Motivation

[SDirickson 0]

Hola, just wanted to make sure you guys know we're still watching your progress. I can't wait to see the first demo, let alone the full sim make it out. Keep up the good work!

[+Dante-JT 6]

Thanks! :)

 

We're at the moment at full throttle working (finally) in the proper terrain for the Falklands, with accurate coastlines and elevation data:

 

I'm now looking about info on the sun position in such far south latitudes. I've heard that even at mid-day in such locations, the sun doesn't get past 26 degrees high in the horizon.

 

Also with this new 'map building' process, I think we'll be able to have a lot of manually placed ground clutter, like the ubiquitous stones and rock formations scattered over the Falklands landscape.

 

We're also doing a few laggy network tests:

 

Still no position-tweening and other online game tricks, so it's still very confusing, at least for me (dunno about Steve, maybe he is more used to laggy/warping gameplay due to his online gaming tastes ) but nevermind, this will improve a lot before any attempt at something resembling a demo.

[scary_pigeon 0]

i dissabled the tweening for testing purposes. glad to see people still interested. the last few months have been slow. network code took 3 months rather than 3 weeks.

Edited September 6, 2005 by scary_pigeon

[+Dante-JT 6]

i dissabled the tweening for testing purposes. glad to see people still interested. the last few months have been slow. network code took 3 months rather than 3 weeks.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

Ahh, Steeeeve, can you print some debug string in the console windows showing what terrain blocks are in or out of the memory in the load-on-demand scheme ?

 

I'm afraid that the system is loading all terrain blocks at once at game's start. I've placed 14(fourteen) 10km X 10km chunks. At the moment there are about 8 blocks aligned East to West. South to North it's only 2 or 3.

 

If I fly in the direction East to West or West to East I can see all 8 blocks with their full textures going into the horizon (result: slowdown in any computer). If I fly in a direction North to South or South to North, where we have a maximum of 2 blocks, it's smooth. Please fix that, loading only the terrain block just below the player and the imediate nearby surrounding blocks, as you did in the older system (the player's plane in the center of a 3x3 matrix, worked well as far as I remember).

[scary_pigeon 0]

i doubt it is doing exactly what you think it is doing.

 

what it is supposed to do - is loads up the positions of all terrain elements in to magic particlemesh data structure. Then comes the render phase. it selects a region, checks if it has been loaded yet - if has displays it, if not loads it.

 

i will check it after though to make sure its not doing anything perculiar.

[+Dante-JT 6]

it selects a region, checks if it has been loaded yet

 

It selects a region based in what? Player position in the world? Shouldn't have a 'bubble' (sort of) around the player to select regions?

 

if has, displays it. if not, loads it

 

It seems it always loads all parts eventually, and forget to get rid of parts that aren't needed anymore (such as the ones outside the supposed 'player bubble'). This ends in our client eating way too much RAM for such a simple thing as a 80km-long piece of isle.

[scary_pigeon 0]

thats what page files are for. :P

[scary_pigeon 0]

for the corrious - it was loading all terrain because currently our new terrain is only about 80km and the view distance happened to be 80km - now with the view distance reduced we have as expected lots of wonderful load on demand pop up. :-)

 

what is nice is that is not going to be hard to include islands in the middle of atlantic. which makes vulcan flights possible rather than air spawning.

Edited September 7, 2005 by scary_pigeon

[SDirickson 0]

Those screenshots look great. I can't wait to see it with the coastline objects and scrub objects in place. I'm looking forward to low level CAS flights in the Pucara.

 

Depending on how much the terrain code gets optimized, would it be possible to add auto-generated scrub brush and, heaven forbid, grass added to the scenery? I'm thinking of something extremely low detail, just to break up the straight edge terrain look common to a lot of sims. Look at Lock On as an example, the tree lines on the farm tiles do a lot to add to the feeling of low level flight.

[+Dante-JT 6]

what is nice is that is not going to be hard to include islands in the middle of atlantic. which makes vulcan flights possible rather than air spawning.

 

Indeed, Steve! :) I'm collecting data about it, so probably, soon we will update our website's features list ;)

 

Those screenshots look great. I can't wait to see it with the coastline objects and scrub objects in place. I'm looking forward to low level CAS flights in the Pucara.

 

Depending on how much the terrain code gets optimized, would it be possible to add auto-generated scrub brush and, heaven forbid, grass added to the scenery? I'm thinking of something extremely low detail, just to break up the straight edge terrain look common to a lot of sims.

 

The current terrain-construction process is a joy, I can actually build the maps in my 3D software, and Steve wrote a clever script that places everything in the relative positions in the game world, so I don't have to bother with game world coords (which are incredibly fiddly, like for example 124064.171875 0.000000 66252.718750 0 1 1, due to the large game's world size) so basically I assemble the map in the 3D software and this script generates this position numbers automatically based on the center of origin of each terrain mesh.

 

Ground objects will be easy to place around (rocks/stones, houses, poles and all), same method but they will have their own colision meshs and are labelled 'statics' by Steve's clever system.

 

Maybe Steve could add some extra flag in his scripts so I can define also if a object will be always-facing or not, this means I can manually place clouds and bushes and such particle-oriented objects.

 

For full grass covering the whole terrain, I've looked at SpeedTree RT, this middleware is being used on most current games that have to display grass and convincing trees and bushes - not such a priority at the moment but it's being looked into.

[Aerny 0]

For full grass covering the whole terrain, I've looked at SpeedTree RT, this middleware is being used on most current games that have to display grass and convincing trees and bushes - not such a priority at the moment but it's being looked into.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Do you want to try to integrate Speedtree in this game? It was posible in the Torque Game Engine... (don't ask me how) so it might certainly be posible to implement this in OpenSceneGraph. Awesome!

 

Expensive also. Got any lines out?

 

Cheers,

 

 

Aerny

Edited September 24, 2005 by Aerny

[Lexx_Luthor 57]

To avoid sacrificing external environment brightness, Please make the canopy "reflections" less intense, or offer the ability to turn them OFF totally and allowing the full external environment brightess to be shown when the "reflections" are turned off.

 

Computer monitors do not have the brightness depth to realistically model glass without crippling the view beyond, especially in low light levels. Flight sim canopy "reflections" are modelled by first drastically reducing the brightness of the external environment by 50% or more -- as can be suddenly seen by switching to external view, then "brightening" some selected portions to represent canopy "reflections." The limited monitor brightness depth cannot cope with the crippling reduction in external environment brightness needed to model light or bright canopy "reflections." This is especially crippling to flying in low light levels where everything external -- even stars -- are reduced in brightness because the developers never give this any thought (although they probably never think their sim would be so successful as to expand to include extensive night operations).

 

Real glass reflection does NOT reduce the amount of light entering the canopy. However, reducing the amount the brightness of the external environment is needed to create canopy "reflections" on limited computer monitors. Be aware that canopy "reflections" come between the simmer and the sim in the most brutal way possible -- the core visual interface. For a pure daylight dogfighting game, you have lots of light available to reduce to make canopy "reflections" but not if your twilight and night environment are also sacrificed.

 

Most flight sim canopy "reflections" are static, and offer no realism to begin with. The (very) brief time I tried LOMAC I did enjoy the tiny dynamic canopy scratches glinting in the sunlight, mostly because they did not (I think) require reduction of external environment brightness, but I never bothered to find out if they still happened in clouds or after sunset -- a common oversight in the creation of flight sim canopy "reflections" and one of the main reasons to ignore them completely by turning them off.

 

In the screenshots, we can see how dim the external environment is, including surface and sky. I may be wrong on aspects of "reflection" creation, but I am frustrated by how dark the external environment is in flight sims that offer canopy "reflections" -- a darkness that vanishes when the "reflections" are turned off or you switch to external view.

 

Thanks~

Edited October 5, 2005 by Lexx_Luthor

[scary_pigeon 0]

well normal glass actually is about 50% transparent or so i remember - but yeah, i think the canopy reflection might be a tad overdone.

[Mothman 0]

well normal glass actually is about 50% transparent or so i remember - but yeah, i think the canopy reflection might be a tad overdone.

 

Hi.

 

Maybe this will help:

 

Bullet resistant glass, which is made with several glued layers of polycarbonate (Lexan from General Electric) and sometimes also with acrylic, has between 75% and 90% light transparecy.

 

I don't know about military jets cockpits, but I am guessing that it's made of plexiglass or some basic polycarbonate. 50% light transparency looks a bit opaque, imho... unless you're traying to simulate salinization produced when flying to low over the ocean (brushing the waves).

 

Of course: plastics loose light transparency with age and get "scratched", but anyway I still think 50% is too much, especially for A-4 and Mirage Daggers where the pilot's life depend very much on his vision of the airspace and ground, imho.

Edited October 6, 2005 by Mothman

[+Dante-JT 6]

It looked too opaque in that screenshots because proper terrain lighting was disabled at that time. But I'm increasing the transparency of glass, and coupled with the correctly lit terrain and improved textures, look like this (sense of speed was excellent during this shot):

[Sweep 0]

Dante : 4 horas da madrugada !!!!! E a hora de dormir !!! Cuidado com a sua saude....

 

Sweep

[Aeroworld 0]

Guys, you simply rock!! I'm following your progresses since I read about this wonderful project on AVSIM.

 

This is going to be a smashing hit: a great and original plot, great planes "combat proven" such as Harriers, Skyhawks and Mirages, wonderful graphics and, I'm sure, wonderful flight models.

 

Please, keep the great work up! You have a BIG fan in Italy.