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Animated Simulation Lets You Watch the Titanic Sink In Real Time (huffingtonpost.com)

An anonymous reader writes: You can watch the Titanic sink in real time thanks to an animated simulation created with Unreal Engine 4 to promote the upcoming game "Titanic: Honor and Glory." The HuffingtonPost writes, "This simulation includes the iceberg strike, the ship coasting to a halt in the North Atlantic about 20 minutes later, lifeboats lowered into the water and even scenes of flooding in the interior corridors." The animation will even give you a play-by-play of what was happening aboard the ship at specific times. What some may find especially eerie about the simulation is the lack of people. Some 1,500 people died when the Titanic sunk, but the simulation shows no people. You can watch the video here.

18 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Well by U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M · · Score: 5, Funny

    What some may find especially eerie about the simulation is the lack of people. Some 1,500 people died when the Titanic sunk, but the simulation shows no people.

    This seems a little Unreal to me.

  2. I prefer it with people... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    At least I can watch Leonardo DiCaprio's character die. That has to count for something.

    1. Re:I prefer it with people... by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 2

      True; I can't believe I'm "defending" him, but his acting has gotten way better over the years.

      * Aviator
      * Blood Diamond
      * Django Unchained
      * The Great Gatsby
      * Inception
      * What's Eating Gilbert Grape

    2. Re:I prefer it with people... by Hognoxious · · Score: 2

      The James Cameron version is better for two reasons: Kate's left one and Kate's right one.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    3. Re: I prefer it with people... by stealth_finger · · Score: 2

      Yes a nerd version would have been jack and his hand. And it would have the nerd satisfying appeal that they'd both die at the end.

      Yeah, but a version filled with nerds probably would've fixed the ship and been on their way within an hour. Or at least had everyone think, this ship is slowly sinking and there aren't enough lifeboats, maybe I'd better go find something that floats.

      --
      Wanna buy a shirt?
      https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
    4. Re:I prefer it with people... by 110010001000 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Nothing says family movie like watching 1,200 people drown!

    5. Re:I prefer it with people... by tlhIngan · · Score: 2

      Have to admit the Jack/Rose plot kinda ruined the movie in my opinion. But I think James Cameron & his crew did a pretty good job with the SFX on that one. Appeared pretty realistic especially on the big screen. Certainly better visuals than A Night to Remember, although that was a better movie

      Actually, Cameron has admitted now that he knows more about the Titanic (as part of the 100th anniversary a few years ago) he seriously screwed up the sinking effects. Of course, given the movie was filmed nearly 15 years prior, I suppose it was excusable (Titanic came out in 1999 I believe). In one of those documentaries, Cameron wishes he could re-do that part of his movie now that he knows more.

  3. Honor and glory? by kuzb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm sorry, but there was little of either in that disaster. It sounds like they're trying to make it out like some kind of heroic war story instead of the unmitigated disaster that it was. The only upside is that many of the people who were killed were among the wealthiest elite of the time, and that it lead to improved safety regulations as a result of who died. I don't understand why they keep trying to put some kind of heroic spin on something that was a combination of gross incompetence and insufficient safety precautions.

    It's well known that corners were cut when building the titanic - particularly with the rivets which metallurgical analysis confirmed were cheaply made and weak due to large amounts of iron slag in the composition of the metal. The crew was operating at night in a stretch of water that was well known to contain icebergs and had claimed a recorded 20 ships already. Essentially they were operating blind. Lookouts failed to spot it, either due to environmental conditions, pure laziness, or overconfidence in the ship design - we may never really know.

    --
    BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
    1. Re:Honor and glory? by rmdingler · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It sounds like they're trying to make it out like some kind of heroic war story instead of the unmitigated disaster that it was.

      We romanticize the past, of course, because the present is so often unremarkable, but we have such high hopes for the future.

      --
      Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

      Ernest Hemingway

    2. Re:Honor and glory? by s.petry · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The only upside is that many of the people who were killed were among the wealthiest elite of the time

      Why the fuck is that an upside?

      There is an argument to be made that if the wealthy had not died safety regulations would not have been enacted and enhanced. If it's only "those" people that died it's easy to overlook.

      --

      -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

    3. Re:Honor and glory? by Catmeat · · Score: 2

      >It's well known that corners were cut when building the titanic - particularly with the rivets which metallurgical analysis confirmed were cheaply made and weak due to large amounts of iron slag in the composition of the metal. The crew was operating at night in a stretch of water that was well known to contain icebergs and had claimed a recorded 20 ships already. Essentially they were operating blind. Lookouts failed to spot it, either due to environmental conditions, pure laziness, or overconfidence in the ship design - we may never really know.

      The Titanic's sister ship, the Olympic differed in detail, but was essentially a clone. The Olympic served on the North Atlantic run for two decades and was only retired in 1935. She gained the nickname "Old Reliable". - Picture of the two together

      This suggests that whatever people now say about the design, construction, or the metallurgy of the iron, by the standards of the time, the fundamental design of Titanic was sound and the construction was perfectly fine. She was sunk by a crap-load of bad luck and four compartments being breached - a set of circumstances the designers hadn't envisaged.

      BTW - "A set of circumstances the designers hadn't envisaged" seems to me what often happens when an airliner crashes. So we really shouldn't be feeling too superior about this.

    4. Re:Honor and glory? by Jupix · · Score: 2

      Indeed. I'm not a naval historian but I believe Titanic sunk because of multiple factors, not just one or two.

      • Titanic was cruising too fast for the conditions.
      • There were more bergs than usual.
      • The sea was too calm to spot the berg before it was too late.
      • Titanic's rudder was too small to turn the ship in time.
      • Titanic's middle prop (driven by a steam turbine, not reciprocating engines) could not be reversed, which combined with the reversed outer props caused bad turbulence for the rudder, causing the ship to turn even slower.
      • The berg only barely punctured the fifth compartment, which eventually caused the ship to founder. Had it only been four compartments, the ship would've survived.

      And, the sinking became a legendary naval disaster because of many more factors.

      • Not enough lifeboats for everyone, which was entirely normal at the time.
      • Women and children only policy, which caused half-filled lifeboats to leave the ship.
      • Radio not being listened at all times while at sea, which caused the nearest ship to not hear Titanic's pleas for help. (The lights mentioned in the animation.)
      • Emergency signal rockets not being respected, which caused the same.

      There was a third Olympic-class vessel, called the Britannic, that sailed into a mine during WW1 and sunk. Because of favorable circumstances, only 30 people out of over 1000 on board were lost. Ships sink. What we have to do as a civilization is to do our best so that sinkings don't become disasters. The Titanic disaster prompted many actions toward that goal, which helped with Britannic also. And we are constantly improving and reminded about these things by events such as the sinking of the Costa Concordia.

    5. Re:Honor and glory? by Penguinisto · · Score: 2

      So in other words you have no rebuttal at all but felt affronted enough to howl in response. Got it.

      Here, let me help you out a bit:

      The motivation as to why it was built (to make $$$$$$ off the emigrant trade), and the very money-grubbing publicity surrounding that was impossible to miss. Now, in order to attract those dollars (and basically operate as a bulk people-mover), the steerage accommodations were actually far better than anything (steerage-wise) up to that time. The ship and its sisters were hyped rather excessively... and the first of the series (RMS Olympic) had already been in operation for awhile.

      The hype for Titanic (and White Star Line) was ratcheted up further after a couple of spectacular (but non-fatal) accidents that occurred on Olympic, and the opulence was ratcheted up because reviews of the Olympic said that (paraphrased) the ship was rather nice, but rather blah... so they really went to town on Titanic to attract the wealthy in order to get even more hype. All that said, White Star knew full well that their majority source of income wouldn't come from the moneyed, but from the horde of emigrants down in steerage.

      As a result? By the time it launched, it was billed as the biggest (it was), best (it was), and safest (well sort of) ship afloat.

      So yeah, when it sank, naturally the public was thrilled, fascinated, and appalled all at once. Sure, a few big names bit the big one (Mr. Astor and Maj. Archibald Butt, among a few others), but the really big outcry came from the sheer numbers: lifeboat space for only half (at best), pushing full-speed in water full of icebergs that were known to eat ships alive at that time of year, and oh yeah - yellow journalism that (much like today's media) just loved a good, hard drama. Read the papers of the time - the editorials focused mostly on the safety issues for the emigrant trade, and excoriated White Star Lines (and specifically JP Morgan + J. Bruce Ismay) for their "criminal" negligence - doubly so for their little policy of forcing steerage passengers to wait for everyone else to get in a lifeboat first.

      As further supporting evidence, the dead nobs were mostly portrayed as heroes, but not much outcry was caused by their specific deaths (at least outside of their families). The closest that their class caused in outcry was strictly moral in nature - specifically concerning Mr. Guggenheim's 18-year-old pregnant mistress (who was among the survivors).

      Finally, note that both inquiries (US Congress and UK Board of Maritime Trade) never focused on the richies as their motivation or their source of outcry. Now whether that was for show or not is debatable, but facts are facts, and 100+ years on (and only one living survivor left - she was an infant at the time), that's all we have to work with.

      TL; DR: The rich corpses were mere icing on what became a very big and very dramatic cake.

      Now, if you have a rebuttal that proves your particular argument that dead money was the primary motivator, cool - let's see if you can grow up this time and articulate it.

      --
      Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
  4. Building a better future for VR by Dashiva+Dan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I imagine in a year or so content creators will start producing VR "Experiences" like this, where a couple of thousand people from all over can spend a few hours/days in VR being "one of the passengers/staff on the Titanic" and have it run as an event, where you're actually in the middle of it.
    And from there the possibilities are endless - The moon landing? JFK's assassination (or whoever's version of it) - Sure there'll be tons of fictional worlds and experiences, but a big part of it will be recreating historical experiences for both entertainment and education.
    The old "simulation" games like Rome: Total war or even Assassins creed (and Civ, of course) will have a whole new level of immersion to work with. Gonna be exciting.

    --
    "lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
  5. Re: The movie was wrong about it breaking in half? by ACDChook · · Score: 2

    I believe the current idea is that the upper decks tore apart, but the bow and stern remained connected by the keel. It was only during the descent that the twisting between the two halves finally tore the much stronger keel apart fully.

  6. Re:Far more people died in WW I and II by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In case you missed it, we've paid a bit of attention to WW2 as well over the years. Also, funny you mention the atomic bombs, since those were relatively minor killers compared to firebombings and other deaths in that war from far more mundane sources. Now why would you specifically mention those?

    It's because, like it or not, you've just aptly demonstrated that the circumstances surrounding deaths are as important or even more important than the numbers. It's not logical, but damned if humans have ever been logical. I'd presume that some of the reaction to Titanic was the fact that this ship represented one of the biggest, most visible technological achievement of humankind, so to have her sink on her maiden voyage was a bit of a shock to the psyche of the average citizen.

    But really, more to the point, Titanic is a compelling story, in the same vein of classic Shakespearean tragedies. Man's hubris challenges God/nature ("God himself could not sink this ship"), and after a perfect storm of events and mistakes, man is proven to be quite fallible, with tragic consequences for the innocent souls on board. There are many individual stories as well. The stoic, grim professionalism that saw the ship's orchestra continue to play when their own doom was at hand. The gentleman and his manservant who adorned their tuxedos, declaring that they would "meet their end as gentleman." The woman who refused to be evacuated without her husband, and insisted her maid take her own place in the lifeboat.

    How could these stories not capture the hearts of people?

    --
    Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
  7. Hmmmm by BigBadBus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Some Titanic enthusiasts are already pointing out errors, such as the rate of list and the time scale of the flooding; I can't speak for this having not seen the video but my analysis of how the ship sank is here. Personally I have doubts as one person who worked on the project is a known plagiarist and one of the authors is a cherry picker of data (he insists that the ship had a massive list to port when she went under but only one of the three survivors who was on the Titanic till the last mentioned it, and his evidence is suspect, like claiming he was in freezing cold water for hours without any ill effect whatsoever). BTW, my own Titanic stuff is on this page.

  8. Re:The Titanic was another shining example by Penguinisto · · Score: 2

    Of what happens when you leave safety up to the private sector.

    Funny thing - this ship was fully compliant with government regulations at the time, including the specific rule governing the number of lifeboats it was required to carry.

    --
    Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?