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
Not convinced this a a great way of arming the Apache. But what we will do I think is provide some quick defaults, option A and option B.
Only the client sees the weapons appear on the ground ready for selection. The crewman loading the weapons clicks the weapon which is then sent to the highlighted pylon. Internally the helicopter entity receives a message to load pylon x with missile y.
To do: Tooltips for the pods to say what they are and I think highlighting the selected pylon might
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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After close checking of memory usage when boarding and exiting the Apache there's feedback saying that objects are getting freed and memory dumped, except it isn't. Only a small percentage. There are object references that are keeping the cockpit and avionic entities alive and preventing them from being released.
Going to take a little time to track each one down.
*edit*
The large memory leak located, was the TADS camera world not being released. It's been removed for now.
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Currently testing the autopatcher software. Broadband upstream speeds being what they are, don't make this a fast process. The project core files are currently around the 300mb mark spread over 1300+ files. This will come down when we package them.
The benefits of having an autopatcher is the ability to push updates for CombatHelo on a regular basis without too much hassle and players having to negotiate versions when playing with friends. Just run the updater and everyone should be in sync.
hehe well the XPatcher2 software worked great for the upload, but the client program doesn't seem to want to work at all, requesting a file that wasn't supplied or exists.
Might have to look at other some other software.
Converting all config files to use XML format, this will make editing control inputs a bit easier later. They are rather messy atm and adding new options should be a lot easier.
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It's been a blissfully quiet weekend.
The Combat-Helo configuration files are now in an easier to use XML format and I added a lot of extra options too. Player profile name, host IP, graphics filters etc. Fullscreen and Windowed modes having their own settings.
Also experimented with light scattering, we'll be adding per time-of-day lighting and retiring the old LB2 style skybox. That's not a priority item just something that's nice to toy as a little break.
Arming system which shoul
I needed to add some on-the-fly lookups for data stored in XML databases without having them gobbling up memory. Most games of this type had a vehicle and weapon database, usually with a rotating 3D model or picture of the object. Using the TxmlTextReader function with a cache works fine. Only need to do the lookup once when examining an object.
All weapons come with suitable entries by entering the ground crew mode from proximity to any Apache helicopter. We can re-use this for tutoria
Spent the day working on the Helicopter entity and the sub-classes that handle all the pylons and stores. It's worth spending time automating these things as much as possible now to simply things later.
I broke out UMLet, a nice fast Java based UML editor to look at my structure. What's missing is the store-jett which needs to be a function of [TStore], pass it the pylon number and it will be required to generate the physics object, parent the rail/pod/fuel cell, detach it from the pylon and
I'm in the process of adding the weapon systems; avionics and links to the stores. While that's coming along at a steady pace I often come across a bit of code and think "I could quickly do this..."
So I just quickly added the third-person cam; as we don't yet have any character models I'm having to use this laughable code generated place-holder.
Character height is 1.8m.
We're going to require a rigged humanoid with a number of animations for sitting, prone, kneeling, aiming,
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
Today I added the ubiquitous chat console complete with 4 colour coded channel presets, Global, Side, Group, Vehicle. Complete with command parsing (/setkey lets you send keys to any object you're standing before which is handy). The console also has a command history using the UP/DOWN cursor keys.
Chat entry toggled by hitting the ENTER key ala Warcraft. Be aware that the primary action key has moved from the ENTER key to the "P" key (P for primary and also handily close to the square bracke
We finally sourced a a reasonably good infantry soldier, low poly model, rigged, animated and exported. We can fill the screen with dozens of these guys, falling, shooting prone, grenade tossing. We'll give them a couple of weapons they can swap between and a range of helmets swapped in by setting an entity key.
To initially test animation sequences I populated a drop-down control for the editor dialog with the following LUA, chopped up for readability. But lets you pick which frames to
Today was spent working on reliable interface network client/server connections. It's apparent I need to add some additional items to the top of the screen:
Current world time
Mission Time (as offset of world time)
Connection status indicators (connecting/connected/ping status)
These to sit alongside the current game mode, camera mode and have a suitable background image.
Testing is proving difficult logistically. I would like a fairly inexpensive second PC with small form facto
I wasn't going to add a complete gui system, we don't need anything complex. The address book needs to accept input from mouse and keyboard and when I thought about it, the planned map viewer/editor will require it too.
It had to be a simple gui system with input focus and keyboard entry. Since the chat console had functions for filtering keys and the input mapper directed keyboard input into it when active it was simple enough to change it to send to a gui class and whatever control input h
Spac3Rat sent in a nice new game icon as well as two editions of his Rotorwash magazine from 2006 to read. Fascinating look at building helos for FSX, one thing we learned about FSX models, they don't work too well for our kind of real-time work. But fascinating all the same.
Dave is busy in 3DMAX building something that looks very much like a Chinook. I'm making incremental improvements to the GUI system, panels can now be roughly dragged around without risk of "mouse droppings" (the window
Spending time working on my laptop here, which now has some reliable memory from Kingston has proved to be a fantastic little work platform for developing with Leadwerks.
The FFD or Free flight dynamics physics engine is still a little rough around the edges for putting into Combat-Helo proper so I'm working on a small test platform which hooks into the Leadwerks entity update callback and calls the FFD update.
I'm not sure if this is a good method of doing it, FFD is just a flight model
A need to test Combat-Helo on Windows 7 resulted in a TESCO purchase of the Windows 7 Upgrade and 1kg of bananas (a rich source of potassium).
Running any Leadwerks program on a fresh OS install results in an EXCEPTION on launch, only two steps required to get it working. Run the OpenAL install then update video drivers. Simple. Everything worked as it should.
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The CH-47F has had a lot more work done in the cockpit area. The seats are looking remarkably clean, I just need to get a child to play inside with some squeeze boxes and a can of 3in1 oil.
The Chinook is smaller than you might think, with a fuselage approx 50ft long, it's shorter than the Apache which is 58ft long (approx). I was surprised by that.
Networking
Today saw successful Combat-Helo net connection between the Leeds UK and Bangkok in Thailand. Getting the link to work throug
More detailing on the rotor head, details on the flap, pitch link and coning hinges.
Assembled audio for the CH-47 today in addition to implementing the Apache cold-start procedure.
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David posted up some more CH47 pics around SimHQ and Facebook and possibly elsewhere. Lot of detail work has gone into the engines, rotor head and trying to get the smoothing correct at the rear of the aircraft.
Looking forward to getting those blades turning, the sound thumping and the dust is flying.
I've been doing a lot of logic work in the Apache in the past day or so. Also full of a head cold which tends to make me cranky.
Sat in the cockpit, the APU sounds like a vacuum cleane
Making notes on discussions of blade flapping.
Definite gravy but easy to add. Currently blade flexing is done via blended animation controlled by the simulation sending key values to the model. The CH-47 has quite a large blade system (almost doubling the length of the helicopter to 100 feet) and low ground clearance.
Most of the droop comes from the flapping hinge Dave has indicated in white (adjoining the red highlights). These pivots allow the blade to horizontally move upward when
