What's New

It's been a productive week. Late last week I discovered that after reworking all of the subs for the new custom drag solution ocean currents were now so strong as to make subs unable to move "upstream". That's been fixed, and the campaign now starts with a little introductory narration and an optional tutorial.

I've also worked on better error logging, to hopefully nail down an intermittent crash when starting the campaign. If you encounter a crash please reach out to me so I can iron it out.

As you can see above I've improved visuals around weapons, new explosions and the bubble trails of torpedoes and jetbullets no longer vanish as soon as the projectile detonates.

Lastly, and I think most importantly from a gameplay perspective, there is a new "cruise mode".

From the map screen, if you're in a safe area you can now enter "cruise mode" for 30x time acceleration. This will make long distance travel vastly less boring. Cruise mode automatically disengages if enemies approach, and can be cancelled by simply pressing escape and leaving the map screen.

Patch Notes

• Reduce volume of "turret movement" sound
• Reduce current water strength to a reasonable level.
• Initial pass on narrative introduction and tutorial in campaign.
• Fix for missing dialogue in campaign.
• Error logging improvements.
• Persisting bubble trails after jetbullets / torpedoes detonate.
• Better explosion effects.
• Added cruise mode from the map screen.

What's Next

The immediate next step I think is to refine the sonar and detection mechanics to make them more simulation-esque. Right now sneaking and stealth is pretty difficult, especially for evading pirates, so I'm planning on tweaking the sound propagation formula, adding towed array mechanics, and adding the option to "sneak" in cruise mode. I'm also planning on tweaking the AI so they only investigate sonar contacts above a certain strength threshold.

Following that, I plan on working on adding one or two quests to the Northburg area.