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Combat-Helo Dev Blog

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Camera views askew

Taking a little time-out from debugging to recharge my batteries, something slightly less frustrating, camera views.   Not helped by my original program flow which had camera commands in-line where needed, and I still have to go through and fix up TrackIR to work with the new class but shouldn't take long. TrackIR is really simple to implement in this kind of software.   Crew positions are parented to a pivot and then offset so it was important to retain any camera/parent relationships, add

Flexman

Flexman

WAH-64D Replica Controls

Summer Sim 2010 is nearly here. Komodo Simulations, makers of replica helicopter controls for virtual training are sadly not going to have their replica controls ready in time but a recent news update on their web site shows the current collective at the pre-mould stage.   Komodo Simulations WAH-64 collective WIP   Looking good so far. Combat-Helo will be there to show a build of some kind. Although like the controls we're perhaps not going to have all the goodies ready to go into a demo bui

Flexman

Flexman

Herat city, almost

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

Flexman

Flexman

Crashed helo fish-tank decoration

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.   Source

Flexman

Flexman

Dave experiments with damage visuals

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

Flexman

Flexman

AD updated his dev diary on SimHQ

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.   Source

Flexman

Flexman

RotorCam - the stupidest idea in the history of helo simulation

Yup, perhaps the most nauseating camera view is back. One that a still screen-shot and an fps hungry FRAPs recording IMPROVES. RotorCam is like having your brain ripped out by your eye-stalks and soaked in vinegar. A virtual camera is strapped to the underside of blade number 1 and everything else is a blur. Only use I can think of is a debug aid when we get to blade flapping etc.   I'd like to thank Macklebee for helping me sort out the LUA object passing to get this working. RotorCam fo

Flexman

Flexman

Problem with gun camera

I like the idea of having a GunCam view. However it means increasing the texture detail on cannon as it really wasn't meant for up close viewing.   Heh, I have you in my sights.   Trying alternative offsets for the cam to get a good viewpoint. You can see the spotlight on but we don't yet have it deploying from the hull.   Source

Flexman

Flexman

TADS/PNVS Stow

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

Flexman

Flexman

Hydraulics - lifeblood of any modern aircraft

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

Flexman

Flexman

Bogged Down - Chin Up

I apologise for lack of updates, long time since the last one (weeks it seems although I have two unpublished ones which are no longer relevant). I've been avoiding online spaces during this time, work has been bogged down with the multitude of tasks not just relating to the Combat Helo game.   I'm working on the flight model again this week so don't expect any updates in a while. I did get started on an updated FAQ and will publish that ASAP. Lots of things happen around this time of year wit

Flexman

Flexman

BBC's BoB Weekend

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

Flexman

Flexman

CH-47D - work commenced

For the record, practical work on the detailed CH-47D interior started yesterday.   The CH-47D is a great machine better suited to the environment in which it will operate in Combat-Helo. The Chinook (prn: shin-uk) is a surprisingly nimble and small helicopter, not the large lumbering giant as is often perceived. What you may find surprising (I did anyway) was that it's about the same size as the Apache. See the comparison image below.   Apache / Chinook size comparisonIn Afghanistan, the CH

Flexman

Flexman

Quick update - optimisations

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

Flexman

Flexman

Mobile Innovators of Tomorrow

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

Flexman

Flexman

Random pics of the Day

Some pics of the day. Battlezoneesque - eerie (debug stuff) Shadow puppet time. Planning terminals awaiting attention This is how I start every day   Source

Flexman

Flexman

US Army showcases AB3 - Apache Block II to Block III in video

US Army released video showcasing the new Block III Apache in a virtual training environment.     The video covers in a nutshell...   Weight reduction Improved software upgrade pipeline Increased engine power 701-D engines and improved drive system Better digital battlefield intergration UAV commanding IFR certified instruments Reliability and servicing improvements RFI range triangulation Maritime classification Awesome new logo Further reading  

Flexman

Flexman

More HUD readability

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

Flexman

Flexman

C-SCOPE

While Dave is away hopefully keeping his head above water (all those Bear Grylls survival videos should come in handy) I've got not much else to do except worry and get on with my to-do list.   C-SCOPE was something I remember saying wouldn't make it but turned out to be a freebie since everything was available to simply drop it in.   [C-SCP] button on the FCR page overlays FCR target symbols on TADS video and HMD. Makes finding those hard to see vehicles a piece of cake.       C-

Flexman

Flexman

Static reflections or cubmapping

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

Flexman

Flexman

Vector font tweaks and HSI

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

Flexman

Flexman

Rain Stops Play - Bangkok Floods

Dave who is the artist on Combat-Helo is currently in the process of evacuating his home in Thailand as the floods in Bangkok have made living difficult. With no fresh drinking water for days, no supplies in the shops and place of work closed, services breaking down it's time to jump ship.   Blue indicates server flooding (clearly) Red=flood defence     BBC carries the story here   Dave's last act before evacuating was uploading the latest Chinook work to our server alas there was

Flexman

Flexman

More HUD config options

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.

Flexman

Flexman

To facilitate new vehicles and multiplayer

In the process of sweeping changes to how the game loads vehicles and other data. A lot of data the describes how the virtual cockpit works, where you sit, angles of views etc. was not available early on and since my long term plan is a system in which we can serve you new vehicles down the wire, even adding the Chinook was going to need a bit of fiddling around. Some data was in the object LUA, some in an external file, some embedded. It wasn't the original intention to build vehicles this way,

Flexman

Flexman

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