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 through two routers involved the same port forwarding process as is required for BlackShark. Enabling NAT punch-through requires an external service to act as a matchmaking partner. Since the onus is on the host, we'll assume they know what they are doing anyway.

The address-book had some problems with the XML save/update, now fixed. More changes to the colour scheme. A tidy into bar at the bottom rather like the in Falcon3+ and LockOn displaying connection status, camera, mode, fps etc. General tidy work to polish what's been completed already.

Apache HMD

I corrected the Helmet Mounted Display to show the pitch ladder and horizon line as fixed instead of being locked forward (as seen in the YouTube VRCockpit First Look video). Much better for the pilot, now I can comfortably look around and make corrections to the aircraft.

There's more work to do in the cockpit to make front/rear/solo seat modes work. This is my focus for the coming week which will sees that engine start-up procedure working at last.

Game Engines / iPhone

We pre-ordered Unity 3.0 last week since it was on offer. We can squeeze the Combat-Helo PC campaign into a stripped down iPhone game. Fans of Combat-Helo can support PC development and have a little fun pretending to be an Apache gunner for 3 minutes at a time.

I still haven't migrated the PC Leadwerks engine to 2.32 yet. So many issues with the cockpit and camera-picking still. Some surface switches in our pit have a tolerance of 0.05 units and were not being recognised. This tolerance is perhaps too small anyway given floating point inaccuracies. These shouldn't be a problem when I move away from rendering the cockpit in the main world (still on my to-do list). Speaking of which here's the current priority list...

To-do

• Electrical power system and engine start-up
• Master Arm and weapon selection
• Cubic spline interpolation for client character controllers
• Landing gear dynamics (still makes landing difficult)

Combat-Helo : Operation Ouroboros

Operation Counter Insurgency was noted on shots of a splash screen posted a while back. As remarked by one soldier, "It's not very military". This harks back where we didn't have a clue for a project title, it didn't seem to be a priority. For months it remained "Unnamed Helicopter Project" or UHP. Operation Counter Insurgency (OCI) came out of that as something to fill a splash screen. In keeping with the military tradition of using really obscure names (British operations have some really odd ones), Operation Ouroboros represents the endless cycle of conflict in the region. As an ancient symbol of a dragon or serpent that swallows itself, it's unlikely to be trademarked. Above all, it makes the game sound like a sneeze "CHOO".

Bless you.

A photo that sums up a fairly typical start to a Combat-Helo escort mission.

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