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
While waiting on fixes for the flight-model and control inputs, putting some game into the game we talked about ranges and how performance measuring was going to work. In addition we wanted to add a little variety which required working mob AI.
So nothing fancy but I managed to rustle up a simple finite state machine FSM to get some tanks and cars running around. Our design uses a group formation system (a group is a number of individual units that share common logic, e.g a tank platoon)
It's a sentence I pulled out of context from the recent Unity newsletter. It relates to a Mobile Generation Education Project, a project with a $250k giveaway to help students become the mobile innovators of tomorrow.
Now, when I was a student, we didn't have mobile phones, or the world wide web. And if we did, we'd have moved onto something else by now. Teachers point out that 60% of the jobs their students end up doing haven't been invented yet. I helped develop Risk Assessment software us
Dave, the kids must have been playing "pilot" again, they've gone and pulled off the knob for the standby instrument lighting, make it like the other two rotaries. I'll fix the camera clipping on the seat
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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.
AD has started some great work on the armaments of the CH47 that will form the first major DLC pack for the full release of Combat-Helo. Each door position will offer a fun interactive activity, usually in the form of throwing out obscene amounts of virtual lead.
For more pictures please see:
ADs SimHQ CH-47 blog update thread
Mini-gun, I don't get the mini part though.
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Dexsoft's Middle East City pack has been tweaked by the Dave-9000 supercomputer and has produced a low poly high density city block of 1038 polys. Requiring heavy edits of UV co-ordinates and placing all the textures onto a single surface for blinding performance.
Perfect for iPhone and as a building block of the high-density city of Herat.
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I was thinking over some official forum posts and one gentleman indicated that they were partly colour-blind. Accessibility issues are something I think about whenever I'm writing software or web site design work so I kicked myself when I didn't apply that to the interface. I added some GUI elements that link current selection to the tooltip, this should avoid ambiguity in the menu system.
So that's all working as it should, just have to fix up the weapon selection system which wi
On the whole, I'm starting to warm to using text for user options, the nineties style. Dave showed me some icon screenshots from ArmA and remembered why I didn't like them. Is that a steering wheel? Desk fan?
Below is an in-game shot showing the menu and data displays for helicopters. Not unlike something you might have seen in older games using pre-rendered art. All interactive objects around the base will have these. If you don't want the floaty status text, CTRL L (for labels) is your fri
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
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
Today I added a postbuffer pixel shader to do light amplification for ETADS. Based on Geeks3D lightamp shader and modified for Leadwerks Engine it actually performs amplification by sampling the source pixel and if it's below a threshold, boosts the pixel intensity. Pretty neat.
These are tests, the left half is the amplified area, right side is ambient light.
The the first greyscale image has the polarity reversed. Into the mix I added a scanline mask with animated noise. The ET
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
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
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
First screen-shot of a quickly put together KBU (keyboard unit). This is a flat 2D image you click on, taken from the texture used in the cockpit. I wanted to see how good/bad it looked since we don't have time to develop a 3D one.
Clicking on Air Surv will abort current FCR operation
and switch to an active air scan (air surv mode)
The keyboard command list is looking horrible if you want full control over this. The shot cut keys work fine however. I made some tweaks to the h
I had a couple of hours with Just Cause 2 which I hesitate to recommend, it a really fun game but you're stuck playing an unlikeable character. Cheesy dialogue abounds and that's no bad thing in games, I scripted plenty of cheese for Longbow Combat Helo. Think about the lines of dialogue from old games you might remember.
The Playstation 3 was needed by the children for Final Fanstasy n so Rico, Scorpio (whatever the slab of MDF you play is called) was parked for the evening.
So back to
No work will be done tomorrow. Just Cause 2 PS3 is released. The acting sucks, the actual game doesn't seem all that hot from the demo either, but the stunt playground aspect is brilliant.
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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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HUDs often used in simulators adopt a green hue and use an additive or alpha blend. It can be hard to read them in some conditions and this is something I was thinking about so I tried a few experiments, non of which I like fully.
First: To improving readability of heads up displays by down-sampling the HUD buffer to a smaller buffer (I called the hud_fx_buffer) with a texture filter, a poor-mans blur. Using the resulting 'fuzzy' version to reduce the intensity level of the background image.
Most of the IHADSS modes are complete except for a couple of elements in hover and bobup, and the flight-path indicator in TRANS mode.
Also added for Dave's benefit a small map which I'll use later as a background underlay for a tactical situation display (TSD) and easy nav mode.
RichP has supplied an authentic start-up sequence complete with appropriate caution and warning signalling that fits our bird nicely. Once we're done with the arming set-up I'll get back on the cockpit sequencin
My chair's really bad and falling apart. Went looking online, some nice ones that might be good for my back but I saw this one,from Amazon.co.uk oh boy, to bad it doesn't come with Kevlar plates and a cup-holder.
This one is quite nice too...bloody expensive though...
Guess I'll end up with this one...
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