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Flexman

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  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. Flexman
    It's ridiculous, I'm seemingly unable to purchase from the UK, PC Pilot, a UK based flight simulation magazine . The only way I'm able to obtain copies is via ebay sellers in the US.
     
    Local stockists are non-existent and repeated attempts to buy them online results in emails informing me that they are unable process my details. The same details which seem perfectly fine for US ebay vendors.
     
    Two weeks now.
     
    I give up, I'll stick with US postal charges. More reliable.
     
    Source
  5. Flexman
    At no point before have I felt so much under pressure as I do now. Hence the lack of blog updates. The new physics engine is still being problematic but these are issues relating to -ff-math and tracking down typos, the odd logic error and other errors that occur when programming.
     
    In a flight model, such errors result in numbers quickly blowing up, which they do. So I'm currently tracking down each issue, one at a time until, eventually, it should just all click into place.
     
    I finally configured my Combat-Helo input map for my Saitek X52 and apart from my shocking oversight of an inverse axis option it was a nice experience using the old mk1 flight model. It's frustratingly hard to get up to speed and it still flies in a nose down attitude. I may fix those points and retain it as a 'rookie' flight model.
     
    All this debugging and testing is taking up all my time, the goal is to have it in place for the show on the 28th. It's looking hit-and-miss atm. We're supposed to be working on some FSX stuff as well but that's had to take a back seat due to holidays and other things. Hopefully will be able to spend some time looking at that in two weeks time.
     
    AD did well finding an OK solution to paved roads. They work, efficient but they require a lot of work.
     
    To quote...


    Just to elaborate a bit. The key component is a vertex shader that takes the Z value (height) from the terrain and applies that to the Z value of the road vertices. The road itself is built in 3dsmax as a primitive mesh, a meter high and 20 meters wide. It's flat and the vertex shader sets the height at the end of each section of road.
     
    40960M's of road can be bought at the cost of about 2500 polys which is outstanding in comparison to the native road system which costs tens of thousands of polys for short distances, doesn't work most the time, creates massive slow-downs, and flickers like a 1950's TV in a washing machine.
     
    The only real down-side is the amount of work it takes creating the road mesh itself. It took me about an hour to lay down 10KM's, debug the path and smooth-out the ground underneath it. Therefore it probably won't be a suitable method for the dirt roads. I would add that the native road system is fine for small areas, it's perfect for small FPS style levels but non-instanced geometry will always have a huge performance hit if there's a lot of it.
     
    Using static meshes for the road system makes it easy for collision testing to flag "onRoad=True" and the model can use this value to adjust sound and emitter properties. For example, running across sand will sound different to running across a road surface. More dust will be kicked up. Those things are more complicated to do using texture splatting or a giant texture overlay to represent these kinds of features.
     
    Here are some pics of the roadworks.
     



     
    Source
  6. Flexman

    Some more architecture

    By Flexman,

    I think these have been on the SimHQ forums for a couple of days but I've been too busy to post any updates. Here AD has been adding some gardens to the Friday Mosque and adding it to the city.
    To overcome scale/zbuffer issues of having a large scene, AD has buried the the tiled gardens into the terrain, just like the river sections. The gardens sit on a large slab that is quite deep, this also accommodates uneven terrain.

     

     
    No paved road surface currently. While Leadwerks supports roads that are baked into terrain geometry they are not efficient for our large scale map. One of the reasons we're looking to build our own terrain streaming system after Combat-Helo is released. We might be able to squeeze in another texture layer to splat a paved surface in.
     

     

    A high altitude view of the city shows the west side is still waiting to be populated. This was the area most damaged during a previous regional conflict.
     
    Source
  7. Flexman
    While I'm spending hours pouring over interfacing the flight model, AD has been tinkering with billboards again, finding a blend of shadows. There's still more to do, I want a ground fog layer, multiple layers, realistic light scattering and a more dynamic LOD system which we can't do yet. AD is reducing the tree poly counts from 1,500 to 500 on the LOD1s. This should improve shadow performance a little.
     

    Looking at shadows again, I came across a GameDev.net post that I might look into. It's similar to the shadow system used in Brano's Outerra whole world engine. I'm not sure what it would do to a high bandwidth environment like a 3 monitor wide system. Probably no worse that using HDR or other post-processing effect.
     
    Source
  8. Flexman
    Updates to the green-zones, incremental improvements to the billboards, painting 'shadow' under vegetation.
    Dev-diary update at SimHQ
     


    It's looking great considering how much detail we can't use. Currently we can't use the 2.32 engine due to lack of LOD distance control, and loading the levels with all the vegetation takes three times as long in the new version due to the extra processing required for veg culling. The detail in our production level map shows little performance difference between versions. Upgrading to a new version of the engine is becoming less attractive from a performance viewpoint. Which seems a bit silly but there you go.
     
    In the background we have started preliminary design work on an all new rendering system, not for Combat-Helo but for a later project (again simulator related). This will incorporating object streaming and allow for very large terrains. This work isn't interfering with Combat-Helo, there will be no unnecessary delays in production.
     
    I'm currently working on aircraft data import, the part that takes a data-file (profile) of an aircraft (helicopter, fixed wing, hot-air balloon etc) and builds an instance of a class that tells it how it flies. Our FFD (Free Flight Dynamics, or Freds Fantastic DLL) class is pretty flexible, a specialist physics engine of it's own.
     
    One of the more interesting features are the virtual helicopter controls. Your control inputs are sent to "virtual controls" which then have any necessary trim by AI/AFCS or other input shaping applied. The virtual cyclic can be set to match throw of your actual joystick, you set the ratio of your joystick to that of a full size 70cm cyclic. So if you're using a 20 cm tall stick, setting the joystick length to a value of 20 will correct the input as if you have a 70cm floor standing cyclic. It uses a non-linear function to still give you 100% cyclic throw (shaped after 20% so you can still apply fine control inputs).
     
    We'll be discussing the Auto Trim feature at a later date. It's so simple most pilots will never know it's there.
     
    Source
  10. Flexman

    Showroom pic

    By Flexman,

    I'm still hard at work on flight model code so not much to show or talk about. I'm feeling a bit sleep deprived but we're against the clock.
     
    Dave is refreshed from his little break in the sun and has been rendering shadows for the opfor ground vehicles and CH47. I like these "showroom" pictures. Gives me a hankering to play an RTS game.
     

     
    Source
  11. Flexman

    Astrasim Expo 2010

    By Flexman,

    If you're in the UK on August the 28th and can make it to RAF Cosford for the Astrasim Expo flight simulation show, there's a chance that one of the more haggard and tired members of the Combat-Helo development team (me) will be hanging around Komodo Simulations.
     
    http://www.astrasimexpo.co.uk/
     
    Some of my favourites will be there, Sky Blue Radio, Flightstore (who were always good at sorting out my Saitek woes).
     
    So fingers crossed we get the demo completed in good time and hopefully we can pair it up with Rich's replica Apache cyclic and collective prototypes.
     
    Fingers crossed, all being well, see you there. Did I mention the show admission is free?
     
     
     

     
    Source
  12. Flexman
    I can't talk about the details much as it's proprietary code. Helicopters have been (inaccurately) described as thousands of moving parts flying in lose formation. Mathematically a helicopter is thousands of interactions flying in loose formation. For Combat-Helo and future simulations we're assembling a modular version of what we call FFD (FreeFlight Dynamics), a library based on definitive engineering texts on how helicopters fly through air. Texts such as Bramwell's Helicopter Dynamics and Wayne's Helicopter Theory are the staple of many an engineer.
     
    FFD is the physics part of HTR, a freely available module for Flight Simulator X. HTR stands for Helicopter Total Realism, conceived and developed over a period of two years by Fred Naar and fine tuned by input from real helicopter pilots.
     
    At the core of FFD library is an ingenious and elegant approach that is easy to expand and simplify. Potentially capable of handling different types of power-plant, flight control systems and rotor configurations without straying from the principles of rotor-dynamics. It has a big future as middle-ware, not being tied to any particular 3D engine and totally independent makes it portable, I can compile this on the Mac. Future versions will handle fixed wing dynamics and possibly other vehicle types.
     
    I'm still on the conversion stage but progress on FFD for Combat-Helo is going smoothly.
     
    In other news, just ordered another 1TB of NAS. every backup is close to 0.3Gb. And a Corsair CPU Watercooler is on it's way to protect my CPU from heat-exhaustion.
     
    Did another job search today, bit pathetic that nobody seems interested in hiring, even for fairly trivial IT support work I don't seem able to get a bite. Can't complain though, the weather is good.
     
    Source
  13. Flexman

    Scrappy day

    By Flexman,

    Began preliminaries on the advanced flight model. This involved looking through the various classes and discussing best strategies to minimise future maintenance and ease integration.
     
    Dor setup a flight-sim workstation and was researching the finer points of .GAU programming but was thwarted when her PC detected a Rookit virus infection picked up when working away over the weekend. She shouldn't have plugged into strange networks and let the client install software. Lesson learned the hard way.
     
    Between looking through physics code and C# I also found time to play with a demo of a terrain editor called GROME" which was used for Blazing Angles 2 and was able to import the ubiquitous Longbow 2 terrain. When I get it painted I'll post a screen-shot but the results are promising.
     
    I also was able to do a little more tinkering with shaders (I was all over the place today you can tell, had a not very nice interview in the afternoon which always leaves me feeling antsy). Was able to trim out some useless parts of the MPD shader and add some smooth filtering and desaturation. Details of the Arrowhead/MTADS (Modernised Target Acquisition and Designation) are a bit scarce but the in general offers three-times the optical range and improved low lighting visibility, highlighting obstacles such as wires, trees. Some edge-detection should be fairly easy to add, I've no idea how representative it would be, but since it's all very definitely under the heading of "capability", is therefore going to be secret. You'll have to live with more approximation based on guesswork and YouToob images.
     

     

    On of the improvements I'm keen on is applying a global X/Z offset to shaders to implement a fast terrain tile system for future releases. If we can cram more ground detail and reduce load times for larger maps by paging in data and translating visuals at the shader level until a big shunt is needed when crossing a terrain page. That should keep floating point errors in check and spread the load. As well as potentially increasing terrain detail.
     
    Some experiments are needed to verify performance but if it works, we'll slice up some DEM terrain with GROME and see what that will do for us. Using meshes for terrain is probably just as efficient, if not more so than the Terrain object we're currently using. I'm not getting hung up onchanging the terrain system for CombatHelo's first release. We have to give you something new to look forward to right?
     
    Source
  14. Flexman
    Congratulations to ArtDave (AD, geddit) for scaring the poo out of me.
     
    He tells me he's been scripting the flare pen (Gyrojet), I'm so busy heads-down in game code I'm often grunting and throwing back idle comments and ideas to get his flare launching LUA code to work.
     
    Then he sends me his completed files. I'm taking a late afternoon break and thought I'd drop his new files into the project to have a look. So I pull over the gyrojet flare pen into the scene editor, I had no idea my speakers were on so loud. I thought a bomb had gone off, the almighty flash and bang/wheeeeeeeeeeee of the flare scared the **** out of me.
     

    This is just too much fun to play with. Animation, sound, lighting. Nicely scripted. Great work Dave, I suppose we're even for farmyard animal noises I put into your cockpit.
     
    Source
  15. Flexman
    Quite a scrappy day. Installed Microsoft Flight Simulator X and the SDK, there's an interface I want to try and build as a gauge in FSX. I've used the Simconnect API to interface to my own radio panel, now I need to build a gauge to talk to the Simconnect DLL.
     
    I re-worked the avionics menu page using the new vector glyphs, adding some commands to toggle the chat console, about page for version information. The UTIL page sets the FMS channels (Flight Management System or FLCS FLight Control System) in the Helicopter State.
     
     
    FMS_AXIS_PITCH:Int = 1;
    FMS_AXIS_ROLL:Int = 2;
    FMS_AXIS_YAW:Int = 4;
    FMS_AXIS_COLL:Int = 8;
    FMS_AXIS_TRIM:Int = 16;
    FMS_AXIS_ALT:Int = 32;
    FMS_AXIS_HEADING:Int = 64;
    FMS_AXIS_HOVER:Int = 128;
     
     
    These are bitwise settings as we need to be efficient sending helicopter stability settings over the network, seems sensible to use a single byte to do this. There's a lot of data needed to set up a complete helicopter if you're coming in over a network and jump into one ready to take-off. Console states won't be updated that often but when we do, we don't want a bottleneck.
     
    Time to sit back and examine the feature list, clear up where are priorities are and how far away are we from the major milestones. It's important to get this bird ready for some serious flight testing, there's the terrain LOD system to work out as we don't want ugly popping, Raleigh Scattering for the sky dome, additional fog and integrating FFD (FreeFlight dynamics tm) flight model.
     
    We might strip down the FCR a bit, the TSD we'll keep on a par with Longbow 2. There are lots of things it can do for designating fire zones and splitting them into groups which we just don't need for this version of the game. Even considering dropping the MPD cursors as they won't do much except mark areas on the TSD.
     

     

     

    I learned something interesting today, In 1980 Ken Perlin of Perlin Noise fame worked at Magi, the company that worked on Disney's film "TRON". His paper on a function to generate non-random "noise" was publish in 1985 and is often the basis of many shader techniques today. I read this today when looking at how we might introduce more ground detail into surface textures. That's the problem with shader programming, once you start, it's difficult to stop. Good job Dave knows when to stamp on my toes.
     
    Source
  16. Flexman
    Dave completed more of the survival equipment, looking really good. The concept is simple, if you need to perform an emergency landing and leave your helo, the CSEL can be activated and will mark the location on everyone's tactical situation display. The signal flare may be use to mark your position visually.
     

    More up close pictures in the SimHQ thread here.
     
     
     
     
    I spun off a new shader to do the MPD video mixing. The symbology layer needed to mask the video layer using its alpha channel which was a five min job.
     
     
     
    Ideally I'd like to pass a "brightness" value to the shader but as the material is used for five displays which have their own settings, the symbology level is set by the alpha value.
     
     
    Here's the completed shader mixing sources and masking.
     
     

     
     

     
    Source
  17. Flexman
    Video underlays are working as intended (more or less).
     
    I split the MPD buffers into two, symbologyBuffer and compositeBuffer. The symbology buffer is texturestage2 and rendered by the shader at full brightness. If the underlay is active the TADS/PNVS buffer is copied to outputbuffer which is texturestage0 (the simple diffuse buffer). The two are mixed by the material shader which is applied to each MPD screen.
     
    The mix works well, providing enough contrast between video and symbology even when the video is quite bright.
     
    I did a version that mixed symbology and the video buffer into a single composite via a shader but the mix was often overbright and hard to read. A good case for adding a working video level control? Maybe in version 1.5.
     
    The final modification is to use the TADS/PNVS postbuffer instead of the raw camera render.
     


     
    Source
  18. Flexman

    Video underlay

    By Flexman,

    Not quite there yet.
     
    What I'm trying to do is copy the raw TADS buffer into the diffuse COLOR0 buffer and render the symbology into the same bugger but into channel 2 (COLOR2). Texture channel 2 is used by the "fullbright" shader and mixes at full intensity. The net effect being a normal diffuse texture with full-bright symbology painted over it.
     
    At the moment it's not working as intended. I need to go through the shader to check it's doing what I think it's supposed to do. And see if I need to just use multiple buffers and mix them instead of trying to draw directly into different stages. I'm probably missing an OpenGL command to set the texture target correctly.
     
    It's getting late and I've had to do a lot or changes, our cockpit MPDs only have two knobs, the photos and source material I've been using to layout have three knobs. So there's a slight shift in positioning required.
     

    Non of this does anything yet except the "VID" button that toggles the current TADS buffer. This is the new vector font/glyph system in use. I've yet to add the various button "specials" such as menu nagivation arrows, but the toggles work. The FOV shouldn't be in the raw TADS buffer, need to switch that.
     
    The FMS toggles on the left will interface to the flight model.
     
    I have to say the bitmap fonts looked just as good, if not slightly better when used at the same size. It was a pain adding new glyphs though, here I can add anything I can code with GL commands.
     
     
    TrackIR remains a tangled mess of wires but I managed to assemble it to test and discovered that I'd not added the Track offsets to the cockpit cam. Quickly fixed that.
     
    Source
  19. Flexman
    Added a simple frame-skip to MPD draw method, they don't need to be updated every single frame and it squeezes out a little extra. Found a "toob" video in which you get a couple of frames of the UTIL page. Anti-ice and FMS options, presumably this is where you can toggle pitch roll and yaw augmentation. Well seems like a good place to add that and we will need to flag some FMCS values for HTR which can auto-trim. Turning that off in the UTIL page will be handy. Looks like "NOE?" at the bottom too. No idea what channel that's supposed to be.
     
    Got some strange problem with my matricies with the new vector glyph render, fixing that this morning. Will update with a screen-shot when fixed.
    Noooo, a totally numb-nutz error. My old OpenGL line macro uses integer verts, switching to floats. Oh man, how dumb.
    PC froze unexpectedly this morning. It hasn't done that in ages.
     
    Source
  20. Flexman

    I need a new chair

    By Flexman,

    My chair's really bad and falling apart. Went looking online, some nice ones that might be good for my back but I saw this one,from Amazon.co.uk oh boy, to bad it doesn't come with Kevlar plates and a cup-holder.
     

    This one is quite nice too...bloody expensive though...

     
    Guess I'll end up with this one...

     
    Source
  21. Flexman

    Quick update

    By Flexman,

    Monday was one of those email days.
     
    Future Tech
     
    As director I'm looking beyond Combat-Helo, the future of the game and where we want to make improvements. One major improvement I'd like to see is the terrain rendering part of the engine. Make it more flexible, scalable and efficient. We've been looking at different engines and technologies, none of them are suited for flight-simulation out of the box. As much as we'd like to license those for use in a future commercial project they are either not ready or unavailable for license.
     
    To satisfy requirements post Combat-Helo we require the ability to model the whole of the earth and stream in data for ground detail. There's potential to do that with the current engine by paging in ground object data with a curved terrain mesh (think of a skybox that's curved into a sphere, but used for terrain). There are several interpolated LOD methods. The Terrain Augmentation Program is to be an ongoing side-project and not to interfere with Combat-Helo development.
     
     
    Vector Graphics and Display Lists
     
    I was looking over our Apache MPD (multi-page display) code, there are items I left out simply because I didn't have a handy symbol or character. Also the amount of updating required is a little inefficient. MPD updates were scheduled to be part of an optimisation pass later in the project but since I was adding the FCR and TADS symbology I feel justified in bringing that forward to make it easier.
     
    Currently the MPDs use a co-ordinate system with 0,0 in the centre of the screen, with -1.0 being the left edge, +1.0 the right side. With +1.0 and -1.0 top and bottom respectively. This allows for resolution independent rendering. However some elements such as the Leadwerks bitmap fonts required converting to a standard co-ordinate system. Bitmap fonts don't scale well.
     
    I've just completed coding a complete alpha-numeric font with symbols that mimic closely the current Apache MPD looks. All using vectors and OpenGL Display Lists (which are sort of pre-compiled commands), runs pretty fast and looks not too shabby. The MPD text and symbols are now fully scalable, also being pure OpenGL they are freed from needing the 3D engine and will run on a modest laptop.
     
    Things left to do,convert existing code to use new VectorFont class, use more Display Lists for page elements. I was adding the FCR (back) into the game while I was away last week but it's aged so much it's worth starting over.
     
    Sensors and Equipment
     
    Regardless of the current Apache capabilities which are not in the public-domain, our Apache will track and classify up to 256 objects (thank you AABB for making it so easy). It's currently magic, meaning instant and no regard for signal strength or LOS. This will be sorted out later. Just needed something to display on the TSD, FCR etc.
     
    David has been looking at the crews survival equipment. Something you can whip out to find out where you are. We know we'll want to have at least one weapon (a sidearm) and smoke signal flares for dropping a coloured smoke emitter.
     


     
    Source
  22. Flexman
    I'm happy to announce that Combat-Helo will incorporate Frederic Naar's HTR Helicopter Total Realism technology for advanced helicopter flight dynamics. (link: Hovercontrol forum, HTR section). Developed as an external physics model that interfaces with Microsoft Flight Simulator via Pete Dawson's FSUIPC, HTR is an impressive implementation of blade theory using door-stopper text-books that designers of helicopters use as source material.
     
    Fred invited me over for a few days for a mutual show-and-tell and I got to see first hand how detailed the model is from the author, who better? First with the Bell 206, which had a tendency to side-slip to the right as weight comes off the skids, which left unchecked could potentially result in a fatal roll-over. Then I got a lecture on stabiliser wings and how vertical stabilisers depending on angle of airflow go from "sail area" to a wing generating lift. Blade flap and pitch is calculated per physics update, the amount of detail resulted in me experiencing a full frontal happy-attack.
     
    After the Bell 206, Fred introduced me to an early Apache flight-model. I didn't find flying with a Microsoft Sidewinder easy, also I'm now used to flying with my joypad (I have shame). Stick in hand, trying desperately to keep the nose on a tree while slipping sideways to gauge the tail drag and weight, with limited success. Apache seemed to make all the right movements with changes to collective and airspeed. Even attempting the classic Apache hammerhead turn, HTR delivers sweat inducing concentration required for advanced helicopter flight. HTR also offers stabilisation and a most impressive auto-pilot function, checking boxes required for Combat-Helo's assisted flight mode. Trim seemed to be a non-issue except when the autopilot was flying to a stable-hover when the pilot was fighting excessive trim while attempting to slow down.
     
    Given that HTR has to work within the limitations of Microsoft Flight Simulator, the implementation for Combat-Helo allows us to use even more parameters; feeding information about local terrain conditions for calculating updraughts, downdraughts , a detailed powertrain simulation as well as the ability to monitor rotor-behaviour via the nausea inducing blade-camera.
     
    The flight-model should also be able to handle a load carrying CH-47, applying all the right moments of inertia. Pretty elegant stuff, a masterful use of OOP.
     
    With Fred's addition we have completed the triad of physics, systems and technical art.
     
    Finally I'd like to thank Frederic and family for their hospitality as well as the staff of Corte Dei Tusci hotel who were always friendly and manage to create the most amazing foods daily.
     
    Source
  23. Flexman
    Today I added a postbuffer pixel shader to do light amplification for ETADS. Based on Geeks3D lightamp shader and modified for Leadwerks Engine it actually performs amplification by sampling the source pixel and if it's below a threshold, boosts the pixel intensity. Pretty neat.
     
    These are tests, the left half is the amplified area, right side is ambient light.
     




    The the first greyscale image has the polarity reversed. Into the mix I added a scanline mask with animated noise. The ETADS mask looks pretty good although I'm using a 'scope' mask here which more interesting visually.
     
    The last shot shows more of the noise distortion that makes the image 'buzz'. This is almost ready to drop into the TADS class.
     
    As for thermal imaging, we would need to add heatmaps as secondary UVs or fake it using some heat lookup. This is adding a level of complexity I don't want to pursue at this time as we could spend years throwing in tiny amounts of detail most gamers are not going to need.
     
    This amplification shader allows us to give some threshold and boost control to the gunner so they can apply some measure of skill in finding ground units visually in poor lighting conditions.
     
    *edit*
     
    After some consideration I think some attention to thermal signatures would be good after-all. This could be done by adding an "objectname_intensity.dds" map to texture channel 4 or 5. Then modify the base Leadwerks pixel shader to boost the intensity of the pixel from that channel. It shouldn't be too hard to take an existing diffuse texture map, desaturate and reduce the brightness to almost nothing then airbrush in some intensity levels.
     
    This would work well with the light-amplification post processing shader too.
     
    Source
  24. Flexman

    Acting!

    By Flexman,

    As I sat down to implement the generic event system I was reading Game Coding Complete which discusses something similar, the Actor class. I was reinventing the wheel...badly. The wheel is overrated as an invention. By far the greatest invention was the second wheel, lets face it, the unicycle isn't the most practical form of transport.
     
    I digress. Actors. If you want to know more about them see Actor model at Wikipeadia
     
    Then I came across this public domain implementation by Otus which also has a remote sockets version. Should work nicely as we need these to fire n-times every t-seconds for displaying alerts.
     
    Also David worked on analogue flight gauges. There's different ways you can implement gauges. Did we want lighting? A glass face? My initial though was to build them like real instruments with different layered discs (hi-res textures with alpha) rather than 3D objects. Looks like we're going 3D for now, the kinds of instruments we have don't need anything complicated.
     
    Source
  25. Flexman

    Additional screens

    By Flexman,

    I updated my work-map today with a more recent one and still in the process of fixing up missing objects. I think I have half of a city missing. The cockpit is now in it's own world space resting at the origin and no longer effected by floating point error, but I did leave in some rotation 'noise' to give the cockpit a vibration effect.
     
    I pushed the tree LOD out a bit more which you might see in the following screens. If you have an uber PC you'll be able to render some really sweet scenes. The ETADS has a temporary green tint because I've not yet added the desaturation filter, it's on the to-do list.
     

    Some of the systems such as the helmet mounted display are not operational as it thinks the power is off. I only just found the ground radar mode from September. It's amazing some of the things you forget you added.
     

    One day soon there's going to be ZSUs in those tree-lines.
     

    I'm missing a chunk of city here. There should be rows of stores and back alleyways around the urban compounds. I have the models installed so I don't know what's going on yet, I suspect they are missing from the SBX.
     

    Gets awful lonely out in the plains. Stopped for a photo-op.
     

    With the cockpit rendering modification almost complete it's back to core systems.
     
    Source
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