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Big list of ship designer improvements


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On 10/16/2020 at 7:44 PM, disc said:

Do you mean having the turrets / barbettes be different sizes for various numbers of guns?

There's a bit more to it than that, but in essence yes.

Also, for additional components I'd like to see properly scaled components always present. For example, the German Superbattleship's superstructure and funnel aren't to the same scale, causing the models to be out of alignment. In that specific case a larger funnel is probably needed for gameplay reasons as well, since there's only room for the one funnel and even the largest one isn't enough to support the kinds of engines such a high tonnage ship requires.

A lot of other components are a similar story, where you can tell that they are supposed to fit together in a certain way, but just don't. Fixing that is a relatively low priority, but among the low priority features/fixes it is one of the higher ones, at least in terms of proportionate effort.

Edited by Friedrich
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I have maybe a slightly different take on the barbette size issue - but I absolutely think that if something like Friedrich's barbette suggestions were implemented, it would be ideal.

On 10/16/2020 at 5:53 PM, Friedrich said:

If OP is still around could you add my own suggestions regarding turrets/guns to the list? I agree with so much of this and it would be nice to have everything in one place to refer back to.

Here is my thought: If the barbettes can't be tweaked like that easily, maybe lock different weapons out of different hulls as a temporary workaround to improve historical accuracy while letting them work on new features. Here's my workaround idea:

Short term fix: Give each battleship/battlecruiser hull a suite of "unlocked" weapons to use. These won't be changing based on tech levels or anything, they are based on the rough size and era of the hull. Lock the too-big turrets out of smaller ships. Don't worry, it isn't too limiting. Here's what I have in mind:

(by the way a fix I really want to see is smaller quad guns down to 9". Because why, exactly, can we have quad 20's but quad 13" is just too much....?) 

2065983827_Screenshot2021-01-31190140.jpg.14205afa877ebab3ff0e45796648aeb7.jpg

I don't personally believe anyone ever even considered more than dual 20's, but hey, the point of this game is to imagine and have fun, so I figured at least there should be a fantasy hull where literally anything goes!

Cheers!

dbs1701

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So, I've been thinking of the ship designer for a while... 

Super structure: This has bothered me for a while, that there is no "custom" to the custom ship designer.

The Unlock button does not unlock enough.

This switch should not merely unlock hulls, but super structure for any fitting hull.

For example, lets take the Pagoda tower and the modern secondary tower, both are relatively compact structures that could, and perhaps shouldfit to any hull in the bb or bc categories with near anywhere on said hull for placement.

This would make building ships like the Izumo or Lenin easier, or even give the Americans a triple forward design far easier.

This is one of my main issues with designing in this game, is that most of the hulls have their corresponding superstructure but no other options besides that with the unlock on.

I want to build an american hull that has 5 to 7 turrets for a bb. I should not have to go to the Yamato type hull to achieve this due to lack of superstructure options and placement points.

Yeah, I get it, the limits on the ai, sure, but all we need in addition to the above is a restricted ai button toggle setting so that we can control whether the ai goes full 9 yards or not.

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On 2/12/2021 at 5:57 PM, Adm.Hawklyn said:

So, I've been thinking of the ship designer for a while... 

Super structure: This has bothered me for a while, that there is no "custom" to the custom ship designer.

The Unlock button does not unlock enough.

This switch should not merely unlock hulls, but super structure for any fitting hull.

For example, lets take the Pagoda tower and the modern secondary tower, both are relatively compact structures that could, and perhaps shouldfit to any hull in the bb or bc categories with near anywhere on said hull for placement.

This would make building ships like the Izumo or Lenin easier, or even give the Americans a triple forward design far easier.

This is one of my main issues with designing in this game, is that most of the hulls have their corresponding superstructure but no other options besides that with the unlock on.

I want to build an american hull that has 5 to 7 turrets for a bb. I should not have to go to the Yamato type hull to achieve this due to lack of superstructure options and placement points.

Yeah, I get it, the limits on the ai, sure, but all we need in addition to the above is a restricted ai button toggle setting so that we can control whether the ai goes full 9 yards or not.

I think there is even more to that. I am convinced we need to break up the superstructure into multiple parts, at the very least in two: the bridge and the mast. Otherwise it becomes far too repetitive.

 

Also: we need smaller bridges, the current ones are far too big 

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8 minutes ago, 1MajorKoenig said:

Also: we need smaller bridges, the current ones are far too big 

Even hull ‘Dreadnought 1’, the game's flagship, can’t fit its 12" side turrets when rotating them to be aligned in the forward direction!!! 

Edited by Skeksis
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Here’s what I would like to see happen:

 

(I should preface this by saying that obviously I have no idea what the code behind the game looks like, and as such it’s very possible that some of my ideas will be way, way harder to implement into the game than I assume).

 

 

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Stuff to do before the game is released (aka before the champaign is introduced):

 

 

Savable designs and better custom battle setup

 

A lot of people have already pointed out that the ability to save your ship designs is a must, and I agree. However, there is another aspect I think should go hand-in-hand with this; the ability to design multiple ships for a single battle, both yours and the enemies. There are a few different ways of doing this.

 

1) Have a ‘ship designer’ screen where you build and save ship designs, and a separate ‘custom battle’ screen where you select designs to go up against each other.

 

2) Use the current system, with a single screen where you both pick the ship types and then design them (or select them from a saved design). This method is inferior IMVHO, since it would unnecessarily complicate the process.

 

My proposed solution is to use method one. From the main menu you enter the ship design screen and select what type of ship to design, from what era and what country, and them you design that ship and save it. Then you exit back to the main menu and go to the custom battle screen, which I imagine would be similar to how it is currently, but instead of just having text that says ‘cruiser’ or whatever, it has a drop-down list of all your saved ships. And maybe if you don’t have any saved it will show options to either auto-design them or take you directly to the ship design screen.

 

Or, and this would take more work but is my preferred option, you revamp the custom battle screen entirely. Instead of just being a list of different ship types and engagement ranges and whatnot, it’s an actual battle map, and you can drag ships from a sidebar and place them on the map. This would be really, really cool, and would allow all sorts of possibilities. Especially if you could select from a few different background maps, selecting the weather, time of day, and whatnot. And of course you could keep the current system as a sort of quick-battle thing, where if you don’t want to waste time fiddling around with stuff you can just select an engagement range and it’ll do the rest for you like it does right now.

 

 

Fix ship over-displacement issues

 

This is pretty self-explanatory. Right now large ships have a tendency to be slightly overweight when compared to their historical counterparts, and I see no reason why this couldn’t be fixed with a simple tweak to some numbers.

 

 

Make “unlock all” unlock towers as well as hulls

 

Also pretty self explanatory.

 

 

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Stuff to do after the game is released (aka after the champaign is introduced):

 

 

Revamp the torpedo system

 

Right now torpedos are modeled somewhat strangely. There are a few things that I would like to point out in particular:

 

1) The torpedo launcher models don’t scale with torpedo diameter. This could be fixed by making the torpedos work similarly to the guns, where it displays a list of sizes and then once you click on one it displays a list of tube arrangements (aka single launchers, quad launchers, etc).

 

2) Historically IIRC reloading torpedos at sea was an extremely risky thing that almost never happened, and certainly not during battles. I recommend making no reloads the standard automatically-selected option, and making reloads come with massive flash-fire chances and huge mounts of extra wight, as is realistic. Except for underwater tubes, which did historically have reloading capability.

 

3) Make it so that you can’t place torpedo tubes in ridiculous places. The obvious thing to point out is that right now you can place tubes such that there is no way the torpedo would make it into the sea without slamming onto the deck first (aka placing tubes centerline or forwards-facing on large hulls), but something else to consider is the fact that IRL big ships didn’t have deck-mounted torps because they would fall so far that they would break upon hitting the water.

 

4) Add more customizability. Stuff like fuel types, ranges, and speeds being separate options to modify.

 

 

Revamp the gun turrets

 

Right now any turret of a given caliber is always the same size, regardless of the number of barrels. Making it so the turret width changed would be cool. And in addition, maybe make it so that you can sometimes place turrets on top of other turrets? That was a thing IRL after all. Additionally, make it so that we have more options in barbette placement, so long as it doesn’t impede the engine rooms or whatever.

 

I’ve seen some people go as far as to suggest having a dedicated ‘gun design’ screen, almost itself as complicated as the ship design screen, while others have suggested simply having more turret designs, possibly down to one-tenth of an inch precision. While I’m all for more calibers, perhaps that’s a bit extreme. Also perhaps consider adding smaller guns, like machine guns and whatnot, although that will probably need to wait for when/if planes and PT boats are implemented.

 

Also, add quintuple and sextuple mounts (five and six guns per turret) so we can properly make the larger Tillmans.

 

 

Revamp the armor system and add an interior component viewer/editor

 

Right now the way armor is modeled is, to my knowledge, very unrealistic, basically consisting of a box inside the hull. Having the armor be modeled inside the hull realistically, with many, many different sections, like upper belts and rudder rooms and multiple decks, and having an armor viewer to display it all in the ship designer, would be great.

 

In fact, having a way to see all of the ship’s internal systems and spaces would be quite useful, maybe even making it so you can chose how bulkheads and such are placed, or the position of the engine room? And maybe make it so that you can click on specific armor plates in that viewer and edit their thickness and slope angle? I have no idea how hard that would be to code, though.

 

 

Add customizable towers, hulls, and systems

 

I’m not even sure how you would go about implicating this, but the ability to design your own towers would be cool. Or if that’s to difficult, maybe make it so you can right click on a tower and select the number of things like gun emplacements and whatnot you want it to have? For example adding the forward secondary mount for the Iowa King-Nimitz redesign. And perhaps even make things like radar systems and rangefinders separate objects that have to be placed on the towers manually.

 

Another way of doing it would be to make the towers out of multiple parts, like base structures, bridges, conning towers, masts, rangefinders, radars, and gun emplacements/barbettes.

 

In addition, making the hulls somewhat customizable as well would be good. Stuff like changing the number of propeller shafts and rudders, or the number of internal components like engines and boilers, aircraft hangers and launch catapults, boat storage and cranes, and things like that.

 

 

Add costal defense ships, monitors, and other classes like corvettes and frigates

 

This is also pretty self-explanatory. Basically some more hull options would be nice.

 

 

Add submarines and ASW

 

And here’s one of the big ones. Submarines. And I’m not talking about intangible strategic elements. I think that actual playable subs would be really cool, although I doubt we’ll see them anytime soon because of how much work they would take to implement. Making it so a ship could go underwater on command probably wouldn’t be too hard to code, but adding all of the new hulls and equipment and AI would definitely take a while.

 

Also hand-in-hand with this is the implementation of hulls like escort destroyers and frigates, and ASW systems like depth charges.

 

 

Add aircraft and carriers

 

And here’s the second big thing. Planes have been a hot topic on these forums, but I want to actually examine how they might be implemented.

 

Firstly, I should point out that the way planes fly, maneuver, and fight is very complicated, and developing an AI for them from scratch would no doubt be ungodly complicated. Nevertheless, other games like War on the Sea have been successful at this, although I am not sure how much time those devs had to spend working on it. I would be quite surprised if it was less than a year. As such, it’s likely that the first implementation of aircraft will either be spotter planes as ship equipment similar to current radar and rangefinder systems, or strategic-level assets that never take place in spectated battles, therefore removing the need to develop 3D models and the AI to fly them.

 

However, I find it inevitable that aircraft will eventually be added in their full splendor. Probably at first as scouts, launched from capital ships. This by itself will require a lot of effort, making the planes interact with the ships realistically as they land on the water and are recovered by crane, and may take a lot of work to get right. But once that happens, it shouldn’t be too difficult to upgrade to full-scale carriers.

 

As for what those would look like, at first I imagine they would be like the ones in War on the Sea, unable to launch and recover planes while actually in a spectated battle, serving as strategic assets only. Maybe at first they would never actually be seen, just the planes from them. Nevertheless, it’s possible that eventually we may get controllable fleet carriers, and maybe designable ones too. It’s worth noting however that that would require the implementation of a whole new set of hulls and equipment, not a small task.

Edited by BillKerman123
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On 3/26/2021 at 9:06 AM, BillKerman123 said:

Savable designs and better custom battle setup...

Fix ship over-displacement issues...

Make “unlock all” unlock towers as well as hulls...

Nice to see new people saying the same things as we did in 2019.

On 3/26/2021 at 9:06 AM, BillKerman123 said:

In fact, having a way to see all of the ship’s internal systems and spaces would be quite useful, maybe even making it so you can chose how bulkheads and such are placed, or the position of the engine room? And maybe make it so that you can click on specific armor plates in that viewer and edit their thickness and slope angle? I have no idea how hard that would be to code, though.

WOWS has hitboxes and that's what you see when using armor viewer, typical of fps. But (and we don't know for sure) UAD doesn't, its damage system is most likely an RNG engine, e.g. a hit is spawned from hit rates/accuracies/dice-rolls and then damage done computed via a criss-cross of shell, armor and a dice-roll, typical of rts.

Sorry but without underlying hitboxes up front there's going to be absolutely no chance of an armor or machinery layout viewer/editor. Would be nice though. 

Edited by Skeksis
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There are some hitboxes apparently, observations show and devs acknowledged dependency of damage on actual location of hits
But these are likely the most simple possible, like literally just hull's bounding box, nothing detailed or internal. And no actual penetration simulation.

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14 hours ago, Skeksis said:

You mean shells fly as physical entities hitting other physical entities and collision detection done at every motion iteration. Nah that's impossible in real time for the total objects in play that we can observe.

Nick's description you refer too can still be derived from an RNG engine. 

Here i'll refer to "From the depths", a game also made on unity, and coded so amateurishly it can be easily compared with an alpha in terms of performance.
It can have hundreds of shells in play, with every single shell being actual physical entity, with a complex multi-part model, and own set of stats "procedurally" generated at launch (from recalculated in real time guns).
Those shells hit not a simple hitbox, but a block grid, think of minecraft or space engineers - usually from 5k-ish to 100s of thousands of blocks in one vehicle, and every single block there is it's own collision box with it's own HP and armour (and there's also some inter-block influences calculated in real time).
Hits do account for angles both of impact and of the armor, and spawn fragments when approproate, with those frags being also physical projectiles.
Besides that there's massive amounts of other realtime calculations, including true detection and aiming algorithm with multitude of various detection devices per vehicle combining their effort.
And it runs just fine.

Therefore, i can't agree that it's impossible.

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On 3/25/2021 at 4:06 PM, BillKerman1234 said:

My proposed solution is to use method one. From the main menu you enter the ship design screen and select what type of ship to design, from what era and what country, and them you design that ship and save it. Then you exit back to the main menu and go to the custom battle screen, which I imagine would be similar to how it is currently, but instead of just having text that says ‘cruiser’ or whatever, it has a drop-down list of all your saved ships. And maybe if you don’t have any saved it will show options to either auto-design them or take you directly to the ship design screen.

Or, and this would take more work but is my preferred option, you revamp the custom battle screen entirely. Instead of just being a list of different ship types and engagement ranges and whatnot, it’s an actual battle map, and you can drag ships from a sidebar and place them on the map. This would be really, really cool, and would allow all sorts of possibilities. Especially if you could select from a few different background maps, selecting the weather, time of day, and whatnot. And of course you could keep the current system as a sort of quick-battle thing, where if you don’t want to waste time fiddling around with stuff you can just select an engagement range and it’ll do the rest for you like it does right now.

I think this is more relevant to the custom mode than to the ship designer itself, but I fully agree with you.

 

On 3/25/2021 at 4:06 PM, BillKerman1234 said:

Make “unlock all” unlock towers as well as hulls

Added this to the list.

 

On 3/25/2021 at 4:06 PM, BillKerman1234 said:

1) The torpedo launcher models don’t scale with torpedo diameter. This could be fixed by making the torpedos work similarly to the guns, where it displays a list of sizes and then once you click on one it displays a list of tube arrangements (aka single launchers, quad launchers, etc).

Excellent idea. I'll add it. I have noticed the tubes don't scale right. Also, we don't have variants of tubes (though this would basically be cosmetic only). For example, the crew shelter on some Japanese launchers was very distinctive.

0*AwFV_It-JmzScWsp.png

On 3/25/2021 at 4:06 PM, BillKerman1234 said:

reloads give massive flash-fire chances

I think torpedoes in general should be a little dangerous to carry. Usually they have only splinter armor to protect them.

 

On 3/25/2021 at 4:06 PM, BillKerman1234 said:

3) Make it so that you can’t place torpedo tubes in ridiculous places. The obvious thing to point out is that right now you can place tubes such that there is no way the torpedo would make it into the sea without slamming onto the deck first (aka placing tubes centerline or forwards-facing on large hulls), but something else to consider is the fact that IRL big ships didn’t have deck-mounted torps because they would fall so far that they would break upon hitting the water.

Nice point. I agree with the first bit. You are right that early torpedoes were too weak to survive long falls, but this was mostly rectified in the interwar period... for ships, anyway.

 

On 3/25/2021 at 4:06 PM, BillKerman1234 said:

Add more customizability. Stuff like fuel types, ranges, and speeds being separate options to modify.

Already on the list!

 

On 3/25/2021 at 4:06 PM, BillKerman1234 said:

Right now the way armor is modeled is, to my knowledge, very unrealistic, basically consisting of a box inside the hull. Having the armor be modeled inside the hull realistically, with many, many different sections, like upper belts and rudder rooms and multiple decks, and having an armor viewer to display it all in the ship designer, would be great.

 

In fact, having a way to see all of the ship’s internal systems and spaces would be quite useful, maybe even making it so you can chose how bulkheads and such are placed, or the position of the engine room? And maybe make it so that you can click on specific armor plates in that viewer and edit their thickness and slope angle? I have no idea how hard that would be to code, though.

An open question on how this will be fixed.

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Having turrets be the 'built component' rather than the entire gun layout might improve AI ship building, (the issue of AI putting tiny guns on massive barbettes or visa versa). 

But it would probably require additional model work meaning fewer unique varieties of turrets, since a single turret will now have to be modeled to support several different gun configurations. That said, the most recent British turrets appear to show that it is possible to mount secondary batteries on top of turrets, which isn't far from what's being advocated. Another downside is that it might be confusing for players. 

The turret types could be based on the current barbette sizes, or even allow players to automatically create Barbetted versions of turrets with a hotkey. (E.G. holding down B whilst placing the turret gives you an elevated turret)

The ship hull in question and where on the hull the turret is being placed determines whether a given turret size can be supported, which in turn decides what diameter bore size and how many guns can be mounted. So a Scharnhorst sized turret could accommodate 3, 11 inch guns or 2 15 inch guns. 

This would also allow better allow for different gun calibers without having to model multiple unique turrets for each. 

'Reload Tech' and 'Turret rotation' tech currently found in the designer can be removed and folded into the tech level of the turret. 

_______________

Another thing: if the ship designer showed the tonnage/cost that was being allocated for each of the component types being built. For example: How many tons displacement go into the armor, how many go into the main battery, secondary battery, how many tons go into the propulsion. 

This could also be used for any potential logic for whether a ship is too top heavy in general. 




 

Edited by admiralsnackbar
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Mostly been just enjoying the game for quite a long time. But I do find a dearth of USA specifics such as flush deck destroyers, cruisers light and heavy reflecting the Barbette arrangements of the Atlanta, Baltimore, Cleaveland's. KM

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10 hours ago, KenM said:

Mostly been just enjoying the game for quite a long time. But I do find a dearth of USA specifics such as flush deck destroyers, cruisers light and heavy reflecting the Barbette arrangements of the Atlanta, Baltimore, Cleaveland's. KM

This goes back to a limited dev team making hulls on top of, you know, actually building the game lol. I and others have said that hull design needs to be offloaded via mod tools for the community. Then us ship nuts can work on those particular hulls we want, while the actual devs make and polish game mechanics. Everyone wins and they don't have to pay employees to crank out hulls. Plus, that level of community engagement and mod possibility will bring in customers from all around.

Edited by Littorio
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Would the implementation of weighting the Auto designer for certain preferences be possible? Probably not worth it, but sometimes the auto designer is inspirational. Having an option to weight the preference towards speed, or heavy guns, or heavy torpedoes, etc. to see what it spits out would be neat.

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