Introducing TASK FORCE ADMIRAL Vol.1: American Carrier Battles

[The_Admiral]

Well well, allow me to intrude here and add a bit to the conversation, hopefully in a constructive way. 

Well it occurred to me as I clicked on the latest dev post that this thread is exactly two years old.

As Toonces points out in his own way, good things take time. I am rather happy to say that not a single month since that day we announced the mere existence of this game went undocumented - aka, we never disappeared from the face of the Earth. You a free to check us out on Twitter and Facebook - I might have missed altogether 2 screenshot Saturdays over the course of 24 months, and these were most probably Christmas-related. We went for an open-development model and we accept the risks of it - on the other hand you'd be hard pressed to find a comparable venture in the field today. Some do it better than we do for sure (I am thinking of GHPC in particular). Some others like our friends at Sea Power just don't have time for that (each and every member in the team being a creative). Too many of other comparable teams, unfortunately, just explode in flight way before they reach the end of their journey. We pray everyday that nothing too serious happens to the members of our small family, which have all gone through their own personal ordeal, but the game has always remained there in development, alive and kicking.

We move forward, at the snail-like pace of a single-dev team, but we do - and the pics I posted above were to prove that we're past mere good looks. The selection & maneuver thing, which you can see in action in the video, are there. Might not seem like much, but these are solving decades-old problems - even more problematic ones in the age of in-game physics. To date, Task Force 1942, Fighting Steel & Ultimate Admiral Dreadnought were the only notable games in my book to allow for actual division-based maneuvers, and in the case of the two latter to display actual turn trajectory. But even then, they wouldn't allow you to pre-plan your moves in a fashion comparable to ours - something of relatively little need as command in these games is of the classic, omniscient type. On our end, we need to make sure that you can provide all the orders you need before losing contact with your units due to distance or LoS, it brought in new problems that we went on solving.  :pullhair:

Besides, none of these games elected to go with a mechanic for an actual change of front - which is, during a turn, making sure that the resulting formation will be a mirror of the original one. I can tell you, after hours debugging the thing, it is easy to understand why, especially as it matters so little during tactical fights as most combat formations are made of a columns. Still, the last thing we want is ring formations to become a cluster**** of ships crashing into each other each and every time a carrier has to turn into the wind for air ops. There's a reason absolutely zero simulation-oriented naval combat game since the 90s has allowed you to launch carrier planes in a realistic tactical setting, especially one that would require pre-launch/recovery fleet maneuvers - it's just too much bother for the hassle, it seems. We got there eventually, but it wasn't without a few buckets of sweat. We end up with a strong tactical navigation component which will certainly set us apart in term of design, but it took the better half of a couple months to get there.   

Altogether, not asking for a blank check from the community. Nobody is ever in any obligation to get hyped. I don't get hyped easily myself, so I can understand those who don't, and I can only praise further those who do. What is true too is that we will never get to the point of trying to sell you something that you wouldn't see in action first, most probably in the hands of capable people like Wolfpack, MagZ and many others who already offered to cover our stuff the day it's made available to them. By then you won't have spent a dime on us yet and you'll be able to see for yourself if we're offering the dope you were waiting for. At worst, you're in for a disappointment. At best, for a reward for all the time you waited, while expressing hopeful thoughts along the way

In the meantime, although I do acknowledge that Sir Slash probably doesn't really plan to wed our girl (not that he wouldn't be a good gentleman and make a respectable in-law) or that rocketman's body temperature probably didn't noticeably rise above normal levels when peeking at Portland swapping outfits, know that every single of these enthusiastically-worded act of kindness do mean the world to us and fuel us into keeping the whole machine go forward, day after day. I have nothing against skepticism, but the same way I won't try to convert you, just so you know, before you try to spread it further the other way around, it does help with the motivation, the mood and the hopes of the team, more than everything else. Won't be asking for your money anytime soon, but in the meantime your dopamine will be our serotonin and we can't get enough of these, so keep them coming if you can  ;)

Just my 2 cents, so as to try to convey what it means to us at the end of the day 

Cheers!

[Sir Slash]

Damn Admiral, you've deduced my plan to marry into the family and reap the benefits of your efforts. I guess I've underestimated you.  ^-^  Won't happen again. No game will ever be perfect nor should we expect one to be. But we can hope. And I don't see a reason not to at present so, carry on and get it done right.  O0

[bobarossa]

Just to be clear, I consider the images of plotting movement to be the "insides" I was talking about. Very exciting to see them.

[ArizonaTank]

Well well, allow me to intrude here and add a bit to the conversation, hopefully in a constructive way. 

Well it occurred to me as I clicked on the latest dev post that this thread is exactly two years old.

As Toonces points out in his own way, good things take time. I am rather happy to say that not a single month since that day we announced the mere existence of this game went undocumented - aka, we never disappeared from the face of the Earth. ....

Clearly this is a labor of love for you guys. Take all the time you need to make a great simulation. The gaming audience will always support a realistic simulation.

You noted ships crashing into each other... If you can manage to realistically work it in, both the Allies and Japanese had issues with collisions (the Japanese worse than the Americans), sometimes affecting the course of battle (Mogami and Mikuma at Midway for example). In "Japanese Destroyer Captain" Hara mentions the tension over maneuvering at night in formation because of the risk of collision. So somehow keeping the chance of collision in the game would be a nice touch.

[rocketman]

Indeed, take the time needed to make it just right. It already looks far above expectations, so if the simulation is close to spot on it will be an achievement to marvel about. I can wait  :dreamer:

[The_Admiral]

A little video that is showcasing something else entirely - our prototyping for our animated briefings, which will illustrate the more traditional full text orders/intel/OOB (which you shall access too, of course).

I'll just quote my original presentation and add a little comment

Although there's nothing special on the technical side of things, we tried to innovate in regard of how the information is constructed & delivered. We went through actual archives & well-known books so as to try to provide the player with a realistic level of intel contents🗺️📚📰

Doing so, we also tried to provide as much context as possible so that you don't need to be an actual WW2 PTO buff to understand the stakes. One of our inspirations were the briefings you had in Silent Hunter 4, others might see DNA from Silent Service 2 too!❤️

Arguably though, so as to provide anything useful, the player still gets to know more than his/her historical counterpart... In this case Admiral Fletcher went to war with a limited amount of info. Actually few days before the battle, he knew more about the enemy than he did about the forces available to SWPA!😅

Tulagi & Rabaul's pronunciation are still on the grill, as we wonder if it's best to have an American voice actor pronounce it as they look at first by his standards, or try to go for the actual genuine pronunciation instead - at the risk of not sounding too authentic considering the setting. We'll decide eventually. Until then, our apologies to anybody who might object to this. Besides, we are aware of other discrepancies or possible objections (Vanuatu being known as New Hebrides in English sources in 1942, or the US flag here showing bases where US forces are present instead of national "ownership" flags) and we will address that in the final product.

Old hands might see that we're trying to give the players some clues as to what to do or expect based of what happened historically - more of a more obvious venue of approach considering it is what took place (aka for instance detaching TF-44 from the main force) or some events the battle is remarkable for (that same TF-44 being bombed by AAF bombers which mistook it for Japanese ships). It's a difficult exercise to keep newcomers and veterans entertained & comfortable with the same content, I hope we'll get there eventually.

[The_Admiral]

Hi there gents,



Sorry for the hiccup, long time no see - had an issue with the boards, and it felt unsolvable despite our own JH's holy intervention, but it so happened that I also needed on my end to flush out all cookies & other stuff so as to enable my access again. Did it on one of the computer and swapped to another country, seems to be doing the trick ^^

So, what have we been doing?



We had a little interview with Tim Stone (see letter M) which covers some of the latest developments
https://tallyhocorner.com/2021/12/a2z-12/

It does contain some eye candy I'll allow myself to repost just below



Larger part of the late Fall was dedicated to AI work in order to solve a long-lasting issue with the naval simulations, that is friendly (or enemy) AI not being able to foresee trajectories when maneuvering, to the point of looking a bit ridiculous. The ancestors shouldn't be blamed, it really is hard to find a satisfying answer to the problem. Hopefully after some new thinking and a lot of sweat, our Dev JB seems to have overcome the larger difficulty. We've been making some stress tests all around to check for weaknesses, but so far so good. The ships depicted in the media below are all asked to swap stations within the Task Force on opposite sides of it - the kind of things you don't do, except for science. Fortunately, worked well-enough so far.





And here, you have a destroyer being overtaken by a carrier - again, not the sort of things that happens everyday, but when operating in close quarters (for instance as a plane guard) you gotta make sure that these situations will not break the whole system. So far so good.



Ah yeah, right, the other big news is the formation editor, which we use during the game, and when making scenarios too. It is one of four planned modes for the fleet board / maneuvering board you see on the right of the main command console. It was not easy there again, because as always human brains for these are much better than the AI or any sort of automated system, but I think the final result will allow you to reasonably make most of the formations you'd expect for the era.









We also went into GUI territory outside of the gameplay proper - here's our prototype for the single scenario menu (although our single scenarios can last a week, as you can see - so I start to wonder if I shouldn't be selling that under another name so that nobody bothers me with campaigns this or campaigns that for the time being... anyway ^^). Good news is that work progressing along the very same lines, it will look 1:1 in-game if we don't encounter any technical issue during production.



And some Pearl Harbor art to finish? Enterprise leaving port, December 9th, after her quick pit stop while Pearl Harbor is still burning in the background - by our artist Julien.



Hope you enjoyed the ride, Gentlemen. Cheers!

(PS: some new clouds too, more on these in a few weeks I guess ^^)

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

Can't wait. 

[Old TImer]

Looks utterly amazing.

[CJReich46]

Can't wait to see this.  :)

[MC]

 :clap:

[Thomm]

Some amazing footage floating around...

https://youtu.be/JPzDsUCpy-k

Best regards
Thomm

[planetbrain]

Why no updates for some time?

[JasonPratt]

I'm just glad to be caught up on the prior posts -- gosh, I was most of a year out of date!

[devoncop]

Why no updates for some time?

The screenshots look phenomenal but my concern with this project has always been about the scale of the ambition and the capacity of a small team to deliver that vision.  I hope I am proved very wrong but until we see any actual gameplay showing capable AI consider me sceptical.