Torpedo Reload Drill

About

Torpedo Reload Drill is a VR simulation where you go through the procedure of loading a torpedo (on board of a "LCF" class ship) from the rack into the torpedo tube and priming it for launch. This simulation is meant to assist/replace the traditional learning procedure/course for loading a torpedo on board of the ship that the Dutch Navy provides to its service members.

Info

Duration: 1 year
Language: Blueprint
Tools: Unreal Engine 4, VR (HTC Vive)

Proces

I did not come up with the idea, nor did I create this on my own. Instead, this project was first created in Unity C# by other employees and interns and because of technical limitations, they decided that we would port over the simulation to Unreal Engine 4 and I got to do that with another intern for a beatiful year with many ups and downs.

Drone Instructor

This project is meant to be used by multiple people at the same time, whereby there is an instructor and a couple of students that can watch and listen to the instructor. In the end we chose to replace the instructor with a drone that guides you through the procedure and that will mark each step you have to take as a player in order to succesfully load a torpedo.

Systems

The first task was to create the project in Unreal Engine 4 with all the same assets and features. After having ported the simulation to Unreal Engine 4, we started working on the new features, such as vfx, information panels and the drone instructor.
I created a task system where you could add tasks and subtasks that you had to complete as a player. Each task had triggers such as audio or vfx and I used the subtasks for that to trigger them in order (synchronously). I also created the drone instructor and created an audio queue system for the voicelines of the instructor.
The fun part about this project was that we used the Advanced Framework for Unreal Engine 4, which made interacting with objects in VR (grabbing, sliding, UI interaction, etc.) much easier.

Complications

The big problem we constantly fased during development was networking. Because everything had to be synchronized and because the clients also had to replicate their interactions to the server, we fased lots of synchronization bugs and those took a lot of time. On the bright side, I learned networking in Unreal Engine 4 and a lot about networking in general.

Result

In the end we created a working simulation that was deployed and used by the Dutch Navy. It was a lot of fun to see the product being used by others and that they had fun while playing the simulation.

Contribution

During this project I contributed to porting the project from Unity to Unreal Engine 4, creating the task system and most of the tasks for the procedure, creating the drone instructor, creating most of the networking functionality and fixing a lot of bugs.