ZoltanTheHun

SkyHussars R12 is available: Due to my limited free time, I was able to include only a handful of features. Enemies are flying again, there are some improvements in physics, there are some features which are making progress in the background. The main problem at the moment that the controls are too sensitive, something that I should fix soon. The other thing is that in case of negative aoa it easy to loose control of the plane, I suspect an issue with the damping code again. New features: Initial TerrainEd UI Projectiles physics are in sync with rest of the physics Small deadzone to joystick Save As… functionality for PlaneEd AI planes won’t fall from the sky when a new game is started Preparation for selectable maps Reorganized PlaneEd UI, moved telemetry panels to the right Please watch the release video here: Release and source code available here: https://github.com/ZoltanTheHun/SkyHussars/releases/tag/R12

Hi, I am an avid Strike Fighters player, and the game inspired me so much that I had the idea to create my own flight game. It is in pretty poor state so far, but I managed to squeeze out 1 release every month since January, and I added new features at every new release. So this is SkyHussars R5: By now I have the most basic things: I create a poor model of a P80, I read about flight physics, and implemented a very very simple physics model. Then I added terrain, some simple particle effects, enemies, shooting and positional audio, then I created simple text configs for the game and simple menus. And now I have sea and some self shadowing. The framerate as of now is quite abysmal though, that's something I should improve immediately. The game s built on top of the jMonkeyEngine. I am a Java enterprise developer by profession, so this engine suited me the best. It was an exciting experiment so far, but because I work on it during late night coding sessions, I don't know how long I can keep this up. So I felt it is time to show this to others, despite the abysmal framerates and the poor gameplay: https://github.com/ZoltanTheHun/SkyHussars/releases/tag/R5 The main platform is Windows, but It should work on Linux and BSD too, but I haven't tested those platforms for a while. Regards, ZoltanTheHun

SkyHussars R11 is out now. New features: New, slightly more accurate flight model Bullet updates are independent of framerate AOA is displayed on UI Airspeed Indicator is added to the cockpit PlaneEditor has Speed, Height ad AOA simulation Small graphical enhancements, bugfixes etc.... New bugs: Physics is not enabled for AI planes Shooting bullets can selfdestruct the plane Reset does not reset plane to original condition Please see the release video here: https://youtu.be/gFh2aUSuMGw GitHub: https://github.com/ZoltanTheHun/SkyHussars/releases/tag/R11

Thank you! I will definitely look into that! SkyHussars R10 is out. Release is available at: https://github.com/ZoltanTheHun/SkyHussars/releases/tag/R10 The new features include: Fixed bug when it was impossible to start a new mission after exiting one. Lots of background in preparation of loadable terrain Airfoils are correctly loaded into PlaneEditor New terrain texture and terrain model introduced First cockpit implementation Shadow bug fixed, it is again possible to see smooth shadows on the surface of the plane. Refactoring, code improvements in the background. A new video will show some of these advances. There is a short clip of the plane editor, after that I show how to set the joystick and I show a configuration file for the game and one for a plane used by the game. All game objects in the future should be configurable via text files, but I try to provide some enhanced tools for modding the game. Terrain just had its folder created. A created a cockpit model, which lacks everything, but will do for now. I show the plane from the outside, then from the inside. There is a little "dogfight". Then I show how shadow is cast to terrain, and then I start another flight with different lighting conditions. At the very end a new bug pops up, so there is work for next month.

I managed to get some worked done again. Most of the work is in the background, I prepare for more modular terrain, so I can work on a terrain editor later, and I had a little work on the plane editor too. I was also playing with some terrain textures, and terrain editing. It is not looking good yet, but I was able to put the code through some high poly stress tests, and I am satisfied with the results: despite the lack of optimization the engine was able to display a 2048x2048 terrain with 15+ framerates:

Thanks everyone for commenting. Since my last post I made some small fixes: There are a small new features that I was able to implement since the last release. The most important one that games won't stuck at the main menu after exiting a flight. After that I took up the work on the Terrain Manager. Small change, but a few of the terrain properties are coming from objects now, which is the first step to be able to select between terrains. The third change is that there is a new panel on the plane editor. This panel will contain airfoil properties. It is already capable of displaying a few of them, but there is a long way to go for fully editable airfoils. I hope I can keep my working spirit and put some further small features in until then ext release.

Hi folks, I did not want to create a new topic, so I post it here. A new release of my humble flight game is available here: https://github.com/ZoltanTheHun/SkyHussars/releases/tag/R9 The new features this time are: Menu navigation and menu look are improved Project upgraded to jMonkey 3.1 Joystick support First altimeter ingame First Options menu, options can be saved Camera outer view movement First Plane Editor

I wonder if full screen shaders could be added to pimp up the game like I made with this screenshot...

I have been away for a while.... 1956, Germany.

Hi everyone, please let me know if this is not the right place of discussion, I don't want to spam the forum, with news about my little toy. Soooooo, SkyHussary R7 is out! A rocky release, further information and download is available here: https://github.com/ZoltanTheHun/SkyHussars/releases/tag/R7 The gist of the release notes is that I had to update the engine to jMonkeyEngine 3.1.0-beta1, and I won't be able to fix all issues that came with that. I had to update the engine version because of 2 reasons: 1 is a nasty sound bug, the other is that the dependencies for 3.0.10 were not available only, so noone could build the project if bothered. There are some good things do: decoupling of the render thread from the logic thread had great progress. AI was moved and I solved an issue with the copying of screen data from the logic thread to the render thread. All the changes had the effect that i can do 30 fps easily with 250 planes on screen. This was useful for testing the polygon rendering capabilities, because that is one concern about using Java. Surely the recorded video is only 12 fps or below that, because of the recording program. A few words about the modelling: I use a so called lock step model. The idea here is that the game logic is updated n times per second. Every logic update does the following: it updates the physics for the planes and their positions, the ai makes decisions, there is collision check and so on. Whenever the rendering starts, it will consult the game logic about the current status and it copies over the necessary information: positions and transformations. There are a lots of good things coming out of it: - We have at least 2 threads running. So multicore CPUs are utilized. But better, because the nature of these updates, like physics for planes are easy to make parallel, with the right use of Java, 4 or 8 core CPUs are utilized now. - Updates are independent of framerate. Each logic update has the same time change between them, so if the screen freezes for a second, the simulation remains stable(drawback, that it won't provide hard real time situation,de clock ingame will deverge from real clock) - It will help with replay and multiplayer development: every logic step is associated with a growing counter. Each input is associated with one such update, and clients need only to exchange these inputs. More info on this later. The other improvement is in the plane descriptor file. Here is an example: { "name" : "Lockheed P-80A-5-LO Shooting Star", "engineLocations" : [ { "engineDescriptor" : { "name" : "Allison J33-A-17", "thrustMax" : 17792 }, "location" : { "x" : 0.0, "y" : 0.0, "z" : 0.0 } } ], "massEmpty" : 3593.0, "massTakeOffMax" : 6350.0, "massGross" : 5307.0, "internalTank" : 1609.0, "airfolDescriptors" : [ { "name" : "WingLeft", "cog" : { "x" : -2.0, "y" : 0.0, "z" : -0.2 }, "wingArea" : 11.035, "incidence" : 1.0, "aspectRatio" : 6.37, "damper" : true, "dehidralDegree" : 0.0 }, { "name" : "WingRight", "cog" : { "x" : 2.0, "y" : 0.0, "z" : -0.2 }, "wingArea" : 11.035, "incidence" : 1.0, "aspectRatio" : 6.37, "damper" : true, "dehidralDegree" : 0.0 }, { "name" : "HorizontalStabilizer", "cog" : { "x" : 0.0, "y" : 0.0, "z" : -6.0 }, "wingArea" : 5.0, "incidence" : -3.0, "aspectRatio" : 4.2466664, "damper" : false, "dehidralDegree" : 0.0 }, { "name" : "VerticalStabilizer", "cog" : { "x" : 0.0, "y" : 0.0, "z" : -6.0 }, "wingArea" : 5.0, "incidence" : 0.0, "aspectRatio" : 4.2466664, "damper" : false, "dehidralDegree" : 90.0 } ], "gunGroupDescriptors" : [ { "name" : "6x .50 M3 Browning", "gunLocations" : [ { "gunDescriptor" : { "name" : ".50 M3 Browning", "rateOfFire" : 20.0, "bulletDescriptor" : null, "muzzleVelocity" : 890.0, "spread" : 0.5 }, "roundsMax" : 300, "location" : { "x" : 0.5, "y" : 0.0, "z" : 2.0 } }, { "gunDescriptor" : { "name" : ".50 M3 Browning", "rateOfFire" : 20.0, "bulletDescriptor" : null, "muzzleVelocity" : 890.0, "spread" : 0.5 }, "roundsMax" : 300, "location" : { "x" : -0.5, "y" : 0.0, "z" : 2.0 } } ] } ] } More on a file format later, but I hope the intent is clear: easy to use human readable format. However here are 2 important proposals for the future: - An opensource mod server will be added. Players can start their own mod server or join one, and can download new planes, missions,everything. - Mods will be versioned and credited. This way it is going to be easy to keep installations up-to-date and in sync. - Long loadtimes will be avoided by preprocessing the text files at first run. So these are some minor ideas around modding. Important to know, that the airfoils and engines are stored as a list, and any number of these can be added, depending on their position and other parameters they will affect the flight. Here is a video from the release, the framerate is slow because of the capturing device and the 250 planes flying around, and it is without LOD at the moment. The release is available here: https://github.com/ZoltanTheHun/SkyHussars/releases/tag/R7 A few words about the requirements: Java8 and a card supporting OpenGL 2 is must, a dual core CPU is useful, but I was unable to test the game on weaker hardware than my own config. If you like the game, or you are interesting in more text with better quality, videos and more, please consider supporting me on Patreon. Even 1$ matters. https://www.patreon.com/skyhussars Time to go to sleep. Cheers everyone.

Thanks Stary, the engine is jMonkeyEngine. It provides many useful 3D facilities, it also supports input, sound, and so on. It is not as advanced as Unity or Unreal, but I wanted to code in Java, and I wanted to do it full open source, and this was the only option which full-filled both. I write the physics, the gameplay, the menus, datastructures and so on. I don't want to write the 3D code, the rest gives enough work to do, but hopefully as the project matures, I can give back a few things to the engine developers.

Thanks ShrikeHawk

A problem with the statement that economic changes mostly working in decades. It takes about 2-3 years to exit the EU, up until then, it is just uncertainty, and what comes after that? How the UK will be cleaner? If not cleaner, but it is going to be leaner without Scotland, isn't it? How much pension money are we burning away in the process? And how much jobs? Is it worth the price to lose car manufacturing in the process? Or will all does damned immigrants remain just for the free trade? Did you know that the 62% of the agricultural export of the UK goes to export? Did you know that Norway has free trade agreement with the EU, but they pay tariffs on agricultural goods, yet they get all the immigrants like an EU member? Do you think that a supranational state like entity should leave its financial sector outside its borders without its regulations and what kind of effect that can have on the City? There are a lot of questions to answer, and it is going to be a long ride. But first someone should trigger that Article 50, which won't necesseraly happen as the referendum was not binding afaik, and suddenly, the real ballsy guys whom were so loud about that, already retreated. For financials nothing is worth then waiting in uncertainty. In the meanwhile, another handful of people had a very nice day: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jul/04/standard-life-shuts-property-fund-post-brexit-withdrawals

I am afraid, you don't understand the concept of shorting. This market movement realized in a tremendous amount of loss for some traders and for pension funds. Sure, markets rebound, but I suppose you do now that this happens via speculation. As an example: pension funds must sell their most risky investments after a certain loss to prevent further loss to investors, this is bought up by speculators, and sold back to them at a higher price once the risk diminishes. This is normal activity, as you know, it is better than having a total crash, but it means that for the given year you will have a bit lower yield on your investment at the end of the year. Also, please do notice a few things: FTSE 250 is still down, the pound is down, the Bank of England will cut interest rate, both UK and EU lost from its credit rating, and there is a lot of uncertainty on the markets. And as I mentioned in a post before, exiting the EU does does not mean that the UK goes back to dark ages, but that GDP growth will be a few percentage point behind in comparison to what could be achieved without this hassle what we see now. .

The problem with this, Rusty Morley, that immigrants made England in the past: the Anglo-Saxons, the Norse, the French all immigrated to England and chased to Celts to West and the North. The good thing is that all the Eastern Europeans are leaving their languages behind, they have the same religious heritage from the past and they have the same cultural interests in the present, and their children will share the language too, they will be English just like your German queen.

Hungary will hold a referendum on refugees too. Britain is not part of Schengen, and It was not forced to take any refugees. Also Hungary will fight to stop any quotas to happen, and our government expected to work together with the conservative British government against that. Regarding Switzerland and voting: Though they held a referendum, where 50.3% of the votes were against Schengen, its actual implementation afaik is yet to be announced, and the end results can be such, that though there are quotas set up, those are high enough to not make a dent on the movement of workforce. The other thing is bank secrecy, it was just last year that the EU made an accord with Switzerland to end bank secrecy, no popular vote about that, and it shows that the EU might matter in certain occasions. It is a sad thing to see Britain go, because it was an important counterbalance to Germany and France. I don't think that it is impossible to fight "EU burocrats", though in my opinion the EU is still more governed by the agreement of PMs rather those bureaucrats. As for the Brexit, there is not much to win there for Britain, probably more to loose. - To access the freemarket Britain must accept free movement of the workforce. Yeah, those going for healthcare must go, that 1-5%. (I would like to mention though, that Eastern Europe has very good healthcare services that is very much enjoyed by the British population, because it is cheaper to take a flight and stay in Budapest for a few days then to go to a dental surgery in Britain(fortunately this option will remain open)). - Fish do not know borders, because of interstate agreements, there won't be much change to the fishing industry. - One thing probably to loose is Scotland and some of the oil over there. - The other thing is to loose if there is any tax on car imports to EU, that can be a big hit to UK manufacturing. - And banking. EU must have its banking center within EU borders. The most probable scenario is that there will be agreement on most things and life goes on as before. I think that it will cost Britain more than to the EU though, but it is not a catastrophe, only 1-3% difference in the yearly GDP change and in unemployment, on rainy days it is enough for a recession. Also I expect that HMS Prince of Wales will be sold, Britain does not need that, and there won't be enough money to fund it in the long run. ,

Hi, Thanks to the warm welcome that my previous topic received, I thought I would share with you that a new version of SkyHussars is out now. This month saw very little progress. The reason for this is my yearly holiday, and some weekend programs I had in the last couple of weeks and in the next couple of weeks. It looks like all my weekends will be occupied till early-mid July, so midnight coding continues till the next release. The release is available here: https://github.com/ZoltanTheHun/SkyHussars/releases/tag/R6 The main features of this release are the following: Number of maximum planes increased to 32. No infinite bullets. Right now bullets have a range of 2km, after that they disappear. Plane physics is now on a separate logic thread. Physics are multithreaded. New background image in main menu with first SkyHussars logo. New font for SkyHussars. Very very very simple AI. It tries to keep the altitude, badly. Slightly change ground texture configuration to make it look better. Terrain features are changed, unfortunately water is not visible this time. There is some additional info in the release notes, it might worth reading. The best news is that I am able to reach 300+ fps with the current release, which is a good indicator for the future improvements. Here is a new video to the new release: Also I setup a Patreon page where people can follow freely the weekly development updates: https://www.patreon.com/skyhussars Regards, ZoltanTheHun

Deutschmark: I think FlightGear has the huge advantage of a good and working flight model, which I think is more difficult to implement than shadows etc... The Combat Simulator Project sounds like a good thing, but if it is in C/C++ at least code from FlightGear could be reused for that game too. One of the good things about jMonkey that there is an active developer community around it, so there are some awesome shadercode available. But there are few people whom needed to render such distances as a flight sim, and last month it turned out that the shader code is not fully compatible with multiple viewports. What I want to say with this that any open source engine will have its limitations, because it does not have the same number of developers/funding as a commercial engine. Therefore I think all efforts should be concentrated in the following order: 1. usability(game setup + menus + modding) 2. flight 3. combat 4. everything else, and FlightGear/SimGear might have the second one Do335: Supposedly if it is not written in Java it won't look cutting edge, and it might have higher resource requirements. My aim would be to reach 2012-2013 level of high end graphics on my rig, which is an i5@3.5GHz and Radeon 270x. I think it must be possible in Java. In case of Il2, I think it is just the scripting that is in Java, the core is in C++. Even in mobile games, C++ is often used for critical parts. That is, Java and C/C++ can be combined. Well, if jMonkeyEngine catches on, than the engine developers can focus on performance and optimize it as it is necessary. The greatest concern is the GC pauses, caused by the automated garbage collection, I think that can be largely avoided, and shouldn't cause an issue. Here is a recent demo about the engine btw:

Thank you all for the kind replies. Well, this is still one very early tech demo, I had to test if Java and jMonkeyEngine, the engine I use is capable enough. Java does not have the performance of C, and game devs don't like it because garbage collection can cause occasional stuttering, also jME is not as actively developed as Unity or Unreal, the guys have too few resources, but it is a nice community. And it's open source, I have most of my experience in Java, and I think stuttering can be avoided mostly. Regarding the performance, I think It would be a must to surpass the Strike Fighters 2 NA detail levels, which I definitely think to be possible on modern hardware and with multithreading. There is the FlightGear route to take, I am going to check the engine, at least that has the flight physics done correctly, I suppose it already supports Blender models, but there are tons of modifications needed there too to make it a functioning combat sim, and my C/C++ skills are poor.

There were a few posts around the AI shooting abilities and other areas where the AI lacks the expertise. And though I agree that the AI has its problems, to me it seems like it is not the gun handling that is lacking. So, I played a Kadesh campaign in stock Israel, and after a few missions it gets really MiG heavy. In my experience the Mystere IV is great against the Meteors and Vampires, but once the MiGs appear, the game is a whole lot of different. They shoot like hell, and in the most unexpected ways. I play with only the radio helping me identifying targets, and once the MiGs appear, I basically lose all chance to turn-fight the Meteors or the Vampires, if I lose speed at one point a MiG appears from nothing and it just simply butchers me. And actually the best is that it happens in some very nice way: just before the moment I am able to put the reticle on the Meteor, I hear the bullets popping on my plane and there goes the mission. So my tactic nowadays is to never loose speed and to always look back, I do it boom and zooming and I disengage from the mission without completing it if necessary. I tried dogfighting the MiGs, and here is the question for you: Mystere IV vs MiG-15? To me the MiG-15 seems to turn faster and seem to have around the same speed and similar climb characteristics, and it is very hard to disengage when one is on my tail. Also I play with both the campaign and the AI on hard, so I guess the AI gets some advantages) What is your opinion in game and in real life? And was any of the early French fighters match to the MiG-15?

Of the hud: I need mostly the speed indicator, and maybe I would need an indicator that shows where is forward, without trackir sometimes it is difficult to figure out where can i turn my neck to. The only annoying part is the notification when someone is about to shoot at you, probably I should turn that off, even if I die sooner. Depending on the model, if the lod is setup correctly, the max visibility range combined with the radio operator is tolerable. About cap and fighter sweep, I see the main targets as the ones that most influence the future of the campaign. Yeah, unfortunately that is not how it is implemented, but that is what I could accept as justification for the targets being dedicated.

But is there a real drawback if I lose a mission here and there? I think it is more interesting to survive not to make a kill every time. (though I have to admit the temptation to check the target is often hard to resist) The only thing I don't know how it works is to identify ground targets, or to make difference between my tanks and the enemy tanks. Though I suppose the trick is to check on the mission mapping each time the direction of the units and decide my approach on that, and one can learn the building types after a while.

Wow, those were beautiful shots. I waste a lot, lot more ammo. The demonstration was very thoughtful, I never considered that performance could be measured this way in game. I really want to do this campaign dead-is-dead, but it is going to be difficult this way. The suggestion to engage the enemy further ahead is good, however probably it won't work in fighter sweep missions: my squadron will lose all ammo before engaging or finding the main target(I try to minimize the use of target identification to ground targets)

Mystere fighter sweep this time, a bit boring, one kill only, a Meteor. It was a good fight, but as I mention in another post: there is no time to slow down with the Mystere when there are MiGs around. Edit: action from 10:00 to 22:30 Kill between 20:20 and 21:40

On the hunt...