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Still a lot of work to be done till WOTA will be finished, but I am a single developer and all this stuff needs time.
From now on most WOTA Newsletters will be published (archieved) here on the website too. However the most important one "WOTA: Wolves of the Atlantic for iOS released!" ;-) won't be displayed here so don't unsub or you might miss it.
One of the hardest parts while developing WOTA is to pay the bills, because I don't earn any money while developing. Actually I am thinking to try crowd funding (indiegogo), maybe this will work and it would speed up development.
But beside this I just released another game for the iPad yesterday which hopefully will make some money. You would really help the development of WOTA by buying it or by telling others about it!
App Store link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/newtons-dice-hd/id463026107?mt=8
Mark
You will also see small vessels in the game like motor torpedo boats, so another movie which might be interesting is this one, it shows the modified buoyancy & collision system tested on (unfinished and untextured) italian MAS Boats running at full speed.
The water shader you see in the video is outdated, it was the very first OGLES2.0 test.
As I've wrote before the minimum requirement for WOTA will be a iPhone 3GS / iPod Touch 3, so it's also time to upgrade the interior of the U-Boat, which was made for older devices, the newer iOS devices can handle more polygons.
I've made a quick test of the lights & shadows for the command room, textures I've used are mostly just a test and will be replaced. The performance on the iPad 1 is just awesome smooth.
Movie of the lights & shadows (as you can see some of the gauges are already round some others still needs to be upgraded):
Next huge change is OpenGL ES 2.0! I feared performance would suffer, but I wrote a shader for the water that is still fast and looks much better now, it even the sun affects the water, this was just not possible to do with OpenGL ES 1.x. So WOTA uses Pixel Shaders now which means Ships and other objects will look much smoother and lights will be more realistic.
This is a picture of the new water taken with the iPhone camera from the iPad's screen:
Visualized sample of the Geo Data showing urban areas around the north sea, looks a lot like satellite pictures of city lights.(of course only those data close to the coast and rivers is used in the game):
Final resolution (200x200 meters, picture shows the bay of Kiel):
Berlin, 11. September 2011.
It's time for WOTA News again. Usually I'll post most news regarding the development of WOTA on the facebook page, so this mail is to keep those up to date who don't use facebook but I also added a new movie not shown on facebook yet.
First of all the game world itself was increased. The game will cover the entire planet now. When I processed the necessary geo data I've decided that it's better to do it now instead of adding the pacific later.
The game world has exactly the same resolution that SH III uses, I guess they have used the same geo data to calculate their shorelines. The resolution of the terrain is 200x200 meters, this does not sound much, but this also means there are 1.05 billion (!) data cells for the coastline! The terrain itself uses SRTM Data for the elevation, this data was collected by a Space Shuttle Mission in February 2000. Correct citiy and vegetation data are also included in the WOTA geo data set. It took over a month to process all this data from different sources to a new format that WOTA uses. More than 100GB of data had to be processed.
Visualization of the coastlines (Web Mercator Projection):
WOTA: Wolves of the Atlantic - Newsletter
Contact / Imprint:
Mark Hessburg
Chausseestr. 8
10115 Berlin
Germany