Flexman

Great stuff, looking forward to seeing a Leadwerks game up on Steam.

In the UK crowdfunding is not legal. Use of such funding sources carries a risk of prosecution.

Not in this case Mac. There's enough going on in the flight-model. Mast separation and structural damage is difficult to achieve, indeed visual representation of damage modelling was quite difficult, we have some 4 stage GREAT textures showing progressive damage but decals are not viable for this. Helicopter mesh detail requires non-instanced meshes and I WISH that I had built the helicopter not as a complete vehicle but as an assembly of common parts that could be instanced however LOD issues would have caused problems with that. Especially as some parts need animation (skinning). So that whole subject was a bag of worms that only with the recent Leadwerks 2.5 update would have been possible but too late to do anything about. So a feature best left for "the future". The damaged skin textures (covered in small bullet holes and scratches) do need to be used somehow and I'm hoping I can add those in later with some shader to blend them onto the aircraft. It needs to be progressive, that is, the greater the damage, the more of the damage texture has to show. Does that make any sense at all?

This one I get confused over: what does ForEachEntityInAABBDo(..) return? Meshes or Models? Both?

I know it's a little late for Valentines Day. Excessive flapping, bumping and separation is discussed in this priceless US Army video from 1980. If only they had "RotorCam ™". The Apache has a fixed rotor, mast bumping isn't an issue but it's all part of helicopter theory. I've been forced to continue hunting for other employment to deal with a mounting debt crisis. As a result work was put on hold the past two weeks (hence the lack of updates). I apologise for letting my post slide, the project really is taking a toll. I've been ordered to get back to Combat-Helo ASAP (taxes and all that business stuff needed to be done too), I'll be updating as well as I can. There's an engine update to finish rolling into the project (I started on that earlier in the week, this fixes a problem with terrain and I hope the EntityUserData and hierarchy problem). A Twitter follower suggested I post some Gun Cam footage, I had a look at that and found vegetation range/LOD issues in the MTADS camera need dynamic adjusting (not sure what the most efficient method will be yet). I'll just round this entry off by stating that raising funds in the UK for technical entertainment projects is very difficult if not near impossible. Bank staff/accountants take one look at video of Apache cockpits and give you funny looks like you're some kind of gun nut (that actually happened). In the meantime, enjoy the technical detail of the above video.

Coding a game with LUA is like trying to get a waffle through a straw (IMO).

Well there you go, someone already wrote a third party package for LUA. To confirm yes it uses XINPUT.DLL (XBOX controller DLL). Thanks Aggror for pointing that out. (LUA Joystick Demo) Perhaps you can take the concept of the demo and use an SDL LUA package to get at all the SDL_Joystick functions you need.

There's no inherent support for Joystick devices, you would need to add your own (somehow). I only use LUA for simple animation. Joysticks and gaming devices tend to be tricky as they are harder to work cross-platform unless you use something like SDL (Simple Direct Media Layer) or Blitmax's own joystick functions and make those available via a shared LUA object. It does seem to be an oversight but nobody has yet asked for it to be added to the LUA interface. Regards

I forgot to add the obligatory "gratz" for your ding

"Hey Alan, can I have some of your popcorn?" came to mind for some reason.

Character animation is a dark art to me, I greatly appreciate your insights Ken.

If I've learned anything from different languages over the years, they all let you screw up in wildly different ways. GC is just something to be aware of (there's even an example of bad practice in the manual). I tend to prefer fixed sizes for significant arrays anyway to minimise memory fragmentation. It's a luxury game programmers get that developers of middleware do not. But if you were making a general wall-chart on do's and dont's for BMX then Josh's thread title is a good candidate.

That's a darn good question. Until I came to think about some kind of seasonal adjustment I hadn't even considered this.

What level of detail is needed on it?

You can't move the terrain object. However if you drop LE terrain and use a mesh (or tiles) attached to pivots (and parent zone contents to that tile) then you can approximate camera relative rendering. There's no easy or clean solution to this with LE. In Unity it's pretty much the same deal except you have control over terrain tile positioning and async loading to make it all seamless. Changing the scale doesn't help either, it just offsets the problem. Short of having a build of LE that uses double precision (not easy as a lot of shaders which use world co-ordinates will be effected) you have to do a huge amount of work and design around it. And It's not something I wanted to do so I adopted a half-measure with the intention to fix it fully in version 2 of our project. Best you can do is mitigate problems. Shorten the camera near and far distance as much as you can Modify shaders to add more depth bias based on distance from camera User the material overlay flag where appropriate Render the scene in layers and blend them And how you tackles those depends on your project and the content. You can't (sadly) create the largest world you can in the editor and expect shadows to be stable once you're past 20,000 units from the world origin. The techniques you mention are solid (camera relative rendering, double precision) , but can't be easily applied to LE. I understand LE3.0 has large world rendering on the roadmap but is down the "to do" list. Our current project is vehicle based (a helicopter) which has the advantage in that you're typically inside an object that obstructs close up views of the main 3D world. And often these imperfections are only visible in outside 3rd person views. When the camera is in such a mode the camera settings are adjusted slightly, also we had to build the models in a way that minimised jitter (objects passing through each other). On the plus side it did make the models more efficient. For a world exploration type game I think one of the better approaches is to forget LE terrain and use imported meshes but that comes at the expense of the vegetation system and you can't use the editor to build your worlds in an easy fashion. GROME is an expensive tool but is built for tiling,painting and exporting individual zones as meshes (now with a direct to Unity export feature). It's well suited to a tile based world. Feel free to ask questions, I'll keep monitoring this thread.

LarryEllis, have you looked at GROME from QuadtreeSoftware?

No refunds

I not only anticipate but plan many updates after launch. It's not a simple game which you can fire and forget, maybe push a couple of updates and forget about it. Although I really DO (oh boy) miss making those kinds of games. There are aircraft systems we didn't have time to add, the biggest being the Hellfire missile system, a major component of the platform. Many games in this genre often have updates and it's quite frustrating hunting them down. There's new maps we can offer with this but just turning on content for users in the database. We take this kind of thing for granted today, I think it will improve the end-user experience.

The situation in the case of EA and Bell here is different because the designs are military and therefore funded by the US government. The Military Toy Replica Act (2006-2007), would have precluded contractors from seeking licensing for designs and designations contracted and paid for by the US government. The bill never got out of committee. When it comes to trademarks and copyright of design and likeness, a request for copyright registration numbers as well as trademark registration numbers would require them to document their claim. Without such paperwork they have no claim. The EFF has interceded on this issue (circa 2005) and successfully tangled with Lockheed. However the prudent approach is to approach is to invite manufacturers to advise you on the basis of any copyright claim. That's the benefit of the legal advice I got on this topic. In short, do you need to license, the answer is a definite "maybe". :/ stay away from trademarks and you should be fine.

Swimming was one. Setting up controllers in XPlane is another. Yes the things you thought were going to take a few days which turned into a week and a bit (you could almost say 'two weeks'). Josh at Leadwerks gave me a leg-up on how to put an MMO style launcher together and I've almost done wrapping up all the security for the necessary database, key code generation, CVS style updates and all the stuff we need to match individual content to clients. We'll make available downloadable content (DLC) such as new maps and the occasional helicopter (the planned CH-47D), not to mention the odd mission pack. No, this key won't work, it's a fakeSo there was a lot to do to make a simple one shot MMO style launcher. The back-end server stuff had to be built from scratch. The launch .EXE calls home, applies on-demand updates and preps game settings for launch. For simple security sakes I layered server-side scripts for handling the updates, admin and audit. Auditing is handled by triggers, SQL injection is futile since only one procedure is exposed to clients. Any DBA will tell you Auditing is an important part of any security. If you build any kind of database exposed to the internet and you don't build your own layer on top of any default transaction logging then you're kind of asking for trouble. The database engine used here is not known for keeping detailed logs so it was necessary to build one anyway. Things you might want to think about if you ever need to create systems like these are making log indexes suitable for frequency analysis (this one method Twitter uses to spot spamming), fake open doors and keys and silent alarms. My favourite trick in the past was a fake database that gives the intruder a high and makes them believe they have walked away with the crown jewels while evidence is collected. That sort of none-sense is not required here, I kept this one functional with a tiny footprint. The Pilot ID we'll be sending out is the key to your content; install once, play as you like. If you share copies around on your network you can launch 'offline' no worries, no need to be connected to the internet until you want to update. It's nice if you want to buy multiple copies for your network and support the effort put into this project but I'm poor too so I know how it is. Little bit of script consolidation and testing to do before we let this loose in the real world. Source

Ah yes, those commands you added to allow easy modification of Texture matricies I really liked (and made good use of) the material animation parameters you could add for OGRE3D materials. Waterfalls, wormholes, engine effects were pretty much fire and forget after making the material with those.

Handy if you're making simple editors or programmer art. From a practical POV, of more interest is taking something already mapped and built by an artist or 3rd party store, then applying autmated animation effects, UV scrolling. I'm sure CSG might be handy and no reason not to have more toys. Just my 0.002 euros.

From an Australian gaming mag (and those guys are tough cookies) at the bottom of a review of Take On Helicopters... Thanks for the mention guys the picture is a bit out of date though, but what the hell. Source

It was over a year ago we were notified that some of the models we had purchased from Dexsoft might possibly have been stolen. After a period of investigation the probability was quite high this was the case and Dexsoft contacted customers to offer new packs. However months later I was unable to get a reply about these replacements and only in November when doing a review of outstanding assets and licensing we had to either press again or do a re-build. Dave elected to take it upon himself to do a rebuild and not wanting to have to reposition every building adopted the same dimensions with the exception of adding much needed 'basements' (a basement is just an extrusion of the exterior wall so that it will sink under terrain so no gaps are left if the centre of the model is positioned on uneven ground. Originally the models were made for use in first-person games and LOD0 had details such as railings and girders. Dave completely built (from scratch) versions complete with new textures and made them more efficient at the cost of some detail. An original building had 5213 polygons, after a rebuild only 728 polys (which is iPhone territory). Original stolen model on left, rebuilt from scratch on right Scratch build on left, original on rightAny small indie developer takes a leap of faith when purchasing models from 3rd parties, you don't know where they came from or their history. In this instance we got bitten as did the 3rd party which handled the situation well (but it would have been nice to have the replacements anyway). No harm was done, anyone using or releasing games with 3rd party content be aware. Thanks Dave for once again being on the ball. Update Started work on the updater again.This is based in part on the Leadwerks SDK downloader which is pretty much everything I needed given a little twist and a slice of lemon. Hopefully some of you will be seeing this in the near future. At some point we'll add user names and a regcode system prior to any content downloads (these will not be required to play). As much as you might want to click on it, you can't yet With any luck the 'one click' update system will let us add rolling improvements at the cost of occasionally annoying you with a download when an update is available. I just want to be able to push one button, get the latest changes to any content I own and go. Support for different builds (content) Source

Angry Birds gets mentioned a lot and while yes it's a simple physics game, its success (and they made 50 games prior to that) is the huge effort and experience applied to presentation then giving it away to create it as a brand. For ballistics see this for a quick simple example of what you want. http://warpycode.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/aiming-a-projectile-uphill/