harry

IL2CPP is the first that comes to mind. Second would be better realtime lighting model.

Any plans for the devs to move to the new unity version? Should get better framerates and some nice options for lighting...

edward - looks really cool, ive been trying to get used to modeling ships as well. we should talk on skype if you have it. ive made a lot of observations about the NA models. The first thing i will note is that their masts use a lot of standardised assets with minor tweaks. probably to save texture memory at runtime. Another thing i am about 90% sure of is the NA models are produced in a way similar to that which we usually associate with environments. That is, they use "universal" tiling textures for their planking, possibly with shaders to depict colour changes, and overlay ambient occlusion as a lightmap much in the way youll see on buildings or whatever in games. Of course i havent seen their files so i cant be sure but as a fairly experienced game artist i feel fairly confident in my judgement. the reason they do this would be again to save texture memory (smaller tiling texture uses less ram than a bigger "unique' one to achieve the same texel density) and so that the gunwales etc can look high res when you are aiming and generally the ship can be quite high res even up close. What you have atm looks awesome but in the aiming view would look a lot lower res than a vanilla NA ship. The only thing making me doubtful about my theory on how they texture their ships is that they havent used the lightmaps as an opportunity to incorporate large areas of discoloration or wear.

well, prepare to see _69 and .net and stuff in peoples ship names then, i suppose. That's something we could do as a community effort. I have made this document edit-able by anyone and already have 300+ names i lifted from wiki https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1a4wWJJt5mwo7u0ELrQipu9E2U4kQhBdPS6uvwZsqC2I/edit?usp=sharing Who said anyone's gonna have to wait? If you want some specific name and it's taken, you can learn to love another one. This adds actual meaning to the name of a ship, there is only one named this way and theres no Papillon, paPiLLon, 420_Papillon, etc. What is really added to the game by allowing unrestricted ship names? I would love to see ship names stay exactly as they are when they are captured, so you can see how many crews it has passed through and follow a real story of the ship. I also dont wanna be stuck with a name like darthvader_666.

i'd argue that names mean something because they are part of a players reputation and identity. It would be a simple way to add a layer of infamy to the game, espescially if there was a deterrant against re-naming ships. then you would see things like in reality of legendary ships being captured and changing hands but still known by the same name. I think if it's just open slather we will end up with "Victory" then ViCToRY" then "VICTORY_89" etc etc. Everyone trying to have the "cool" names. I say getting a "cool" name should be something you work for. If you want that name capture the ship. or sink it and re-register the name. I would make the comparisin of the blogging website tumblr.com - in this, catchy single-word URLs are coveted. People "hoard" them and offer to sell them. People wait til the user deactivates their account and snatches the alias as soon as they can. People become famous for their URLs and there is a level of game to that. It would be a great gameplay addition to be able to say "The Acheron" and people know you're referring to a specific ship rather than however many people decided to take that name. The ship would become your identity, a legend, a coveted treasure. It would add a lot of weight and meaning to names, i think. -------------- BUT the original topic of the thread was more about... If you see a ship to buy or whatever, it should be called by its class or rate or how many guns it has. It's silly to think "yeah im gonna buy an HMS surprise" when theres no reason to assume its gonna be in british service, or named the surprise at all.

what if there was a huge register of 1000s of ship names. Some "less cool" names would be allowed to be used up 3-4 times but the "cool" ones there could only be one ship named that way?

In the final game will the names of the ships be genericised? for example lynx being named a schooner, frigates named for their "rating" or number of gun ports etc... It feels a little immersion breaking to have like multiple "HMS surprise" in one battle already.