Just got back home and Dave left a nasty sight in my MSN window. No, not another scene of drunken debauchery, actually I have to complain, there's been a distinct lack of that.
We got to discussing visual representation of damage. Different ways we can do this. I write it here so I can remember what we discussed. We looked at some complex set-up of assets for iL2, the results of which are impressive but it hardly makes for an easy pipeline, especially if we want to quickly add more aircraft
I'm putting together specifications on the mission side of the game. To me, the bit that you 'play' is every bit as important as the simulation side, and while it's taken a back seat for now, things are getting to the point where it's time to get on and make it all work. Going through some of my older material on this, it needs to play like Longbow 2, have the crew management elements from Gunship 2000 and strategy elements from tactical board games on guerilla warfare and a bit of a story eleme
Working on two principles K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid!) and more for less.
I spent a lot of time researching (read playing) certain games that have what I call an ambient NPC population. This is specifically those NPC's that reside in the background and generally have no real or very limited interaction with the player. Two such areas of research <coff> included Assassins Creed and Fable 2. Although both of these games have a far more complex general NPC population than what I am s
Actually the rotor brake system. I'm not really clear what would happen if the rotor brake is off when you move the power levers from the Idle to Fly position. Procedures say DONT, return the switch back to on until the engines are at flight speed (approx 100%). Once the engines are happily settled at flight speed flip the brake off and the rotors begin to turn. Watch the rotor RPM gauge on the MFD until it's in the yellow close to 100% then you're good to go.
Conversely, I'm not too clear w
Here is the amazing first shot of Leadwerks Engine 3. Behold not one, but TWO triangles! It's a dual display of isosceles inspiration.
Believe it or not, this screenshot actually demonstrates a feature that's new for LE3...hardware multisampling. Look carefully at the edges of the triangle:
This isn't the first time I've done multisampling, but until now it hasn't been possible to use with deferred rendering. It's now possible to combine these techniques with OpenGL4. You'
Finally a video showing the free flight mode we really wanted to show at Summer Sim 2010. Thanks AD for doing an amazing job of making it all look good.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6ILqIQDaio
Sorry about the lack of blade-cam, LUA object reference problem. Will get it sorted.
Never felt the need to keep fish until now. It's a crashed helicopter for use in your pond or aquarium. Thanks Phil (and Rob for sending it on).
This wonder compares to the bizarre "Titantic with inflatable iceberge" bath toy I once found in an English Heritage gift shop.
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AD has been working on a new FOB which will be the "other" main camp you'll be deployed at during the course of the campaign.
It's a triangle arrangement used by some forward operational bases. Here the CH47s are ready to be deployed.
And finally..
Don't have a name for the camp yet.
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Well. here am I.. again. Almost everything is going well. Characters are our current tasks. and one side a "little big" level is in modeling process, one side some destructible buildings are modeling. one other side motions are going good and clear. (but not good as you may except!)
and like always the biggest thing that really hurts, is the one of the smallest problems!
any way..
here is what I've left behind:
Hesam Bani Eghbal is with us as our art director. well actually he works much
I've been using this for testing and making profiles for Combat-Helo since the weekend. This is a really odd stick. It's perhaps the best built joystick out of the box I've ever had the privilege of using. And quite a looker too. The textured metal feel, the metal triggers and even a couple of the HATs. Oddly this level of build isn't consistent with several hats made from what feels like a poor quality plastic. But it wasn't broken or badly assembled, and nothing has broken yet.
If you didn
Dave, the kids must have been playing "pilot" again, they've gone and pulled off the knob for the standby instrument lighting, make it like the other two rotaries. I'll fix the camera clipping on the seat
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I know I said this week but will likely be over the weekend, there were some LUA issues I needed to get my head around. As for LUA, I think I'm going to pull out some of the model features I've been putting into the model LUA scripts as it's starting to get in the way when I need to control them in game logic. Reading values and objects back seems to be a dark art, these things may have been fixed, or not bugs at all, but caught between moving engine versions and not much documentation I'm left
Was exactly a year ago today we started work on Combat-Helo. I really don't know where the time has gone. Happy buffday team, and well done. To commemorate the occasion I dug out one of the earliest screen-shots I could find to compare with one from this afternoon.
And thank you to everyone who's offered kind words of support and encouragement. It all helps.
Sept 2010 - "Herat"
Oct 2009 - "Camp Zero"
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Nakama - Japanese for comrade, friend, ally, gang, loved one etc.
That is how I feel about the software that people use that allows them to do what is otherwise improbable or impossible. That's how I feel about Leadwerks Engine, Blender, 3dCoat,Renoise, ADN Material Editor, etc. They are not tools, but they are my nakama.
With the latest addition of Genetica I feel like I have an ensemble of software for game dev now that is stronger than ever. For the longest time there was a gap as fa
Had a quick play with Saitek's DirectOutput SDK, results are mixed but not bad. The MFD resolution in Combat-Helo is a native 512x512 and the Saitek Flight Instrument Panel is VGA 320x240, there's a bit of difference.
Sampling the buffer down to a smaller surface and then adding a suitable BMP header to send over to the device. Remarkably easy. I'll have three more please Saitek
BUT please can you make an FIP version two with a 512x512 square ratio display? Or at least increase the ve
The last two weeks were mostly me wrestling with C++. I had promising results with a meta language that translates to C++ and compiles, and also learned how to create makefiles as a result of that. I tried CodeLite and CodeBlocks, in addition to MS Visual Studio. I finally settled on CodeBlocks.
Codeblocks can be configured pretty easily to use GCC, the MS C++ compiler that Visual Studio uses, as well as about a dozen others (very curious to see if LE3 compiled with the Intel compiler is
I want to thank Komodo Simulations for inviting me down for Summer Sim 2010, even though it didn't go according to plan we all learned a lot, I certainly did and this was really a chance to meet people and forge connections.
Rich was clearly deep in thought and concerned about hardware performance. I was lost in deep thought and concerned about software. Everyone else didn't seem to mind very much. What happened was, early in the day while I was re-compiling the demo to fix a stupid inverted
Following on from:
On The Right Path, A* Pathfinding In Leadwerks.
The Way Forward ... Making Blitzmax Trax ...
I decided to give the testing a few more hours. First off I wanted to create a new NPC Type which would have its own control flags and most importantly its own path storage buffer.
After a little thinking (a little thinking is what I excel at lol) and a few hours of coding and tweaking, I managed to get 32 new NPC Types all pathfinding their individual way around "Block
All the things we want to show but can't. Still making some final hour changes to get a robust demo working that can be operated by Joe Public (I'm told he's coming along). A simple flying demo that will show the technology, Afghan map, lighting and cockpit. It has the mark 1 flight model I keep tweaking. sounds could be better. I wish I had time to do the landing gear joints, it's hard to land without wheels.
Better stop with the bloggin and get back to writing.
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After more work the project has finally come to an end. It was very interesting to do a 4000x4000 tile 1 project with Leadwerks. Some things are running nicely with LE2.4 others gave me real pain. But Josh gave excellent customer support and reacted very quikly with engine updates to the problems and even improved things like the terrain scultping speed.
Most projects will have no problems but placing 2.750.000 vegetation assets plus thousends of models on the landscape will push engine
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