Steam Workshop?

[K^]

I've tested the game for not too long, but long enough to enjoy the concept and the potential it has. However. I do miss more "maps" or lakes to drive on. Plus the option to create not only speed boat hulls, but maybe more like daycruisers and so on too :)

Would it be an idea to create a steam workshop page like many other games has where users can create and share their own maps, boat designs and so on? I'm sure that with more and easily available content a lot more people will find the price to be more fair and more value :)
And to not forget, make the development easier for yourself at the same time as more content will be created by the community? :)

[Todd W]

I'd love it if people could create their own maps using Unity and World Composer/Terrain Composer and share them on the workshop. I don't take much pleasure in creating them myself and I'm not very good at it anyway. It'd be better if I was spending my time on the program itself (I'd rather be coding anyway), so would love it if the community took over that part. Unfortunately right now the simulator doesn't have any way to import maps, so that isn't possible yet.

More boat types: This is a little different from other games like flight simulators and so on where to a create a new vehicle type somebody just needs to create a 3D model and a physics file that the simulator imports. In Design it, Drive it : Speedboats it's not that simple because that part (on some level anyway) is built directly into the program through the design aspect of it all. The physics are run directly on the boat mesh, so there are some poly count restrictions, some parts of the mesh have to be ignored or treated differently, etc.. There are special things going on there that users wouldn't be able to do themselves with 3D software. So players at best would be limited to sharing the boat files that are created by DIDI.

To do a different boat type like day cruisers or cats or something, a new hull mesh constructor has be to be coded into the simulator and tied into the user interface (among other things) which isn't something that could ever be done by players directly. So each new boat type unfortunately has to be hand written by me which is a long process. After that people of course could share their designs of that new boat type that are created in the sim, but I have to write the framework for that new boat type first. The whole idea was to let users design their own boats directly in the sim, after all.

I haven't looked into how the workshop works or how to set it up, but will take a look when I get a chance. Maybe people could at least share their boat files for whatever DIDI allows you to design internally there? Each boat is just one tiny little file comprised of the specs chosen in the simulator and was done this way so the files could easily be shared by players and were super fast downloads. It's just one 2KB or so file per boat containing the specs, drop them into the "Boats" folder and they'll show up. Nice and simple. What's lacking right now is some way to actually share them. All that people would need to be able to do is post a tiny boat file and maybe a screenshot and description to go with it so folks know what they're downloading. Maybe Steam Workshop would be the perfect way to do that? I haven't used it so don't know. Feel free to fill me in if you know something about that. :)

The next thing I want to do is add a tunnel boat mesh constructor. A friend is possibly going to take a look at the shader code and see if something can be done about the appearance of the boats to hopefully make them look nicer. After that I'll see how sales are and decide where to go next with it. It's pretty bad right now, but if things pick up enough with the addition of tunnel boats to live on it, I'd like to add more types of boats at least. Maybe take a look at changing the program so maps created with the free version of Unity could be imported. I have no idea if that would even be possible, but it's something that would be good to have if there are enough folks out there that will actually create useable maps to share.

I'm not making any promises here other than doing my best to make tunnel boats work, but I'll at least keep these things in mind, ok? :)

[K^]

Thank you for the extremely good reply! :)

Yes, with steam workshop players will be able to upload their work(maps, boats, textures and so on) just like you described with screenshots and so on.
Im no coding expert, but i guess adding a "Import" button in the map menu wouldnt be too dificult? And then people can import the maps created by others from the steam workshop?
I know that there are tons and tons of extremely talented people on the steam network that would love to create more maps and open worlds to any game and Im sure they would be thrilled to be able to easily import it into the game and play it and share it with the rest of us :)

Catamaran boats would indeed be an awesome adition to the game. Of course if it can be done at all.
If I may ask, what is the reason for the polycount restrictions? Hardware?

Im very sure that the sales would go up a fair bit if you had a steam workshop with tons of community created maps and boat models for players to choose from at the click of a few buttons after installing the game ;)
At least thats what has made me and many of my friends buy a lot of games in the past.

Keep up the good work! I absolutely love physics based games/sims like this and cant wait to see what you come up with for it in the future!

[Todd W]

Thanks for the support and kind words. :)

Adding an "import map" button is the easy part. The hard part is writing the system behind that button to actually import and use the map. So it's a little more complicated than it might seem, but I'll take a look to see if it might be possible at some point. There was some other discussion here about that too a couple weeks ago when it launched on Steam, so it's been suggested before. The most likely scenario might be that people would have to use Unity to create maps (I use Unity + World Composer which imports satellite data directly), doing it with 3D software like Max probably would never be an option. I agree it'd probably help sales, although what worries me is that the screenshots section right now is mostly filled with silly stuff like sunken boats and absurd designs that I'm not so sure are really helping things. If people are just making goofy maps and nothing that makes the sim look good, it probably won't help. Oh well, at least people are playing and having fun with it.

One concern is there aren't very many people playing yet (this is a boat sim after all, not something millions of people dream about playing), and the percentage of people that could actually make their own quality maps is very low, so just having the feature there won't necessarily mean anyone's going to do anything with it. When you have hundreds of thousands of players, the chances of a few people showing up to make maps is pretty good, but this is growing so slowly that the odds of anyone making maps any time soon is probably not good. Someone else posted the same map importing idea in another discussion, but when I asked the people in that thread if any of them would actually make maps themselves, the crowd fell silent. So people want other people to make maps, the only problem is there isn't anyone around to actually make the maps! So things might need to get a lot busier for that to really work out anyway. It's all a numbers game really.

Low poly requirements: The problem is physics. There's a series of equations that runs on (almost) every triangle of the boat separately (rather than a generalized model for the whole boat like games normally do). So the amount of physics CPU work per boat scales with the number of triangles. With just a few hundred triangles in the boats there are thousands of forces computed a hundred times per second for each boat. That takes the CPU a long time to do compared to the average physics simulation, so this isn't like most other games/sims where somebody can make a million poly model, drop it in and be off and running. Once you hit a couple thousand triangles in a boat, the frame rate will drop to almost nothing and the sim will be unplayable. Hundreds of thousands or millions of polys in a model is out of the question unfortunately. That's a large part of the reason why the boat graphics aren't very sexy looking, the boats have to be very low poly. It's also why the physics are so good, I talked to a US Naval engineer and he said this was working pretty much the same way their simulations they used to design real warships back in his day did.

So there's a tradeoff between physics and graphics here because of the way the physics works, and DIDI leans heavily toward the physics side of the spectrum because I'm a simulation nut. :P

What I really wanted to do was have all the physics computations done on the graphics card which in theory greatly expands the possibilities, but unfortunately there is a huge overhead in reading any data back from the graphics cards right now which makes this not really a possibility at the moment. Maybe some day when graphics cards can send information back to the CPU side much more quickly it'll become possible to have much higher poly counts on the physics side. That would be a quantum leap forward, but we'll just have to wait for the hardware to continue to improve.

With the new system I'm designing for the tunnel boats, I'm trying to do things in a way where the graphics mesh can be generated separately from the physics mesh using the same data. This way the invisible physics part could be low poly like we have now, but the graphics side would be separate and could potentially have the poly counts cranked up a lot so the boats look nicer. It still wouldn't be anything close to AAA quality, but it might be noticeably better anyway. Not sure if I can actually pull it off, but if successful, the tunnel boats might look nicer than the vee bottoms that we have now. This boat meshing has to be done in the simulator though, so again that throws out the possibility of users ever adding their own meshes with 3D software. There are other reasons but that one alone is enough to kill the whole idea.

The idea all along has been to have this all built in to the simulator like it is on the vee bottoms now so everyone can make their own boats very easily and it's not just limited to the folks that can use 3D modelling software. I think it works pretty well on the vee bottoms, now it just needs to be expanded into other boat types to get us some more variety. At this stage I think that'll help sales more than adding maps, so that's where the focus will be for awhile.

In the meantime, if you're having fun with it and think it's cool, tell your friends. Word of mouth helps. :)

[K^]

Very informative and explaining reply yet again.

I completely get everything you are saying and agree that this is the best way(physics over graphics).

Regarding the steam workshop idea. When people add stuff there, nothing is automatically downloaded to other users games. Its basicly like the good old FileFront websites where people upload mods and so on. Of course you will always have people uploading goofy stuff. But every once in a while a real gem turns up and people can rate everything so that just the top rated stuff are of interest and I think I myself would probably give it a shot at creating a map once I get some spare time.
I love the idea of creating a huge almost infinite straight lake to test the absolute top speeds of different designs. Also I like to create beautiful and stunning landscapes, so I would probably give it a go. Maybe create replicas of real life courses.

Is it possible to add waves to the game? Would be really cool to create a offshore boat race course out in the ocean with huge waves and so on.

I have no experience with Unity, but I will download and see what I can come up with(if I get the hang of it)

[Todd W]

If you grab the free version of Unity, check out the Unity Asset Store for World Composer and Terrain Composer. I used those two together with Unity Pro to create the terrains. They're not free, so don't go buying them before you can actually use them for this purpose, I just wanted to point you to the tools so you can see what is used.

Basically the way it works is World Composer is used to download satellite data which generates textures and height maps for the terrain. Since it's basically radar data, the water areas end up flat, so in Unity I go in and dig out the waterways and clean up the shorelines. After that I use Terrain Composer or Unity's built in stuff to add trees/bushes/houses and so on.

Come to think of it, I'll need check to see if there might be licensing issues with Unity free when used this way. I suppose if the maps people would make are free add-ons it might not be a problem, but I'll need to look into that when/if the time comes. Keep in mind I still don't really know if this will all be possible.

Waves: This one at best is a "maybe someday" but it won't be anytime soon, if ever. I also have serious concerns for VR users on that end. Big offshore racing in VR might induce the worst kind of motion sickness possible.