Dave has been inspired to work a bit more on the more empty areas of the terrain to give them a bit more "pop". See his diary update at our forum hosted by SimHQ.
Source
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.
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A good question, one that it seems several people have now asked me. The answer is, I'm doing quite a few things, and multi-tasking them. Of course this causes a problem in that it can appear to take much longer to get any visible results down, but I remain faithful. During my last year at uni I was tasked with making a simple multiplayer game, and only in the final two months before submission could you really see any evidence of the game itself. But once the first sign of life had emerged from
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
Please excuse the rather horrifying pun in the title, but today’s update will highlight quite a few new assets and more level design, focusing in on the new grave sites and Zone signs specifically.
Let’s dive in!
First up, here are the new overview images. I’ve been working on the level design quite a lot, so you’ll notice lots of changes, along with a new skybox and afternoon lighting.
I’ll be showing more detailed images of some of these areas later.
The new skybox:
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 Wa
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 w
Hello. This is my first blog entry. I am making it to test the blog thing out. And also because the past couple of days I had been sort of preoccupied with whether or not I should make a post about my actual Leadwerks project yet. I've been on the forums quite a while and yet I haven't posted a single project information.
Well anyways, I have come to the conclusion that it's still quite early and not time to showcase my project right now. However, I think that may change before the end of
I feel like you guys are owed an explanation of our long-term strategy, and now that I have definite plans I am happy to reveal them to you.
I've been spending a lot of time in the Silicon Valley area, and have learned a lot about business. We've been investigating external investment. I believe we could raise pretty much any amount of money we want, based on the fact we already have an existing business that is self-sustaining, and we have a great strategy. However, money does not necess
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 speak
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 S
I had no idea how long it had been since my posting. I guess this is part of running a web hosting and design company, as well as having a regular full time job. My company needed me to jump in and get some things rolling. I hope to get back into my game and soon. I think I may just use BM for my first completion. I might be focused on the "next great mmorpg" and not enough on "just get one done" I have enough knowledge and assets to complete a simple project, so I need to do that. I have
I had no idea how long it had been since my posting. I guess this is part of running a web hosting and design company, as well as having a regular full time job. My company needed me to jump in and get some things rolling. I hope to get back into my game and soon. I think I may just use BM for my first completion. I might be focused on the "next great mmorpg" and not enough on "just get one done" I have enough knowledge and assets to complete a simple project, so I need to do that. I have
I had no idea how long it had been since my posting. I guess this is part of running a web hosting and design company, as well as having a regular full time job. My company needed me to jump in and get some things rolling.
I hope to get back into my game and soon. I think I may just use BM for my first completion. I might be focused on the "next great mmorpg" and not enough on "just get one done" I have enough knowledge and assets to complete a simple project, so I need to do that. I h
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 c
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 eve
Today’s blog update on the Zone project will be quite lengthy, as over the last few weeks I have been finishing up the remaining assets and now I’m beginning to focus on the level design side of things. My new Intel i7 system is up and running once again (and no longer on fire), so today I have a good number of screenshots to share with you.
It’s been a while since I shared some overview images with you all, so I’ll start off with those:
In these you can see where I’ve begun
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
Hello,
i will present today, our new development video from project airport simulator.
You can see the build mode!
have fun
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LZ_5jG-Tq4
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 to
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
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 e
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
