what am I doing now?

[scary_pigeon 0]

hello :)

 

quite a lot has been done. but little to show.

 

graphically the difference between using a particle mesh data structure to hold objects and a link list are nill. Its just in frame rates and expnsion.

 

dante has been busy created a pucara cockpit.

 

He's now gone on an expedition to argentina taking some copies of what we currently have availble to show some project friends what we've got so far. Its a case use your imagination, Imagine if this cockpit demo was working with the carrier take off and landing demo, plus that bit with the combat in..

 

..and imagine it all as a game. thats the state the project is in. a state were we must bring all elements together. Also dante apparantly has organised with curator at museum to sit in take lots of photos of cockpits. Pucara's and Canberra's are available. this will let him get exactly what he needs to complete more cockpits to his usual splendid standard.

 

I did something minor and new today:

 

 

before we'd had bomb and bullet splashed, thought we'd add splashes for the aircraft blowing through the water.

 

-

 

code wise, a decision has been made with regards to missions and campaigns and internet. This is one the same thing now project wise. Before we had the idea of the single player mode would be run in a very separate way to the way online play would be done.

 

It turns out technically for me to do something that I think is kind of neat and tidy. The server is the mission/campaign manager. This is the program that will do all the funky particle mesh - player bubble goodness. A client app will then interface with this and receive appropriate telemetry.

 

In this way, we will not be making any mistakes about tagging on network code at end, or tagging on campaign at the end and coming up lacking. instead, it will be all one thing and that there will be options for people to run their own little persistant falklands wars. I think this will be excellent for cooperative team play as well as straightforward dogfight mode.

 

I am thinking that I am looking forward to this game.

 

I play wwii online, flying the stuka quite often at the moment. And when I play it i am always thinking, I cant wait till I'm doing this in JT. Flying a pucara probably, napalming a load of my virtual countrymen.

 

In IL2, in hyperlobby, for while my username was Vulching Hero. I used to fly an IL2 practically exclusively and alls I did was vulch. I never got the satisfaction of a dogfight kill. Yet with vulching I always found great satisifaction. The tatical forcefulness of systematically destroying the enemy airbase defences. then the orgy of destruction begins...

 

...In jet thunder- vulching hero will be in the air again. flying harriers hovering over a spawn. perhaps a pucara loitering over a temporary harrier runway. Its going to be so much fun.

Edited February 5, 2005 by scary_pigeon

[ViperBR 0]

Tanks for the big reply :)

 

 

About Dante's trip to Argentina, i talked to him, but actually it was not possible for me going with him.

I live in Foz do Iguaçu (Iguassu Falls), border with Argentina, not so far from me to go to Buenos Aires. =(

 

I´ve been thinking in a lot of new features for the game, but i won't send you them before the coding part is done, you are overworked now, maybe i send them to dante.

 

I'm learing to pilot on an airplane called AeroBoero 115 (Argentina), Maybe we can implement the 3d/FM on the game as an instruction plane, but thats not for now :)

 

Again, tanks for the reply, and keep up the great work

[MBot 0]

Found some pictures in my little library. Perhaps you find them usefull. Keep up te good work.

 

 

 

 

 

[Incendiary Lemon 0]

...In jet thunder- vulching hero will be in the air again. flying harriers hovering over a spawn. perhaps a pucara loitering over a temporary harrier runway. Its going to be so much fun.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Love reading the project updates, its actually quite fascinating to watch your progress. :)

[scary_pigeon 0]

that was a useful post mbot.

 

I had peceived ground effect to be a stabalising effect. i thought that when it rolled it would recenter as well as give exta lift cushion.

 

 

:) and its nice to know people are reading this.

[+Dante-JT 6]

S! :) I've just returned from my expediction to Argentina, where I've succeed in getting all photos and material I need for the Pucara cockpit.

 

I'd like to thank very much Gabriel, the museum's curator, who kindly opened the cockpits and we've seated and spent a lot of time getting many photos :) usually these cockpits are locked, because in the past some tourists had stolen parts of the cockpits as souveniers. The A-4C Skyhawk present in the museum shows this fact, although it was an incredible experience to seat down and lock myself with canopy closed in this historic aircraft (which performed an attack on HMS Avenger, it's feels like you're "wearing the plane", due to so tight and small is the cockpit space but it's actually confortable, that's why feels like 'wearing' !

 

I was also pleased with the hospitality and kindness of argentinean people, in special my hosts, Cancio's family. :)

 

Also I've bought a lot of books (in Spanish) about the planes of the conflict, as well as a Malvinas t-shirt and other merchandisings - the museum's content is incredible, and heavily biased towards aviation - there are many ejection seats, pilot's uniforms, helmets, oxygen masks, debris and parts of shootdown planes, empty shell cases, empty/deactivated air-to-ground bombs, and a interesting wall poster showing many photos and description of the infamous "Hercules bomber", an adapted C-130 capable of carrying underwing stores and bombs (!), Sharkey Ward mentions this in his book, and I found it very odd, something hard to swallow, but in the museum I've saw strong evidence that this really was attempted!

 

MBot: this "Warbird Tech Series" seems very impressive and detailed, is it still available to sell? Amazon.com ? Or is a rarity? Thank you very much for the scans!

[MBot 0]

The book is called "Warbird Tech Series Vol.21: Boeing/BAe Harrier" by Dennis R. Jenkins. I ordered it some years ago trough my local book store ( altough I think they imported it from the USA ).

 

But I wouldn't call it a must have book. It basicaly covers the developement from the first prototype to the Harrier II+, but not in extraordinary detail. The best from the book are some interesting drawings and diagrams, from wich I think I scanned the most interesting ones.

If you can find it easily and have some bucks left, get it. Otherwise I wouldn't run after it :)

[Mothman 0]

The modified C-130... I recall having read about it somewhere. A bomber able to reach the Georgias, that was the idea if I remember well.

 

What's it like? Can you post any picture?

[+Dante-JT 6]

The modified C-130... I recall having read about it somewhere. A bomber able to reach the Georgias, that was the idea if I remember well.

What's it like? Can you post any picture? 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

It was odd, I will get some material on it soon, actually I wasted all the digicam's mem stick to cover the actual cockpits, the C130 bomber was in a series of photos in the wall so I didn't photographed it, it was odd because I saw underwing stores for at least 3 bombs in a MK82 style mounting.

 

At the moment I'm busy with the Pucara's cockpit, need to adjust better the dashboard mesh according to the photos I've took:

 

but it will be fine - I got all the photos I wanted to do this job. :)

 

Btw, I think Steve is still working to get his AIs to follow orders like keep certain altitude, go to certain waypoint then keep circling, etc.

[PG_Raptor 0]

Wow... you guys are amazing. I've never seen any developer keep the customer so informed on their process, along with so many WIP shots, videos, and information available to them. Everyone should do it like you guys! :D

[Mothman 0]

Truely amazing, not just the insights, but also the speed at which you guys work. And how many are you, btw? Not too many, right?

 

.. and a trip to Argentina to get first hand info an pics... That speaks very well of Thunder Works.

 

Mk82s in a C-130? That would be fun. Challenging, at least.

[scary_pigeon 0]

how many of us?

 

there is just me and dante 'full time' well really its part time since we both have jobs.

 

Theres a few helpers mostly on the art side - and possibly somebody is going to replace our terrain with something better - otherwise i just update what we've got when I get round to it.

 

at the moment:

 

continuing the scripting approach, doing the AI in lua. I'm looking forward to thursday - a day off from work - so I get a bit of time to get more of this AI done.

 

whats done so far is fairly basic still. testing the lua approach - I got the aircraft to take off conventionally. I must say, im not much looking forward to doing the vertical landing AI. it seems quite fiddly.

 

conventional take off was kind of easy - just put throttle to max, pull up, retract gear, fly at particular height.

 

having said that - unless cheating approaches are used - conventional landing in a precise area might be a bit harder than vertical landing.

[Bard 0]

i really like your approach for using a seperate server application, should give quite a bit of flexibility down the road.

 

can you make the single player engine default to localhost, but give the user the option to throw the host onto another box and define the ip address of that unit - great for those people with spare boxes ;)

 

one thing that could be REALLY handy for online play would be to allow peer to peer communication between multiple servers who then service the local clients. Useful for bandwidth management and latency management, and possibly if you guys follow up later with a larger theatre (say.. vietnam.. *hint hint*) you'll have a way of clustering for future growth.

[scary_pigeon 0]

i really like your approach for using a seperate server application, should give quite a bit of flexibility down the road.

 

can you make the single player engine default to localhost, but give the user the option to throw the host onto another box and define the ip address of that unit - great for those people with spare boxes ;)

 

one thing that could be REALLY handy for online play would be to allow peer to peer communication between multiple servers who then service the local clients. Useful for bandwidth management and latency management, and possibly if you guys follow up later with a larger theatre (say.. vietnam.. *hint hint*) you'll have a way of clustering for future growth.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

yes, local host will default address thing. 127.0.0.1

 

a nice thing about putting it on another PC is that the AI and all that is done server side. I would imagine considerably improved performance on the client side which just concentrates on rendering the locality.

[Mothman 0]

Dynamic multiplayer campaigns. That would be awesome. :yes:

[scary_pigeon 0]

Dynamic multiplayer campaigns. That would be awesome.  :yes:

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

this is been a sort of unpublished goal for some time.

[skyhawk-arg 0]

i have the photos of the c-130 bomber

 

 

 

here is the aim of the bombs

 

 

 

i read in a DeySeg magazin, that c-130 atack a ship

Edited February 24, 2005 by skyhawk-arg

[+Dante-JT 6]

i read in a DeySeg magazin, that c-130 atack a ship

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

Yes, the C-130 attacked a british supply ship named "British Wye", dropping 8 bombs in it, only one bomb has hit the target but failed to explode - no serious damage or casualities in the ship.

 

In Ward's book he said that the C-130 rolled the bomb out of the cargobay door in the back, but in reality I think they really dive-bombed the ship dropping those underwing bombs you showed in the photo!

 

That photos are on display in the Malvinas Museum walls.

[+Fates 63]

hello :)

 

I did something minor and new today:

 

 

before we'd had bomb and bullet splashed, thought we'd add splashes for the aircraft blowing through the water.

 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

Will the Splash be directional? Will it splash in the direction that the aircraft hit the water? Not just straight up? I now this is a stupid detail, but something I've never seen before....Keep up the great work guys!

 

<C>

Fates

[+Dante-JT 6]

Will the Splash be directional?  Will it splash in the direction that the aircraft hit the water?  Not just straight up?  I now this is a stupid detail, but something I've never seen before....Keep up the great work guys!

Fates

 

Yes, I think this can be easily altered to splash in any direction. I'm also obsessed by these small little but funny details - I enjoyed a lot the Lock-On Flaming Cliffs demo due to the new crash landing effects in that Su-25 ! Fabulous ground physics as well. I wish we could bring JT to these good levels in terms of overall fun factor (yes, nearly everybody enjoys to just play around with the physics and damage systems of a game when they're becoming bored of the missions!) At the moment in JetThunder I enjoy doing the jump in the ski-jump deck ramp in the HMS Hermes, the physics are becoming good and I think it will be another flight sim to experiment new ways to crash in a funny or dramatic way and them save the track for the amusement of the friends in the web. :)

[scary_pigeon 0]

recently all my effort is to add this scripted AI to the behaviour of objects.

 

Here we see a sea harrier, with a bomb 'attached' somewhat, above the aircraft.

 

Scripting gives the position of where the missile type object is attached. script can then release that object. Its quite generic - I attached a sea harrier as a 'missile' to the sea harrier too.

 

 

Its incredibly boring this part of the project. to get the AI to fly the plane in a non fake physics way - just to take of and follow waypoints seemed to take me days and days - thousands of failed take offs with different parameters. I just tried that now actually, attached a sea harrier as a bomb and it worked nicely as expected (of course the mass of the 'bomb' isnt being added to the physics model at moment) the harrier sort of glides into the ground. and does that nice bouncing stuff.

Edited February 25, 2005 by scary_pigeon

[Bard 0]

that flexibility sounds excellent.

 

one thing though - will you guys be implementing some sort of rudimentary anticheat (checksumming the scripts and validation with the host) to prevent the kind of cheating we saw when LOMAC first came out?

 

it's starting to look like this sim is going to be a modder's dream.

 

thanks.

Edited February 25, 2005 by Bard

[Mothman 0]

Thank you for the pictures, Skyhawk.

 

I don't know if splashes are really directional. They normally go up unless the bomb bounces back up from the water, right?

 

What it could be cool is to see the effects of the wind on the splashes (like the water splash going straight up but falling somewhat in diagonal).

 

Or maybe I just should stop drinking.

[Phlerp 0]

Is this something you might consider implementing into Jet Thunder?

[+Dante-JT 6]

Is this something you might consider implementing into Jet Thunder?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

I've followed with interest the news about the PhysX since its first announcement, it's truly interesting and I've did a look at the SDK they have for download. But I am not sure about how easy or hard will be to make Steve's physics code be processed by this unit - I'm guessing here that it will be a straightforward job :) But Steve who has the final word in this.

 

Personally, I think it will be awesome to have in JT some of the features claimed, like deformable terrain (with ease - I know there are games doing this now by software) but I look forward to have naval or artillery shelling creating huge holes in the battlefield or the Harrier's thrust digging a realtime hole in the terrain under its hovering