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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

Don't Panic

Yes Panic.   When you're rushing to get a reasonable build ready for hammering out problems I'm finding I'm making all new problems. Going over the HMD code I realise how badly it needs rebuilding, there are existing elements that need updating, a few new ones that require adding. There's no way to rebuild the HUD in time.   Another problem. LUA in the Apache entity. Works in the first instance, but fails in subsequent entity spawns resulting in the inability to mount the aircraft. It's an i

Flexman

Flexman

Amazing what you can find on the internet today.

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 *wince*   A lifetime of programming and tinkering, stacks of hard drives of unpublished projects ranging from Spanish school time-tab

Flexman

Flexman

Minigame...I mean gun

AD has started some great work on the armaments of the CH47 that will form the first major DLC pack for the full release of Combat-Helo. Each door position will offer a fun interactive activity, usually in the form of throwing out obscene amounts of virtual lead.   For more pictures please see: ADs SimHQ CH-47 blog update thread Mini-gun, I don't get the mini part though.   Source

Flexman

Flexman

NTS Next To Shoot aka TAB targeting

[NTS] Left Upper button. Next To Shoot is the ubiquitous video game cycle through targets. Or TAB target if you play MMOs.   I've touched upon how radar works in this blog entry from August - Radar - A Discussion   The Apache can automatically selecting priority targets based on some sort of criteria. This short blog post touches on how I've elected to do this. Again if you're familiar with the 1996 classic, Janes Longbow 2 there's nothing unfamiliar here.   The TSD (tactical situation di

Flexman

Flexman

Random Pics of the Day

Starting to feel the pressure now. Both the financial and stress factors are weighing in. Doesn't stop me working but it's hard to switch off. On the business side there's a ton of things on the to-do list, it all eats time taken from production.   Spooky, ok so the lip light isn't actually on his mic. If it was you wouldn't see this. Boeing sent me a poster back in 2002, this is a homage to that. This time with the rear seat. Taking out bad guys without damaging the good guys is a challen

Flexman

Flexman

GROME 3.1 is out

Quadtree software has released the 3.1 update to Grome.   Grome is a fantastic terrain editor I've been playing with for future enhancements and rolling out a larger terrain systems in the future. If you play flying games and RPGs on consoles chances are you've probably already seen a Grome edited terrain. It's used by nearly every major player in the simulation industry. Incorporating a plug-in system, OpenSceneGraph and now new improved Unity integration.   What's new in 3.1      

Flexman

Flexman

Where Angels Fear to Thread

Leadwerks Engine 2 is single-threaded. The engine performs one task at a time. The engine updates physics, then performs some other tasks, then renders the scene, waiting until each task if finished before moving onto the next one:   I have experience programming threads in BlitzMax, and it works pretty much the same way in C++. Leadwerks3D is taking full advantage of threads and multicore CPUs, splitting off any expensive tasks that can be run on separate threads.   Multithread program

Josh

Josh

My First Demo

Here's a look at what I've been working on. The games I'm interested in making will resemble World of Warcraft, Dark Age of Camelot, and Warhammer Online, so the look and feel will mimic those as much as possible.   I've been working out the programming kinks. Had a 20 minute headache the other day when I suddenly realized that I was mixing up radians and degrees.   The animations look pretty good. I don't know that the video clip does them justice. I will probably revisit them later on

Clackdor

Clackdor

Short summer :(

It has been a while. I have been very busy and unfortunately that means I have not been modeling much. Not as much as I would like. I still with about one or two hours a week have about 20 to 30 models 70 percent done. I know, I for some reason have a problem with getting bored and moving on to another model. If I want to go any where with this stuff I will have to kick this in the butt soon. The models that I have made was a nice learning process since I have modeled for a while, I have never r

tournamentdan

tournamentdan

Did I mention the FCR offset?

Remember the spinny radar thingy in Longbow 2? Scan sectors sizes and off-axis settings for the Longbow FCR (Fire Control Radar)? No?   If you look at the heading tape of the screen-shot you'll see in the heading tape the "butt-cheeks" (two Ds back to back) on a heading of 225, off axis by 45 degrees. This indicates the direction the radar is pointing, as the FCR display is 'always up' in GTM mode. This can be a little disorientating and the radar footprint is mirrored on the TSD, this paints

Flexman

Flexman

Field Trip

I was at a shopping center this afternoon wasting time, and came across a hobby shop. I can't quite articulate what it is about stuff like this that I like, but this is what I want game development with Leadwerks3D to be like. This is why I set up the Leadwerks Asset Store and make the effort to make nice thumbnails with transparency to show off items in 3D. I want more game development to be a process of producing reusable components, and then at the design level, of picking and choosing whi

Josh

Josh

Fuel XFER

Dull day, so lets post about something most normal people find dull. Fuel flow controls. In the Apache D model this is administered on the FUEL MPD page.   Not much to say about it, I'm bored already. It does what it does. Our Apache has two internal ballistically shielded self-sealing fuel tanks. Fuel can be drawn or transferred from one or the other to adjust weight distribution. Activating fuel boost engages the rear tank cross-feed valves as seen here. Fuel transfer between tanks should no

Flexman

Flexman

Shaders the old fashioned way

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

Flexman

Flexman

Apple and Leadwerks

I was thinking this morning how Apple has influenced my life and the company Leadwerks. You might ask why I am talking about this, since we are only now coming out with our first product for any Apple operating system. Well, before Windows existed, back in the 1980's, this was my first computer:     The first "game" I ever made was in Macintosh Paint. I drew a road from a top-down view, with barriers randomly placed on either side. I drew a race car, zoomed in the image, and used the se

Josh

Josh

AD posts more Chinook updates at SimHQ

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.

Flexman

Flexman

Three's a Crowd

Crowd navigation is built into Leadwerks3D. You just set a destination, and your characters will automatically travel wherever you tell them to go. I think having navigation built into the engine will give us better results than a third party add-on would. We can automatically recalculate sections of the map that change, AI script functions can be called when certain events occur, and the code to control characters is extremely simple.  

Josh

Josh

Combat-Helo Prologue wip Video in HD

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

Flexman

Flexman

Navigation Win

I fixed our AI navigation problems and got pathfinding to work using navmeshes. Now you can easily make a horde of zombies chase after the player without setting up any waypoints. Which is the whole point of this, of course.   The problem had to do with a polygon filter, and I am still not sure what is going on, so I disabled it for now.  

Josh

Josh

Artificial Stupidity

I'm testing the Leadwerks3D AI navigation and getting some interesting results. I'm not sure why it's acting this way, but we'll get it figured out soon. It seems like the navigation gets "stuck" on corners, fails to enter some tiles, and likes to take the scenic route to some destinations. B)  

Josh

Josh

"Finding" a "Path"...Get it? Wait a minute...

So after about three weeks of pain and frustration, I have successfully calculated my first path using Recast navigation. This has been a new experience for me. I've implemented half a dozen low-level C++ libraries, and never had any serious trouble, but Recast Navigation is something else.   The technology underlying Recast is impressive. First they take triangle geometry, convert it to voxels, then calculate navigation, and convert it back into rough polygons. You can read about the proc

Josh

Josh

Two years old

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.   Source

Flexman

Flexman

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