Looking at the pieces we have and project roadmap. Our game, like football (soccer for American readers), is a game of two halves. Side A and Side B. One campaign is the thinking man's approach; counter insurgency. The other game is the more familiar tank spanker; survival in a high-tech hostile environment against well armed self-sufficient mechanised infantry with air-defence units.
Compounds are anchor points of the campaigns, in groups they form the villages, strategic points you're tas
Still working on the loadout system, as it happens I totally forgot to do the pylon classes. While I'm working on polymorphic classes to deal with that (lot of cases to think about). During lunch I played with some more dust effects, this time for rotor downwash. This uses the roaddust pixel shader so it picks up the colour of the terrain it's currently over.
With no wind vector applied, brown-outs, where the crew can't see outside are occurring. Not sure why the canopy isn't blending
Some pics of the day.
Battlezoneesque - eerie (debug stuff)
Shadow puppet time.
Planning terminals awaiting attention
This is how I start every day
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Starting to feel the pressure now. Both the financial and stress factors are weighing in. Doesn't stop me working but it's hard to switch off. On the business side there's a ton of things on the to-do list, it all eats time taken from production.
Spooky, ok so the lip light isn't actually on his mic.
If it was you wouldn't see this.
Boeing sent me a poster back in 2002, this is a homage to that.
This time with the rear seat.
Taking out bad guys without damaging the good guys is a challen
Dave who is the artist on Combat-Helo is currently in the process of evacuating his home in Thailand as the floods in Bangkok have made living difficult. With no fresh drinking water for days, no supplies in the shops and place of work closed, services breaking down it's time to jump ship.
Blue indicates server flooding (clearly) Red=flood defence
BBC carries the story here
Dave's last act before evacuating was uploading the latest Chinook work to our server alas there was
Last week I identified one issue relating to UserEntityData introduced with the last engine update which prevents consistent update of Enity data due to some change in the hierarchy and no documentation on what was changed.
So I'm faced with having to re-factor (meaning to changing code but same behaviour) core sensor code. It's the sort of thing that is utterly frustrating and makes one want to throw everything out of the window. It's not as if there aren't enough things to do.
There's
Monday was one of those email days.
Future Tech
As director I'm looking beyond Combat-Helo, the future of the game and where we want to make improvements. One major improvement I'd like to see is the terrain rendering part of the engine. Make it more flexible, scalable and efficient. We've been looking at different engines and technologies, none of them are suited for flight-simulation out of the box. As much as we'd like to license those for use in a future commercial project they are e
I like the idea of having a GunCam view. However it means increasing the texture detail on cannon as it really wasn't meant for up close viewing.
Heh, I have you in my sights.
Trying alternative offsets for the cam to get a good viewpoint. You can see the spotlight on but we don't yet have it deploying from the hull.
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Writing this up for reference later.
Thinking about players, names, callsigns, current rank, medals, changing characters. The 3D base metaphor avoids a lot of GUI work. Using 3D lockers (since I have one to hand) is perfect. As it turns out, as easy as setting user keys on Locker entities. Simple.
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It's ridiculous, I'm seemingly unable to purchase from the UK, PC Pilot, a UK based flight simulation magazine . The only way I'm able to obtain copies is via ebay sellers in the US.
Local stockists are non-existent and repeated attempts to buy them online results in emails informing me that they are unable process my details. The same details which seem perfectly fine for US ebay vendors.
Two weeks now.
I give up, I'll stick with US postal charges. More reliable.
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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
I've just moved on to doing research into co-ordinates and floating point accuracy.
Going to make a few test projects to try different ideas. Dave has been posting updates on the greenzone development.
Welcome to Afghanistan
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[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
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.
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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 :/
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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.
It was over a year ago we were notified that some of the models we had purchased from Dexsoft might possibly have been stolen. After a period of investigation the probability was quite high this was the case and Dexsoft contacted customers to offer new packs. However months later I was unable to get a reply about these replacements and only in November when doing a review of outstanding assets and licensing we had to either press again or do a re-build.
Dave elected to take it upon him
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'
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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All actions relating to the AH64D go though a message receiver. Player mount, dismount, ground crew arming, lights, AI commanding and (getting to the point) virtual cockpit interactions.
The MPD button naming convention of "MPD_1_17" refering to MPD 1 (pilot left) and key 17 (counting from top left) that gets sent to the input handler for that MPD.
Key messages can originate from the client or network. I had to add a source ID to account for situations where one person in the same vehicl
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
First of all, a sincere thanks for the feedback. It's not something to get too hung up about and it's easy to get the idea that we spend hours and hours on making HUDs pretty colours without getting anything else done. Yesterday was pretty intensive in terms of tweaks and adjustments to the HUD but not just in terms of colours.
We've added clipping regions (using glScissor() ) so items like the pitch ladder no longer intrude into areas it shouldn't, this declutters and improves overall reada
Completed changes to the HUD section of the config file.
<HUD col="1.0, 0.8, 0.2" glow="0" shadow="1" breakoutfpi="1" />
I'm using the TinyXML lib for config functions, it's been fast efficient and easy to use. I added a new option today that was born out of looking at videos of games projected onto huge screens giving almost 1:1 scale. Before my tripplehead PC went pop I had a problem with virtual symbology relative to HUD size. The larger the screen, the smaller the HUD relatively.
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
