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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Compounds, the Herat map contains approx 500 of them. Each one consisted of a number of walls and out buildings. Turns out, these sub objects chewed through a bit of processing time. In effect there were 7500 objects getting worked through. That's a lot and it was reflected in the performance in LE 2.31 on a fully dressed map.
By collapsing the compound models into a single object for the lower LODs we saw a large increase in fps in LE 2.31. Although LE 2.32 shows not much difference (it's a
Today I added the ubiquitous chat console complete with 4 colour coded channel presets, Global, Side, Group, Vehicle. Complete with command parsing (/setkey lets you send keys to any object you're standing before which is handy). The console also has a command history using the UP/DOWN cursor keys.
Chat entry toggled by hitting the ENTER key ala Warcraft. Be aware that the primary action key has moved from the ENTER key to the "P" key (P for primary and also handily close to the square bracke
We're not trying to re-create Armed Assault, or even build some form of Helicopter MMO. Our plan is to take the old school 2D interfaces of military bases and create 3D analogues. Mission assignment and planning is done in the command tent. This is still exploritory, we have a number of office furniture elements planned, some of which we have tried in the editor to get a feel.
There's more furniture to come. A mil-spec laptop/terminal, interactive map on a board (that's a copy of your person
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
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)
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Now available.
*edit* A few additional notes...
The controller setup page shown in this video has a number of devices listed. These are just the ones I had plugged in at the time of recording. All DirectInput controllers should be available, some will have ready to fly config files (most Saitek sticks, Logitech).
I forgot to turn on the post processing effects since I work without them (generates more heat). There is a LOT of changes going on to various sensors and the IHADSS w
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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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
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
Check off the list, working external canopy doors, flip up/down, will indicate available crew position as well as letting you chat to your mounted team-mate while you're on foot. You could even arm the pilots chopper for him.
Internal doors and wipers next followed by external lighting system. Hopefully we'll have the cold start-up sequence in a few days, we need that so we can get on with more vital systems.
(I just noticed the text on the rail is reversed)
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Dave's been busy building the unsung hero of Afghanistan and other operations around the world.
Rolf: Can you tell what it is yet? ;-)
It's a non-flyable but will feature prominently in the game as you'll be tasked to provide armed escort for supply, insertion and extraction missions.
Much time has been spent correcting smoothing errors. Brilliant work. We'll be adding the same functionality to the rotors and rear door using LUA scripts. This morning we were looking at the various fl
AD has been working on a new FOB which will be the "other" main camp you'll be deployed at during the course of the campaign.
It's a triangle arrangement used by some forward operational bases. Here the CH47s are ready to be deployed.
And finally..
Don't have a name for the camp yet.
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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
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-
Dave sent me his first bridge work for crossing the Death Star trench across our terrain.
Pictured below is an editor scene showing it in place with some of our other 3D assets rolling across it.
Five brickwork textures were used to break up the surface detail with colour matching used to make it blend with the terrain textures.
Last night I finished playing around with the cockpit night lighting thanks to Bushmaster and his reference photos and nudging to fix the colours. Three
Another update of map progress on the SimHQ Combat Helo forums. Showing how the City of Herat as a sprawl of densely packed compounds and commerce is being built. Using blocks of prefabs and arranged on a grid. This is a selection of my favourite.
Meant to be viewed from a low altitude, the prefabs do a good job of keeping the eye busy. Here is half a city already with parks and minarets to add. All built to be frame-rate friendly.
And a mini-game for your base, the "Hello World" of
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.
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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
Last night we added rotor blade coning which resulted in realising the helo was just a little slightly off axis, now corrected. The Apache has been attacked by an angle grinder on more than a few occasions, might be showing signs of wear.
Some LUA issues came up which erroded confidence in relying on it for so much. I've ditched arming through scripting. It's prone to misuse.
The pylons are now ready to take the 3D models of the assigned loadouts leaving the final stage of th
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
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
Today we looked at a neat little program called SMAK which is a neat little program for generating normal maps for low poly models by using high poly models. It also can bake ambient occlusion shadows onto your diffuse textures.
This is also a feature of 3DMAX so Dave tried a little experiment.
Before, no baked AO
After, with baked AO
You might want to click on those images to see the full sized renders. Certainly the cockpit area could benefit, and the buildings we have with ground
