Spac3Rat sent in a nice new game icon as well as two editions of his Rotorwash magazine from 2006 to read. Fascinating look at building helos for FSX, one thing we learned about FSX models, they don't work too well for our kind of real-time work. But fascinating all the same.

Dave is busy in 3DMAX building something that looks very much like a Chinook. I'm making incremental improvements to the GUI system, panels can now be roughly dragged around without risk of "mouse droppings" (the window/item being dropped off the mouse during aggressive mousing). Buttons and input fields are getting focus and their classes respond to events OK. Running two Combat-Helo instances side by side isn't recommended but doable, solves the logistics problem for network testing until I can persuade my wife to maybe set-up a virtual machine with 3D acceleration like she has on her desktop.

The gui system is linked list of active TGUIPanels (base type) which maintain their own linked list of user controls (TGUIItem), each control having a simple drawing function. They keep track of what's got focus, what's been clicked on and dragged around. It's only going to be used for a few things but it makes it easier to add checklists if needed. And they just make use of a couple of base textures and existing game fonts (of which there are about 5).

The IHADSS or HMD has a problem that has been bugging for some time since the early flight tests and a recent personal message confirmed it. Look over your shoulder and how the hell can you tell which way up you are when the artificial horizon vanishes? So we're going to fix that to work as it should as soon as we can. It's also supposed to be quite low resolution but that would look really ugly when it's constantly in your face, I can't bring myself to reduce it to VGA res.

Dave has learned that Chinooks are round, very round. I learned how to pronounce it correctly (Shin-uk) thanks to my Canadian wife who repeatedly laughed at my attempts.

Finally, Red Dead Redpemtion has been a fantastic game, the open-world and amoral nature of Grand Theft Auto games applied to the old West (USA, 1903 era) fits perfectly. And you get to play a protagonist you can like. Amazing inverse kinematic system meaning character movement seems quite natural compared to traditional baked animations. A world that is just fun to roam around in, a magnificent achievement. I spent an hour in a saloon just playing Blackjack. Which reminds me, I'm out of Whiskey.

Source