We have moved to a private repo. Contact information below is still valid.

ColdWarSubSim

A indie game based on post WWII submarine simulation. Basically Silent Hunter 6, since UbiSoft no longer supports it, and there are no modern cold war subsims. Blender is used for model work and Unreal Engine 4 is the game engine, code is mostly BluePrint with some C++. With the release of Unity 5 for free the engine choice is still up in the air.

Contact:

• Email - info@blendertek.com
• Skype - blendertek
• Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/Blendertekpage
• Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/Blender_Tek
• YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/Nsomnia

FOR ANYONE WANTING TO HELP

CODERS NEEDED TO GET THIS PROJECT OFF THE GROUND C++/Blueprint WILL PAY FOR A UE4 SUBSCRIPTION AS LONG AS YOUR MAKING DECENT COMMITS TO THE GAME AND AND SPLIT OF ANY FUTURE PROFITS. Also looking for modellers/artists etc. feel free to email at info@blendertek.com

Check out all the reference pictures and the virtual tour at http://www.ussnautilus.org/virtualTour/index.shtml# to see if anything looks like something you'd like to model.

If your a programmer and this intrests you, contact me also. The project is currently in pre-alpha state until I can learn to code better, or find another coder.

Then please contact me at info@blendertek.com to discuss more. I don't commit changes to the models daily to the repo, so the .blends may up to a week behind.

Current Status (Feb 26, 2015)

• Moved from Unity to Unreal Engine 4. Work re-starts this weekend. Stay tuned.
• Using UE4 Community Ocean and Weather project as a starting point. https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?42092-Community-Project-WIP-Weather-amp-Ocean-Water-Shader/page6
• Finish modelling the attack and control compartment to a decent level so that a very early alpha can be released.
• Looking for partners (see below)
• Started UV unwrapping some simple objects and starting some simple DIFF texture maps. [Feb 11 2015]
• Modelled and textured a mark 14 torpedo [Feb 15th 2015]
• If someone lives in Groton CT. The one thing I have budgeted for is for measurements, photos and drawings of the free admission museum ship. One Crystal Lake Road Groton, Connecticut 06340

Basic Goals

1. Create a video game using the Unity game engine similar to the Silent Hunter series but based on the cold war, since World War 2 has been done over, and over again. More or less emulate and update Silent Hunter 5 only post-WWII.
2. Allow anyone and anybody who has an interest in submarines, Unity, Blender and particularly a combination to add what they see would be a benefit to the game.
3. Polish, polish polish.
4. Create a business model for early access sales.
5. Repeat steps 3 & 4 for Steam greenlight or self-publishing.

Current Major Needs (In order of importance)

• A competent programmer
• A 3D rigged model of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover (see issue # )
• The Attack Center and Control Room compartment fully modelled (see issue # )
• A basic exterior model (see issue # )
• Start coding the physics of a submarine moving through water [Code is ready for surface vessels, just needs to be tweaked for a submarine above water (the easy part) and below water (the hard part) (see issue # )
• Start coding a map system [Started as of Feb 6 2015, but its very very early] (see issue # )

"I want to help!"

We are a small team that consists of...

1. Nsomnia - myself (Modelling, animation, sound, code, graphic design, research)
2. On hand but not directly associated with the project is a coder (C++), 2 graphic designers (Photoshop and other Adobe programs), and a sound artist.
3. Navy correspondents for accuracy and realism on an unpaid basis at this point
4. Future Partners

Our current budget is near nil (see the budget page in the wiki). Will be updated soon; as the project has JUST gotten underway less than two weeks ago. We have potential small backing from a local business.

However currently as of Feb 10, 2015 all work is done in one (1) of five (5) ways.

• 1. I scratch your back, you scratch mine: Anyone who can add in any noticeable way will have my full support in their current or future needs with any of my skills listed above.
• 2. Pure voluntary: For those who love the idea of open-source and freedom of knowledge plus a love of indie video games, submarines, Navies, cold war, 3D modelling, animating, Unity or a combination of these.
• 3. Portfolio and Resume Building: Any work you put any noticable effort into can be included in your personal resume, portfolio, demo reel etc. your free to use our models in any of your future work as long as any projects started using them credit this original project here, we follow the GNU GPL v2 license.
• 4. Small payments. Any work done (See section "Paid Work" below) can be discussed beforehand on a small payment to be made via paypal in 30-60 days once the alpha is out. I'm not talking about 80$ an hour freelance work, at least not at this point, if I wanted a freelancer I would get one from an actual freelance website where the job can be bid upon however if you absolutly require payment for your work, it can be discussed however be forewarned this may omit you from the project. I'd rather spend longer creating this project than paying what little profit I make working from home.
• 5. A cut of potential future game sales. Any work done (See section "Paid Work" below) can be discussed for a cut of either early access sales, release sales, steam release sales, or a combination.

No matter what, if you want to work on this project in even the smallest ways you will get the oppertunity to have your name/username/or anonymous in the credits and documentation and website to show off you worked on an indie game.

It must be said this is as indie is as indie comes currently but has the potential for bigger indie success.

Paid Work (I want to help, but not for free)

If you have a desire to work on this project as a job, your in the wrong place. If you have a desire to work on this project but require some kind of monetary reward read this basic outline:

• 1. Everything will have to be discussed beforehand, if you commit a model you worked 50 hours on and say "There you go, that'll be 750$ at my rate please" your work is going to be deleted. A virtual contract will be signed for any paid work in other words.
• 2. Our budget will increase with time which will lead to future payments as the budget increases. If you require payment ahead of time ASAP, your probably in the wrong place.
• 3. Partnership: if you'd like to add work with the idea of a cut of future sales (see "I want to help" section five (5) above) then again a contract will have to be negotiated and signed. No guarantee this game will ever make it into the sales stage.

Most likely for any paid team member, I will supply a copy of ManicTime or a similar time tracking software.

Check out all the reference pictures and the virtual tour at http://www.ussnautilus.org/virtualTour/index.shtml# to see if anything looks like something you'd like to model.

So whats this game exactly?

At the time of writing (Feb 10, 2015) the current game overview is this. You are the captain of a submarine that goes out on missions (a mix of scripted and random) during the cold war. However you are infact at war with Russia, thus you will be required to not only hunt her submarines and warships when they try to attack you, you will be required to attack their merchant shipping.

The game will follow history. When a certain class of submarine is historically available, you will have the opportunity to command it instead of your current class instead, at the expense of losing your crew and upgrades.

We start out in 1946 with a GUPPY class diesel-electric submarine not at war. Your taught the basics of of the game and how submarines work through a series of interactive tutorials (skippable) that take you into 1950 or so. At this point nuclear submarines are becoming a possibility (USS Nautilus, SSN-571 is the first nuclear submarine in the world, and thus will be your first real command). At this point you are asked to take her out on sea trials to explain how a nuclear submarine works. The campaign now begins.

1954 - You start as the captain of the newly commissioned USS Nautilus the world's first nuclear submarine. It differs in no way from the submarines of world war 2 except the fact that she only needs re-fuelling once every 18 months. Russia declares war.

With world war 3 looming Navy recruits are ready to serve on the most advanced ship in the world. You choose your crew from a large selection, 12 officers and 50-100 enlisted men. Each man is assigned to a certain part of the boat and each man has certain ability points (mechanical, weapons, leadership etc.). Each officer oversees a part of the boat (sonar officer, radar officer, watch officer, torpedo officer etc) You spend all your initial upgrade points on your crew and your first load of food, spare parts, ammo, and torpedoes. You have to choose what food to buy (better food costs more points but causes your crew to have better moral (happier)) and the kind of torpedos/missles for the mission. IE. if your mission dictates that the Korean war is on and you may be asked to fire cruise missles at land targets you should probly load up at least 1 or 2 cruise missles, if your mission is just to attack merchant shipping maybe choose cheap basic torpedos.

As new technology becomes available, you can choose to add it to your submarine, as long as its not totally un-realistic. This allows the player to build the boat that they want essentially. Taking out enemy ships (and eventually land targets when missiles become available) gains you upgrade points. You can spend them during patrol on your crews ability levels. Once your patrol is over (when you run out of provisions, ammo, mission success, or at your own choosing you head back to port. Going back to port takes 2 weeks of game time. In port you get more upgrade points based on how successful your patrol was (ships sunk, damage taken, equipment breakdowns etc.) which you can spend either on your crews abilities or on your boat (both historial and research ideas). You can also award medals to crew members you deem worthy (say they worked extra watches or kept cool under pressure etc.) and eventually they will upgrade in rank eventually all the way up the chain of command.

When a new class of submarines is available you have the choice to choose command of her but you will lose all your upgrades to your previous boat, your crew and all their upgrades and promotions and have to start fresh, albeit with a upgrade points refund depending how long you commanded the previous boat for and how well you did over your patrols.

Crew members have passive abilities (IE. the sonar operator can be upgraded to increase the range he can hear sound underwater) which are enabled at all times and active abiltiies which you have to manually enable and are time based (IE. the torpedo officer can have his crew reload torpedos 25% faster for 2 hours). Officers also have passive and active abilities (ie. torpedo officer passive ability: torpedo loading experiance level 1: 10% faster lvl 2: 15% faster lvl 3: 20% etc. active ability: tweak the torpedo 'your torpedomen load some plastic explosives into the nosecone of the torpedo increasing its damage by 20% but increasing the chance of a dud by 5% since thats where the detonator lies')

Crew members have moral and the longer the patrol, and the less experienced you, and they are, the less effective/slower they are and the greater change they will break equipment etc.

You have to carry spare parts on board and harder difficulty levels will require you to decide what parts to take on patrol and what most likely isnt needed, but if a part breaks down with no backup system or parts, your patrol will end and you'll haver to wait for a rescue tug, and the enemy may find you in this time.

While you are the captain of the ship and you basically just send out commands, you can if you wish command important stations yourself. For example you can take control of the sonar station to get a more accurate fix on contacts (especially if you have a novice sonar officer and sonar operator), you can take control of the radar station to check for contacts a novice radar operator might have missed like a fishing boat. You can take control of the galley and choose what meals get served on what day to increase your crews morale by using better ingredients or saving food and losing crew morale.

The player will have the ability at anytime to add details into the ships diary which is basicacally just an ingame text editor. The player can add a new entry and it will list the date, time and location and you can write your own details ie: attacked enemy aircraft carrier with 2 torpedos at 8m depth, did not do enough damage to sink her before we had to dive and evade. Next time try at 10m depth so that it will sink faster. The player can edit entrys.

An automatic captains log wil be kept which can be organized by the following entries which are automatically entered in: Radio contact reports, sonar contact reports, radar contact reports, torpedo/missle firing, torpedo/missle hits, mission objectives, ships sunk, aircraft downed, equipment breakdowns, general messages from headquarters.

While underwater you will not receive reports from HQ however if you are on the surface or you have your towable antenna extended you will receive contact reports from HQ ie: "Enemy convoy of 1 small warship and 13 merchants seen at 13:00 on Mar 8, 1961. Course 241 degrees, speed 12 knots." however having anything above the water (periscope, towed antenna, radar mast, snorkle, radio mast etc.) will increase the odds that ships might see you if your operating in close quaarters.

Still in the planning stages. More ideas welcomed/coming.

How hardcore of a simulation will this be?

At first we hope to keep it fairly arcade like to appeal to the most customers possible. However if time permits, and definitly eventually, we hope to have various difficulty levels ie.

• Landlubber: Torpedos hit where you aim for in the periscope, ballast and trim water tanks are handled automatically, all you have to do is drive, upgrade, and attack. Your crew stays happy forever. Good for people who just want to point and shoot
• and various levels all the way up to
• Subnut: You are nuts about submarines! You have to make mental calculations and use a stopwatch, you have to control nearly every aspect of your boat or else you may face the depths of the ocean (reactor core temperature, equipment breakdowns, realistic reloading speeds, crew moral if your patrol lasts too long) only for die-hards

Eventually I plan to calculate everything from thermal layers (differnt water temperature layers that sound reflect off in the ocean), air velocity when blowing ballast/trim/negative tanks, to how often your crew showers and goes to the bathroom and uses up fresh water.

I have an un-answered question.

Feel free to email me (nsomnia, the project lead) at info@blendertek.com. I check my email constantly throughout the day. Forums/youtube/etc will get a slower reseponse.

F.A.Q (Frequently asked questions)

1. What is the expected release date? When the team is happy enough that they can be proud to show it off.

Myself, working alone, hope to have a version out where you can drive the USS Nautilus around on the surface of the ocean, some of the GUI done, and most of the interior done to explore by May 5th, 2015.

2. Is this open-source, free to play, pay to play? I'm confused. While desigining, this game will be completely open-source (except anything that I buy like unity assets) and all credit will be given where due. Once the project is self sustaining and has money flowing in any files that are not permissable for commerical use will be redesigned in-house for an eventual early access sale. Then a version 1.0 release. Then Steam, if for some reason Steam doesnt accept it, we will publish it in-house.

3. What software is being used? I use Unity, Blender, Maya, 3ds Max, Photoshop, GIMP, Krita, Mari, Corel Painter, ManicTime, MakeHuman, zBrush 4R7, ShaderMap, NDo2, Realflow, Audacity, Audition, Camtasia Studio, Visual Studio 2013, Notepad++, and a bunch more. For the most part, Blender, Unity and Photoshop take up 95% of my time.

4. Can I use your resources for my own project? Everything except blueprints or layouts, those are property of the US Navy or General Electric under heavy license and some files or folders will mention if they require a differnt license.

5. How can I/we be sure a budget will be added While one can never be completely sure that a game will succeed, there is a gap in the market for submarine simulators. Ubisoft was releasing them during the 2000's every couple years but then stopped and went the browser based free2play with pay2play meathod. This ruined the series for them. The last release was Silent Hunter 5 in 2010. Silent Hunter Online is their browser based version and frankly... it sucks. This gap is Cold War Submarine Simulators the last one released was in the mid 90's and it saw commercial success.

Thus we have a market. Most people who played and enjoyed Silent Hunter have been waiting and hoping with fingers crossed that UbiSoft will release a new game. The havn't and the general consensious is they wont.

Open-source and Unity-made games are hot right now. We fully intent to incorporate the ability to mod the game similar to Kerbal Space Program, Euro Truck Simulator 2, Farming Simulator 13/15 and other simulators of the like. Most likely with a python or lua interpretor.

A local business has expressed intrest in purchasing a small percent of a game once some real results are seen. At that point we can have paid team-members or else hire freelancers.

Crowdfunding/Kickstarter while I dont think Kickstarter is the best way to get a game going it is a possability.

Buying assets isn't needed I can either code whats needed or I already own an asset that will work for whats required, I have a VAST library of assets I've purchased over the years when I was a hobbyist game designer.

6. What about mods and modding / mod capability? We fully intend to have the game support modding so that people can add features in or change things or add new equipment and such. That way people can do "what if" things like what if I had a nuclear ICBM that I could launch from my boat in 1958. Mostly likely a python or lua interpretar will be used. Similar to the way KerbalSpaceProgam works.

Current Version & Changelog

Currently version 0. Still planning and modelling/texturing to get to the point where we can start bringing everything into Unity, using some old code, writing some new, using my vast collection of assets and go from there.