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
HMD = Helmet Mounted Display
Remember when Virtual Reality was going to be the next big thing? Seems odd having to re-create something virtual in a game that is virtual, the modern Apache has evolved a bit since the late 1990s. Being able to display in the pilots 3D monocle (yes that's a joke) a lot of data to the crew about targets hidden behind objects, terrain contours. These 'virtual' items are matched 1:1 with the crews head movement unlike a lot of the symbology that is static.
The
More flight symbology added today. Raining almost non-stop and my cars wiper motor has failed, so wasn't going anywhere.
We added a couple of items that make it possible to do some precise flying.
Velocity Vector
Acceleration Cue
The Velocity Vector is the blob on the stick that originates from the cross in the centre of the HMD. This is a representation of the direction and speed of your aircraft. Think of these as "top down" views with your aircraft in the middle, forwards move
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
Quadtree software has released the 3.1 update to Grome.
Grome is a fantastic terrain editor I've been playing with for future enhancements and rolling out a larger terrain systems in the future. If you play flying games and RPGs on consoles chances are you've probably already seen a Grome edited terrain. It's used by nearly every major player in the simulation industry. Incorporating a plug-in system, OpenSceneGraph and now new improved Unity integration.
What's new in 3.1
Airbase preview at our SimHQ forum.
Gluing the airfield into place has been an interesting job, using terrain 'visibility' to cut out terrain chunks and fit it into place. Shindand airfield is used for medical and humanitarian flights, it's currently VFR only and no lighting system. We might modernise it a little for our scenario.
Most NATO flights will come and go from here. A node system for AI aircraft to follow the taxiways and tank-off/land will be added.
Multiplayer options sta
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
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
Quite a scrappy day. Installed Microsoft Flight Simulator X and the SDK, there's an interface I want to try and build as a gauge in FSX. I've used the Simconnect API to interface to my own radio panel, now I need to build a gauge to talk to the Simconnect DLL.
I re-worked the avionics menu page using the new vector glyphs, adding some commands to toggle the chat console, about page for version information. The UTIL page sets the FMS channels (Flight Management System or FLCS FLight Control S
I can't talk about the details much as it's proprietary code. Helicopters have been (inaccurately) described as thousands of moving parts flying in lose formation. Mathematically a helicopter is thousands of interactions flying in loose formation. For Combat-Helo and future simulations we're assembling a modular version of what we call FFD (FreeFlight Dynamics), a library based on definitive engineering texts on how helicopters fly through air. Texts such as Bramwell's Helicopter Dynamics and Wa
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
Congratulations to ArtDave (AD, geddit) for scaring the poo out of me.
He tells me he's been scripting the flare pen (Gyrojet), I'm so busy heads-down in game code I'm often grunting and throwing back idle comments and ideas to get his flare launching LUA code to work.
Then he sends me his completed files. I'm taking a late afternoon break and thought I'd drop his new files into the project to have a look. So I pull over the gyrojet flare pen into the scene editor, I had no idea my speak
Fingers crossed the weather is not too bad tomorrow at Gilze-Rijen air force base. Our man in the Netherlands is prepared for a day of audio recording for the Apache and Chinook.
Good luck Reck. Weather is pretty lousy here, high winds, low temps and rain, sat images and forecast is so-so. Expect wet weather and don't forget the 'dead cat'
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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
It's not going to win any awards for realism but we have a rudimentary ENV environment class that handles time-of-day ticking and updating scene elements accordingly. Lighting, colouring, fog, sun position. Currently it's using computed light values which renders lovely post apocalyptic scenes, the colours are terrible IMO, looks like a nuke's gone off. A lookup table will be better and an exercise I'll leave for later. Also I added some data structures for moving weather zones around the map. T
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
Been pretty ill this last week, progress has been sporadic. I took time out to rebuild the engine code so it's now the same for all Apaches, AI and player alike.
Pilot feedback from screen-shots and videos also allowed me to rebuild the whole engine start-up and ENG display page. Automatically switches to in-flight mode. Things blink, change colour, are boxed appropriately. Couple of bits left to do, the biggest headache was dealing with all the fiddly scale changes and adding new code to si
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
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
Remember the spinny radar thingy in Longbow 2? Scan sectors sizes and off-axis settings for the Longbow FCR (Fire Control Radar)? No?
If you look at the heading tape of the screen-shot you'll see in the heading tape the "butt-cheeks" (two Ds back to back) on a heading of 225, off axis by 45 degrees. This indicates the direction the radar is pointing, as the FCR display is 'always up' in GTM mode. This can be a little disorientating and the radar footprint is mirrored on the TSD, this paints
The art-gnome at Combat-Helo has been playing with bloom and glow shader materials for the cockpit and came up with instrument night lighting. I thought it was a cool use of extra texture stages and materials with Leadwerks engine, it's an easy effect to add. With additional green point lights around the pit it should look pretty close to the real deal.
Here's a real shot with night lighting. Panel back-lighting and small point lights.
Source
Just got back home and Dave left a nasty sight in my MSN window. No, not another scene of drunken debauchery, actually I have to complain, there's been a distinct lack of that.
We got to discussing visual representation of damage. Different ways we can do this. I write it here so I can remember what we discussed. We looked at some complex set-up of assets for iL2, the results of which are impressive but it hardly makes for an easy pipeline, especially if we want to quickly add more aircraft
Dave completed more of the survival equipment, looking really good. The concept is simple, if you need to perform an emergency landing and leave your helo, the CSEL can be activated and will mark the location on everyone's tactical situation display. The signal flare may be use to mark your position visually.
More up close pictures in the SimHQ thread here.
I spun off a new shader to do the MPD video mixing. The symbology layer needed to mask the video layer using its alpha c
