what am I doing now?

[flying_squirrel 0]

thought i'd say hello.

 

scaryp was getting into bother for working on JT. His workplace was not too frilled. I've been working on JT for over a year now as coder. mostly the code has been improved - i think scary was learning how to program whilst doing this and you can tell! Much has changed, but somethings like the cockpit and HUD system remain.

 

the latest thing is as dante says - adding in a physics SDK. this will augment the current flight model with ground physics. no more vehicles falling through the ground, or bullets and planes striking earth in mid air! things are coming together.

 

hopefully when we've got some funding we'll be able to poach scaryp from his current work place to work on JT again.

[flying_squirrel 0]

example of whats being worked on currently:

 

in the past the plane would often endup pointing upwards. it perhaps didnt matter too much because then it was only aircraft being dealt with, but now there is a direction to include ground vehicles. possibly under player control. it must look right.

[SkorpioN 0]

Hi!

 

I want to ask to the developers some new questions, here I go :

 

1.- If we consider the main campaign it's hundreds and hundreds of kilometers over the hostile South Atlantic Sea, what treatment will receive the development of the water: great waves, rains and lower clouds and fog, Is it possible to the "JT Engine" make a realistic sea with these characteristics?

 

2.- Directly related to item 1, due to the tactical situation, flights were made at very, very low altitude over the sea on their road to the objectives. So, planes flied among the top of the waves or just above them. Besides, a fine layer of salt was growing slowly over the front cockpit, making vision difficult and incrementing the pilot’s stress. Will the “JT Engine” be able to represent these situations? Great waves and a salt layer on the cockpit?

 

3.- I recently saw a couple of videos about sea in the simulator of BOB Storm of War from Oleg Maddox. It’s impressive! Could we see something like that by Jet Thunder?

 

4.- When will the forum in Spanish became up?

 

Thx a lot.

 

Saludos!

[+Dante-JT 6]

1. Yes, we're aware that sea is high priority. But take as example Silent Hunter III & IV: extremely huge map either Atlantic or Pacific oceans and yet the ocean and waves are the best ever sim (well it's a sub sim after all!), we aim as design goal to have Silent Hunter quality sea, but we can't predict exactly what the programmers will bring to us inside the allowed project's schedule and budget.

 

2. Yes, I know the stories from pilots in Halcones de Malvinas, Carballo had his Skyhawk windshield almost entirely covered with salt while he did the HMS Broadsword attack run. I think I can do this by increasing or decreasing the alpha values on runtime during a very low altitude attack run over the sea. I also read the story of some pilot who slightly touched a wave with a wingtip causing his A-4 to cartwheel and crash killing the pilot, so the high mesh waves are also something to consider.

 

3. Moving/animated coastlines should be in final product by design but the reality is that this demands programming skills not yet found in the team (any volunteers out there able to code an animated shoreline shader effect? Please step up!) I've tried a clever art-only shifting UV coords approach to have shoreline moving in and out, worked in theory but in practice the effect was blocked by the fact that all gfx are stored in display lists (not able to shift UV coords on runtime).

 

 

Hi!

 

I want to ask to the developers some new questions, here I go :

 

1.- If we consider the main campaign it's hundreds and hundreds of kilometers over the hostile South Atlantic Sea, what treatment will receive the development of the water: great waves, rains and lower clouds and fog, Is it possible to the "JT Engine" make a realistic sea with these characteristics?

 

2.- Directly related to item 1, due to the tactical situation, flights were made at very, very low altitude over the sea on their road to the objectives. So, planes flied among the top of the waves or just above them. Besides, a fine layer of salt was growing slowly over the front cockpit, making vision difficult and incrementing the pilot’s stress. Will the “JT Engine” be able to represent these situations? Great waves and a salt layer on the cockpit?

 

3.- I recently saw a couple of videos about sea in the simulator of BOB Storm of War from Oleg Maddox. It’s impressive! Could we see something like that by Jet Thunder?

 

4.- When will the forum in Spanish became up?

 

Thx a lot.

 

Saludos!

[+Dante-JT 6]

oops :) 4. Spanish forum: there will be yet another website major upgrade ahead, will add Malvinas/Falkland detailed history and info, and also about the planes and squadrons who participated in the conflict...a comprehensive bibliography with links to the books on the subjetc etc. And amongts all these, we will have official in-house forums for spanish and english languages ;)

[SkorpioN 0]

Thx Dante, I'm very appreciate for all responses.

 

Hope, finally can you include Moving/animated coastlines in the BOB style.

 

Saludos!

[+Fates 63]

Thx Dante, I'm very appreciate for all responses.

Saludos!

 

And CombatAce appreciates them as well. Keep up the good work Dante and the rest of the JT team.

[flying_squirrel 0]

theres been a 1 step back, 2 step forward development recently. a lot of the programming has had to be reworked because it was getting a bit messy. it was not using good object oriented programming style making it hard to add new features..

 

..but there was a lot of features present. not all of them working 100%

 

over the past months the code has been reworked with effort to make sure that the features do actually work, or will work. There was once for example, an ongoing issue with collision detection. the system overall understood the idea of destructable parts for an object but couldnt garantee reliably detecting a collision - or flying low, you would sometimes hit invisible terrain yet otherwise able to skim and thud the ground as you would expect.

 

gradually have rebuilt the project and now we're mostly towards the feature set we had when we started reworking the code mid 2007.

 

were we had a simple mission with AI warships firing back at a raiding aircraft under player control. But it was unsatisfying with game breaking issues like collision detection and other things not working right.

 

 

now we again have Ai controlled turrets on warships that will fire back at enemies (again). Soon we should be back to the feature set we had - but this time a feature set that works correctly. And with the code now cleaner be able to press ahead with the rest of the games features.

[shu 0]

Sorry to post in this forum, but does anyone know how to get in touch wit the dev team? I PM'ed Dante a few days ago but havent heard anything back and was wondering if theres an e-mail etc?

[Nobby 0]

Do you still intend to model the County class destroyer HMS Glamorgan, and its' Wessex Mk 3 helicopter?

[+Dante-JT 6]

Do you still intend to model the County class destroyer HMS Glamorgan, and its' Wessex Mk 3 helicopter?

 

 

positive, sir.

[SkorpioN 0]

Excuse me Dante, any news about High definition A-4C/P/Q Skyhawk 3D model?

 

Saludos!

[scary_pigeon 0]

It is now January 09 - it has been an interested month or so. A couple of months ago I got made redundant, so inbetween that job and my current one, have been able to advance Jet Thunder quite rapidly. Its now in a sort of demoable state, no user interface, just lua scripting that can define everything - setting up missions and triggering events. But there are things that cannot be shown yet such as the way the surface to air missiles AI is not well done yet. Missiles will loop around the plane until they hit or exhaust themselves rather than if missing, passing onwards. Some of the aircraft AI is not ready to show to general public either - when flying in a straight line, the plane rocks left and right too much - like when Maverick's mate is spooked and can't land his plane.

 

The good thing is that the main gameplay features like the different sorts of AI is there - just that they need fixing and polish - Also, much improved is the ground physics. which reminds me, the new ground physics only works with terrain - it will fall through other objects at the moment so I must fix that.

 

At this stage in the project there is a lot of bugs and issues like that.

 

So after the AI is fixed, and after a user interface system is written, then I think the project enters content period where we recreate historic and what if missions using the scripting system and possibly some tool that we might develop... ...and then there is also dynamic campaign and online play options to work on. So a lot has been done, but theres still a fair bit to do.

[scary_pigeon 0]

most recently upgraded the ground physics - and also making the new ground physics work with ships rather than just terrain. It is again possible to sit on an aircraft carrier with a skyhawk or harrier.

 

also doing house keeping task - setting up new SVN repository for the developers.

Edited January 24, 2009 by scary_pigeon

[Luiz Carlos 0]

most recently upgraded the ground physics - and also making the new ground physics work with ships rather than just terrain. It is again possible to sit on an aircraft carrier with a skyhawk or harrier.

 

also doing house keeping task - setting up new SVN repository for the developers.

Eeerr...

What´s a SVN repository?

[scary_pigeon 0]

and svn repository is versioning system - lets us developers ensure we have coherent versions on each others machines- we can update the central repository then everybody else gets the changes when they update.

 

whats been worked on most recently is UI system, working to move away from hard coded keymaps so users can customise that aspect.

 

Got to fix a host of bugs, then we continue to polish the demo.

[choki 4]

GOOD!!! KEEP WORKING IN THIS PLZ!!! The best game in history!

 

PLZ Dante or any other in the team, kan poot a new pics or video, becouse a lot of people are loosing the hope, tink who the game is down.

 

Thanks a lot and keep this work!!