WOTA: Wolves of the Atlantic (upcoming U-Boat Simulation for iPhone)

12/2013 - Current visual state of the game (quality settings of iPhone 4S / iPod touch 5)



OUTDATED INFORMATION & GRAPHICS:

Image from current version (09/2012):





EVEN MORE OUTDATED INFORMATION & GRAPHICS:

I already posted this in another Forum before but I totally missed that macrumours allows developers to show their Apps

"WOTA: Wolves of the Atlantic"™ is still in development, it took already over a year of fulltime development. It will be one of the most complex games available for the iPhone and a full scale submarine simulation. Mac & PC Versions will follow.
Caution: This won't be arcade. This is made for fans of simulation games like Silent Hunter ((C) by Ubisoft, also check out their iPhone version) and other simulations.

Website: http://www.wolves-of-the-atlantic.com/


First preview footage from the upcoming submarine simulation game:

Newest video showing overcast weather & rain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2ymgGvuYMc&feature=player_embedded

This video also shows the unfinished U-Boat interiors, night scenes and more vessels:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc0lD9ydL7A&feature=related


Facebook Fanpage (first place to get news of next steps during development):
http://www.facebook.com/pages/WOTA-Wolves-of-the-Atlantic/350874354603



WOTA GOES ON TAUCHSTATION!
2010 ON YOUR IPHONE AND IPOD TOUCH

About WOTA:

•A full scale U-Boat simulation for the iPhone

•Career orientated game play (1939-1945)

•Huge game world spanning the entire Atlantic Ocean, North and Mediterranean Seas.

•Dynamic campaigns. You won't be limited to fighting battles in tiny preprogrammed missions.

•Historically accurate AI behavior based on original research

•Wolfpacks!

•Use all important german WWII U-Boats Classes

•Full walk-through U-Boat interiors

•Full iPad support

You will find more iPhone Apps including my new game (which is currently featured by Apple in 65 countries, check out it's funny trailer on youtube) on my main homepage:

http://www.hessburg.com/hessburg.com/Products.html

Screenshots:
(you better also check out the videos on my youtube channel, some show how the flying camera works and how the map navigation will work)

WOTA is still in development (and the release date is still unkown).

Just an update, I improved the ocean & graphics




Video of it taken from the iPhone 3GS (colors don't match, actually they are like on the pictures)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7Ra5MyGAhM&hd=1


3GS Screenshots:









There is also a Facebook Page of WOTA, more news usually there

LostLogik said:

I've been waiting for this but had assumed it had sunk without trace. Good to see it's still afloat, but sad to hear only limping home. Here's hoping for a fair wind. (think that's enough puns)

Click to expand...

Yes, slowly but steady on it's way to the AppStore. (tell me next weeks lotto numbers and I can dramatically increase the speed)

Anyway, to show some slow progress:
improved ocean shader - has more details now and better performance.

new vs old:

Machoo said:

I've been watching this forever. You are doing a great job and I am following it on Facebook! I can't wait to get this on my phone!!

Click to expand...

some more new screenshots taken yesterday:

Tinted periscope view:




Two new movies and more new screenshots on the (NEW designed) website:

http://www.wolves-of-the-atlantic.com

LostLogik said:

Impressive pictures. (but how much longer for the game?)

Click to expand...

really hard to say - several months

Some news about WOTA:

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 Silent Hunter 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):


Final resolution (200x200 meters, picture shows the bay of Kiel):


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:



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:



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):

Still a lot of work to be done till WOTA will be finished, but all this stuff needs time.

blueroom said:

Looks like fun, I love WW2 navel simulators. I still play BF1942

Click to expand...

This is more like Silent Hunter III for PC...
But BF1942 was a fun game, to bad I have no time to play games anymore

Announcing "WOTA: Seehund Type XXVIIb"
(A kind of special preview version of WOTA)


(Video shows the current water running on the iPhone 3GS)


"WOTA: Seehund Type XXVIIb" will be the first release of the "WOTA: Wolves of the Atlantic" series.

It's about midget submarines only, so you can think about it as a kind of reduced version of the final WOTA subsim - to increase development speed it will offer less types of enemy ships and because it's about midgets it will use a portion of the map limited to the historical area of operations and range of the Seehund.

You want to help me to finish the project(s)?: Just spread the word!

Now to answer the most important question: WHEN?

The plan is to submit it to Apple in late december 2012 / early january 2013. Which means you possibly won't see that many types of ships in the initial release of the midget subsim.

12/2013 - Current visual state of the game (quality settings of iPhone 4S / iPod touch 5)

"WOTA: Wolves of the Atlantic - Arcade Missions" …Winter 2014 for iOS


This video just shows the start menu of the first title of the WOTA submarine simulation series: "WOTA: Wolves of the Atlantic - Arcade Missions". (Graphics quality of iPod touch 5 gen., iPhone 4S, iPad2)… Well, actually I think it also shows some nice mobile 3D Graphics and I really didn't thought I could even add this PostFX… but it works

Does "Arcade Missions" mean "arcade mode"? No!
It's a realistic U-Boat simulation for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. But instead of freely navigating during the missions of a campaign the games offers a fast arcade style campaign mode to go from battle to battle without the need to use a map and with no land at all in V1.0 - hence the name "Arcade Missions". Also it does not offer "super extra realism" like the later titles will do.
Some more details after Christmas…

Release date: this winter

Please note: The Seehund sub sim will be delayed because of this title - I've changed target of development to "Arcade Missions" already in october.

Thank you!

More info about how the game play in "WOTA: AM" works http://www.wolves-of-the-atlantic.com/wotawolvesofthea.html

Current state of the game, january 2015:















From my newest Newsletter:

Progress made in 2014:

- Visually WOTA definitely reached desktop quality on mobile now.
- Implemented my custom high performant global illumination system.
- new custom physically based shaders with real time IBL (Image based lighting).
- Improved the water shader with transparency and refractions.
- Water color based on weather and lighting.
- Water shader works now for higher altitudes of the camera - up to 10,000 meters.
- New realistic underwater environment with correct visibility, crepuscular rays and caustics.
- new FX, fire, smoke, depth charge explosions, large water splashes and new ship trails.
- New dynamic clouds with correct lighting. Weather FX like thunderbolts (this all works with real time IBL).
- All new 3D model of the Type VII U-Boat „U 96“.
- Highly detailed 3D interor of the command room.
- New buoyancy and underwater physics system.
- Correct hydrodynamic simulation - matches historic Type VII test data by 90% in all situations.
- Correct simulation of the diesel engines and propulsion. (which means for you: absolutely correct acceleration and fuel consumption).
- Correct simulation of all ballast tanks (including damage) based on newest scientific research for computer controlled ballast tanks. (my head is still smoking)
- Physically correct aircraft simulation based on the blade element theory
- Aircraft AI which really flies the aircraft with a virtual joystick. (crazy stuff, would in theory even work with RC models if they are fitted with sensors)
- New skin shader for the new characters.
- School of fish implemented into my underwater environment.
- Tons of stuff and optimizations under the hood.

Learn more about the game play of the upcoming submarine simulation for Smartphones and Tables "WOTA: U 96" here http://www.wolves-of-the-atlantic.com/games/simulation/submarine/mobile/WOTA-U_96-Uboat-subsim.html

Parts of the 3D interior and the submerged U-Boat of the WOTA subsim can be seen in the new "WOTA: U-Boat Compass" app:
https://itunes.apple.com/app/wota-u-boat-compass/id956825556

I've made this app in cooperation with the Technical Museum U 995 of the German Naval Association.
It offers a fully working 3D simulation of a U-Boat Compass Repeater as used on german submarines during WWII. You can look (and zoom in/out) at it from all sides, in the background is a panorama of the command room of U 995 and by moving your device you can look around inside this spherical 360° panorama.

Nice thing is that people who buy this (awesome) compass app can see (in the "animated compass tour" under "information") how some stuff of WOTA performs on their device.

Website: http://www.wolves-of-the-atlantic.com/apps/compass/wota-uboat-compass.html

App Preview Video:

Hello, It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything new about the WOTA. I’ve wrote a newsletter and released it on the website:
https://hessburg.com/state_of_the_game/