Thanks to "GrViper", bit of Russian press coverage courtesy of "Game Navigator". I think I like the intro about raining fire and brimestone? I had to have a Russian friend in Siberia read it out to me over Teamspeak after which he asked, "so you're interested in flight simulation then?"
Work update
Last night I added the waypoint/navigation system which is rudimentary but has the needed functions for other bits of code to insert them into an aircrafts avionics. It's a linked list with some
Spending time working on my laptop here, which now has some reliable memory from Kingston has proved to be a fantastic little work platform for developing with Leadwerks.
The FFD or Free flight dynamics physics engine is still a little rough around the edges for putting into Combat-Helo proper so I'm working on a small test platform which hooks into the Leadwerks entity update callback and calls the FFD update.
I'm not sure if this is a good method of doing it, FFD is just a flight model
A couple of days I've worked on a GUI solution, and I made good progress. I tried to make as simple solution that completely fits the style of the engine.
Of course I have not finished everything I planned but I already have a version that works.
The basic idea is to be modular and variable depending on size of screen, it must look the same on all screen resolutions, and everything happens automatically in the background.
This is how everything works:
CreateGui();
addFont("fonts/
Let's start with some code for making instances and unique copies of a material:
Material* mat1 = new Material;
mat1->SetColor(0,0,1,1);
Material* mat2 = mat1->Copy(true);
Material* mat3 = mat1->Copy(false);
mat1->SetColor(1,0,0,1);
mat1 and 2 will be red. mat3 will be blue. Shaders, textures, and entities work the same way.
Drawing commands are in. I like how OpenGL3 gets rid of all the built-in matrix stuff and just lets you deal with pure matrix multiplication. It
I have a bunch of books on coding that I like to approach slowly. Everyday I read a section or two from a book and let the idea's resonate so I can really understand them and see where they're applicable in my own work.
The latest book I'm reading is "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. It's a book full of concepts and ideas to make you a better programmer. One of the things they discuss is a principle called "Don't Repeat Yourself" or DRY.
When I initially read t
For every project, a coder is ultimately caught between 2 opposing ends of the spectrum. The first end is the goal, the purpose for developing the software. The other end is how the machine implements the code. I'm realizing that through development, we're trying to produce code with a balance between efficient implementation, readability, and of course the ability to accomplish the task it was designed to do.
You could say the most efficient implementations would always be written in some
Another disaster strikes, PC wont boot at all. Strange thing happens on the BIOS screen, the moment any attempt to detect any drives (and I tried a few different drives that I know were fine), a bright underscore character appears under the circled comma (picture above).
So apart from my laptop I'm now without a working PC and no means to fix it atm :/
Source
More flight symbology added today. Raining almost non-stop and my cars wiper motor has failed, so wasn't going anywhere.
We added a couple of items that make it possible to do some precise flying.
Velocity Vector
Acceleration Cue
The Velocity Vector is the blob on the stick that originates from the cross in the centre of the HMD. This is a representation of the direction and speed of your aircraft. Think of these as "top down" views with your aircraft in the middle, forwards move
Technically the title isn't really correct since game development hasn't really started yet. The first 10 weeks are introduction weeks, which are probably neccesary for a lot people who do not know which business unit they want to choose. As for me it has been clear that Game Development is my direction but in the mean time I get all sorts of classes from different IT directions:
System and Network engineer
Software engineer
IT manager
Human Centered Design
Technical Computing
HMD = Helmet Mounted Display
Remember when Virtual Reality was going to be the next big thing? Seems odd having to re-create something virtual in a game that is virtual, the modern Apache has evolved a bit since the late 1990s. Being able to display in the pilots 3D monocle (yes that's a joke) a lot of data to the crew about targets hidden behind objects, terrain contours. These 'virtual' items are matched 1:1 with the crews head movement unlike a lot of the symbology that is static.
The
So I'm the guy who writes 7k lines of code only to find out that "I'm doing it wrong." If you haven't been there then you probably haven't learned much.
This is going to make me sound like a complete idiot, but damn! I really feel like one. After coding as a hobby for 3 years I'm finding out now I never really knew how OOP worked and how fantastically useful inheritance and polymorphism really is.
It seems like everyday I'm learning something new about programming, languages have so muc
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 us
Hello everyone.
I want to welcome you all as a new member of this wonderful community. LE is a great engine, and its strength is in its simplicity and gives us a low level of control. I've worked in many excellent engine that have power tools, but work with them is painful, because you have no freedom. Sometimes it is much easier to do something from scratch.
Excellent job guys
Here's some LE3 code for a simple program. The Graphics / Window stuff is not worked out 100%, and it's a little tricky because of the different operating systems and different kinds of windows.
I think we'll see a little more consistency across various languages with the LE3 syntax. It was suggested that the C syntax use the following scheme:
verb-class-noun
SetEntityPosition()
GetMaterialTexture()
I agree with this suggestion.
SetGraphicsDriver( OpenGLGraphicsDriver() );
Cre
I was determined to get 3D graphics working this week, and I did it. Behold, a box, now with *3D PERSPECTIVE*.
Making another variation of the infamous "my first box" demo with OpenGL is certainly nothing to brag about. However, there is quite a lot of code in use beyond just a simple hard-coded demo. The materials, shader, file system, camera, surface, graphics, math, and entity classes are all functioning at various levels of completion. I coded these systems and then used them to
Been pretty ill this last week, progress has been sporadic. I took time out to rebuild the engine code so it's now the same for all Apaches, AI and player alike.
Pilot feedback from screen-shots and videos also allowed me to rebuild the whole engine start-up and ENG display page. Automatically switches to in-flight mode. Things blink, change colour, are boxed appropriately. Couple of bits left to do, the biggest headache was dealing with all the fiddly scale changes and adding new code to si
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<root>
<behavior name="create_cube" >
<result type="Entity" value="cube1" />
</behavior>
</root>
These 6 lines are the start of a flowgraph system I'm working on. I've been playing with UDK's Kismet and enjoying what it can do. Now UDK's Kismet is pretty specific to UDK functionality for the most part. They have things like SpawnPlayer, which LE obviously doesn't have. LE gives you much lower level control than SpawnPlayer type s
Thanks for the great responses to our new released project! After some considerations about the assets of the Kabul City it's now available for sale. The possibility to release such high-quality assets to the community is very rare because of the nature of contracts.
There are 25 models in total - including 7 buildings and 18 props - for only 89,95 EUR. This is only 3,59 EUR for one model. The offer is limited until 10th of October so make sure to save your 40 EUR now because after this per
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
Maybe some of you have seen my work in progress thread for some while now but the final screenshots and work breakdown deserve an own Blog entry in my opinion.
I think the snippet from my company website explains the project quite well:
"The city environment of a sub-urb in Kabul was done for "serious gaming" purposes which simply means a simulation of trained tasks in a save environment - like a flight simulator. Our task was to develop seven buildings with complete additional props se
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 episod
Shader class...done.
Surface class...done (pretty much).
One change in LE3 is the addition of .shader files. This is just a text file with a list of shader components:
vertsource="mesh.vert"
fragsource="mesh.frag"
Your material file then just has to reference a single file:
shader="mesh.shader"
Of course, you'll be able to just drag the shader file onto the material shader property in the editor to assign it. You will never have to use Notepad, for anything.
Now working on
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 mus
