Flexman
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Blog Comments posted by Flexman
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I wouldn't go so far as to say ignored. Getting to the point where you need these kinds of objects is a pretty big step.
My ideal way of working with NPCs would be to drag some form of "Crowd" box into the editor and adding characters, specify number, variation, movement pattern in the box. Not just people but animals too. Chicken runs, birds, cows. That would be a pretty high-level operation, but wouldn't it be a fantastic way of populating such scenes?
That would be awesome. Even those people that use Leadwerks for architectural visualisation, putting people in the scene that move about would be pretty handy.
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You seem like you have stuff organized. How long have you been working on this game?
Almost 12 months now, started from scratch last Sept after a few experiments with Leadwerks engine. But I've been working on lots of stuff in other areas before. I think the Minnesota air national guard was using some of my old mission planning software at some point for some cheap desktop training (or just plain fun, who the heck knows). I keep seeing it about on torrent sites which is handy, if I ever need a reg key I can download a keygen, saves me hours of looking through old hard-drives for my original generator.
I'm much more familiar with this kind of stuff. Had a rough plan from the start, that's the key to getting something finished. Knowing limits, where to compromise and hardest of all, not get distracted. I might not be very good but at least I'm persistent.
Having said that, I attempted to write this game in 2002 but didn't have the time. The research has proved useful though.
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Well yes I thought bad things would happen too. Turns out the Apache stops the pilot from doing stupid things like that and freezes out controls and switches so it never happens.
I've added game logic to to do just. You can no longer advance the power levers past IDLE until the rotor brake switch is set to the OFF position. The switch event will fire but won't move, so I can add some warning or message to the player as to what to do next.
To bad I didn't script all this but I didn't know we might need it.
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That's a really interesting read MG. A subject that I've only just considered, ambient mobs or mobiles. Reading what you wrote sparked a few ideas on zones and assigning such spawned entities to different movement behaviours within them.
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It's a "feature"
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A geometry shader could be used for wires, overhead cables that need to sag and have some form of elasticity. I think the 5th edition superbible had a rubber mattress example that looked neat.
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@omid: The movement inside the helo?
made me laugh I supposed technically that's mocap.@pancakes:
I'm really pleased that the impression of the older game comes through, very pleased. The music was just my usual hodge-podge pick of 90s Amiga demo scene and that last bit was something I composed in Reason. Anything free to use. I don't think it really goes with the theme of the game but makes for a fun little journey in a demo of what is basically a boring 14 min "sim-a-thon".
I licensed some music for the game and used that in an earlier preview movie "welcome to afghanistan" which is a little bombastic and overly epic which I felt would appeal to the US audience more and in keeping with the older sim style.
@Aggor:
Next step is the Mk2 flight model which uses a lot of really snazzy math used in the development of real helicopters. I have a simple OpenGL test shell of a program with the flight model, I'm going to use the UpdateEntity callback to update the velocities from the flight dynamics engine. Our physics engine still has a few little bugs in it as a result of my conversion from C#.
The roads are not perfect as I'm using the shader that moves verts to terrain height but the physics are not aware so there's a cheesy fix to add.
AI mobs and the mission system is the next milestone, it's based loosely on an earlier game I worked with. Players get assigned (or select) a mission ID and when they sit in an aircraft, the aircraft entity will pass the mission ID to the avionics class which will build all the waypoints and other bits needed for the displays. It's like taking a data cartridge with you and plugging it into the aircraft.
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Revolver, I like that
The flights have callsigns named after guns (Winchester etc) so it might be confusing to have the FOBs named after them too. But that's an inspired idea
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"Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing." hehe I like that. I suppose like most things, if you're skilled in it it's second nature but made me chuckle though.
I just want to add that I love seeing a Roadmap. Streaming terrain and is something we started to look at using GROME as an editor, it has powerful scripting features and the ability to slice up huge maps. But of course it's breaking LE in two which is fine, cherry picking is part of creation process. The prospect of staying 'native' is quite appealing.
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We wouldn't leave home without cubic spline interpolation, between Bangkok and the UK we couldn't. In the real wold outside the US and cosy net services the internet weather can be a little rough. We send more data than just positional, since our entities don't make sudden changes positional updates can rely on client prediction between those updates to allow state data through which potentially can change faster.
It's your opinion of course, I've had time with commercial sims like Empire Interactive's Apache Havoc and the networking was a disaster. Assumptions on letting the transport layer handling problems is just doomed to failure leading to complaints about performance. Nobody will end up using it.
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Hmmmm, I wonder if this might be good for our project? *cough cough*
We could use the trees a little bigger but only have max 2009, is there a way to edit them using last years earlier version?
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Aye Mack.
Although, a funny thing. I edited the script in the 2.40 editor just to get on with it. And while it doesn't work in the 2.31 editor, it works in game compiled with 2.31
So I'm left a bit, "blah". I can't find the word so the sound will have to do.
"blah", there it is again. As much as I want to upgrade then engine for the project it still has issues with my game I don't currently have time to work on. Got a demo for a public show to do this Saturday and it's not going to have many features ready in time.
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I would have had this working already, but in LUA SetColor() doesn't seem to work. All the lights created are white?
There are light strips on the tail, wings and other parts that offer a dim green glow. I'm supposed to use the FULL_BRIGHT shader and a glow map for those.
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Maybe add ribbons, ribbon particles too?
Looks great.
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It looks great.
We had a lot of crashes using large maps, know the frustration you felt. It's just memory allocation I think. Try making a 40x40km map
THAT's pain If you were group all those walls into a single compound, you'd get much better performance. I think culling all those walls really eats into CPU time unless queries are done on the GPU, even then there was a noticeable performance difference. This is how we tried building compounds at first. Going from a 'LEGO' approach to single models was the difference between night and day.
Your approach which grants more fidelity anyway and lots of veg which looks like a pain to place. Procedural veg would be a nice to have.
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You can indeed land anywhere and take a walk as I often do, really makes me wish for a procedural grass feature.
We built the helicopters so you can run around and jump in and out. The act of boarding a helicopter creates an detailed instance of it on the client. The client loads the avionics and cockpit for that vehicle which is dumped when you exit the vehicle. Player controlled vehicles (just one kind of helicopter is supported atm) retains a 'state' that is persistent between players and sent over the network. There's also a mini-state used to sync the same vehicle between players in the same helicopter.
This system enables us to add a detailed CH-47 Chinook later without much extra code other than the avionics code for the cockpit instrumentation. Flight model is data driven.
Going for a walk is as simple as finding a nice spot to land and popping the canopy to exit. Could add controls for ground vehicles too but the focus is very much on low level or NOE (nap of the earth) flight. Only the player bases will have detail enough for FPS levels of detail and even that is functional. But more than most combat sim products.
All this map data, veg, models, textures has to be loaded in one go. So we have learned to make good use of single materials, optimised everything for the rendering pipeline. Compounds originally we made from discrete walls as sub objects, too much memory, we reduced all objects into one single object where possible, much faster. Didn't loose anything.
There will be some civilian traffic following routes along the roads, eventually. It's feature number nine-hundred and ninety nine on the list, well pretty low down. If it can be done without much impact it will stay in the game.
Traffic will be fun to do, there's many ways you can go about it. But it needs to sync across clients and any vehicle might be destroyed through player action. That imposes some constraints. I had in mind a simple array of vehicle type and distance, like toy cars on a length of string. And simply winding the string around roads and pulling all the cars along. Array positions can be crafted so they don't intersect oddly when it crosses another at intersection.
Open to ideas on this. Has to be as cheap in terms of CPU time.
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Be careful.
In Black Holes graphic engines break down below the sub pixel level. It's impossible to render them beyond that point.
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No water plane. Water planes don't work well at all with large maps or long draw distances. So we built the river that runs east/west across the whole 40km map from 3D meshes, in sections. And cut into a a "death star" trench in which they are positioned. This eliminates z-fighting. The steep banks don't look natural but it's far less noticeable than z-fighting.
A few oasis are being added to give some focal points to otherwise empty areas.
Draw distance is currently set at 6km (6000 units) but will be adding a variable view, fog and shadow range based on camera height.
As far as FPS goes, it varies greatly depending on in-cockpit or over the city, or green zone. With an nVidia 460 it's around 40-50fps in cockpit which is quire remarkable considering. The fan gets a workout. For helicopter flight my personal taste is for a min of 20fps. 9800GTX manages around 30fps average. Add 20fps when on foot or free-cam mode. The cockpit is quite CPU intensive with the avionics and flight model.
Still using 2.31 due to the fps style LOD ranges introduced with 2.32 which are no good to us at all.
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Clouds are most def on the to-do list after the Rayleigh light scattering skydome.
I was chatting to Eternal Crisis about clouds. Skyboxes and maybe particle based clouds are ok if there's no danger of flying close to them. And the air density of the region means getting a helicopter up to that altitude will take a lot of work, it's still possible.
My thoughts on clouds was either, a) don't bother, or
billboard sprites with the old proximity fog trick.Some good cloud photos on sprites might do the trick, or look really terrible. Will find out in due course.
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Industrial Cargo Model Pack Released
in Ultra Software Company Blog
A group blog by The Ultra Software Team in General
For iPhone, my general rule of thumb is about 8000 polys total per frame, so budget props accordingly.
You don't get much, nor do you need much.
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That seems reasonable. It's almost possible to get it to work in the current editor by having an entity load an SBX and parent it to that object. But it doesn't work in code, tends to crash.
Leadwerks is in desperate need of some near game-ready tools, prefabs, greater control over painting. Things that both SDKers and drag-n-droppers can use. Something that can build and assemble joints for testing.
Good stuff.
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Bet that was a shock. Well good luck getting that replaced.
Keep a fire-extinguisher by your PC
I had a bad solder weld come loose with heat once, the whole heatsink popped off as a result.
As for the Zone, I really wish we could afford that kind of detail in our project. It's superb.
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There are shadows but sometimes they are pulled up close to maintain fps. We're finding ways to improve performance all the time.
When you're running around on the ground it's fine apart from the lack of veg detailing which we don't have the memory for unless we can add some procedural scrub. At medium altitudes, well I'm sure you'll agree it's hard to push shadows out very far.
With only 3 shadow ranges and if you push the third one out too far it looks quite 'diffuse'. Some kind of distant shadow layer would be a good, perhaps by baking them onto a texture layer.
Baking some ground AO onto the buildings would help too. If I was clever I'd have them sitting on a floor mesh upon which I could update a single shadow. There's three compounds at different orientations so it might work.
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No joints on the tracks, it's too computationally expensive. The tracks are made so they can be animated by scrolling the UV co-ordinates. I don't yet have a shader to do that. Needs to take the vertex colour of the track and turn that into the necessary offset.
I did have an APC with full vehicle physics, just the wheels though, in grass at speed with dust you couldn't really tell if they were moving or not.
If you want to give the shader a go I'll throw some tanks at you to play with.
made me laugh I supposed technically that's mocap.
THAT's pain 
Picking Up St(r)eam...
in Development Blog
A blog by Josh in General
Posted
If you get an iMac, avoid blowing money on a matching mouse (the ones with the 4 way scroll nipple), use a decent multi-button Logitec or something you're familiar with. Those Apple mice suck for heavy duty use.