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Combat-Helo Dev Blog

Entries in this blog

Let's Make a Game - Procedual Content Creation (part 01)

About: This is a short series for the Leadwerks community on the process of creating a simple game using procedural content.   A short while ago I was approached to write a book on terrain generation using dedicated tools for a variety of game engines. There's a lot more to game content than just terrains. Josh's recent blogs on CSG got me thinking about one of my favourite games and had me itching to re-visit the genre.       This series is an exploration of topics I don't normally exerci

Flexman

Flexman

Let's Make a Game - Procedual Content Creation (part 03)

About: This is a short series for the Leadwerks community on the process of creating a simple game using procedural content.   This week we implement the map creation process discussed in part 02 then add the mesh generation and a controller to fly around our level. Then we'll have the first iteration of our procedurally generated map.   Part 01 Part 02       Starting with the Map class.   Map:Create Function...first iteration, no corridors.   Simple nested for-loop to generate a ro

Flexman

Flexman

Smoke ribbons, when emitters are too slow

Particle engines are commonly used for fire and smoke effects adding a lot of eye-candy for little effort. Every frame an emitter creates a number of billboard sprites along a vector. Normally this is not an issue when movement along this vector between frames is quite small.   But what if you're talking about something that moves really fast between frames? Such as a rocket launcher or space-ship? Fellow Brit and indy developer Cliff Harris of Gratuitous Space Battles fame ran into the same p

Flexman

Flexman

Let's Make a Game - Procedual Content Creation (part 02)

About: This is a short series for the Leadwerks community on the process of creating a simple game using procedural content.   In part 01 we looked at one theory of generating random maps in the style of old school dungeon crawlers. This week we'll put that into practice to generate map data, room geometry and mesh colliders. The easy part was adding a flying physics based camera to act as our first-person flown "spaceship".     Again I want to flag I'm not a LUA expert, this is not a LUA t

Flexman

Flexman

Saitek Instrument Panel test

Had a quick play with Saitek's DirectOutput SDK, results are mixed but not bad. The MFD resolution in Combat-Helo is a native 512x512 and the Saitek Flight Instrument Panel is VGA 320x240, there's a bit of difference.   Sampling the buffer down to a smaller surface and then adding a suitable BMP header to send over to the device. Remarkably easy. I'll have three more please Saitek   BUT please can you make an FIP version two with a 512x512 square ratio display? Or at least increase the ve

Flexman

Flexman

Combat-Helo Prologue wip Video in HD

Now available.   *edit* A few additional notes...   The controller setup page shown in this video has a number of devices listed. These are just the ones I had plugged in at the time of recording. All DirectInput controllers should be available, some will have ready to fly config files (most Saitek sticks, Logitech).       I forgot to turn on the post processing effects since I work without them (generates more heat). There is a LOT of changes going on to various sensors and the IHADSS w

Flexman

Flexman

US Army presents "Mast Bumping"

I know it's a little late for Valentines Day. Excessive flapping, bumping and separation is discussed in this priceless US Army video from 1980. If only they had "RotorCam ™". The Apache has a fixed rotor, mast bumping isn't an issue but it's all part of helicopter theory.       I've been forced to continue hunting for other employment to deal with a mounting debt crisis. As a result work was put on hold the past two weeks (hence the lack of updates). I apologise for letting my post sli

Flexman

Flexman

Stuff you thought was going to be simple but wasn't

Swimming was one.   Setting up controllers in XPlane is another.   Yes the things you thought were going to take a few days which turned into a week and a bit (you could almost say 'two weeks'). Josh at Leadwerks gave me a leg-up on how to put an MMO style launcher together and I've almost done wrapping up all the security for the necessary database, key code generation, CVS style updates and all the stuff we need to match individual content to clients. We'll make available downloadable cont

Flexman

Flexman

Mossie concept art

Just a short post since I'm busy being pulled in a dozen different directions; I got roped into helping someone create a short health and safety film, drafting a project proposal, raising finances and even managed to fix a long standing bug in Combat-Helo. Now the sensors, line of sight and all that guff is now WORKING again, Hooray. A quick background on that, an engine update needed to fix some occlusion issues slightly changed the Model hierarchy in a subtle way that changed how actual filen

Flexman

Flexman

Some more architecture

I think these have been on the SimHQ forums for a couple of days but I've been too busy to post any updates. Here AD has been adding some gardens to the Friday Mosque and adding it to the city. To overcome scale/zbuffer issues of having a large scene, AD has buried the the tiled gardens into the terrain, just like the river sections. The gardens sit on a large slab that is quite deep, this also accommodates uneven terrain.     No paved road surface currently. While Leadwerks supports

Flexman

Flexman

Building a city, Herat

Another update of map progress on the SimHQ Combat Helo forums. Showing how the City of Herat as a sprawl of densely packed compounds and commerce is being built. Using blocks of prefabs and arranged on a grid. This is a selection of my favourite.   Meant to be viewed from a low altitude, the prefabs do a good job of keeping the eye busy. Here is half a city already with parks and minarets to add. All built to be frame-rate friendly.   And a mini-game for your base, the "Hello World" of

Flexman

Flexman

Not a good sign - drive IO failiure

Another disaster strikes, PC wont boot at all. Strange thing happens on the BIOS screen, the moment any attempt to detect any drives (and I tried a few different drives that I know were fine), a bright underscore character appears under the circled comma (picture above).   So apart from my laptop I'm now without a working PC and no means to fix it atm :/   Source

Flexman

Flexman

Saitek X65 - A Tale of Two Joysticks

I've been using this for testing and making profiles for Combat-Helo since the weekend. This is a really odd stick. It's perhaps the best built joystick out of the box I've ever had the privilege of using. And quite a looker too. The textured metal feel, the metal triggers and even a couple of the HATs. Oddly this level of build isn't consistent with several hats made from what feels like a poor quality plastic. But it wasn't broken or badly assembled, and nothing has broken yet.   If you didn

Flexman

Flexman

Baked AO, ambient occlusion

Today we looked at a neat little program called SMAK which is a neat little program for generating normal maps for low poly models by using high poly models. It also can bake ambient occlusion shadows onto your diffuse textures.   This is also a feature of 3DMAX so Dave tried a little experiment.   Before, no baked AO   After, with baked AO You might want to click on those images to see the full sized renders. Certainly the cockpit area could benefit, and the buildings we have with ground

Flexman

Flexman

Dave experiments with pit lighting

The art-gnome at Combat-Helo has been playing with bloom and glow shader materials for the cockpit and came up with instrument night lighting. I thought it was a cool use of extra texture stages and materials with Leadwerks engine, it's an easy effect to add. With additional green point lights around the pit it should look pretty close to the real deal.     Here's a real shot with night lighting. Panel back-lighting and small point lights.     Source

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Flexman

Nothing serious but one reader sent in this...

From an Australian gaming mag (and those guys are tough cookies) at the bottom of a review of Take On Helicopters...     Thanks for the mention guys the picture is a bit out of date though, but what the hell.   Source

Flexman

Flexman

Environment, weather, day cycles, iPhones, everything.

It's not going to win any awards for realism but we have a rudimentary ENV environment class that handles time-of-day ticking and updating scene elements accordingly. Lighting, colouring, fog, sun position. Currently it's using computed light values which renders lovely post apocalyptic scenes, the colours are terrible IMO, looks like a nuke's gone off. A lookup table will be better and an exercise I'll leave for later. Also I added some data structures for moving weather zones around the map. T

Flexman

Flexman

Units, Events and Triggers

I'm putting together specifications on the mission side of the game. To me, the bit that you 'play' is every bit as important as the simulation side, and while it's taken a back seat for now, things are getting to the point where it's time to get on and make it all work. Going through some of my older material on this, it needs to play like Longbow 2, have the crew management elements from Gunship 2000 and strategy elements from tactical board games on guerilla warfare and a bit of a story eleme

Flexman

Flexman

Avionics and cockpit update

Quick update. Busy working on a lot of small things. We have a cockpit update coming to update MPDs, internal and external night lighting. MPDs taking to the TStores class and working towards having a number of cockpit functions up and ready for the start-up. Dave added the CP/G throttle panel too (which removes the power switch and engine startup).   Experiencing a problem with fps slowdown over time again. Mostly down to repeatedly running combat-helo, stop, edit, re-run. FPS drops to single

Flexman

Flexman

New video finally ... free flight

Finally a video showing the free flight mode we really wanted to show at Summer Sim 2010. Thanks AD for doing an amazing job of making it all look good.     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6ILqIQDaio     Sorry about the lack of blade-cam, LUA object reference problem. Will get it sorted.

Flexman

Flexman

Command Tent - wip

We're not trying to re-create Armed Assault, or even build some form of Helicopter MMO. Our plan is to take the old school 2D interfaces of military bases and create 3D analogues. Mission assignment and planning is done in the command tent. This is still exploritory, we have a number of office furniture elements planned, some of which we have tried in the editor to get a feel.   There's more furniture to come. A mil-spec laptop/terminal, interactive map on a board (that's a copy of your person

Flexman

Flexman

GEOWEPS - Gratuitous end-of-week post of screen-shots

Airbase preview at our SimHQ forum.   Gluing the airfield into place has been an interesting job, using terrain 'visibility' to cut out terrain chunks and fit it into place. Shindand airfield is used for medical and humanitarian flights, it's currently VFR only and no lighting system. We might modernise it a little for our scenario.   Most NATO flights will come and go from here. A node system for AI aircraft to follow the taxiways and tank-off/land will be added.   Multiplayer options sta

Flexman

Flexman

Another art-dev diary update

Updates to the green-zones, incremental improvements to the billboards, painting 'shadow' under vegetation. Dev-diary update at SimHQ   It's looking great considering how much detail we can't use. Currently we can't use the 2.32 engine due to lack of LOD distance control, and loading the levels with all the vegetation takes three times as long in the new version due to the extra processing required for veg culling. The detail in our production level map shows little performance difference

Flexman

Flexman

Exterior night lighting

These are placement tests for the Apache model in the editor, getting a feel for colour, levels, position, range and angle. The left nav light (red) on the Apache model needs to have the fullbright material applied to be visible in dark conditions. One pilot was telling me that the ground on the left side on the helicopter appears brighter than the right with night vision. Interestingly our night vision shader amplifies lighting levels based on final pixel colour and gives a boost to red values

Flexman

Flexman

NTS Next To Shoot aka TAB targeting

[NTS] Left Upper button. Next To Shoot is the ubiquitous video game cycle through targets. Or TAB target if you play MMOs.   I've touched upon how radar works in this blog entry from August - Radar - A Discussion   The Apache can automatically selecting priority targets based on some sort of criteria. This short blog post touches on how I've elected to do this. Again if you're familiar with the 1996 classic, Janes Longbow 2 there's nothing unfamiliar here.   The TSD (tactical situation di

Flexman

Flexman

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