Titanic : Honour & Glory (big demo)

There is one passenger on board, see if you can find him.

This is awesome isn't it, a very long time project by the creators but seems to be coming along nicely. The finished product should be quite something.

Like many people I have an interest/fascination with the Titanic story so its interesting to wonder about the great ship.

Is this an ocean liner sim?

Aah cheers, reminds me of one those interactive games you used to get free with a mid 90s PC.

It has been dropped - originally you were going to play a character and there was to be a narrative to take you through the voyage and the sinking, which included recreations of Harland & Wolff and Southampton as well.

As the project has continued (and gone, way, way past its original projected release date - not something I have a problem with, by the way, as this is clearly a labour of love and the pay-off will be worth it) they've realised what a huge job simply building a full, all-nooks-and-crannies digital replica of the Titanic is and have scaled back the scope.

I believe that their main goal for the initial release is simply the ship in its totality, with an educational slant so you learn about the ship and its story as you roam around. Their next ambition is a fully-realised 'real time sinking' experience, and after that comes any notion of a narrative game on top of those.

Honor & Glory is a seriously impressive piece of work, and the level of detail and commitment the team have is laudable. It's not just a case of rebuilding the ship from the published deck plans - they've had to do serious historical research into all the fixtures, fittings and furniture. The surviving plans don't by any means cover everything so some parts have had to be recreated by educated 'guesswork' from studying other H&W ships of the period, and in some cases their attempts to recreate the ship from the plans has clashed with the photographic evidence of the real thing.

They are at risk of the 'infinite coastlines' problem (that it's impossible to arrive at a conclusive figure for how long the UK's coastline is because it depends entirely to what accuracy and detail you measure it). If anyone remembers the old 1990s point-and-click adventure game 'Titanic: Adventure Out of Time', that included a perfectly serviceable recreation of the major parts of the ship, but only covered about half the actual interior space and used a lot of generic copy/paste elements and parts that were altered or simplified for technical and gameplay reasons. And that's a perfectly sensible way of building a game environment on the Titanic. Honor & Glory have committed themselves to a fully-realised digital recreation, right down to the cutlery on the tables, the coat hooks in the reception room alcoves, the deepest corners of the coal bunkers and the dusty recesses of the cupboard draws in the Second Electrician's cabin. At one point they were flogging themselves over recreating the exact wood grain in the panels of one of the rooms from contemporary photographs.

They've also hit the problem of it taking so long (10 years now) that at points they've gone back and revised their earlier work that had already been signed off, either because the state of Titanic knowledge has changed in that decade or they've improved their digital modelling capabilities.

It's great to see such care and attention in a real passion-project, and I am very much looking forward to the end result. But they do need to keep their goals realistic and realise that perfection is simply not possible.

I had a nosey around the other day, really cool. A bit uncanny valley without much sound effects. Really cool to just potter around but good god, my computer got grumpy had to turn the ray tracing off and turn a couple things down.

Update 2.0 trailer, it's all in Unreal Engine 5 now.

Demo 401 V2 is out now - https://www.titanichg.com/project-401

Plus big news of a collaboration with RMS Titanic Inc

For the latest demo they have put in a few loading screens at doors to take you from one area into the other. Perhaps it makes it run better on slower systems? Doesn't really effect the experience.

Also VR support is coming - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvEZkEwZKuU