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?

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