Julhelm

Well it started as a Pacific Fleet sequel, then early in development it became realtime and much more patterned on Great Naval Battles. However we couldn't make the gunnery feel right at the time and also we had misgivings about being overambitious and possibly alienating our existing customers. So it was scaled back to the turn-based format but refining it a lot and adding the dynamic campaign.

I see nothing wrong with using a 3d ripper if you can learn and get better from it. It's only lame when people rip entire models and then distribute them or make money off of them.

CAP2 is getting released anyway and the kickstarter money was for affording some extra features the team wanted. It's not vaporware yet.

Congratulations Stary!

There's another advantage with mobile, and that is that people still have no real expectations when it comes to core games. Unlike on PC where customers will compare a one-man sim like SF to AAA works like DCS or FSX, only to conclude the one-man show doesn't measure up.

Game development is usually not very high-paid work. You are expected to put in massive hours in return for pay that is less than you would get at a programming job making commercial software. Even less pay if you are an artist. The only people who ever seem to get paid well are senior employees and the various leads and art/tech directors. Bottom line if you don't like it there's a thousand other young people passionate and dumb enough to work 80-hour weeks for peanuts. I cannot possibly imagine russian devs get paid better than we do. As for TK my guess is he just got tired of working on the same thing forever. At some point you got to move on.

The graphics are pretty poor for a mobile game.

Fast Attack and Red Storm Rising are the best modern submarine sims. If you have a phone or tablet and fancy some WW2 Pacific combat, there is always Pacific Fleet.

One time long ago I started working on a Douglas 1211J. But between game development and being a daddy I have no time for hobby projects anymore =/

I also think people are probably overestimating how much money he makes from the mobile games. In my experience and in that of some of my friends in the industry, the % of people who actually spend any money on your typical free-to-play game is only about 2-4%. It is bad enough that here at Killerfish Games we've specifically decided to avoid this type of business model.

The intent with this tutorial is to try and teach discipline and technique. I chose the F-101 as the subject because it's a plane many like and it's also a fairly straight-forward design that doesn't pose a lot of complexity, assuming one goes about the job in the right way. First of all, we need to set up max with reference material, which I've kindly provided below: Next, we begin by creating a single plane in the 'top' viewport using the button on the right hand side as visible in this pic. Remember what the menus look like because we'll come back to this one: To have any use of the plane, we need to put the picture we want on it, and to do that we'll open the materials tab by pressing 'm'. Selecting a material amounts to simply clicking either of the spheres at the top, and to add an image click on the empty square button next to the 'diffuse' color window. In the menu that appears, select 'bitmap' and then the file 'f101_top.jpg'. Fairly straight forward, huh? Now add the other two pics to materials of their own until your materials tab looks like this: Apply the material to the plane using the apply button and click on the checkered box to be able to see the map in the viewport. At any time you may switch any viewport between display modes by rightclicking on where it says 'top', 'left' and so on. Personally I find 'smooth+highlights' with 'edged faces' the most intuitive to work with. Next we have to scale the plane because the picture is out of proportion. Select the plane and use the scale command at the top for this. Since we already know that the F-101's span is 12 meters, height 5.5 meters and it's lenght is 20.5 meters, this shouldn't be too difficult: Now rightclick on the plane and convert it into 'editable poly'. On the right menu, go into the 'modify' tab (we'll be using this a lot) and open up the editable poly until you can see and select 'element'. Select that and then click on the plane so that it turns red. Press shift and use the move command to make a copy of the plane. Make another copy and place these somewhere by themselves. Apply each material to each plane and place these using move, rotate and scale until they're all in proportion and pics are visible in the 'left' and 'back' viewports respectively: Now we're ready to move onto modelling.

Al Quaida has never been so strong. They were nothing but a bunch of ragtags hiding in Afghanistan back in 2001. Now they control entire countries. Go War on Terror!

They broke the aspect ratio in the UV editor though. Not a problem doing LBP characters but it is when doing things that need be proportionate.

It looks a generation behind SF2NA, and that's saying something.

You should get rid of the very bright highlight on that radio panel to the left. Other than that it looks real good.

Too highpoly. Totally unsuitable for conversion IMO.

You have to use .tga for alpha maps and you set it up by dragging an instance of your map into the opacity slot and changing 'mono channel' to alpha. Then need to click the 'global' texture toggle in the material.

I guess I could make some lods.

Yeah, I have a tanker and a containership somewhere.

What if Paran bought some MiG-25 or Yak-38?

My bet is on Seven-G.

One of my favourite concept-aircraft, and I used to play the Amiga version of F-19 religiously. This one clocks in at around 5000 something tris at the moment. I've worked out the control surfaces based on the Testors kit, with the elevator-thingy behind the exhaust, rudders on the fins and some kind of spoilers on the very small wings.

Thanks but nah