Sound is an impressive tool. And something I worried a great deal about from the start. Just adding various audio sources to the Apache, from the Betty, to various computers tones, compressor noise, all adds to a sense of cockpit space.
The Chinook needs similar attention, as a non-hero aircraft (currently a non-flyable). The game engine uses OpenAL, which employs a system of 3D positional audio. In the Apache most of the noise is behind your head, looking left and right appears to pan the a
I'm happy to announce that Combat-Helo will incorporate Frederic Naar's HTR Helicopter Total Realism technology for advanced helicopter flight dynamics. (link: Hovercontrol forum, HTR section). Developed as an external physics model that interfaces with Microsoft Flight Simulator via Pete Dawson's FSUIPC, HTR is an impressive implementation of blade theory using door-stopper text-books that designers of helicopters use as source material.
Fred invited me over for a few days for a mutual show
Dull day, so lets post about something most normal people find dull. Fuel flow controls. In the Apache D model this is administered on the FUEL MPD page.
Not much to say about it, I'm bored already. It does what it does. Our Apache has two internal ballistically shielded self-sealing fuel tanks. Fuel can be drawn or transferred from one or the other to adjust weight distribution. Activating fuel boost engages the rear tank cross-feed valves as seen here. Fuel transfer between tanks should no
Yes Panic.
When you're rushing to get a reasonable build ready for hammering out problems I'm finding I'm making all new problems. Going over the HMD code I realise how badly it needs rebuilding, there are existing elements that need updating, a few new ones that require adding. There's no way to rebuild the HUD in time.
Another problem. LUA in the Apache entity. Works in the first instance, but fails in subsequent entity spawns resulting in the inability to mount the aircraft. It's an i
Time for another dull dev blog. This time, the exciting world of Hydraulics which I didn't know much about except what I can gather from various books I have laying around.
Hydraulics are a game component as it effects how long you can maintain control in event of damage to your controls or hydraulic lines and it also powers gun turret control. Controls are not direct in modern aircraft, due to the amount of force required to move a large surface area on an aircraft weighing tons, human mus
That's right. No 3D glasses will be required. Full support for the very latest 2D high-resolution monitors will be included, no additional headache inducing hardware will be required.
(yes I am loosing my mind)
Source
AD posted more Chinook goodies at SimHQ Link here >>> SimHQ - AD Chinook Update
What am I looking at?
It's a little creepy, crew heads now reflect the pilot helmet sight (PHS) and gunner helmet sight (GHS) Vec2 offsets, so using trackIR, mouselook etc will operate the appropriate crewman head position (with suitable organic tweening). These positions are stored in the aircraft state so will work across all aircraft (AI and player) as well as multi-player.
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
Source
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.
Source
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
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?
This is OpenGL, vector based rendered to an offscreen buffer, now with added mipmaps. I'll try and detail the functions of these pages and sub-modes as I go and allow you to submit corrections early on.
The WEP (weapons) MFD page
Pictured below shoing the gun sub-mode. Main feature is the bust limit selector on the left side indicating the number of rounds fired when the pilot commands. The bottom MFD buttons marked GUN, MSL and RKT will switch the weapons and display rounds and options.
I wasn't sure about the STOW angles so I set the PNVS to 165 inboard (0=along the nose) and TADS 180' inboard. Activated via the NVS mode switch in the cockpit (or CTRL S). The CPG station doesn't seem to have the noeswheel/NVS panel unless we missed it. You'll just have to play as the pilot if you want to flip the switch by hand.
Switch has 3 position, off (stows the sensors for transitional flight), normal for tracking head movement and fixed for boresight (straight ahead).
The NVS Mode sw
This is months of painstaking trial-and-error, optimisation and experimentation. I said months ago, "We don't have the resources or time to build a whole city, just a close approximation". Well it's an approximation but it's more than what we anticipated was possible. Given that the old girl Longbow 2 had a small village, a dozen or so muddy cubes, this is 2010 and we can afford to push it a little.
Putting the demo together for Summer Sim 2010 next weekend, the updated map includes Herat
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.
Working on the tactical situation display elements, the vector font output was never quite as crisp as I'd hoped for but that's now fixed by keeping the 1:1 scale and changing the ortho projection matrix. Bigger works better than smaller when it comes to float accuracy with consumer level drivers that focus on games and performance I guess.
Still have the map scale to do, that's forming part of the mission terminal code. But the rest of the TSD is coming together. I need to put an upper limi
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
Thanks to "GrViper", bit of Russian press coverage courtesy of "Game Navigator". I think I like the intro about raining fire and brimestone? I had to have a Russian friend in Siberia read it out to me over Teamspeak after which he asked, "so you're interested in flight simulation then?"
Work update
Last night I added the waypoint/navigation system which is rudimentary but has the needed functions for other bits of code to insert them into an aircrafts avionics. It's a linked list with some
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
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
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.
Hey it's a blog, I'm blogging. All this talk about fluids.has brought on a nasty head cold. Up at 6am searching for the Lemsip (a horrid lemon flavoured drink with decongestant) and watching "Dogfights" on DVD.
The History Channel series "Dogfights" prompted the next three to four hours of viewing since I realised just how bad it really was from the simpleton "Top Trumps" presentations to the seemingly good idea at the time computer graphics. To be fair I did learn something new every episod
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
