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
Added some fixed internal views for 'quick' look downs and drama shots.
Wiper dash...this has a little vibration.
Pilot displays...
Over shoulder...
Pilot engine controls (startup and lighting)...CP/G similar (not pictured)
Co-pilot target panel (TEDAC)...
I think a 'foot-well' cam will come when we get a pilot model in game so we can see the crew looking around. And I think we could use an ADI/Comms panel view. Feel free to suggest a few more.
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AD made some atmospheric screen-shots when playing with lighting and environment settings. SimHQ Diary
Starting with the only major airbase in the region. AD is responsible for some Strike Fighter mod aircraft models, one of which is a Tornado GR1 (?). Which he's used here. I don't think these will be in the game unless we get permission from the original mod maker to use it. But it does look nice.
This is our early version of Camp Stone complete with a half-court basket. You wouldn't
At no point before have I felt so much under pressure as I do now. Hence the lack of blog updates. The new physics engine is still being problematic but these are issues relating to -ff-math and tracking down typos, the odd logic error and other errors that occur when programming.
In a flight model, such errors result in numbers quickly blowing up, which they do. So I'm currently tracking down each issue, one at a time until, eventually, it should just all click into place.
I finally con
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
While I'm spending hours pouring over interfacing the flight model, AD has been tinkering with billboards again, finding a blend of shadows. There's still more to do, I want a ground fog layer, multiple layers, realistic light scattering and a more dynamic LOD system which we can't do yet. AD is reducing the tree poly counts from 1,500 to 500 on the LOD1s. This should improve shadow performance a little.
Looking at shadows again, I came across a GameDev.net post that I might look into. It'
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
Compounds, the Herat map contains approx 500 of them. Each one consisted of a number of walls and out buildings. Turns out, these sub objects chewed through a bit of processing time. In effect there were 7500 objects getting worked through. That's a lot and it was reflected in the performance in LE 2.31 on a fully dressed map.
By collapsing the compound models into a single object for the lower LODs we saw a large increase in fps in LE 2.31. Although LE 2.32 shows not much difference (it's a
My Dennis Norden bit. Out-takes from today. Most programmers we have a few wilco tango foxtrot moments from time to time. Here's a few from today. Starting with "How not to render lights to a buffer."
The canopy glass makes for an interesting effect. Next, an interesting effect you REALLY don't want to see....ARRRRGHHHH....
This is me getting a transform wrong. You can almost see the join between the high detail cockpit and the Apache exterior model. Mind the gap? I did fix this by c
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
Seem to be having performance issues with the new nVidia drivers 257.21
I noticed the reported OpenGL version has done up from 3.2.0 to 3.3.0
Repeated launching over an hour will sap the frame rate to around 1, yes one. No apparent memory leakage. But other games are fine. Also the editor will remain unaffected unless importing the Apache model where it will sometimes exhibit a black skin.
So there's some combination of factors I need to understand, the current Apache model with it's re
Just wanted to report this to the blogosphere. I'm not a Wow player (I have an account but I don't play very often) but my wife friends across several raiding guilds play from time to time.
They've all been subjected to hacks. And I think the leak is at Blizzard.
Over the past few weeks, everbody we know, including friends of friends have had their accounts hacked. Including mine, which was inactive, but had an "authenticator" (a hardware device that generates a new 6 digit number
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
Periodically I'll create a debug build to see if any OpenGL errors popup and sure enough one did. Tthe MFD buffer mip-maps are created after rendering the contents with a call to buffer.GetColorBuffer().GenMipMaps()
Not much had changed except some additional meshes, animations, all the specular maps, actually quite a lot of material changes to the interior and exterior this past week. But the debug ran fine after building and running it on the laptop. My desktop wasn't having any of it.
The 3 active IR-LED head-tracker clip was never made of study stuff, constantly falling apart as soon as you put it down on the desk. Now it's finally disintegrated, I might have to resort to super-gluing the tattered remains.
Microsoft Kinect apparently shoots out hundreds of IR beams in a grid pattern and uses that to build a set of data points from which the software can pull out a skeleton, track body motion. It's a motion capture studio in a box. Brilliant, for indie game producti
Another "gravy" feature which I wouldn't have spent time on had David (part man, part 3DSMax) hadn't made it so easy. He detached the existing low res wipers from the exterior model and created a single 100 frame animation cycle of both wipers complete with slight wobble. The two blades operate at different speed ratios too.
The cockpit wiper control was set to send it's setting as a key to both the exterior and interior cockpit model. Allowing for dual speed wiper control and a park mode
Our Apache received more love today, the cockpit panel textures suffered a little from DDS compression acne. But by increasing the bits-per-pixel to 24 and using DXT1, we get better quality results using a texture half the size as a larger one using 8bpp compressed. And smaller texture memory footprint too. This only works for some textures.
Additionally specular maps were added to the cockpit, now it reacts to light in a much more dynamic way and the scratched glass blast shield and canopy
Connection time-out now resets the connection status to "disconnected"
Apache canopy glass, lighting issue fixed
GUI input controls that receive key-presses still occasionally hogging the keyboard. (fixed)
Some speed improvements to OpenGL DrawCurve function.
New GUI style as submitted by Spac3Rat in place. See Facebook image
Next week: Back to weapons and more multiplayer functions.
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The game world clock is now synced across network clients, time advance and day-night cycles locked. Accuracy is down to round-trip packet times plus a few milliseconds. More than enough to keep entity spawn times and waypoint navigation in close sync.
I'm as yet unsure how often to send clock updates, currently it's every half-second which is quite aggressive, it's easy enough to tweak. Clocks run on client and frame-rate independent so they don't need to be updated often. They just need t
Dave's been busy building the unsung hero of Afghanistan and other operations around the world.
Rolf: Can you tell what it is yet? ;-)
It's a non-flyable but will feature prominently in the game as you'll be tasked to provide armed escort for supply, insertion and extraction missions.
Much time has been spent correcting smoothing errors. Brilliant work. We'll be adding the same functionality to the rotors and rear door using LUA scripts. This morning we were looking at the various fl
Combat-Helo presents a persistent world, day-time / night-time mission capability where you can stand around your base with your thumb up your rear-end. The game's heartbeat is the day cycle clock from which all missions, AI entity start/stop times, spawn times. All operate as offsets from mission start time. This presents the issue of real-time vs game time.
To offer variety of day/night operations in a real-time game could be tedious. I want to fly a night mission, but it's noon, I can't.
We've been using the black and orange diamond logo for some time, it needed to reflect the game colour palette. As a 90's homage to sims of that era, a saturated colour scheme with the GUI elements using 90'-45' angles, black and orange. Two contrasting colours that are visible against most backgrounds.
It wasn't until after I had designed and coded a number of elements that I noticed other military games using the same colours.
Why bother with stuff like splash screens at this stage?
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
Before I code the address book, what do you think of this arrangement?
I'm trying to keep interface items as simple as possible as I hate coding fiddly bits. But these things are mandatory for modern multi-player games.
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