russgl

Our servers will be down for maintenance on Tuesday, March 26, between 2am and 4am Pacific time. During this outage you will not be able to log into our authentication server. Any existing game sessions will be unaffected. We apologize for any inconvenience. Russ Glaeser

Hello and thanks for the feedback. Creating a simulation is always a balancing act. On one hand, you are simulating a real-world activity which usually requires real-world training, and people don't want to pay money to sit in a virtual classroom. There are real downsides to being "too simmy". A good example is the dead man's switch on a locomotive. Some people want that, but the vast majority would think it's incredibly tedious. We aren't trying to replace, or even replicate, the type of training a diver would undergo during real certification. On the other hand, we recognize that the simulations audience can be your strongest advocates if you keep them satisfied. As I said, it's a balancing act. You may disagree with the decisions we made, but if our initial offering were a slavishly accurate recreation of dive training nobody would buy it. That's not to say we couldn't or won't add more "dive training" and strict realism in the future. I would like to point out that we do track nitrogen loading. We actually include a full VPM gas absorption model. These features aren't surfaced in V1 because we made the decision not to initially support repetetive diving. Forcing the user to do a one-hour surface interval, or even a 3 minute safety stop, doesn't sound like good gameplay, and it's virtually impossible to get the bends on a single tank of gas starting with no nitrogen loading. In the future we plan on adding more technical features like real wreck penetration, cave diving, tank swapping, deep (<200 ft) dives, saturation diving, different gas mixes, oxygen toxcicity, etc., including more of the information a real diver would learn along the way. It's all a work-in-progress. Once again, we appreciate the feedback and are working hard to make something compelling, for sim fans as well as a wider audience. Thanks, Russ Glaeser Certified diver since 2002 Development Manager Cascade Game Foundry