what am I doing now?

[Aerny 0]

I did a Ju-87B Stuka for Air Ace (model and textures) to give a hand to Phil and it's a lot of fun to do WWII planes. :)

Brilliant work, man!

Great musics you did for it, btw!

Thank you! :) Sounds familiar..?

More or less what we do with FMOD Sound System, which does sound output for Jet Thunder.

Cool link... never been there. Worth a good check.

 

 

Cheers,

 

 

Aerny

Edited March 12, 2006 by Aerny

[Quandt_da_Skinner 0]

No very much, perhaps two days, in reality the UV mapping is not an alone delay consumes me some hours this type of 3Dobject relatively is amused since uses especially planar mapping helped by uvwrap for more precision in the coordinates , the texture is another way more difficult for my

saludos!

 

 

you are very fast. This one toke me a week and couple days and I recieved the object already maped.

I need practice...

[Shadowcat 0]

Ah, interesting that you're using the TSE! I was wondering what the first high-profile game to use this would be (you guys are high-profile in my books, at any rate :)

 

I can't say I much care about shaders and such, just as long as the viewing distance doesn't suffer. I think the Atlas demo I looked at a while back was pretty good in this respect, however.

 

I presume you're still working on getting the terrain integrated? The water looks okay (and in fairness water is kinda important for your campaign), but I'd much rather see the landscape :)

 

I hope the new work goes smoothly!

[+Dante-JT 6]

Ah, interesting that you're using the TSE! I was wondering what the first high-profile game to use this would be (you guys are high-profile in my books, at any rate :)

 

Thank you ! :) Other people think so, like most high-profile gaming sites who have JT sections (Gamespot)!

 

I can't say I much care about shaders and such, just as long as the viewing distance doesn't suffer. I think the Atlas demo I looked at a while back was pretty good in this respect, however.

 

Yes, it's the big advantage of the Atlas terrain engine. The view range can be extended on the fly, and can be very long. I've always watched 3rd party 3D engines but all of them seemed too FPS-centric, but this one changed all. Seems even flightsim-centric in some demos.

 

I presume you're still working on getting the terrain integrated? The water looks okay (and in fairness water is kinda important for your campaign), but I'd much rather see the landscape :)

 

So far what we have in this TSE JT is the good old Atlas terrain shown in their latest demos - it's very good quality resembling a Terragen-generated terrain with cast shadows and snow caps and all that. But we're working to bring also our primitive but effective terrain method of directly loading the Falklands terrain meshes in blocks of 10km X 10km - that will be easy too. Probably a mixed approach will be used: our terrain blocks loading for the most detailed areas (the island themselves) and the Atlas approach for the really huge and snow-caped Argentina/Chile areas.

 

I hope the new work goes smoothly!

 

Thanks! :) It's already going smoothly!

[scary_pigeon 0]

be interesting to move along with that. currently i just kill time working on old JT stuff. maybe i opensource it. from what i've heared its surprisingly good this TSE thing and all i've done may as well be binned :) - though would be porting cockpit code and developing capaign stuff.

 

cross platformness could be sweet.

[+Dante-JT 6]

... :) - though would be porting cockpit code and developing capaign stuff.

 

FM! Don't forget flight model as well! :) The V/STOL one is getting very neat!

 

cross platformness could be sweet.

 

Indeed! What platform would you like to see JT being ported?

[Incendiary Lemon 0]

Does a shift to Torque push the release back?

[+Dante-JT 6]

Does a shift to Torque push the release back?

 

It will make development go faster, because now we can actually focus in doing the game properly, instead of just the painfull effort of trying to do an engine and then starting to develop a game on top of this engine - I must confess we're very delayed in all things that really matter to simmers, like campaign, realistic comms, ground war, GUI, mission planner, and realistic aircraft operation... :(

 

To sum up, we were trying to create our own "Torque" (sort of) but when it will be finally close to usable, it will be already obsolete...this happens in the gaming industry a lot... luckly, content and gameplay are what matters to gamers and we now can concentrate in the game itself and this way let the Torque makers care about keeping their TSE engine up-to-date. :)

[Incendiary Lemon 0]

Good new all around then :)

[Aerny 0]

One thing where I am concerned about.

 

The engine you worked in maybe gave you a better position to future publishing companies because of your independancy. If you use Torque, maybe one doesn't take your efforts more serious.

 

Please don't read this as a flame to anyone. I am just concerned. Maybe it is the right step at the right time; what you did. It just flew into my head right now.

 

So before ye'all start to stumble upon me... Torque is cool

 

Cheers,

 

Aerny

[A4-AR 0]

HEY GUYS! Any news? Is the Mirage III cj´s cyrano radar model working already? Have you flown any mirage?

;) :) I´m quite anxious to see any small video of a Dagger low level flight as we saw already to many from the Harriers radar and hovering. See ia people... don´t forget about the plane models; SUE, Pucara cockpits, and the bomb free fall modeling, haven´t seen any of those either... thanx

[+Dante-JT 6]

HEY GUYS! Any news? Is the Mirage III cj´s cyrano radar model working already? Have you flown any mirage?

;) :) I´m quite anxious to see any small video of a Dagger low level flight as we saw already to many from the Harriers radar and hovering. See ia people... don´t forget about the plane models; SUE, Pucara cockpits, and the bomb free fall modeling, haven´t seen any of those either... thanx

 

 

 

Don't worry, this weekend I will experiment with heat-effects / afterburner effects with this shader engine - specially important for Daggers. ;) About Pucara cockpits, see this short test video, I didn't have the canopy glass yet and the instruments aren't ready yet, but you can see a generic Atlas Terrain test mesh and and how good it looks, shaded and with excellent performance and view-range as well. Terrain textures that we have for our exclusive Falklands/Malvinas terrain meshes are better resolution than this demo textures in the video, so expect it to be far more impressive when we start using the right terrains and textures.

 

 

The engine you worked in maybe gave you a better position to future publishing companies because of your independancy. If you use Torque, maybe one doesn't take your efforts more serious.

 

Arnold, speaking to my gaming industry contacts, it's seen it's exactly the other way around: by using a proven tech, there is much less scepticism from publishing companies and this indeed open doors for us. Most of the companies in the game industry that contacted us with interest, offered their own tech or parts of it to speed up JT's development.

 

By the way, as explained, our programmer will be doing a clever job with the OGL wrapper and TSE will just do our render display output and probably an Atlas terrain instance will be used for better performance/quality, but the rest of our flight simulation engine that was coded (Flight Model, cockpits, instruments, HUD code, AI...) will be fully used and these are the actual core parts of our effort - other than that, it would not be a flightsim engine, just a game engine like many others around. ;)

Edited March 25, 2006 by Dante-JT

[Aerny 0]

Dante, I am very glad to here this! :yes:

 

Keep up the good work.

 

Cheers,

 

 

Arnold

[Incendiary Lemon 0]

Really Impressive video :)

[AWL_Spinner 0]

Yeah, looks really good - one question though, with the new terrain rendering engine do you still retain all that great looking ground clutter (the boulder strewn landscape) you guys had previously?

 

Any chance of a picture from altitude?

 

Oh, and is that glassy water capable of a deep Atlantic swell? :)

 

Cheers!

 

Spinner

Edited March 29, 2006 by AWL_Spinner

[+Dante-JT 6]

Yeah, looks really good - one question though, with the new terrain rendering engine do you still retain all that great looking ground clutter (the boulder strewn landscape) you guys had previously?

 

 

That was easy, that clutter was more of an artist-made feature than programmer-made thing. It was just a 'single' object per 10km X 10km area embedding all clutter for that area, in a way it stands on top of landscape surface. The single object approach is for the system to draw it faster - it works as a 'layer' of 3d objects on top of landscape.

 

In other words, any 3D engine able to load 3D objects would be able to do. Just depends on the patience of an experienced artist to spread the boulders over the landscape correctly creating that huge layer of objects. :)

 

Any chance of a picture from altitude?

 

Not yet from JT, but you can check some high alt tests in Air Ace, the other flightsim project experimenting TSE:

http://www.thunder-works.com/furball1.jpg

http://www.thunder-works.com/formation.jpg

(these are online tests, BTW - network seems solid.)

 

Oh, and is that glassy water capable of a deep Atlantic swell? :)

 

That's a slightly more complicated question. :) But the water is fully 'programable' in the size/intensity of the swells and roughness of sea. I will try to increase/alter sea state to grab a few pics later.

[AWL_Spinner 0]

Thanks, look forward to it!

 

:)

[SkorpioN 0]

Hi :)

 

Any news?

 

Maybe some pics, videos?...pleaseee

 

Saludos!

[+Dante-JT 6]

Hi :)

Any news?

Maybe some pics, videos?...pleaseee

Saludos!

 

 

A kind person from Argentina, Lionel Bianchi, emailed me some very usefull photos taken through the Pucara's reflector gunsight, showing clearly the actual gun reticle - something we've been just guessing due to lack of references - but now I will be able to correct it and make it accurate and I will soon post a few screenshots here. :)

[+Dante-JT 6]

Here is the real photo that Lionel has sent, of the Pucara gunsight reticle - not yet in game because I'm waiting next batch of fixes for TSE engine (they will fix alpha blend so these gunsight glasses will look better).

 

In the meanwhile, between my campaign flights of F4:AF and WoV/VPAF campaign, I'm doing a re-evaluation of JT's campaign, now I'm sure it gonna work.

[+Dante-JT 6]

I'm doing some tests with shadows projected in the ground beneath the aircraft:

http://www.thunder-works.com/shadowtest.rar

 

Looking quite good as I can make soft boundaries in it (the shadow is just an alpha-channeled object going thru vertical axis of aircraft object, always being cast in ground). Although in the above video, the plane's standby parked position is slightly off (need fine tuning, it's noticeably too nose high). Also, we can also steer the planes on ground now, with good handling while taxying.

[Incendiary Lemon 0]

[+Dante-JT 6]

To test this RapidShare thing and if it could help us with our bandwidth limits, I've uploaded a 40mb video demonstrating a complete flight from taxying, take-off, buzzing Stanley city and surroundings, a uneventful and smooth flight ending in a VTO landing back at Stanley airbase:

 

http://rapidshare.de/files/20476485/takeof...anding.rar.html

 

To download the file follow these 5 easy steps:

 

1. Left click on the link above

2. Click "free" which is located in the bottom right hand corner of the page

3. Scroll down to the bottom of the short page, and wait at least 22 seconds

4. Enter the 3 digit prompted password

5. Download

 

The video is a bit low quality and the codec distorts the bottom area of the video, but it's watcheable and a good demonstration of our FM and sim engine, already enjoyable enough for leisure flights and sight-seeing.

[Aerny 0]

Hey Dante,

 

Is this footage from the old engine or is it the TSE already? If so: hats off!

 

An other thing: about the airbase, is it a placeholder? It is used in Air Ace too.

 

Cheers,

 

 

Arnold

[+Dante-JT 6]

Hey Dante,

Is this footage from the old engine or is it the TSE already? If so: hats off!

 

It's the same good old JT engine. :) TSE got a show-stopping problem: severe z-buffer flicker at shorelines and airbases runways, and we can't do anything about it at all, just wait for (if) garagegames to fix it. As mentioned before, JT engine will stay as it is as would be nonsense to dump 2 years of work that already resulted in an enjoyable flight sim engine, as show in the footage. What we're attempting is a seamless merging of both systems, or to transplant the shaders tech to JT.

 

An other thing: about the airbase, is it a placeholder? It is used in Air Ace too.

 

Yep, I've donated that airbase to Phil. :) I've did it for JT to represent Stanley airbase, but since then I've received more references on how Stanley airbase was in 1982, to sum up, that airbase is placeholder in both games, but very efficient now to test taxying, take-off and landings and it also (in JT) has all its buildings checking collision individually, so we can take them down one by one - the only problem remaining is that the server must know when a building has been taken down to pass this state to the other players connected in a multiplayer game, so everyone connected will see the building as destroyed.