Alphadelta

I'd suggest sorting out your seat padding before bolting down your controllers. A couple of inches behind and under you can make quite a difference to where your feet and knees end up. I'm looking forward to seeing it finished! Cheers

The reflections are dynamic (they move as you change your view position in the cockpit). They're made using cubemaps. It's a really fast way to make reflections and as you say, it contributes a lot to feeling like you're surround by glass. A quick preview of the Chinooks door gun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8AHX8uXHpQ

Nightlighting + backlighting + cubemap reflections.

A couple of new screenshots:

That method would require removing the model from the instancing system, which would put serious burden on the GPU as each airframe would be rendered in it's own individual batch process. Squadron decals and possible weathering could be done via glyph bombing but for that you need eye-relative rendering else you get graphical issues caused by floating point inaccuracy. Welcome to the world of highly efficient, 200$ engines. :) Cheers

VRAM limits become a real and unpleasant issue when you start going down that route. An airframe already gets Diffuse + bump + specular + cube map + glow map + damage + damage bump + damage spec...Adding the 4 extra maps (dirt map + dirt map bump + dirt map spec + mask). would probably push VRAM usage over the limit. Cheers

Almost, but not quite! :) We'll have the target range out this year, Herat + campaign next year and possibly the CH-47D by the end of next year. We'll see. I couldn't agree more. The latest version of the skin is quite a bit dirtier than the skin shown in this thread. You and me both Dudley. That's why the MH-6/AH-6 series will be worked on after the Chinook is complete. Cheers

Once the CH-47F has been released we'll assess which helicopters are in demand and subsequently make decisions on what we want to model next. Cheers

Feel free to check out the video of our target range terrain. http://www.youtube.com/user/CombatHelo Don't forget to like and subscribe. :) Cheers

Evening all, The first draft of Combat-Helo's website is almost complete. There's a few more pages to add and some details to fix but it's coming along. Check it out. http://www.combat-helo.co.uk Cheers

We're continually asked to release a beta, but if we had something at beta level we'd be laughing. :) It's an understandable fault, but most gamers seem to believe that every stage of game development before gold status is beta and that developers are holding-out on them for the purposes of masochistic self-destruction. At this point we are so far from what a full beta would contain (i.e EVERY features of the release build) it's not funny, far from funny infact. Hence the need to release the target range/taster/teaser to generate funds and publisher interest to make a full release possible. A taster would also solve one of our greatest problems; that we don't have the man-power or financial resources to properly 'pimp' CH to a wider audience, A taster in the hands of a few hundred hardcore fans would rapidly solve that problem. Once a product is out on the market a larger more active community form and subsequently the players promote the product via screenshots, videos, word of mouth, articles etc for free. :) Just as you say Jedimaster, fewer features, but all working correctly, that's the aim. Hopefully the features we include will be impressive enough that people feel that it was A) worth the money and B) worth future support. Cheers

I haven't been following the latest Jet Thunder developments so I'm not sure whether or not we're going down a similar release path. The current plan is to put out the target range as a taster to the hardcore sim community. Something to generate interest and capital to ensure the larger release can come sooner rather than later. New website coming soon! Cheers

Hopefully we can include a season changer. Cheers

Evening gents, Apologies for the lack of updates lately. Time has been extremely tight! Rather than chip away on the full Combat Helo project and release it in one big drop we've decided to develop and sell an initial taster/trainer. This way players get to try out the full Apache and it's various systems sooner, learn to fly and fight in a less frustrating/dangerous environment, and provide feedback to make the final release smoother and less buggy. We always wanted to develop a fort Rucker style map so the decision made sense on a number of levels. The terrain is a work-in-progress but we've happy with it's accuracy and diversity. There's relatively dense forest, farm land, scrub and an area of desert. Various buildings have been include to give it a mid-western feel. Our yet to be named stagefield. Basic, but with everything an Apache needs to operate. Fuel, ammo and maintenance tents. From inside the control tower. There are 3 regular ranges of differing lengths and 2 slightly more natural firing ranges. Targets range from rusty old pickups to rusty old T-72's. There's also a mock-up of an Afghani compound with multiple enemy firing positions surrounding it. Unorthodox, but it provides some training for the future deployment to Herat, Afghanistan. As always, follow the latest progress on: Our development blog: http://combathelo.blogspot.com/ Our facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/CombatHelo Cheers