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Design it, Drive it : Speedboats (simulator/video game)

Todd Wasson

Todd Wasson

Jet Boat Lover
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I'm developing a high fidelity speedboat simulator for Windows PCs that lets you design and drive your own speedboats. It's just outboards for now, no jetboats, but I hope some of you might find it interesting anyway. I'm still working on it and am not sure about a release date yet.


Website (Sign up here to be notified upon release. I promise not to spam you to death.)
http://speedboatsim.com

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/designitdriveitspeedboats?ref=bookmarks

Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/405024603032224/
 
I looked on my phone but hope to get on the pc and check it out.
can drawing of some/any sort be imported?
 
Oh, and can I do dual engine?
Catamaran? Top side of the hull design?
 
very cool, dont leave us hangin
 
Thanks, guys. Glad it's interesting to a couple of you.

Speedling said:
can drawing of some/any sort be imported?
Click to expand...

Nothing can be imported, everything has to be done within the program. There's a set of 40 or so paint patterns that you can choose from, and you can set separate colors for the top, bottom, back, interior, seats, driver shirt, etc., separately. So while there's a lot of customization you can do (especially to the shape of the boat, pad/step designs, etc.), it's not so open that you can spray paint stripes or put someone's picture on it or anything like that. I gave that some thought, but it's rather complicated to do when the shape of the boat is customizable like it is.

The first release will be single engine outboard vee bottoms (no cats) with a maximum of 300 HP. The deadrise angles can be set to about whatever you want, so while flat bottoms are possible, cats are not. After the first release, there are more things that I'd like to do with it later including adding cats, inboards, and multiengine, but whether or not I can afford to do any of that will depend on sales. This is super niche and I don't expect regular PC gamers to like it all. There's no multiplayer racing or anything like that, it's more like a flight simulator where you just design the boat and drive it around various scenes with no real goals other than to have fun with your designs to see what they do, so I don't expect any support from gamers. Performance boaters seem to be the people that are the most interested, so what happens later will depend mostly on the support of communities like this one.

Top side of the hull design: There's some things you can do there. The overall shape aside from the length/draft/etc can be tuned to a degree with a couple of spline factors. The top of the bow can be curved or made to be sloping at various levels, so it's pretty tweakable there. It all affects the aerodynamics too, so the changes you make are not just for looks. It all affects performance considerably. I'll make a longer video at some point that shows the customization in full detail so you can see what you can and can't do. For the trailer I just threw in a few seconds with a limited number of things being changed to get the point across as quickly as possible. There's more to it than is shown there.

Thanks for the interest, guys. If you have more questions, fire away. :)
 
That is so cool. My dad did some amateur game design in the early 90s and I was begging him to make a speedboat simulator.
 
This looks like a pretty cool game. But I would need a trial run before dropping $25 on a game I have no idea if I will enjoy or not. Do you have anything like that?
 
There's no demo, sorry.
 
@Todd Wasson, I wonder if you would want to have @Volffas review your software. Our members having a better understanding of your software might bring more business for you.
 
Todd Wasson said:
There's no demo, sorry.
Click to expand...

No big deal, there probably isn't a demo for most games out there, just thought I would ask.

As Bruce said, if you need someone to review, I could do that.
 
Thanks for the review offer. I'll consider it. There's a YouTuber right now doing a play-along, video should come up in the next couple of days, hopefully. I don't think he's a boater though so he might not appreciate the physics/dynamics as much as boaters do, he might just have a passing interest in fast boats generally. We'll see.

Demo: This is something I've thought about, but these days it's not as necessary as it used to be and may actually be harmful. Just imagine a typical gamer experiencing chine walk. A boater will think that's amazing and rejoice at a sim that finally does that, but a gamer will think the physics engine is broken or something. Nope, that's how real boats are too, but they don't know that.

My first PC game was Virtual RC Racing (released 2004), then VRC Pro (six or seven years later, I think). Back then a demo helped a lot, but in this day and age with YouTube and so forth, people can learn about everything they want to know ahead of time so it's not as critical as it used to be. (Downloads aren't free either, once I hit my monthly bandwidth limit it'd be almost $1 per download). Some evidence suggests that these days a demo is just as likely to hurt sales as it is to help it. In my product at the moment there's not a lot to do yet other than tinker with boat designs and drive them around, so it's tough to figure out what to restrict that still leaves people with something to buy in the end.

I thought long and hard about all this but in the end decided against doing a demo. Demo is like another project unto itself anyway, it's quite a lot of work to deal with which just takes time away from improving the product. So while I don't see doing a demo any time soon, I'll be making more videos that hopefully show it off a bit more at least so people can be more sure about what they're buying.
 
Three minutes on the Oculus Rift:

 
Added support for twin and triple outboard setups today. Here's a new trailer showing that off:

 
Jet boats have a host of characteristics that other boats don't. Thank God that they don't exhibit chine walk. You may want to get a demo ride with @Volffas or someone if your developing these games for realism. Because the jet boat ain't your granddads open bow! Many of our members come from varied backgrounds and nautical experience. But a game with jet boat characteristics would be not only fun but a good teaching aid.
 
Thanks, Mel. Jet boats are something that get quite a bit of requests, especially the jet sprints. They're a different animal, but the physics should sort themselves out to a large extent just because this is all solved with fluid dynamics on the mesh. I.e., I don't program the boats to chine walk or blow over, they just do it as a natural progression of the physics simulation. If I get a chance to do jets, I'll remember to come back here and ask questions. :)
 
New trailer with hull water spray added.

 
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