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
We're going to edit the LUA script for the CH47. Helicopters are somewhat complex and incredibly noisy machines, you thought your XBOX 360 was loud?
Yesterday we trawled through some online video, ripped the soundtracks and used Audacity to get some loops of the compressor, and rotor beat. That's two discrete sounds that when mixed together should give a good representation of helo noise. Using Audacity it's possible to mark a region, and use that as a 'sample' to remove that noise from anot
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
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.
I updated my work-map today with a more recent one and still in the process of fixing up missing objects. I think I have half of a city missing. The cockpit is now in it's own world space resting at the origin and no longer effected by floating point error, but I did leave in some rotation 'noise' to give the cockpit a vibration effect.
I pushed the tree LOD out a bit more which you might see in the following screens. If you have an uber PC you'll be able to render some really sweet scenes.
As I sat down to implement the generic event system I was reading Game Coding Complete which discusses something similar, the Actor class. I was reinventing the wheel...badly. The wheel is overrated as an invention. By far the greatest invention was the second wheel, lets face it, the unicycle isn't the most practical form of transport.
I digress. Actors. If you want to know more about them see Actor model at Wikipeadia
Then I came across this public domain implementation by Otus which
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
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
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
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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Added a simple frame-skip to MPD draw method, they don't need to be updated every single frame and it squeezes out a little extra. Found a "toob" video in which you get a couple of frames of the UTIL page. Anti-ice and FMS options, presumably this is where you can toggle pitch roll and yaw augmentation. Well seems like a good place to add that and we will need to flag some FMCS values for HTR which can auto-trim. Turning that off in the UTIL page will be handy. Looks like "NOE?" at the bottom to
Not quite there yet.
What I'm trying to do is copy the raw TADS buffer into the diffuse COLOR0 buffer and render the symbology into the same bugger but into channel 2 (COLOR2). Texture channel 2 is used by the "fullbright" shader and mixes at full intensity. The net effect being a normal diffuse texture with full-bright symbology painted over it.
At the moment it's not working as intended. I need to go through the shader to check it's doing what I think it's supposed to do. And see if I
Video underlays are working as intended (more or less).
I split the MPD buffers into two, symbologyBuffer and compositeBuffer. The symbology buffer is texturestage2 and rendered by the shader at full brightness. If the underlay is active the TADS/PNVS buffer is copied to outputbuffer which is texturestage0 (the simple diffuse buffer). The two are mixed by the material shader which is applied to each MPD screen.
The mix works well, providing enough contrast between video and symbology eve
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
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
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
Began preliminaries on the advanced flight model. This involved looking through the various classes and discussing best strategies to minimise future maintenance and ease integration.
Dor setup a flight-sim workstation and was researching the finer points of .GAU programming but was thwarted when her PC detected a Rookit virus infection picked up when working away over the weekend. She shouldn't have plugged into strange networks and let the client install software. Lesson learned the hard w
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
If you're in the UK on August the 28th and can make it to RAF Cosford for the Astrasim Expo flight simulation show, there's a chance that one of the more haggard and tired members of the Combat-Helo development team (me) will be hanging around Komodo Simulations.
http://www.astrasimexpo.co.uk/
Some of my favourites will be there, Sky Blue Radio, Flightstore (who were always good at sorting out my Saitek woes).
So fingers crossed we get the demo completed in good time and hopefully we
I'm still hard at work on flight model code so not much to show or talk about. I'm feeling a bit sleep deprived but we're against the clock.
Dave is refreshed from his little break in the sun and has been rendering shadows for the opfor ground vehicles and CH47. I like these "showroom" pictures. Gives me a hankering to play an RTS game.
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Dave has been inspired to work a bit more on the more empty areas of the terrain to give them a bit more "pop". See his diary update at our forum hosted by SimHQ.
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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
Was exactly a year ago today we started work on Combat-Helo. I really don't know where the time has gone. Happy buffday team, and well done. To commemorate the occasion I dug out one of the earliest screen-shots I could find to compare with one from this afternoon.
And thank you to everyone who's offered kind words of support and encouragement. It all helps.
Sept 2010 - "Herat"
Oct 2009 - "Camp Zero"
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I know I said this week but will likely be over the weekend, there were some LUA issues I needed to get my head around. As for LUA, I think I'm going to pull out some of the model features I've been putting into the model LUA scripts as it's starting to get in the way when I need to control them in game logic. Reading values and objects back seems to be a dark art, these things may have been fixed, or not bugs at all, but caught between moving engine versions and not much documentation I'm left
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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