Longbow - Combat Helo

[Josh]

I think you should make details like the corn fade out long before you get as far away as you are in that picture there, and the texture beneath them should be yellow to match.

 

You're also going to get a big speed boost in the next version, because the vegetation rendering will be much optimized.

[Flexman]

The vegetation performance increase sounds promising. Have you approached it in a similar way to your lighting optimisation? I must say though, vegetation rendering speed hasn't been a big issue for us, nothing that really high fill rates wouldn't fix.

 

Really looking forward to collisions being added to the mix.

 

I'll scratch my head over what to do about the corn. Probably best mask it with something else and have it go at a near range. I spend the day examining the issue of detailed objects "vibrating" or "z fighting" like crazy at camera positions like Vec3(10000,2,10000) and beyond.

 

What I did was create a new world, a cockpit_world just for the cockpit, it needs it's own space to prevent intrusion by Main.world objects. Setting the camera range for the cockpit_world to something really close (near range 1, far rage 20) didn't help much, it seems just as bad. So I can only conclude that this vibration is simply down to floating point errors at these distances. Consider that some buttons are offset from their surface by 0.05 world units. Scaling the cockpit to a factor of 20 pretty much eliminated *all* traces of the problem. Great....make it 20 times bigger and move the thing 20 times further away.

 

However, I've no idea how to match up main_world shadows+lighting with the cockpit_world (on the gigantor cockpit).

 

The other thing I tried was having the cockpit in it's own world at 0,0,0 and matching the camera moves to it, which also worked but the same problem again. How to match up lighting from one world to another spatially offset.

 

 

Heh, video games, "some assembly required".

[Josh]

The vegetation performance increase sounds promising. Have you approached it in a similar way to your lighting optimisation? I must say though, vegetation rendering speed hasn't been a big issue for us, nothing that really high fill rates wouldn't fix.

Not really. It's also completely separate from the scene octree. Octrees work best for sparsely populated scenes (where you don't have a ton of objects around) and the vegetation rendering of course is the opposite of that. It's a really highly specialized technique. I can usually explain other things pretty easily to people, but I have trouble even explaining how this works internally, which is probably a good thing.

[Flexman]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNvqRM0lT04

Some of the billboards look a bit broken, lot of polishing to do later. But the core game is coming together. Some of the cockpit shows the polygon jiggle with having it positioned at the viewpoint location. I plan to have the pit in it's own world located at the origin later and draw it to the main buffer. If that makes sense. It's the only way I can think of to get rid of those artefacts.

Weapons should be ready in a few more weeks.

[Josh]

There is a 64-bit Newton DLL in the Newton SDK. I don't know if it will fix the problem, but it's worth trying. The current Newton version 2.19 will not work with Leadwerks 2.31. 2.32 will use the latest Newton.

 

The "troughs" in the terrain really bring attention to the low resolution grid you are using. If those were smoothed out, the user wouldn't be able to tell at all how spaced out the tiles are.

 

The ambient light should be bluish, and the sunlight slight orange. It looks like you are using pure white/gray.

 

The thick bar right across the middle of the screen is annoying. You specs might be realistic, but it isn't realistic for the pilot to be viewing everything through a cut out rectangle two feet from their face, so you need to compensate for the limited field of view.

 

Some of the LOD changes appear too close to the camera. Version 2.32 will help a lot with the efficiency of your vegetation rendering.

 

For the helicopter blades, I suggest using an alpha-blended material that simulates motion blur, and turning the rotors at a slower rate. Right now they are flashing on and off, and while it might be realistic, it will call attention to screen tearing and generally create an unpleasant experience.

[Flexman]

It does seem like a face full of billboards, it's using the settings saved to the map. My intention is to have them extend out with altitude, closer to the deck extend the LOD but reduce the view distance based on a user detail setting. Not going to play with that until we get an idea of performance with the new veg system.

 

The video shows the viewpoint from the gunners seat up front who mostly is looking at instruments and the HUD indicators. Longbow 2 fudged it a little and moved it down in the 2D version of the pit. Bad Company 2 has the head position mashed up against the canopy glass. Sitting back or raising the seat position helps. With TrackIR, mouseview and the ability to turn off the pit and use pop-up repeaters it's not a big deal. Plus I would face the wrath of hardcore flight sim nutters if it went AWOL. It creates a sense of cockpit space.

 

The rotors really do get on your nerves after a while, the rotor disc needs to pitch forwards another 4 degrees but cone upwards a bit more. I want to add a fake rotor, the early Apache I used had an alpha-blended "Iron Cross" shape which I might resurrect and offer as an end user option. (Make it the default and have the current 3D blades as a realism option, using FRAPS makes it worse, not so bad when the FPS is 30+). That should be easy to do apart from the coning effect. It's currently an animated mesh and the amount of cone is simply picking an animation frame. LUA handles that.

 

Good to know I can rely on good constructive feedback, it is appreciated.

[Marleys Ghost]

Its all looking great Flexman, really nice work m8, but I wanna see the guns !!!!!!

 

Did I see Ross Kemp in one of those compounds?

[Flexman]

Its all looking great Flexman, really nice work m8, but I wanna see the guns !!!!!!

 

Did I see Ross Kemp in one of those compounds?

 

Ross Kemp? "OI! SHART-IT", boy I had to sit through a lot of **** for research purposes. I don't take this subject lightly, I've had a few friends out there, one has just gone out for another tour.

 

Guns are coming in their own time. I only just added the arming procedure, on reflection I should have added that to the video as it's a good demonstration of using game states, hand rolled cheap and cheerful menu system and entity messaging. But it involves a player (would also work multiplayer) running around the outside the vehicle selecting weapons that lay on the ground. I was keen on a console like left/right/up/down menu thingy with panning camera moving from pylon to pylon. As one of our advisors was a farmer Apache weaponeer he likes the idea of other players arming choppers on foot. So I added that as an extension of the on-foot mode.

 

There's a picture of him here loading flechette rockets (web site currently a placeholder for testing the autopatcher software and gamehost server)...Combat-Helo UK Site