any work that I can find.

I've spent 8 of the last 10 years working on game projects at different game companies. None of those projects ever got finished. Very frustrating experience.

LOD's
We did some experiments early on and the programmer figured that even with a medium size convoy we wouldn't need LOD versions of our models.

Playable prototype:
The programmer had one on his computer and when I went over to his house for our weekly meetings he'd show me how things were working. So I became suspicious when he stopped showing me these "progress reports" during last summer and he kept putting me off when I asked about getting a copy on my machine.

Getting the code from the programmer:
Even though there was no agreement in writing and I wasn't paid a penny for my work, the programmer claims everything, including the artwork, belongs to him, because the work was done on his computer, using his software. That's only partly true, because all of the UI art was done on my computer using my software. So with that kind of attitude, I don't think I'll be getting anything from the programmer.

Lesson to other developers. Get everything in writing before you do anything, especially if money is involved. I thought that I could wait until we had a product that was ready to ship before getting agreements in writng. Big mistake on my part.

Am I in debt now?
Yep.

When the programmer decided that we needed more ships, the amount of modeling required tripled because each merchant ship had to have three versions of itself. 1 -normal, unarmed. 2 - normal, armed (for use later in war) 3 - a Qship version. The goal was to make a situation where the player could never be quite sure what he was going up against until he got very close to the surface ship.

[Deamon]

[sergbuto]

[Xeidos2]

Some more answers to Deamon's questions:

Is it difficult in the US for you to finde a job ?

Yes and no: Yes if I'm trying to find a job working in 3d, no if I'm willing to pick up after messy customers in retail stores. I've sent applications to two game companies and neither one has responded. I don't know if this is because it's the holiday season or if it's because they're not interested in me. I'm in the middle of getting ready to move 1,400 miles from Denver, Colorado to Columbus, Ohio.

Why did they (Destineer) broke the contract ?

It's a complicated story and I'm sure there are parts that I don't know about but I'll try and give a correct answer.

The original contract was between Destineer and Aspect. But it became apparent that decisions made at Destineer were being dictated by people at Take Two and The Gathering. An indication of this was that we were told that final approval of our milestones had to come from an executive at Take Two. Also, we were asked if we would make our flight sim playable on the Xbox. We said no.
One month after Destineer broke their contract with us, Take Two and The Gathering published Wings of War for the Xbox and the PC.
Also, because of a broken terrain system, we were going to miss our original completion date of Sept 2004.

Camera positions:
From the few times that I saw the game in operation, it looked like the programmer had built up a pretty detailed viewing system. But I think is was mostly based on fixed camera positions that the player would move between. I don't think you could move about freely. I think there were about 6 positions inside the conning tower besides the two periscope. At the periscope the camera would move with the periscope as you rotated and elevated.
Up on the bridge you could move to different positions. If there were crew members standing out on the deck, like the gun crew or members of the parley party, then you could move the camera to those positions by clicking on the crew member. There was also a viewing system developed for looking at the "target" ships. It would differ depending on whether or not you were in easy mode or normal mode. In easy mode you could orbit around the target ship. In normal mode you could only see what was visible through the periscope or binoculars.

"That's realy suspicious. If finde it most odd that you never got any prototype from him. I wouldn't trust such a person."

That now makes two of us. I had started having suspicions about the programmer's intentions several months before the work finally came to an end. I didn't confront the programmer because to do so would have ended the project then and there and I had already passed the point of no return because of all the money that I had borrowed in order to complete the project.

"can he claim it that simple ?"
He can claim it all he wants, but I don't think he has a legal leg to stand on. There was nothing in writing between the two of us. He also knows that it's very expensive and time consuming to take any issue into the courts and that I don't have the resources nor the inclination to sue him over anything. In many ways it's like a bully making a threat.

"But is this the final end of both projects ? No Knights over Europe anymore ? "

In theory, both projects could be finished. The programmer has enough artwork on hand to put together a version of both games. He could make a few tweaks to the ship models and then claim them as his own. I've seen him do it with sound files. He could hire another artist to make any UI art he might need.

In practice, this is most likely the end of both projects. In the last ten years this programmer has been involved with four separate projects and none of them have been completed. They've all reached the final stage and then they/he self-destructs. He could approach a publisher, but it's not likely because he likes to have complete control. He could try publishing the game himself over the internet but since he despises forums, it's not likely he'll gain any community support.

The man is a brilliant programmer, and has a good sense for what makes a good game, which are the reasons why I was willing to risk so much to make a game with him. But as long as he's left in charge, it's not likely he'll ever finish anything.

I hope this answers your questions.

I've looked for but haven't been able to relocate the website with information on British depth charges in WW1. If I do find it, I'll forward a copy to you.