Julhelm

Congratulations!

At EA Dice, no less.

I would if I were an American. But I'm a Swede so I have tax reductions to look forward to ;)

Too bad we never could have Orion blam-blam :(

Would you rather they just forcibly sterilized as many men as required?

I'm going through that right now.

Yeah, it's starting to look much better. I'd recommend finding a good base texture and do the deck fairly highres, and use max's render to texture function to bake some ambient occlusion and use that as a multiply layer. It's similar to when you apply a wash to a plastic model to bring out all the geometric detail. Also start looking into doing some basic normal and specular maps and preview them in a game engine such as Marmoset toolbag.

Well get base images from places like cgtextures.com and use these to create your own textures. Photoshop layer effects like drop shadow etc can be used to great effect to produce sharp looking textures. And like everything else you get better by doing.

The photos you used for the texture look very low-res. You'll get much better results if you use them for reference only and paint the textures yourself in Photoshop. I don't know how you've mapped it but from the looks of it you should easily have something much nicer looking using a 1024 map. Also you can try sharpening the texture and see if that makes it look more crisp.

I'll fix the gun axes tomorrow. How do you want them oriented? Facing forwards?

Well that sucks. I too have had to take a temporary job with bad pay after getting my degree. It is really difficult to get an artist gig these days.

@ Russo: IMO the random texel density on various surfaces detracts from the modelling, which is superb, rather than complements it. When you texture environment stuff like this, it is generally a good idea to decide on a certain pixel density (say 64px per meter which is ok for a flight sim) and use that as a target when texturing. Right now your tanks are very high res while the buildings and the deck is very low res, which just looks wrong. It will look much better with a cohesive resolution.

External spec maps go into skin folder and cockpit spec and normalmaps go into the cockpit folder.

Well we need to save our stash in case the russians are coming.

Hierarchy in Max is really easy. Just open the schematic view and it's like putting together any other flow-chart. You guys aren't all doing it selecting and linking stuff in the viewport, are you?

Poor dog.

Mobile market which is out and out casual games only has much more up-front cost and because you generally doesn't have any community that means you have to funnel tons of budget into marketing, marketing, marketing and marketing. Whereas the flightsim niche on pc is so small pretty much every single little indie project that pours little or no money at all into PR/marketing still has excellent exposure within the community. Getting featured on the SimHQ frontpage is certainly cheaper than paying off Gamespot or IGN and probably more effective, too. For someone who has supposedly worked many years with the big game devs, you certainly have no clue what you're talking about. Let's see here: Absolutely ridiculous. First of all Steam's drm is the most transparent one there is. So transparent, in fact, that certain publishers commonly add their own (intrusive) DRM schemes on top just to be sure. Also there is no such thing as forced auto-patching on Steam. First of all not even all games use the feature, and secondly for those that do you, the user, can always have the option of turning it off if you want to. Again, no issue there. Except that in-app ads would be handled by the Steam app itself via in-game overlay, which cannot be modded. Try again. Again, this seems to be no problem for the games that do feature ingame DLC yet support user-generated content at the same time, such as Killing Floor or TF2. If Valve and Tripwire see no problem, why is it all of a sudden a problem for TW? People tend to buy DLC because it lets them use unique content unavailable elsewhere. Yet a quick glance at the Steam store reveals such incredibly narrow, niched titles like: Farming Simulator 2011 Dive To The Titanic as well as really simple Pipeline-clones: SpaceChem which is far more impressive than unpolished, 3/10 IGN score titles like: Top Gun Which in its original release didn't support anything other than a 360 controller and Alt+F4. Surely they cannot be THAT selective? I mean, even Apple requires your app to be reasonably polished and free of bugs. And don't get me started on the amazing anal-retentiveness of Samsung. Turns out the only place where everybody can sell their crap is Android Market, because it is completely unregulated. Well except for the PC download market, then. I mean, there ARE alternatives to Steam after all. No, they don't. Apples do not compete against oranges, even though both are fruit. If I want an apple I'm going to buy an apple. Just like pickup trucks do not compete against compacts. If I want a car that can haul a lot of stuff, I'm going to get a pickup. Conversely if I want just a small car for transporting myself, I'll go for a compact. This claim that TW somehow competes even with the likes of Battlefield because Battlefield has planes and helos in it is patently ridiculous. They don't even compete in the same market. Nor is Ace Combat or Hawx any competition because they are out and out arcade games with little to no simulation value and everybody knows it, and someone who's out for a sim won't be buying those. Likewise MSFS is a civilian sim that doesn't feature combat at all. LOMAC and DCS are milspec study sims that focus on a single aircraft in excruciating detail. If I want a game where I can dogfight over 'nam, surely I'm not going to pick up DCS:A-10C just because it has a plane in it? Likewise noone interested in a cold-war flight sim is going to pick up Wings of Prey or Rise of Flight because one is a WW2 and the other a WW1 game. Again, turns out that if you're interested in cold-war air combat Strike Fighters is the only game in town for the past decade. If there was such strong competition, TW would never have survived cranking out what is essentially the same basic game with a little different planeset and a new graphics feature every 6-8 months. Free mods do not compete with the stock game. How many people do you think bought this game because it lets them dogfight in an F-14? TW as developer has the advantage of being able to offer new gameplay features or tech features and that is their selling point. Your argument that free mods offer competition is only valid if each new iteration of the game didn't offer any new features at all. But they do which is why the mods compliment it. The strength of the series has always been its ease of modding and sandbox-like qualities of "do what you want". Yes, not having competition doesn't guarantee huge sales numbers, but if I were concerned about huge sales numbers I certainly would stay away from the sim market. I never said any of the sort. What I did say is that the mobile casual games market (where I worked) is more competitive than the PC flight sim market. I also said that on mobile market you are quite literally invisible if you are not at least top 25 grossing on US itunes. Not so in PC flight sims where games like Strike Fighters, which I have never ever seen an ad for, can boast substantial fanbases that are loyal bordering on the fanatic.

Well like I said I always run the low horizon setting and it has never bothered me. I don't think F-14 game will sport Strike Commander-like haze a mile out but you never know.

I can live with shorter horizon distance if everything else looks better. I always run the game with "near" horizon distance anyway. It's not as if the higher settings do anything other than steal performance for what is very little visual gain. Remember than Wings of Prey and HAWX2 have far lower horizon distances than SF due to their smaller terrains but everything looks so good so we don't care about it.

Does that mean we can look forward to much improved terrain visuals?

I'm just sick of getting fed the same excuses of "no budget" year after year. Especially since other teams seem to manage putting out much nicer terrain visuals without having 9 years worth of back catalog sales to fund their development. Hell, even on our Iphone production we were able to match AAA visuals within a very limited budget (~€100k) and still have tons of content for the character customization system. And this on a game that gets the majority of its revenue from in-app purchases. Or better yet, hire some CFO/PR guy to do all of the community and customer support that sucks valuable development time. You can easily find these people at business schools and universities who LOVE to do that s**t, allowing TK to focus on programming. When all that non-development related stuff is detrimental to the quality of the product (ie cutting out features, getting stuck with last-gen visuals, etc), you're in a downward slope. And I'm talking from the POV of someone who has worked in a small studio in the industry, in a sector far harsher and more competitive than flight sims.

Or just get an intern from Austin University to do the graphics programming as part of his thesis work. Gets done that way here all the time.

Also it's funny how the studio I was at could afford to have 3 full-time programmers with much less than his sales.

I have a hard time buying that statement, along with all the other usual excuses.

It's funny how he complains about cost all the time while Combat Helo which is developed by a two man team looks infinitely better and more contemporary.