flying_squirrel

work continues. currently it is us programmers who are behind and need to catch up. although quiet, we continue in the background completing the seemingly endless little things that need to be done. At the moment we work on the AI. in this sucessful test, we got aircraft to fly in formations, two offset to a leader which itself is flying down a scripted path. that shot was a couple of weeks old, the leader was then not able to fly accurately down the path - it would fly parallel but off centre by about 200 meters. pretty close in navigational terms, but not good enough if the same system is to be reused to guild a plane down onto a landing strip! happily now the AI can do this. so the next step is to do just that - make our planes land on a landing strip/carrier. this is a fun part of the project. from working on the AI, gameplay emerges.

getting it to land on aircraft carrier at the moment its a bit, top gunish, where the guy has lost it and is rolling from side to side a bit. but it lands - though last time i tried it the plane smashed into to the tower.

heh yes. that would be a pity. I think some sort of time compression is a good thing. It doesn't compromise realism. Of course some people will like to fly for several hours and take a bottle with them if they want the loo.

fantastic :)

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=PBBFP13Ln9I skyhawk landing under AI control. i spent the weekend teaching the AI to do this. next trick is to make it land on a carrier. :-)

we will our best to make it authentic feeling. its these extra details we can certainly do, but will have to make a decision on - there is a saying that, all games are eventually abandoned: the game gets released but there was always more that could be done. So there are priorities and secondaries and so on. I think obviously the in game feeling should feel authentic and dangerous from take off to landing. - not so sure about having a harrier lifted onto deck via the lift - then moved about. or operation flashpoint style - walk up to it, hop it! for the demo we're working on, it will be take off, fly the mission trying not to die. we are most concerned with AI to represent the agents in the battle/mission, the feeling of the flight models and graphical audio feel. we are wondering if anybody can speek english with a spanish accent for demo purposes. also, what do people think? should jet thunder be like IL2 with subtitled speech but authentic voices in native languages - or should it have accented speech. so in spanish version, you would have english depicted with english accented spanish speech - without subtitles and visa versa. as in playing a game like company of heroes, were the germans speak english but sound germanic. __ i am one of the programmers, i'm not sure what state the argentine carrier is in.

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.

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.

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.