Quick update. Busy working on a lot of small things. We have a cockpit update coming to update MPDs, internal and external night lighting. MPDs taking to the TStores class and working towards having a number of cockpit functions up and ready for the start-up. Dave added the CP/G throttle panel too (which removes the power switch and engine startup).
Experiencing a problem with fps slowdown over time again. Mostly down to repeatedly running combat-helo, stop, edit, re-run. FPS drops to single
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
AD made some atmospheric screen-shots when playing with lighting and environment settings. SimHQ Diary
Starting with the only major airbase in the region. AD is responsible for some Strike Fighter mod aircraft models, one of which is a Tornado GR1 (?). Which he's used here. I don't think these will be in the game unless we get permission from the original mod maker to use it. But it does look nice.
This is our early version of Camp Stone complete with a half-court basket. You wouldn't
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
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.
Source
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
Updates to the green-zones, incremental improvements to the billboards, painting 'shadow' under vegetation.
Dev-diary update at SimHQ
It's looking great considering how much detail we can't use. Currently we can't use the 2.32 engine due to lack of LOD distance control, and loading the levels with all the vegetation takes three times as long in the new version due to the extra processing required for veg culling. The detail in our production level map shows little performance difference
Not a Combat-Helo post. I'm engaged in a spot of design and research but was looking for some old material online and found I had left a digital trail pre-dating commercial internet use.
28 Years ago I drew this. I was in high school. Shocking really. I used Z80 machine code to generate the 'impressive' sound and visual effects in this game. *wince*
A lifetime of programming and tinkering, stacks of hard drives of unpublished projects ranging from Spanish school time-tab
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.
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
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
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
AD posted more Chinook goodies at SimHQ Link here >>> SimHQ - AD Chinook Update
What am I looking at?
It's a little creepy, crew heads now reflect the pilot helmet sight (PHS) and gunner helmet sight (GHS) Vec2 offsets, so using trackIR, mouselook etc will operate the appropriate crewman head position (with suitable organic tweening). These positions are stored in the aircraft state so will work across all aircraft (AI and player) as well as multi-player.
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
