Bullethead

Bravo! I move that this become the popular name of OBD from this point onwards. Do I have a second?

I haven't had much time to play with Gmax lately. All I could do at first was just make the backgrounds. But yesterday I finally got around to making the 1st polies on my Morane-Saulnier type AI. If you've never heard of this plane, don't feel bad--I hadn't either until a couple months ago. Think "French Razor". They built over 1000 of them, but they only served for a matter of weeks in just 3 squadrons during the war, although they were widely exported afterwards. Anyway, after several false starts caused by needing to do certain things in different orders, I finally got the main fuselage cylinder down. Then I started playing with smoothing groups on it. The real plane had prominent stringers all down the fuselage but a metal front end, as seen in the pic below. So, I decided I'd try leaving most of the fuselage unsmoothed circumferentially and just smooth the fore-and-aft strips. Below is the result. What do you think? And for you experienced folks out there, is this a good idea or not? I mean, the poly count is the same whether I leave the fuselage rough or smooth it and fake the stringers with the texture, right?

Start with the official Gmax tutorials available at TurboSquid, where you get Gmax itself. This gives you a good idea of the basic interface. Then get the Bitmap to Bullets tutorial linked in one of the stickies above and all things that that tutorial links to. Also get the Cesena 162 tutorial in another sticky above, and all it links to. The B2B tutorial teaches very little about using Gmax itself, but tells you everything you need to make and how to hook it all together to get a flyable plane in the end. Do it first because then you'll appreciate the scope of the task, of which building the external LOD100 model is just the tip of the iceberg. If you're not intimidated by that, read and perhaps do all the others. Having done that, pick an airplane (not necessarily from WW1), something that you're a little bit interested in but don't care that much about, and try to build it using what you know so far. The result will be crap (like my Bristol M1c) but you'll LEARN a lot doing it. After numerous restarts, you'll get to the point where you think you're doing it pretty good to start with, but when you get towards the end you'll think it's crap and want to start over yet again. At that point, you've probably gotten as much out of it as you can. Then perhaps do a "real" plane, something you're very interested in and think OFF needs, or start another test subject. And all the while, read threads here and ask the experts for help.

Yup. Our signature small-batch elixir is a careful blend of castor oil, spar varnish, and canvas dope aged for no more than 2 weeks in rusty 55-gallon drums. One of the perks of working for BAD is that this spirit is freely available to all employees in unlimited quantities. The reason the company also makes airplanes is that everybody thinks they can fly after drinking this stuff all day. BAD is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Bullethead Airconditioning, Septic Tank, Asphalt, Roofing, and Ditching Service (motto: "Get those BASTARDS back to work!"). Won't happen. This thing is so BAD that I'd have to start over completely. I was just doing it to learn something about Gmax. So if you ever see an M1c in OFF, it won't be from me. Naw, this thing needs a Le Rhone.

At one time, the Bullethead Aerospace Distillery (motto: "We only make BAD airplanes") had plans to put the M1c into production. However, the shoddy workmanship was rejected by the RFC inspectors before even the static test article was completed, so the contract was canceled. The incomplete machine now gathers dust in a storage shed, serving only as a nesting place for stray cats.

It shouldn't take you very long. The hard part is learning how to use Gmax. While the tutorials give you the basics, building airplanes requires specialized techniques that you can only learn by asking the experts like Stumpjumper and Hairyspin, plus they also know shortcuts that speed things up. You can see all sorts of great info they've given me in this thread plus others. I started this airplane in early December and have, due to time constraints and waiting for answers to questions about how to proceed, probably only worked on it an average of 1 day per week in all that time. So say 12 days total. In that time, I have started over a couple of times and rebuilt a number of the major pieces several times each as I've learned better ways of doing them. Despite all this, I have the exterior LOD100 airframe complete except for the landing gear and bracing wires, and have completed and textured the engine. So the actual building of the airplane doesn't take much time--what takes the time is learning how to use Gmax. But once you know which commands to use for what jobs, the airplane takes shape very quickly. I should point out that while this MS AI is my 1st "real" airplane, as in something I hope to fly in the game someday, I have previously built a few other things for practice. This wasn't really good practice because I didn't know what I was doing, so if I ever return to building those planes I'll start them over from scratch. However, at least that experience taught me enough about Gmax to enable me to ask meaningful questions of the experts.

That's supposed to be the varnish of burnt castor oil. I've never seen a working rotary in real life, but this type was all bare metal like a model engine, so I varnished it like a model engine. No. I'm undead, you know . I started the airplane first, but I had to make the engine to make sure I was doing the cowling right. You can see how it's coming along in the OFF mod forum. Thanks! I feel better about it now that I know it looks enough like the real thing to be recognized. See Olham for your drink

Do you think I'll have to simply this LOD100 stationary version? I was thinking that because you'd never see it from the cockpit nor even on your wingmen, it was OK. I just made it for close-up glamor external screenshots. Yup, and my bosses can never understand that :).

Something I knocked together as part of what is probably a futile attempt to create a new plane for us. . Olham will buy a beer for whoever can identify this POS .

OK, finally got the engine finished. Booleaning all the cylinders on was a pain, but I learned a lot about how to do it. One thing I found very helpful was hiding various vertices and polys so I'd be able to find the ones I wanted despite the strange angles. I also got the texture to a point where I'm pretty happy with it. I've made a bunch of skins so that wasn't too hard; the non-intuititive part was learning how to map it, but I think I've got that down now, too. As you can see on the texture, the cylinders and spark plugs have the same thing front and back, while most of the rest are wrap-arounds. The real fly in the ointment was making the 3 rings of nuts around the front of the eninge, so I laid out the texture based on them. The whole damn engine has over 5000 polys. However, this is is the LOD100, stationary version. As such, it will only ever be seen in a close-up external view with the motor off, like you were doing a walkaround. The LOD90 version will be MUCH more austere, and of course when the motor's running there'll be a very, very simple version (I'm thinking a single short, fat cylinder with a blurred texture on it). So I figure I can live with all the polys of this version of the motor. If it turns out I can't once I get to the point of putting the plane in the game, I guess I'll have to scrap it and start over. But for now I'm pretty proud of it

And if anybody cares, the gold medal game of women's hockey is tonight (sadly not televised due to friggin' figure skating and curling). US vs. Canada, who have outscored their previous opponents 40-2 and 46-2 to get to this point. I'm holding out for tiddly winks myself

I think we've had this conversation before . Don't get me wrong--I think the Concorde was a very cool machine and I'm sorry it's no longer flying. However, I can't escape the conclusion that if SSTs were commercially viable, the sky today would be full of them. After all, everybody would like to fly faster, so they wouldn't have to spend so much time wedged in an uncomfortable seat next to some fat, flatulent, and unignorable jerk. They might even be willing to pay a little more, but not significantly more, for such relief. But we don't have SSTs, so the numbers must not be there. IIRC, the only reason Concorde lasted as long as it did was because it was flying on tax money and thus largely immune from market realities. I flew across the Pond several times while Concorde was operating, and each time I wanted to go on it. But when I checked the prices, I had to say NO THANK YOU! That would have blown my budget for the entire 2-week trip I had planned. Think about this.... There are a number of places in the country where you can dogfight in real planes, or fly a P-51 or some other old, cool warbird. We all know it, we're all flight fanatics, we all want to do this. And all we have to do is pick up the phone and make reservations. But how many of us have actually done these things? Few if any, I bet. What's stopping you? I have a feeling it's the ungodly amount of money they want for just a few minutes of fun. Same with Concorde. So, I don't think it's a lack of a desire for cool things or a willingness to sit in a rut. It's just that SSTs are hideously expensive to operate, which puts their tickets out of reach of everybody except those with more money than sense, even with government subsidies. If that ever changes, then SSTs will become common, but I don't see it happening until the UFO aliens give us their technology. Wouldn't you call Rutan a pioneer?

I saw it fly twice. Once when I lived in the Los Angeles area, and once when I lived in Midland, Texas, both times when one of them was doing a demo hop outside its usual routes. But the only time I came closer than 5 miles to it was seeing one in a museum in the UK. Very cool plane. Not particularly practical then or now, but no airliner has ever come close to its style points.

I resort to this quite often and when I do, I advance time manually. If my plane is OK, I just skip the next mssion, assuming I was flying home during that time. If my plane is shot up, I advance 24 hours to simulate either the time for repairs or getting a ride home in the duty staff car.

That's the reason why manually killing off your downed wingmen results in horrific attrition. With the Historical AI set, you still see planes staying in the fight until it's hopeless for them. Right now, we seem to have an AI that always attacks and then is all death before dishonor (the "aggressive" setting) and an AI that never attacks and if attacked just sits there and gets slaughtered (the other AI, whatever it's called). Neither one buggers off, scarpers, chickens out, pisses off home or otherwise does the Sir Robin. And that's why wingmen die in droves (or would, if their actions were truly tracked) and why human pilots can get so many kills. I would like to see an AI that for attacking has a mixture of the aggressive and passive AIs, sometimes but not always. Then I would like to see most of them run away as soon as they've lost surprise. When you hit them, even with just 1 burst, I'd like to seem them go into a spin for a long way faking death and then, now being at a severe E disadvantage, running away while your attention is focused elsewhere. If you do that, then tracking AI pilot actions might be worth doing. But as it stands now, the only thing that keeps your squadron loss rate at historical levels is that most wingmen shot down in flames minus a wing 20 miles behind the lines miraculously are OK and ready to go on the afternoon mission.

Yeah, this is a big problem in my job, too. Customers remember games from 20 years ago that provided all sorts of detailed reports so expect the same in new games. And you can't convince them that 1) new games have orders of magnitude more units, bullets, damage states, etc., to track, and 2) old games ran so slowly that you never noticed the slowdown due to write-to-drive operations going on to make the reports, whereas these days you can really see it. So, I'd be perfectly happy with just 1 improvement: in the Mission Review playback, if the airplane in question is from your squadron, show the pilot's name instead of some incomprehensible string of hex digits. That way, I'd be more able to hand-tweak my dossier file to match what happened. I don't care if wingmen continue to die even if they survived my mission--that's entirely realistic. HOWEVER (now talking to customers instead of devs), be warned that if you mark all your wingmen dead who really should be, you will shortly find yourself pretty much alone in the squadron except for the aces who only die on their expiration dates. The rate of wingman attrition in campaign missions rather exceeds their replacement rate, and then on top of this you have the apparently random decision to kill guys off here and there. IMHO, this is all good if you're flying for the Brits in Bloody April, but at other times and places you might thing this rather excessive......

You can easily see why the Concorde went so fast--it was those motorcycle-style handlebars that did it

For lack of anything better at present, you can keep track of this yourself. In your pilot's dosier file there's a list of all your non-historical squaddies. You can tweak their entries to match what happens in your missions. The format seems to be as follows: rank;1stname;surname;kills;claims;status Valid values for the status field seem to be: In Service, On leave, Returning, Injured, Missing, Presumed Dead, and KIA. "Missing" status seems to have a variable attached to it, so that sometimes they come back but usually go through Presumed Dead to KIA. Kills sometimes increase over time as claims go up. This can never be much more than an approximation because, as you mention, it seems impossible to tell who is who from the code numbers shown in the mission replay, and of course a lot of the times you don't see everything they all do. Still, it's a start. Be advised, however, that even doing this, wingmen are still subject to the existing seemingly random death thing. But that's cool with me; I figure they got killed doing test flights between missions, or whatever.

Ah, the 202... I also enjoyed that plane--it was in Aces High as well. Only me and maybe 3 or 4 other folks ever flew it, and none of us very often, because in the main arena it was usually just hopeless in a sky full of late-1945 uberplanes. But if you chose your fights correctly, it was effective enough, and you could talk major smack about your successes . In Aces High, some planes (as alluded to above) are "perked". The perk system went like this... Most planes were freely available but some planes were perked: things like the Me262, Me163, Tempest, Ta-152, Spit XIV, (and hopefully the Lamer). Each perked plane cost X perk points to fly. If you survived the sortie and landed safely, then you got your perk points back. If you didn't make it back to a friendly field, you lost those points. You gained perk points by doing damage in air-to-air combat, and the worse your plane was compared to the enemy's, the more points you got. But in the normal course of events, where everybody was flying essentially equally badass late-war rides, it might take you a month of steady flying to afford a hop in a 262. This is where the C.202 was awesome. It had the about lowest rating in the game (for good reason), so anything you managed to kill with it earned you beaucoup perk points, especially if you could land safely. And some arena maps had this central area designed for tank battles, where some guys would go to jabo all the tanks they could find. Usually they'd fly some late-war, high-value p38, P51, or P47 version loaded down with 2-3 bombs plus rockets to maximize the number of tanks they could kill. So I'd circle the friendly tanks just above the treetops and pretty soon here'd come a jabo dweeb totally fixated on tanks and all sluggish from carrying so much ordnance. 1 good lead-turn up and into his belly--he'd never know what hit him. I'd do this 2 or 3 times, then go land and rake in the points. Do this just 10 times and a 262 was mine . Check out the cool green C.202 skin I made for AH. All the better to hide in the treetops with

The La-7 was a great plane, but it's horrible in MP games. It's in Aces High, and from the moment it was introduced it became the dweeb ride of choice, because it had an excellent ROC, was one of the fastest planes in the game, could turn like a Spit IX, and had a nose full of cannons for concentrated destruction. IOW, it broke the delicate balance between stallfighters and E-fighters. As a result, at least 2/3 of the planes you encountered in any given sortie were "Lamers" or "L-Gay7s, as we called them. Nobody with an ounce of self-respect flew them, and constantly flamed those who did. There was also a constant campaign to try to get HTC to "perk" the damn thing. I hope they did eventually. The endless herds of Lamers was one of the reasons I quit playing the game.

Do you have the official Gmax tutorials available at TurboSquid? The 3rd chapter ("Adding the Ramp") of the 2nd tutotrial ("Making a Level") describes how to make a helical object. In this tuturial, they started with a box primitive but I expect the same technique would work with a cylinder. Based on this tutorial, I'd expect the process for making a valve spring would be kinda like real life, where you bend a piece of wire into the spring shape. Here's my suggestion on how to do it: 1. Create a cylinder with MANY height segments in the top view, so its long axis is parallel with the valve stem. The cylinder's radius should be the same as the wire the spring is made from. 2. In the top view, the finished spring will appear as a circle some distance out from the valve stem. Move the cylinder so that it's X coordinate is 0 and its standing on the circle where the finished spring will be. 3. Texture the cylinder as you want the spring to look, before you do anything else. I imagine it would be a total bitch to texture it after you bend it into a spring. 4. Apply a Twist modifier to the cylinder. 5. In the Parameters rollout for the Twist modifier, set the angle to the desired number of spring coils * 360. Now you've got a barber pole that's still cylindrical. 6. Select the center object of the Twist modifier and move it to the center of the valve stem. This turns the barber pole into a helix. Or at least that's my best guess.

My log on the fire, taking no account of the nationality of the WW2 planes. All analogies also completely ignore the firepower question. This just goes to flying characteristics vs. the opponents of its day. FE2b = Fairy Fulmar Bristol Scout = Boulton-Paul Defiant (mostly for cock-eyed gun, not strictly performance which really ain't bad) DH2 = Polikarpov I-15 DH5 = B-25J strafer mod (for weight) N11 = Polikarpov I-16 N16 = LaGG-3 N17 = Mitsubishi A6M2 N24 = Mistubishi A6M5 N28 = Spitfire IX Pup = Macchi C.202 Tripe = Macchi C.205 Camel = Kawanishi N1K2 SE5a = Spitfire XIV SE5a Viper = Lavochkin La-7 SPAD VII = Typhoon SPAD XIII = Focke-Wulf FW-190D9 Albatros D.II = Grumman F4F Albatros D.III = Grumman F6F Albatros D.V = Bf-109G Fokker E.III = Bell P-400 Fokker Dr.I = Nakajima Ki-43 Fokker D.VIII = Nakajima Ki-84 Fokker E.V = Lavochkin La-5 Halberstadt D.II = Hurricane I Pfalz D.III = Seversky P-35

Yeah, when I do the real texture, it's going to be liberally coated with the dark brown varnish of burnt castor oil, at least in the areas around the cylinder heads. The rest of it will be covered more or less thickly with slightly yellowish castor oil "jelly" (unburnt oil that's lost water content and turned to sticky goo). Leaves, grass blades, bugs, and blobs of mud will be stuck in this gunk. NOTE: I have no idea if veteran rotaries looked like that back in the day, but I imagine they must have given my experience with RC model engines. I don't wait on them to be drawn. I have a killer rig. When I change views, it's POOF! there it is. HOWEVER, regardless of rig speed, polys are always drawn in a specific order, and the last poly drawn is always on top of those drawn before in the same part of the screen. In games, there's a thing called the Z-buffer, which dynamically changes the draw order of polys based on your LOS to them, so that the most distant poly is drawn 1st and the closest poly is drawn last. Gmax, OTOH, seems to lack a true Z-buffer. It seems to draw polys by entire object in the order the objects were created, so that newer objects are visible "through" (really on top of) older objects. Then within objects, the individual polys are drawn in numerical order of creation. At least I HOPE that's what it's doing. That theory matches observations. However, I haven't yet seen this thing in the game so I don't know if it'll do better there.

Aw c'mon, it's not THAT bad, is it? The cooling fins, I'm afraid, are always going to have something of a moire' effect when seen at any angle, which will at least always be the case for 8 out of 9 cylinders. However, I hope to minimize this when I do the real skin. What concerns me the most is the Z-buffer problems you can see in the pic. Notice the top cylinder, how you can see the rocker arm and valve stem through the walls of the cylinder head. Then notice on the 2nd cylinder from the bottom how you can see the rocker arm mounting brackets through the rocker arm. I infer that when showing the surfaces of objects instead of wire frames, Gmax draws polys in the order they were created. In this case, the order of creation was valve stem, rocker arm, then mounting brackets. All polys have been Booleaned into 1 object, but still they retain the order in which they were drawn, probably something to do with the numbers Gmax assigns to the polys. I hope this is just the way Gmax displays things and not how the game does it.

I've been trying to learn how to map textures and I'm not quite ready to do it on the airplane itself, so I decided to do it on the engine. This is just a rough draft texture, which will be refined later, so don't pick it apart too much. It's whole purpose is to help me get the polys mapped, and also make the engine itself look better. I textured 1 cylinder and then cloned and rotated it 8 times, and while I expected this to work, I was still somewhat surprised that it actually did . For them as don't know, mapping textures appears to be quite archane when you read a tutorial on it, but once you struggle with it for a while, it makes sense, mostly. Anyway, I think I got the cylinder textures in the right place. The only changes to polys since last time is that I added spark plugs to the cylinder. Now I'm going to texture the crank case, and once that's done, I'll Boolean the whole thing together (I hope).