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
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
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,
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
Spending time working on my laptop here, which now has some reliable memory from Kingston has proved to be a fantastic little work platform for developing with Leadwerks.
The FFD or Free flight dynamics physics engine is still a little rough around the edges for putting into Combat-Helo proper so I'm working on a small test platform which hooks into the Leadwerks entity update callback and calls the FFD update.
I'm not sure if this is a good method of doing it, FFD is just a flight model
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
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
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"
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
hehe well the XPatcher2 software worked great for the upload, but the client program doesn't seem to want to work at all, requesting a file that wasn't supplied or exists.
Might have to look at other some other software.
Converting all config files to use XML format, this will make editing control inputs a bit easier later. They are rather messy atm and adding new options should be a lot easier.
Source
Looking at the pieces we have and project roadmap. Our game, like football (soccer for American readers), is a game of two halves. Side A and Side B. One campaign is the thinking man's approach; counter insurgency. The other game is the more familiar tank spanker; survival in a high-tech hostile environment against well armed self-sufficient mechanised infantry with air-defence units.
Compounds are anchor points of the campaigns, in groups they form the villages, strategic points you're tas
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
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
I was thinking over some official forum posts and one gentleman indicated that they were partly colour-blind. Accessibility issues are something I think about whenever I'm writing software or web site design work so I kicked myself when I didn't apply that to the interface. I added some GUI elements that link current selection to the tooltip, this should avoid ambiguity in the menu system.
So that's all working as it should, just have to fix up the weapon selection system which wi
I'm in the process of adding the weapon systems; avionics and links to the stores. While that's coming along at a steady pace I often come across a bit of code and think "I could quickly do this..."
So I just quickly added the third-person cam; as we don't yet have any character models I'm having to use this laughable code generated place-holder.
Character height is 1.8m.
We're going to require a rigged humanoid with a number of animations for sitting, prone, kneeling, aiming,
Spent the day working on the Helicopter entity and the sub-classes that handle all the pylons and stores. It's worth spending time automating these things as much as possible now to simply things later.
I broke out UMLet, a nice fast Java based UML editor to look at my structure. What's missing is the store-jett which needs to be a function of [TStore], pass it the pylon number and it will be required to generate the physics object, parent the rail/pod/fuel cell, detach it from the pylon and
It's been a blissfully quiet weekend.
The Combat-Helo configuration files are now in an easier to use XML format and I added a lot of extra options too. Player profile name, host IP, graphics filters etc. Fullscreen and Windowed modes having their own settings.
Also experimented with light scattering, we'll be adding per time-of-day lighting and retiring the old LB2 style skybox. That's not a priority item just something that's nice to toy as a little break.
Arming system which shoul
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
Today was spent working on reliable interface network client/server connections. It's apparent I need to add some additional items to the top of the screen:
Current world time
Mission Time (as offset of world time)
Connection status indicators (connecting/connected/ping status)
These to sit alongside the current game mode, camera mode and have a suitable background image.
Testing is proving difficult logistically. I would like a fairly inexpensive second PC with small form facto
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.
Source
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
I needed to add some on-the-fly lookups for data stored in XML databases without having them gobbling up memory. Most games of this type had a vehicle and weapon database, usually with a rotating 3D model or picture of the object. Using the TxmlTextReader function with a cache works fine. Only need to do the lookup once when examining an object.
All weapons come with suitable entries by entering the ground crew mode from proximity to any Apache helicopter. We can re-use this for tutoria
Still working on the loadout system, as it happens I totally forgot to do the pylon classes. While I'm working on polymorphic classes to deal with that (lot of cases to think about). During lunch I played with some more dust effects, this time for rotor downwash. This uses the roaddust pixel shader so it picks up the colour of the terrain it's currently over.
With no wind vector applied, brown-outs, where the crew can't see outside are occurring. Not sure why the canopy isn't blending
