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Flexman

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  1. Flexman

    BBC's BoB Weekend

    By Flexman,

    Hey it's a blog, I'm blogging. All this talk about fluids.has brought on a nasty head cold. Up at 6am searching for the Lemsip (a horrid lemon flavoured drink with decongestant) and watching "Dogfights" on DVD.
     
    The History Channel series "Dogfights" prompted the next three to four hours of viewing since I realised just how bad it really was from the simpleton "Top Trumps" presentations to the seemingly good idea at the time computer graphics. To be fair I did learn something new every episode but given the subject and use of 'state of the art' CGI to tell the tale of classic air-wars why did it come over as really dull? Maybe current affairs news programs are to blame, their overuse of 3D graphics to portray everything from the invasion of Iraq to Tiger Woods getting kicked out of his house for a case of the "not-wife" has dulled the senses to the point where I really don't care about news any-more. It no longer gets read, watched or listened to. My mornings are happier and stress free since I'm no longer aware of what the children are up to in Westminster. The media seem to be outraged for me, it's one less thing to worry about.
     
    The downside of forgoing traditional media is a sense of isolation. Feeling I might have been missing out on the recent Battle of Britain events I decide to check out what the BBC have been up to for the 70th anniversary.
     
    *pause to drink my Lemsip - yuck*
     
    Back again.
     
    Horray. The BBC declared war on boredom as the Battle of Britain Weekend has given us a season of themed documentaries, dramas and ...er...entertainments. The first and one I recommend to everyone to catch is a fascinating film based on the book "First Light" by RAF pilot Geoffrey Wellum, at just 18, he was among the youngest pilots who saw combat and subsequently wrote his memoirs which I must read after watching this erm, docu-dramatainment film. It charts the slide into "VoidComp" (no compassion, the first of two Blade Runner references in this blog post), loosing your humanity and identity through combat on a daily basis.
     
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/comingup/first-light/
     
    Geoffrey Wellum was also in the BBC's "The Battle of Britain" documentarytainment 1hr 30min special in which Colin and Ewan McGregor try to ... I'm not sure what. Trace the steps of those pilots? Train up for a once in a lifetime joyride at the controls of a Spitfire? Establish the significance of the events of August/September 1940? I'm not clear what it was about but features lovely photography of Duxford and classic aircraft. Colin is like what Ewan would be if he grows up (and I mean that in a good way). The look on Colin McGregor's face after his flight at the controls of the Spit was priceless. And a great 3 point landing with no bouncing down the airfield.
     
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00txy2q
     
    Not much more to add, except a plee to all documentary makers.
     
    If you're going to raid photo archives for genuine images, is it really necessary to add that off-putting 3D panning effect to EVERY SINGLE BLOODY ONE? You're not making Blade Runner, clearly they weren't using Holographic technology in WWII, photographs only move if you're attending school at Hogwarts, so please lay off the stupid effects, it just looks wrong. There's no replicant hiding behind Winston Churchill, Hugh Dowding or Sir Douglas Bader.
     
    I should know, I was just seven years old and in short trousers when I met Douglas Bader, I vaguely knew who he was from my fathers stories. My father was not a pilot, but he was in the RAF doing what he did best, build things, repair planes, make do, valuable skills for the war in North Africa. While posted somewhere in England when Duggie needed some change for the pub phone, my father was there to loan him that sixpence. Which was never returned I should add. Not that this reflected badly on his character, Duggie was often legless in or even out of the pub (as he would be the first to joke). Both have since passed away. But bless the BBC for letting us remember those who have passed on in such a way that celebrates the present.
     
    Through the experiences of those before might we learn something about ourselves, if we care to listen. Watching Dogfights you'd be forgiven for thinking that all you needed to be to win was be a great pilot. It's a blinkered armchair general point of view that lacks any basis in reality. In "First Light", Mr Wellum reflects that it didn't matter if you were a good pilot or a great pilot, you just had to be lucky.
     
    Never a truer word was said.
     
    Source
  2. Flexman
    Time for another dull dev blog. This time, the exciting world of Hydraulics which I didn't know much about except what I can gather from various books I have laying around.
     
    Hydraulics are a game component as it effects how long you can maintain control in event of damage to your controls or hydraulic lines and it also powers gun turret control. Controls are not direct in modern aircraft, due to the amount of force required to move a large surface area on an aircraft weighing tons, human muscle has been replaced by a system of wires, pipes, pumps and actuators.
     
    Pressure within this system is vital as it translates a pilots control movement into control surface movement, on a helicopter the cyclic (joystick) operates hydraulic servos that move a large ring under the main rotor called the "swashplate". Wikipedia (swashplate)
     
    I digress.
     
    To simulate damage to this system, we need a basic simulation that isn't too complex as it needs to work for all AI helicopters in our main update loop. If the hydraulic pressure drops then control response has to become "mushy", you should feel this if you're flying a damaged bird. Additionally this should give the AI flying as it's virtual control inputs lag potentially inducing poor looking oscillation. More experience AI crew having faster input response times should be able to handle emergency situations better.
     
    From time of loosing pressure, we're going to give you around 20 minutes to land, your mileage will definitely vary. The ACCumulator stores around 3000psi and is a buffer that maintains the pressure of the primary (PRI) and utility (UTIL) system pressure. These two systems, PRI and UTIL are pressurised from the APU and used to start the engines.
     
    This is reflected in the ENG page during startup. Start the APU, watch the pressures (there's a bleed metric for damage to the system and a fluid level as a percentage). As soon as the primary system reaches around 3000psi (there's a bit of fluctuation added for authenticity) you're good for engine start.
     
    I think this is where the LOCK position of the rotor brake gets it's pressure from.
     
    Almost everything in the Apache is automatic here, operation of this system is handled for you with some exceptions. We have a big Emergency Hydraulics button in the cockpit, pictured below. This allows fluid from the accumulator circuit to flow into the utility circuit. After that, you're on your own.
     

     
    The things we have to do just to get three numbers up. Oh, and don't get me started on oil pressure ;-)
     
    Source
  3. Flexman

    TADS/PNVS Stow

    By Flexman,

    I wasn't sure about the STOW angles so I set the PNVS to 165 inboard (0=along the nose) and TADS 180' inboard. Activated via the NVS mode switch in the cockpit (or CTRL S). The CPG station doesn't seem to have the noeswheel/NVS panel unless we missed it. You'll just have to play as the pilot if you want to flip the switch by hand.
    Switch has 3 position, off (stows the sensors for transitional flight), normal for tracking head movement and fixed for boresight (straight ahead).

    The NVS Mode switch is located forward of the engine power levers, left side panel.
     
    Source
  6. Flexman

    Problem with gun camera

    By Flexman,

    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
  7. Flexman
    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 for all your video game torture needs.
     
    Source
  8. Flexman
    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
  9. Flexman
    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 in future.
     
    After some thinking we boiled it down to two simple options.
     

    The first is application of a damage texture on parts (child objects) of the helo model that match the aircraft's damaged state. And Dave left me the following image, a simple test to check it out...

    Another technique is decals. Now I've looked at LE decals before and I don't think they will work everywhere on our map due to floating point and surface fighting in the outer regions. These are patches that positioned to be almost co-planer with the surface of a model (like the decals you stick on a model). If they work, they have the advantage in that they should work for everything.
    A more complex alternative is a new method of decals using a glyph shader. What we'd do is have a single texture upon which, in a grid patter is lots of damage and battlescar images. We pass this glyph texture into the mesh frag shader along with a damage map of the aircraft. The shader will splat areas from damage map with psudo-random glyphs of damage. This might look OK to pretty bad depending on textures. I'm quite keen to try this as I want to add such a system to give players some custom paint jobs reflecting game achievements/rank (such as earned 'shart teeth' and other hokey things).
     
    A similar shader is already present in LE version 2.40 for adding plaster-work to brick walls. Now 2.40 has some new commands for adjusting LOD ranges, we're almost goo to go to move the project to the new version of the engine.
     
    For now, keeping it simple works and I think the damage texture looks alright.
     
    Source
  10. Flexman
    I'm putting together specifications on the mission side of the game. To me, the bit that you 'play' is every bit as important as the simulation side, and while it's taken a back seat for now, things are getting to the point where it's time to get on and make it all work. Going through some of my older material on this, it needs to play like Longbow 2, have the crew management elements from Gunship 2000 and strategy elements from tactical board games on guerilla warfare and a bit of a story element that wouldn't be out of place in a Chris Roberts game.
    So where do we start? Units, missions, events and triggers.
    Units perform missions, missions contain waypoints, events and triggers. So lets start at the top and work our way down.
    Missioneering
    Not many will remember the last iteration of my mission planning tool and generator, Missioneer Delta pictured below, circa 2000, seems like almost 10 years ago :/

    The plan is to put in something similar onto the command tent terminal you can operate to change waypoints and assign untasked airCREW to helos to carry out listed missions. In some ways this is not unlike Enemy Engaged. Missions are not necessarily assigned to aircraft (they can be), but we'll assign them to the player, AI pilot or crew. Like the arming system, it will be possible for a player to take the role of a commander and assign missions to aircraft that pilots execute.
    You can walk around and choose an aircraft that's not already assigned (see it's info plate when on foot for status). In future we hope to have a selection of helicopters/vehicles (CH-47) but we're focused on the Apache.
    When the player boards the aircraft, this is like loading a data cartridge with your mission detailed into the aircraft's avionics. The TSD will be updated with waypoints, times and mission page populated accordingly. First man in sets the mission.
    The mission ID# key is set in the vehicle entity. This is reset on one of two conditions, the player has exited the aircraft for 5 minutes or the master zeroise guarded switch in the cockpit is operated. In the case of the latter, a new mission profile can not be loaded until all crewmembers have exited the aircraft.
    Mission ID# is just a key reference to the hosts list of active missions which can be viewed on the command tent terminal (connected to the projector).
    But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Missions and units need a detailed specification which is the point of this blog entry and my current task.
    Running under the surface of the simulation will be the all important campaign engine which iterates through units. We'll take the term UNIT to mean a collection of vehicles, a "group entity". Lets look at an old user editable unit form, take from Missioneer. Nothing really remarkable about it, just happens to be handy.

     
    So we can see some of the basic parameters of a unit. There's a list of entities than make up the unit, a 'formation' which is a list of relative positions that each member of the group will attempt to follow (we'll have some behavioural exceptions to this). An orientation, direction to face when at rest. A name, something fancy and military. Skill level, agression and some factional information.
    There are also some timers, our game runs in a real-time 24 hour clock cycle (with time advancement). So unit timers might be relative to an absolute time (world time) or mission time (from dust-off). Timers have an enabled/active status too in case they need to be activated by triggers.
    For example, if we want a group of insurgents for player assigned patrol mission to spawn when a player has taken off, the mission engine will assign a MT (mission time) of "00:00:00mt Active", but we might want them 5 minutes into the mission, or not spawn at all except by some trigger, such as a player entering the engagement area.
    Or we can set the unit destruction time (just means the de-spawn time). For example, a rescue against the clock, get to them before they are discovered by encroaching insurgent forces. Once depawned, that would trigger a unit removal message which another event trigger can listen for, signalling a mission fail.
    So timers are simple unit level events that require no special handling by an event system. But for our game to handle recognition of a "win" or a "fail" situation we'll need to add a basic "cause and effect", a "cause" being destruction of unit "x" with the "effect" being "mission complete".
     
    Mission Events
    SpawnUnit (unitID) DestroyUnit (unitID) SetUnitWaypoint (unitID, waypointID) SetUnitFlag (unitID, active|weapons_free|godlike|formation|state, param) SetUnitFaction SetMissionResult SetWorldFaction( factionID, delta) SpawnObject (objectID, parameters) CreateWaypoint (unitID, waypointID, location, speed, altitude) Play Audioscript (script or audio filename)
    Mission Triggers (in any active combination)
    MissionRating (percent, win|loose|draw) MissionTime (+ - secs, MT|LT) UnitDistanceFrom (unitID, targetUnitID, distance_meters) UnitDamage (unitID, damage_percent) UnitWaypoint (unitID,at|before|after, waypointID) UnitStatus (not_in_combat|combat|flee|panic|landing|takeoff) UnitInZone (unitID, zoneID) FactionDelta (factionID1, factionID2, + -value) DiceRoll (percent)
    These are enough for the campaign and mission system to generate pretty much most situations.
    Now the tricky part is to build the logic to generate seemingly intelligent behavior and entertain missions using this small command set. And here is where we can have a lot of fun.
    We could extend the complexity of the logic further by adding a LUA Get/Set interface for the event system. Then user made missions can apply some complex logic. Even creating whole missions from a LUA script. This is not something we want to do at this time. But for the future, it could be done.
     

     
    Source
  11. Flexman
    Actually the rotor brake system. I'm not really clear what would happen if the rotor brake is off when you move the power levers from the Idle to Fly position. Procedures say DONT, return the switch back to on until the engines are at flight speed (approx 100%). Once the engines are happily settled at flight speed flip the brake off and the rotors begin to turn. Watch the rotor RPM gauge on the MFD until it's in the yellow close to 100% then you're good to go.
     
    Conversely, I'm not too clear what damage might occur when then rotors are at 100% and the rotor brake switch is is turned on. A lot of heat and grinding metal noise? A nasty letter from the Boeing company? Currently I just have it decay the RPM to zero under a constant until I get a better answer.
     

     
    I added more realism options to the config.xml for control over individual items like startup, targetting, flight model.
     
    OOOH, I just remembered why I was really happy today. AD fixed the road physics problem by using displacement mapping in 3DS MAX. So no hacky hacks may be required for road driving afterall. Well done sir. I knew I was feeling buoyant for a reason. If you want to know what the hacky hack means, the road surface was aligned to the terrain with a vertex shader which moves each point on the model level with the ground (relatively) but physics engines don't know what vertex shaders do to geometry, as far as they are concerned the model is unchanged. So there's a disconnect between what the physics engine updates and what the 3D card renders on screen. Using displacement mapping with our heightmap as source, the road meshes are baked at the right elevations to fit, the physics model and visual model are now united and traffic may now use the roads without any problems.
     
    So, way to go AD. Another cracking solution.
     
    Source
  13. Flexman
    Finally a video showing the free flight mode we really wanted to show at Summer Sim 2010. Thanks AD for doing an amazing job of making it all look good.
     
     

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6ILqIQDaio
     
     
    Sorry about the lack of blade-cam, LUA object reference problem. Will get it sorted.
  14. Flexman
    Never felt the need to keep fish until now. It's a crashed helicopter for use in your pond or aquarium. Thanks Phil (and Rob for sending it on).
     

    This wonder compares to the bizarre "Titantic with inflatable iceberge" bath toy I once found in an English Heritage gift shop.
     
    Source
  15. Flexman

    Camp....insert name here

    By Flexman,

    AD has been working on a new FOB which will be the "other" main camp you'll be deployed at during the course of the campaign.
     

    It's a triangle arrangement used by some forward operational bases. Here the CH47s are ready to be deployed.
     

     

    And finally..
     

    Don't have a name for the camp yet.
     
    Source
  16. Flexman
    I've been using this for testing and making profiles for Combat-Helo since the weekend. This is a really odd stick. It's perhaps the best built joystick out of the box I've ever had the privilege of using. And quite a looker too. The textured metal feel, the metal triggers and even a couple of the HATs. Oddly this level of build isn't consistent with several hats made from what feels like a poor quality plastic. But it wasn't broken or badly assembled, and nothing has broken yet.
     
    If you didn't know, the X65 is a force sensing stick. It doesn't move and is really sensitive to tiny amounts of hand pressure along the x/y and rotation axis. The amount of pressure you apply is translated into a direction. It makes fine control a joy since there are no springs or rubber boots to interfere with your intent. Apart from the plastic hats I don't have anything to say about the stick. Just really nice to hold, use, and with no moving parts it should be reliable. Guiding the Apache in Combat-Helo around for landing can be tricky made easier by the X65.
     
    Then there's the throttle. *sigh*
     
    Again beautifully made except for the dual throttle tension adjuster, a tiny hex screw on the underside made from the softest metal on the planet designed to dissolve on contact with anything heavier than neutrinos. The dual-throttle operation set to the weakest tension setting requires quite a lot of force. More force than is comfortable or practical for a helicopter collective that might require a good percentage of travel quickly. The perfect combo would be a separate collective controller and then just use the dual throttle for the engine levers. Also it has a rather unpleasant sounding 'gloop' noise when operated, like there's a lot of grease inside being moved around. The noises are almost pornographicly sticky.
     

     
    So we have a super sensitive joystick perfect for fine control. And a near impossible-to-move dual throttle controller that needs to be nailed down (which is why it comes with a heavy steel plate).
     
    All in one neat package. A tale of two joysticks.
     
    Source
  17. Flexman

    Missing lighting knob

    By Flexman,

    Dave, the kids must have been playing "pilot" again, they've gone and pulled off the knob for the standby instrument lighting, make it like the other two rotaries. I'll fix the camera clipping on the seat
     

     
    Source
  18. Flexman

    Weekend video

    By Flexman,

    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 with having to "land at an alternate airport" just to keep things moving.
     
    Also I want to fix up the cockpit ambient lighting before recording a sight-seeing tour around our version of Herat city. Here's a tasty screen-shot of the Citadel to keep you going.
     

     
    Source
  19. Flexman
    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
  20. Flexman
    Had a quick play with Saitek's DirectOutput SDK, results are mixed but not bad. The MFD resolution in Combat-Helo is a native 512x512 and the Saitek Flight Instrument Panel is VGA 320x240, there's a bit of difference.
     

    Sampling the buffer down to a smaller surface and then adding a suitable BMP header to send over to the device. Remarkably easy. I'll have three more please Saitek
     
    BUT please can you make an FIP version two with a 512x512 square ratio display? Or at least increase the vertical resolution to 256?
     

    Text is near impossible to read, but the general layout is recognisable. I don't know if we're going to support these devices in game, it's just one more thing to go wrong and support, and the default button locations don't match up so it would need code to move functions over to the left side, there are only 6 six buttons. But it's interesting to play around with.
     

     
    Source
  21. Flexman
    I want to thank Komodo Simulations for inviting me down for Summer Sim 2010, even though it didn't go according to plan we all learned a lot, I certainly did and this was really a chance to meet people and forge connections.
     
    Rich was clearly deep in thought and concerned about hardware performance. I was lost in deep thought and concerned about software. Everyone else didn't seem to mind very much. What happened was, early in the day while I was re-compiling the demo to fix a stupid inverted axis problem, FSX was running a helo demo and a visitor came and stomped on the left pedal, ripping out the weld and smashing the Hall sensor. We had to make do with alternative hardware (thanks to Flightstore for the loaners etc.)
     
    The "Virtual Blade", but nothing virtual about it, very real.
    What you would have seen today.
    If you came along, thank you very much to coming up and saying hi, I'm really sorry you didn't get a chance to see (much) of the game. Things just conspired against us from the start. But we'll get a new movie done showing some of the things we wanted to show this weekend but didn't. Oh, please email me if you were there as I'd like to get your names for future reference.
     
    Laptop demo, not a flying toy
    I came away with a Saitek X62; a stupidly knobbly joystick that has more buttons and hats than you thought was possible to put on a joystick. And also a Saitek Instrument Flight Panel which are those little LCD panels with VGA resolution (320x240). This morning I installed the Saitek OpenOutput SDK on my laptop (which continually gave me a memory errors after compiling till I rebooted *grrrr*) and got the 512x512 MFDs in Combat-Helo supersampled down to 240x240 to fit Saitek's panel. It was readable, not great, but certainly readable. The SDK is quite nice, a lot of callback hooks and functions for sending JPGs, BMPs and text to the screen. It's actually a good resolution for the Upfront Display, some nice chap at the show asked about (sorry I forget your name, even though I asked I'm pretty terrible with them). I'll post a pic later when I get a chance.
     
    I'm going to have to get a new stick of RAM for the demo laptop, it was one more thing letting me down. Yesterday it was crashing randomly when trying to run the demo and same again today when compiling. What's more the changes I made to fix one issue caused enough which I didn't notice till later (collective at 230%??), silly typo.
     
    The Komodo team comes equipped with a deadly "nice-guy", a chap so full of charisma he could (with apologise to Douglas Adams) charm all four legs off an Arcturan mega-donkey except perhaps the manager of a local restaurant who insisted it was perfectly normal to wait two hours for your starter. But at least the conversation was good and I learned fascinating things about horses.
     
    Thank you "Cyclic" (aka Rob) for being my point man again, have a good trip back to Saudi. Phil, I know you couldn't make it but the photo you sent of the Blackhawk Down fish pond decoration was a real ROFL. Every pond should have a crashed helo in it. (Rob, can you send it to me?)
     
    Day two and the chair was fixed, sorry I couldn't stick it out the whole day but there was a lot of interest in the chair and it was a really busy Sunday. We'll be looking to have a special Combat-Helo software/hardware package with a replica Apache control system consisting of a cyclic with magnetic force trim and full length collective. Unless it all goes pear shaped of course. How much will it cost? We'll you know but estimates sounded reasonable and not far off a certain A10 replica stick soon to arrive.
     
    Actually we all had a long chat about the Thrustmsater A10 and while Rob in particular voiced how nice it looked, the fear is that they will drop the ball again like they did with the Cougar. The trust isn't there anymore. A scary thought.
     
    *edit* The X65 force sensors are amazing, apart from the **** plastic HAT2 and POV (also plastic) it's pretty slick. Most of it's metal including one of the HAT, so why skimp on the rest?
     
    Sunday: the Komodo Simuations camo tent "FARP"(Rich, forground left looking pensive)
    (and YES I finally got my bloody PC Pilot subscription, can you spot where?)
    Thank you to my hosts, Rich, Mac and the nice lady who needed chocolate. Good luck at Duxford next week (it's also Battle of Britain weekend there so it's going to be mental). Take a spare
     
    Source
  22. Flexman
    All the things we want to show but can't. Still making some final hour changes to get a robust demo working that can be operated by Joe Public (I'm told he's coming along). A simple flying demo that will show the technology, Afghan map, lighting and cockpit. It has the mark 1 flight model I keep tweaking. sounds could be better. I wish I had time to do the landing gear joints, it's hard to land without wheels.
     
    Better stop with the bloggin and get back to writing.
     
     

     
    Source
  23. Flexman
    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 have a pair of M1A1s on the doorstep but they do look interesting.
     

    Poster child..."never alone"
     

    We have been hard at work on getting a simple flying demo ready for a public showing, we've had to make it playable and gave me an excuse to put some more time into the mark 1 flight model which is a much simpler easy to fly model for general consumption. This approximates the mass of the helicopter, rotor thrust from engine power and semi coordinated turns. The landing gear desperately needs some joints to make it easier to land but I don't think I'll have time for that.
     
    Following the road north our of Camp Sone you eventually approach Herat, our version is perhaps more idyllic taxi-free version, and perhaps more green to make efficient use of geometry. Enough to fill enough area to represent a small city.
     

    No orange sunset here. Looks much more natural.
     

    Freecam mode lets you move anywhere you want to take snapshots. Contemplating broadcasting a regular call to prayer from the towers at the appropriate local game time.
     

     
    Nice choice of sky. You can see what we had to do to the rivers to prevent a lot of clipping and z-buffer fighting. Hence the "Death Star Trench" name we use.

     
    Source
  24. Flexman
    These are placement tests for the Apache model in the editor, getting a feel for colour, levels, position, range and angle. The left nav light (red) on the Apache model needs to have the fullbright material applied to be visible in dark conditions. One pilot was telling me that the ground on the left side on the helicopter appears brighter than the right with night vision. Interestingly our night vision shader amplifies lighting levels based on final pixel colour and gives a boost to red values so you should also experience the same effect.
     

     
    Same again but with the nav strobe blinking, ever so short flash that should be visible 2km away in game terms. It uses a corona and not a real light source for performance reasons. It's highly visible and does it's job. Although it will probably flare-out or clip in NV mode. I experimented adding two point lights in the cockpit area, these lights currently exist in the internal cockpit mode but I'll see about adding them to the external model if it can be easily done. On the whole, performance would be better just baking that light onto the texture but the exterior cockpit is really simple, the canopy doesn't cast shadows and the light range is short.
     

    Final shot is the retractable spot-light, which we were going to model, maybe we did already but can't remember...(check notes). It's supposed to be steerable and there's a toggle switch for it somewhere. I think using a 3D cone mesh to add a bit of fake 'haze' around it might be an idea.
     

    I shall get these coded up into the game model now. Pretty pleased with the overall layout.
     

     
    Source
  25. Flexman

    Internal views

    By Flexman,

    Added some fixed internal views for 'quick' look downs and drama shots.
     
    Wiper dash...this has a little vibration.

     
    Pilot displays...

     
    Over shoulder...

     
    Pilot engine controls (startup and lighting)...CP/G similar (not pictured)

     
    Co-pilot target panel (TEDAC)...

     
    I think a 'foot-well' cam will come when we get a pilot model in game so we can see the crew looking around. And I think we could use an ADI/Comms panel view. Feel free to suggest a few more.
     
    Source
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