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.
First of all, a sincere thanks for the feedback. It's not something to get too hung up about and it's easy to get the idea that we spend hours and hours on making HUDs pretty colours without getting anything else done. Yesterday was pretty intensive in terms of tweaks and adjustments to the HUD but not just in terms of colours.
We've added clipping regions (using glScissor() ) so items like the pitch ladder no longer intrude into areas it shouldn't, this declutters and improves overall reada
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
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
Yes were still using Notepad to edit them. Well that's not quite accurate, I'm using Notepad++
What's nice about Leadwerks is being able to create a shader to add new effects or change how the engine renders something without anything getting in your way. So when Dave asks for a version of the cubemap that will blend in some particular way it was no problem to quickly put it together. He's doing terrible things to make filthy looking windshields, chrome toggle switches and this rather neat l
I was looking at the problem of glass again, reflections for cockpit instruments and improving the canopy and TADS optics. FSX manages to do so much with so little (a small 128x128 DDS) for shiny metal parts, such as chrome props it was time to look at adding cube mapping again.
I know this has been added to Leadwerks 2.40 but the corona problem doesn't seem to be fixed yet. Retro-fitting cube-maps to 2.31 is an easy task and the river mesh material was updated (we don't use the single heigh
This entry is not about the life of pioneer George Stephenson. The pylons seem capable of configuring themselves, got some elevation in there for aim assist if/when we add that.
I removed the LUA based weapon loading, it wasn't working out the way I hoped it might. There's a level of disconnect between LUA and the game-engine which added to the complexity of something that is already complex, when it didn't need to be.
Can finally get started on the arming now. Got a little sidetracked w
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
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
Yippe..the 18 month project is now 24 months old. Horray. Short post but I felt I couldn't let it slip by unnoticed. Especially with all the Tipex (White-Out) all over my Project Planner.
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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
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
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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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
AD's SimHQ Dev Diary - Road works
Interesting post on improving the look of the new roads which are meshes exported from 3DMAX using a number of different post processing techniques to level them to our height-map. He touches upon adjusting the height-map to sink roads into the terrain, thus ageing them.
Note that the heightmap images in this post are flipped vertically. If you plan to use them as a map at a later date and get confused then this is why.
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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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Never felt the need to keep fish until now. It's a crashed helicopter for use in your pond or aquarium. Thanks Phil (and Rob for sending it on).
This wonder compares to the bizarre "Titantic with inflatable iceberge" bath toy I once found in an English Heritage gift shop.
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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
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
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
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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All the things we want to show but can't. Still making some final hour changes to get a robust demo working that can be operated by Joe Public (I'm told he's coming along). A simple flying demo that will show the technology, Afghan map, lighting and cockpit. It has the mark 1 flight model I keep tweaking. sounds could be better. I wish I had time to do the landing gear joints, it's hard to land without wheels.
Better stop with the bloggin and get back to writing.
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