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Flexman

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  1. Flexman
    In the process of sweeping changes to how the game loads vehicles and other data. A lot of data the describes how the virtual cockpit works, where you sit, angles of views etc. was not available early on and since my long term plan is a system in which we can serve you new vehicles down the wire, even adding the Chinook was going to need a bit of fiddling around. Some data was in the object LUA, some in an external file, some embedded. It wasn't the original intention to build vehicles this way, but it was expedient at the time.
     
    Now it's time to put things right and make a nice neat all-in-one package that's flexible (after all that is my middle name).
     
    Another thing I wanted to do was allow the ability to tie entities to simulation variables, so a cockpit altimeter needle can be assigned to the vehicle.baroaltitude parameter. Hey does any of this sound familiar? If it does then you've done aircraft/gauge development for Microsoft FSX. While this isn't anywhere as deep, it's enough for us to be able to bundle new helicopters and even ground vehicles later on. I'll publish a list of available parameters later when I know the scope myself. MPDs and HUDs can be copied to specified entities using the name of the glass instrument output and the name of the surface you want it displayed on.
     
     
    * edit*
    This is pretty neat, I've now added a bit more flexibility to what we can do with the cockpit inputs. Each individual switch position may now have a delay (hold at this position n seconds before firing) and fire an additional command at that position.
     
    * end edit*
     
     
     
     
    The FFD (dynamics) data could be added too to describe how it flies/drives, that's to be look at later.
     
    There's still a quantity of code required to determine message priority, client/server authority. but at some future time if we want to add "user roles" as a message filter to any control, this is flexible enough for us to drop that in and not rely so much on coded game logic. Filtration and authority of incoming messages are important for multi-crew vehicles in multiplayer, you need to be as lean as possible (I bake state flags into bit fields as much as practical). Not all switches need to be recorded or sent, some are vital (crew helmet positions need fast updates for the HUD and sensors), some (wipers/lights) can be delayed.
     
    The "command" string in the cockpit switch data is sent to the messaging system, if it's a network level command it's forwarded to any needed clients via Raknet.
     
    As our vehicles are 'portals' there isn't much physics going on for attached crews. As a gunner, your helo position comes from the pilot and interpolated, your sensor position is based this, and that in turn is relayed back to the pilot. So there is room for some weirdness but not too much I hope. The way the Apache works actually works in our favour. Since each weapon system has a designated 'crew in command', the game logic knows who's the shooter and the positional data from the client in authority is used. And if you're not targeting a visible entity (e.g tank) then you're aiming at an invisible one (a pivot). This reduces oddities caused by differences of position reported by actual and interpolated crew positions.
     
    Source
  2. Flexman

    More HUD config options

    By Flexman,

    Completed changes to the HUD section of the config file.
    <HUD col="1.0, 0.8, 0.2" glow="0" shadow="1" breakoutfpi="1" />
     
    I'm using the TinyXML lib for config functions, it's been fast efficient and easy to use. I added a new option today that was born out of looking at videos of games projected onto huge screens giving almost 1:1 scale. Before my tripplehead PC went pop I had a problem with virtual symbology relative to HUD size. The larger the screen, the smaller the HUD relatively. At it's worst, the effect was looking through a keyhole.
     
    So I removed the keyhole, the "breakout" option in the HUD config will plot some indicators outside the HMD area and in a relative scale to the screen size. This makes it more useful at the expense of not being totally accurate, hence the option.
     
    In the screenshot below you'll note the user colour option for the HUD symbology in effect alongside the flightpath indicator outside the HUD buffer (right of the altitude bar in the hilly bits). This is easier to use on a laptop too where screens are not as bright and it's easier to pick up.
     

     
    There's been an intermittent windows exception error when launching the game (release build). I tracked this down to the old controller config loading which uses IO streams to pull in a data-file. Something is going on there. I need to re-do the controller settings anyway using XML to store response curves and other tweaks you can't do right now. Just a pain as laptop drives are a touch on the slow side.
     
    Source
  3. Flexman
    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 no time to upload the PSDs. Good luck and fingers crossed we'll hear from you in a week or a month...

     
    Source
  4. Flexman
    Working on the tactical situation display elements, the vector font output was never quite as crisp as I'd hoped for but that's now fixed by keeping the 1:1 scale and changing the ortho projection matrix. Bigger works better than smaller when it comes to float accuracy with consumer level drivers that focus on games and performance I guess.
     
    Still have the map scale to do, that's forming part of the mission terminal code. But the rest of the TSD is coming together. I need to put an upper limit on symbols otherwise some numpty crews might get a bit happy adding symbols to spell rude words or add smiley faces to the map.
     
    Added a basic HSI rose function and added that to the TSD NAV mode. Everything seems to mask OK. Only issue so far is the pop-up repeaters, they are currently too dim/dark, see second image below.
     

     

    You can see the vector fonts are much better defined in the above image even though it's a bit feint (and oversized for the window res I use on my laptop).
     
    So far, the Apache avionics suite includes a basic navigation system, 5 radios, two almost complete HMD modes and a tactical system in progress. It's actually getting pretty fun to fly around now, some bugs notwithstanding. View system could use some love as well as the stabiliator to stop the nose-down pitching.
     
    Source
  5. Flexman
    I was looking at the problem of glass again, reflections for cockpit instruments and improving the canopy and TADS optics. FSX manages to do so much with so little (a small 128x128 DDS) for shiny metal parts, such as chrome props it was time to look at adding cube mapping again.
     
    I know this has been added to Leadwerks 2.40 but the corona problem doesn't seem to be fixed yet. Retro-fitting cube-maps to 2.31 is an easy task and the river mesh material was updated (we don't use the single height infinite plane as it doesn't work with real-world topography). As water goes it's not fancy, real-time reflection and surface animation for high-speed machines during the polish end-phase. River surface cube-mapping matches the environment lighting and thus provides a simple and economic effect. There's only one river that runs east-west.
     


    Shiny chrome parts and subtle glass reflections should be trivial to add (when I get the alpha component sorted out).
     
    Source
  6. Flexman

    C-SCOPE

    By Flexman,

    While Dave is away hopefully keeping his head above water (all those Bear Grylls survival videos should come in handy) I've got not much else to do except worry and get on with my to-do list.
     
    C-SCOPE was something I remember saying wouldn't make it but turned out to be a freebie since everything was available to simply drop it in.
     
    [C-SCP] button on the FCR page overlays FCR target symbols on TADS video and HMD. Makes finding those hard to see vehicles a piece of cake.
     
     



     
    C-SCOPE FCR symbols presented on the HMD
    ref: http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/docs/ah-64-mfp-1-33.htm
     
    The High Action Display is currently getting an update for the ACQ interaction (I've tried really hard to work through what this does and how I can gamify it to make something both usable and understandable by normal people).
     
    Also I'm overjoyed at getting news of our ATC audio recordings and looking forward to playing with that.

     
    Source
  7. Flexman

    More HUD readability

    By Flexman,

    First of all, a sincere thanks for the feedback. It's not something to get too hung up about and it's easy to get the idea that we spend hours and hours on making HUDs pretty colours without getting anything else done. Yesterday was pretty intensive in terms of tweaks and adjustments to the HUD but not just in terms of colours.
     
    We've added clipping regions (using glScissor() ) so items like the pitch ladder no longer intrude into areas it shouldn't, this declutters and improves overall readability. Also the acceleration cues are no longer available on the CRUISE mode symbology, again reducing clutter.
     
    And the biggest headache which I'll come to in detail has been the flight path vector, that little circle with the stokes at 3, 9 and 12 o'clock. It presented a problem I hadn't anticipated. It's also difficult to explain but I'll try and sum it up.
     
    The idea is that the FPV is drawn in the the direction you're moving, so if you are moving directly forwards it's in front of you. If you are performing a perfect sideways slip to the left, if you turned your head to look along your left shoulder you would see the marker in front of you.
     
    The HMD or HUD represents a 30x40 degree field of view. However, the default field of view for the main 3D view at a resolution of 1024x768 is 90 degrees. The HUDs default scale is 512x512 and would need to map virtual symbols to a 45 degree field of view (512 being half of this example full screen resolution).
     
    Now, if you have a much larger screen resolution, say with a super-wide monitor, or tripplehead (worst case) you're horizontal resolution can be around 3840 pixels across, the game FOV might be 120' and therefore to match the 3D world, the HUD symbology has a field of view as little as 16 degrees. That's tiny.
     
    The result would have the flight path marker moving the HUD really quickly since it covers a smaller relative area. This would suck if you really needed it.
     
    You can't scale the HUD to match the screen resolution as you loose the top and bottom off the screen. Well, answers on a postcard please. Chewing this one over.
     
    Source
  8. Flexman
    US Army released video showcasing the new Block III Apache in a virtual training environment.


     
     
    The video covers in a nutshell...
     

    Weight reduction
    Improved software upgrade pipeline
    Increased engine power 701-D engines and improved drive system
    Better digital battlefield intergration
    UAV commanding
    IFR certified instruments
    Reliability and servicing improvements
    RFI range triangulation
    Maritime classification
    Awesome new logo

    Further reading

     
    Source
  10. Flexman
    It's a sentence I pulled out of context from the recent Unity newsletter. It relates to a Mobile Generation Education Project, a project with a $250k giveaway to help students become the mobile innovators of tomorrow.
     
    Now, when I was a student, we didn't have mobile phones, or the world wide web. And if we did, we'd have moved onto something else by now. Teachers point out that 60% of the jobs their students end up doing haven't been invented yet. I helped develop Risk Assessment software used by Walmart among others, five years later it's old technology. Everything moves so fast in this information age and it's accelerating.
     
    I wonder how much of this social web technology that is perceived to have permanence will be around in ten years or even five. I'm starting to see an effect that could be best described as Dawinism applied to digital data, a process of selection that results in the useful data being retained (at least higher up the search tree) and copied. And this process snowballing with an ever increasing amount of new data.
     
    With amazing concepts of collective information gathering such as Seadragon and Photosynth on the horizon, any guesses as to what the future holds in information mining are just that. If you don't know what Photosynth is then check the link and prepare to have your mind blown by possibilities of this and other forms of data.
     
    It doesn't take academics to come up with these kinds of ways of looking at data, it takes a creative (and ever so clever) mind. Picasso said everyone is born an artist until it's taught out of them.
     
    Right, that killed 10 minutes. I wonder if anyone will be referencing this blog entry when I'm gone from this world. I expect the URLs will have long since died
     
    Source
  12. Flexman
    Last week I identified one issue relating to UserEntityData introduced with the last engine update which prevents consistent update of Enity data due to some change in the hierarchy and no documentation on what was changed.
     
    So I'm faced with having to re-factor (meaning to changing code but same behaviour) core sensor code. It's the sort of thing that is utterly frustrating and makes one want to throw everything out of the window. It's not as if there aren't enough things to do.
     
    There's 4 major issues I'm not happy with:
     
     

    Flight Model bridge refinement
    Ground dynamics
    Horizon gapping and other asset problems (licences/legal, audio)
    Events / Triggers

    I know I can rush some of these things and end up with something I'm not happy with. And if I'm not happy with it I don't see why anyone else will be happy. The majority of potential customers don't follow this blog, they don't care about how much work or team sizes, finds and lack-of, how or why, and often they don't care about the word "beta". To do what's right in the long term means having to not cut corners and do what needs to be done.
     
     
    Sucks though.
     
     
    Who would have thought building a stand-alone study sim of the most advanced attach helicopter on the planet would be so difficult? What gives?

     
    Source
  13. Flexman

    CH-47D - work commenced

    By Flexman,

    For the record, practical work on the detailed CH-47D interior started yesterday.
     
    The CH-47D is a great machine better suited to the environment in which it will operate in Combat-Helo. The Chinook (prn: shin-uk) is a surprisingly nimble and small helicopter, not the large lumbering giant as is often perceived. What you may find surprising (I did anyway) was that it's about the same size as the Apache. See the comparison image below.
     
    Apache / Chinook size comparisonIn Afghanistan, the CH-47 usurped the role of the UH-60, having a larger lift capacity, no energy hungry tail boom, armed protection from it's ramp and door gunners as well as a range of countermeasure devices. It's range, power and speed has saved the lives of many Afghan civilians and troops in the region. Additionally, transport helicopters reduce the reliance on vulnerable road convoys and are important in maintaining remote security outposts.
     
    The AI CH47 will be included in Combat-Helo. If we hit our sales target we hope to release a flyable CH-47D with detailed cockpit and systems as an addon (or stand-alone version - to be decided), as Combat-Helo Operation Pegasus. This will add the CH47 as an option to fly on medevac, armed escorts, insertions, extractions, transport, search and rescue missions as well as a new variant of the counter insurgency campaign.
     
    We feel that this is the better choice, it lets us explore the portalised aircraft technology we started with the Apache which will enable a level of interaction between crew that hasn't been seen in any other PC simulation title to date.
     
    Source
  14. 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
  15. Flexman

    Bogged Down - Chin Up

    By Flexman,

    I apologise for lack of updates, long time since the last one (weeks it seems although I have two unpublished ones which are no longer relevant). I've been avoiding online spaces during this time, work has been bogged down with the multitude of tasks not just relating to the Combat Helo game.
     
    I'm working on the flight model again this week so don't expect any updates in a while. I did get started on an updated FAQ and will publish that ASAP. Lots of things happen around this time of year with concerts and church services, when you have a musical family there's a lot of evenings taken up with those.
     
    So I don't know when we'll have something to show for all this work. It'll happen when it happens, there's no budget to finish and I've got huge debts that require me to stop at some point and take time off to do other work.
     
    On the plus side I did get a nice pressie from one of my brothers which is going to buy a nice cheap car (sensible, used K car but importantly has a working HEATER, a nice to have feature for UK winters). Something to be said for being happy just by virtue of being in a car that's warm.
     
     
    "Do you know what’s killing Western democracy, George? Greed, and constipation. Moral, political, aesthetic. The economic repression of the masses institutionalized." - Bill Haydon from John le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy 1974.

     
    Source
  16. 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
  17. 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
  18. 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
  19. 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
  20. 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
  21. 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
  22. 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
  23. Flexman

    Herat city, almost

    By Flexman,

    This is months of painstaking trial-and-error, optimisation and experimentation. I said months ago, "We don't have the resources or time to build a whole city, just a close approximation". Well it's an approximation but it's more than what we anticipated was possible. Given that the old girl Longbow 2 had a small village, a dozen or so muddy cubes, this is 2010 and we can afford to push it a little.
     

    Putting the demo together for Summer Sim 2010 next weekend, the updated map includes Herat city which is not a center for our first campaign map, geographically or strategically as it's close to the north-west corner of the map. But it is a regional feature, the city is the gateway to Iran. One of the campaign scenarios involve a armoured invasion by Iranian forces in an attempt to do something about a deteriorating security situation in which NATO led US forces are caught in the middle and ultimately you decide which way that goes. The city will present a real challenge for pilots, not only is it a maze of structures and narrow streets, there are not many open areas to perform an emergency landing should the need arise.
     




    I don't think we want to build another city like this. Hopefully you'll be able to appreciate the amount of work that's gone into the environment. Flying over the rooftops and sat dishes in the pilot seat with a full HOTAS is a dream come true, I certainly never expected anything like this when we started last September. It has the feel of an old familiar sim mixed with the new and we're not finished yet. AD has done an outstanding job in realising the setting. If there's one criticism I can level, there's not enough of it. I'd happily fly for longer than I perhaps normally would in other sims as the detail is better. There's always something interesting over in the next valley, or a nice low level route to challenge your flying skills.
    We chose from the outset not to put the player in Helmand which is where the worst of the troubles are. It's a question that's been asked, why not?
    It limits what you can do with scenarios and we wanted the Apache to do what it does best, spank heavy armour. Italy is currently the occupying security force in this region which is set to pass on to the US in the near future. Here we get to play out two different kinds of warfare. And what starts as one kind, if you do really badly in one campaign, may step things up and move you into the second. And if that happens you'll be flying over Herat, weapons hot.
     
     

     
    Source
  24. Flexman
    Summer Sim 2010 is nearly here. Komodo Simulations, makers of replica helicopter controls for virtual training are sadly not going to have their replica controls ready in time but a recent news update on their web site shows the current collective at the pre-mould stage.
     
    Komodo Simulations WAH-64 collective WIP
     
    Looking good so far. Combat-Helo will be there to show a build of some kind. Although like the controls we're perhaps not going to have all the goodies ready to go into a demo build. We're still working on getting the new flight model ready, going to be a bit hit and miss that one.
     

     
    Source
  25. Flexman

    Camera views askew

    By Flexman,

    Taking a little time-out from debugging to recharge my batteries, something slightly less frustrating, camera views.
     
    Not helped by my original program flow which had camera commands in-line where needed, and I still have to go through and fix up TrackIR to work with the new class but shouldn't take long. TrackIR is really simple to implement in this kind of software.
     
    Crew positions are parented to a pivot and then offset so it was important to retain any camera/parent relationships, add offsets to source entity location and target entity location (in case the view needs to point-at some object but add some fudge factor, such as trackIR offsets or something).
     
    So I untangled the inline camera code and added a new class with SetPostion() Move() SetParent() SetOffset() etc.. and added GameCamera.Update() which does the final camera positioning. Now changing cameras is as simple as updating the GameCamera class you wish to render the viewpoint from. It will be possible to add camera views from an external source with a bit of extra code.
     
    These screens are not using the current terrain so still a bit washed out and using the old veg (will update my test build in the next few days, it just takes longer to load which doesn't help testing).
     
    Blade tip cam will be added again shortly. And I need a key to toggle the canopy doors (yes they do swing open and closed).
     




    And I remembered to increase the TADS camera range to 6km, I'm not using deferred lighting on the TADS buffer, just shader effects for light amplification and edge detection but need some atmospheric fogging to fade into the distance. Scratching my head on best way to implement that one.
     
    Source
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