~ THG - Kyle's November Update ~

Hi all, Kyle here:

~FLOORS~

Placement of the wing tank floors is done!

It was a tedious process, but they're all in place with their lightening and limber holes figured out. This means all the floors are now in place, so only the wing brackets are left to do. However, I can skip the brackets for now as I need to make progress elsewhere before I can get to that point.

~NEXT STEPS~

Next I will go back to the bottom plating and finalize those meshes. Doing so includes several steps:

1. Adjust the meshes so their overlapping ends are a little more precise. Doesn't need to be perfect, but it's pretty off in a few spots and the curvature needs to be adjusted in other small spots.

2. Smooth the plate meshes, which is just increasing the number of faces really.

3. Cut the "scarphing" into the plates. This is basically where there are overlaps in strakes and plate ends that require corners of these plates to be trimmed flat. This is a seemingly unimportant thing but it'll avoid plate overlaps from peeking out through areas they're not supposed to be seen. Basically, those need to be trimmed.

The actual process of all that is fairly fast and simple per plate, it's just there are a LOT of plates. I expect it'll take a ~bit~ and while I do it there won't be much visible progress as it's just working on meshes that are already placed. Once this is done, I can double check the floors and finalize them, then move on to the next steps.

Again, this is a very tedious process and I'm painfully aware of how long it's taking. I started with not only the hardest area in terms of structure (the entire lower part of the ship is no cakewalk) and curvature, but it's all interdependent on different parts, so I have to get a bunch of pieces in place and adjusted before I can move to some of the more fun stuff.

~STUDY-LEVEL MODEL~

I've seen concerns now and then about the process so far; why you're seeing the keel being built up and not B Deck, the necessity of the structural model, and more. There's a lot we can say and will when we can afford the time, and I've already said a lot on the topic in previous posts here and on Reddit.

One thing I'd like to stress now, however, is that this model is not meant purely as a video-game "set". I'm sure if some huge studio were making this ship, they're skip all this stuff I'm doing now, think it absolutely insane. They'd probably skip most of the structure, opting for a small selection of easily-repeatable assets, a limited area of the ship, and a very low standard of accuracy. You'd probably get overly wide corridors, no sheer, a lot of skipped detail, approximations of real areas, and so on.

In this case, that's not our goal. Not only is our goal the entire ship, but our goal is a model of Titanic that can hold up and serve as virtually a study-level recreation based on massive amounts of research, containing all that we've learned over the years. Wanna see how the keel and double bottom was constructed? It's there! Wanna get a grip on the ventilation system through the ship? Have at it! Piping? That all goes somewhere, and we'll probably try to figure that out as best we can (you'd be surprised what we know about the piping systems and just how much of it is visible throughout the ship). Layouts of rooms, doors, windows, the structure as it was built up, and so much more.

There are limits, of course. I'm not aiming for perfection and I'm sure there are things a few inches off here and there. And I'm sure there will be other things we'll have to compromise on in the future. That's fine. But the standard is still very high for accuracy, and frankly we wouldn't have it any other way.

~NOTE ON THE ALPHA~

Back in 2021 we set out a goal to get at minimum the Forecastle Deck done and in the engine as a playable and interactive first level and release of the THG Alpha, with successive releases going through the completion of B Deck and eventually culminating in the full ship. Sadly this did not work out the way we expected and many issues arose in doing it this way, and I don't think I need to recap here the shockwaves that sent through the project and team. The further work I did while snowballing the extent of Demo 401 further solidified the issues of the old approach and what needed to be done.

I think it's safe to say we're not starting with the Forecastle, at least not for a first release. That all-important groundwork needs to be laid first, groundwork that was never quite done, groundwork I'm laying now in the form of the structural model, the skeleton of the ship. It'll open up many possibilities that simply weren't there before, make building the ship so much easier and more concise, and provide a framework in which to fit all that work and research we've done over the last ten years.

We don't yet know what or when the first release of the Alpha will be, but I'm working to get us closer and closer to that point and will try my best to keep you all updated as much as I can. Sometimes there's more to show, sometimes less, but every step gets us closer.

~CONCLUSION~

The pace will definitely pick up as this goes along and there will certainly be more exciting things to see later on. But for the moment the "foundation" must be built, and a good foundation takes time.

All that said, I will be taking a few days to a week for myself for the holiday and other matters. Once that's done and I'm refreshed, I'll jump into the plate-finishing and hopefully get that out of the way as quickly as possible. It's so easy to suffer burnout, especially for me and especially when doing work this tedious, so breaks like this are very much a necessity, particularly at this time of year.

I appreciate your patience as I work though this, though I know patience is difficult to ask for.

Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it!