Dante-JT

Some new pics of areas I'm currently working on: Fitzroy Goose Green Bodie Creek Of course they're still missing the 3d ground clutter and other details that I will add as next step.

This is the info about this documentary: http://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/front...+6%3A00%3A00+PM

Yes, probably it was from the famous Volcano and Zeus flights at May 25th 1982. Speaking about this mission, Monday here in Brazil will be airing, at the National Geographic Channel, 20:00hrs, a documentary about the sinking of the HMS Coventry - it's been aired several times but I always fail to catch it :) Maybe this time I will try to come home earlier.

It looked too opaque in that screenshots because proper terrain lighting was disabled at that time. But I'm increasing the transparency of glass, and coupled with the correctly lit terrain and improved textures, look like this (sense of speed was excellent during this shot):

Awesome video Steve, much better than the previous one. As for myself, I've been busy lately creating the first settlement of the islands, and an important one: Darwin/Goose Green settlement (Pradaria del Ganso), where the first major land battle occured (and both sides used their aviation in CAS role); below first tests I'm doing of the settlement position (map accurate) and overall look: In Argentina, Ariel Cancio is modelling one of our first 'landmarks', the Bodie Creek Bridge, which is situated a few miles south of Goose Green and is considered now a tourist stop as "one of the southernmost suspension bridges in the world": Lenght, width and height of towers are accurate based on info we researched. This chap here got a few interesting photos he took: http://www.kpadgett.org.uk/falklands/Pages/bodie.htm

Stutter reduction is also a very desirable effect of the use of texture compression. EDIT: he just said too that if you load the textures as TGA then compress it, as you probably is doing, you will end up using more or less the same memory as before (bad). You must load the textures already compressed - either in .dds or whatever other texture file format compression, to make it work as it should do. According to a Hoplon programmer here (we're talking about the issue), Taikodom for example, had an absurd memory footprint of more than 1Gb. It was a must to reduce it to be able to run normally in a PC with 256 MB. Texture compression played a big role in this massive reduction but he said there is other things involved like discharging textures/managing whats needed and what is not and other specifics. They completed the goal and now Taikodom had its memory footprint reduced from 1Gb to around 256 MB. They could help us in that matter. Around 15x .asc terrain meshs of around 500kb average - would increase only 7.5 MB of the memory footprint, so as you say, seems improbable really.

Maybe the textures need to be compressed as well instead of staying as TGAs as they are now - in Taikodom for example, we have to open textures in Photoshop and save them as .dds compressed file format. The memory footprint went to less than a third of what it was before. Check this: OpenGL's answer to this situation is texture priorities. A single function call, glPrioritizeTextures(), is all that is required, and it works with texture objects. void glPrioritizeTextures(GLsizei n, GLuint *textures, GLclampf *priorities); This function lets you tell OpenGL which texture objects are the most important to keep in graphics memory. Explained in Gamasutra article "Texture Priorities" http://www.gamasutra.com/features/19990723..._objects_07.htm That's really strange. Probably related to that bullets/memory leak?

Ah, Ok. The problem with point 3, is that its quite hard to test the whole (larger) terrain I'm inserting now, because client closes due to memory issue before I reach the far edges of the island. Probably will be even worse with roads. Maybe I should alter my initial spawn position to test the far alway regions, but this seens like a palliative.

Maybe give priority to the issue above, can't stay flying for more than 10 minutes because Windows says "page file is being increased, some programs may have access denied to page file while its increased..." JT client is one of these programs, and so it closes.

Looks awesome! Good job!

I've did 35 more terrain blocks. The whole contour of the islands is starting to be recognizable. Below, there's Fitzroy, Bluff Cove, Stanley area (city and roads not yet in place) and other nearby areas (I think mount Kent): Terrain high-alt textures are placeholders, they will be manually worked for better fidelity.

I'm working in the seaside objects like cliffs, there should exist an enormous amount of these around the isles: Some z-buffer fight happens here and there, which I'm trying to solve now.

Indeed, Steve! :) I'm collecting data about it, so probably, soon we will update our website's features list ;) The current terrain-construction process is a joy, I can actually build the maps in my 3D software, and Steve wrote a clever script that places everything in the relative positions in the game world, so I don't have to bother with game world coords (which are incredibly fiddly, like for example 124064.171875 0.000000 66252.718750 0 1 1, due to the large game's world size) so basically I assemble the map in the 3D software and this script generates this position numbers automatically based on the center of origin of each terrain mesh. Ground objects will be easy to place around (rocks/stones, houses, poles and all), same method but they will have their own colision meshs and are labelled 'statics' by Steve's clever system. Maybe Steve could add some extra flag in his scripts so I can define also if a object will be always-facing or not, this means I can manually place clouds and bushes and such particle-oriented objects. For full grass covering the whole terrain, I've looked at SpeedTree RT, this middleware is being used on most current games that have to display grass and convincing trees and bushes - not such a priority at the moment but it's being looked into.

It selects a region based in what? Player position in the world? Shouldn't have a 'bubble' (sort of) around the player to select regions? It seems it always loads all parts eventually, and forget to get rid of parts that aren't needed anymore (such as the ones outside the supposed 'player bubble'). This ends in our client eating way too much RAM for such a simple thing as a 80km-long piece of isle.

Ahh, Steeeeve, can you print some debug string in the console windows showing what terrain blocks are in or out of the memory in the load-on-demand scheme ? I'm afraid that the system is loading all terrain blocks at once at game's start. I've placed 14(fourteen) 10km X 10km chunks. At the moment there are about 8 blocks aligned East to West. South to North it's only 2 or 3. If I fly in the direction East to West or West to East I can see all 8 blocks with their full textures going into the horizon (result: slowdown in any computer). If I fly in a direction North to South or South to North, where we have a maximum of 2 blocks, it's smooth. Please fix that, loading only the terrain block just below the player and the imediate nearby surrounding blocks, as you did in the older system (the player's plane in the center of a 3x3 matrix, worked well as far as I remember).

Thanks! :) We're at the moment at full throttle working (finally) in the proper terrain for the Falklands, with accurate coastlines and elevation data: I'm now looking about info on the sun position in such far south latitudes. I've heard that even at mid-day in such locations, the sun doesn't get past 26 degrees high in the horizon. Also with this new 'map building' process, I think we'll be able to have a lot of manually placed ground clutter, like the ubiquitous stones and rock formations scattered over the Falklands landscape. We're also doing a few laggy network tests: Still no position-tweening and other online game tricks, so it's still very confusing, at least for me (dunno about Steve, maybe he is more used to laggy/warping gameplay due to his online gaming tastes ) but nevermind, this will improve a lot before any attempt at something resembling a demo.

Nice video, Steve ! :) I'm glad to see that finally the terrain thing is being solved. For those who wanna know, this new terrain system is based on accurate elevation data about the islands, and coastline contour is map-accurate too. For example, in Steve's video, he was flying near Stanley from Cape Pembrook to Seal Point, approximately here: Soon Steve will hopefully improve the system with a loading-on-demand of terrain chunks and other clever parts transplantated from his older terrain system. To form the complete and accurate Falklands/Malvinas mesh, I believe 100 to 150 chunks of terrain like that will be used. It's huge. P.S.: for the argentine people, we will provide the spanish/argentinean map names as well (as an option)

I loved this !!!! :) The planes feel "heavier"...sort of...specially the Kfir mission... How real is the FM supposed to be? I will try to do some online matches against Steve :) I keep remembering him how stable and fast is ysflight's multiplayer code!

We see that way, multiplayer is very tricky to get it right and some other jet sims usually just drop it at the end of the project hoping to fix it later in patches. So we can say that, at the moment, about 2 years short of any Gold release of JT, we have it working online more or less like the other jet sims around... Of course it is still not as solid as the IL2 series as they have a solid and polished netcode at this point. The biggest problem is that we have only the Sea Harriers in multiplayer, so our tests are always myself (in Brazil) in a Sea Harrier against Steve (in UK) in his Sea Harrier. Sometimes Steve places a drone A-4 Skyhawk (AI) but we still can't jump into the cockpit of an Skyhawk for example. It's just a simple Sea Harrier vs. Sea Harrier afair at the moment. Pretty silly, as we usually hover around in front of each other exchanging cannon fire to see if all is fine, if pieces of the planes are detaching correctly when severely damaged and all that. When one of the players "die", the client usually closes in his side. So, we got no respawn stuff/select spawn airbase sorted yet but Steve planned all this carefully early on so soon it will be working too. I am also finishing the MirageIIIEA cockpit, still a lot to do apparently, but the hardest part was to unwrap all into the uvw space to paint the textures, this is ready, now it's just a matter of painting all and then, setting the instruments and avionics in the Lua sub-system. It should be added also at the game's database, as we seem to have only Sea Harrier, Skyhawk and a couple of weapons as game entities now.

India is upgrading their Sea Harriers with the israeli Elta EL/M-2032 radar and the Derby BVR missile: "New Delhi, 05 June 2005 - A total of 14 Sea Harrier FRS51 will be updated, fitting these with Rafael Derby/Alto Beyond Visual Range Air-to-Air Missiles (BVRAAM) in tandem with Elta EL/M 2032 radars. Combat manoeuvring flight recorders and digital cockpit voice recorders will be added. Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) at Bangalore will carry out the upgrade. The upgradation was long overdue as the original combination of non-coherent pulse ‘Blue Fox’ radar and Magic 2 Within Visual Range Air-to-Air Missiles (WVRAAM) combination was critically inadequate in dealing with emerging threats in the Indian Ocean region. The upgradation of the Sea Harriers may also send a tacit signal that the Navy may be interested in the Royal Navy Command Cruiser HMS Invincible facing premature decommissioning and is capable of providing a robust Afloat Naval Headquarters useful for distant and amphibious operations."(...) Read more

The Sea Harrier is the only one with air-to-air role, a good radar (Blue Vixen), and it's faster than the McDonnnell Douglas versions (well, it is 'less slow' :) ) I'm sure the airframes and the avionics (specially the radar) are too new to just be retired next year (we all know, it was just a political decision), they probably will be sold to Indian Navy or even brazilian navy, who only has a couple of A-G only modernized Skyhawks in the Foch carrier bought from France and needs a real fleet defender aircraft (Hornets and Su-33s don't fit in the tight carrier's elevators, navalized MiG-29 or Sea Harriers are the answer).

Really nice, thanks for the link subarug! Specially interesting to see the two Sea Harrier's facing each other in hover (at about 7min30segs of video up to the end). A pity that the Sea Harrier will be withdraw next year.

The Mirage IIIEA cockpit is in early uv-mapping stages, it's so far the most hard cockpit to work to date - it's very detailed. I think I will have to reduce the complexity of the mesh in the progress to keep eficiency. The photographic coverage we have of the Mirage and Dagger cockpit is also good and comparable to that of the Pucara, so expect a similar result in the next weeks. Yesterday Steve and I did a good test, all was fine except the bug mentioned above (of invisible bullets), but the in-game chat feature was solid and Steve even used fraps to record myself flying around while he was parked in the ground, all online. The radar is pretty usefull already and it helped me find where Steve was flying, giving me the HUD cue so we meet each other easily in the sim's world.

This one looks awesome, "Iluminados por el Fuego" (Enlightened by Fire), war drama, centered in argentinean side of infantry operations at Falklands/Malvinas between April and June 1982: "Iluminados por el Fuego" will be released at Q3 2005, their website: http://www.iluminadosporelfuego.com The other movie about this war is "1982: Estuvímos ahi", was filmed in Argentina and is 60 minutes long, MiniDV format, they sold online (DVD or VHS) at their website at http://www.creavision.com.ar/malvinasesp.htm It has a chapter about a young argentine infantry soldier, and another chapter about the controversial mission of May 30 in which the target of the Super Etendards and Skyhawks was the carrier Invincible.

How many sets of 1024x1024 bmps are used per aircraft? The textures in the models are so incredible! We're using just one bitmap of 1024x1024 per aircraft in Jet Thunder so it's quite outdated for todays standards of Lock On 1.1 using multiple sets of 2048x2048 in that Su-25T... but our warships are using at least 3 textures (3 bmps at 1024x1024) so it's technically possible (I hope!) to keep your models looking so fantastic in JT's engine as well. The terrain textures are gorgeous! But, how it looks at tree-top level? Is there a bump/detail texture overlay? I consider a fine detail texture / noise / grass / whatever essential for feeling of flight at low level (speed). Indeed! I should dust off my Falcon 4 just for this! :) Speaking in Falcon 4, I've yet to send a spare Falcon 4 CD to scary-pigeon (Steve) who lost his game cd. (I wonder how Steve would get used to the 2D cockpits in F4, he is so fussy with 3D cockpits with mouse-look! ) Yes, there are no 2D cockpits, only 3D cockpits, not a problem at all except that as I've said, Steve is totally obsessed with his mouse-only view control method and at the moment JT doesn't supports any other view method a thing that indeed confirms that we're very 'sim engine' phase as you said, not exactly playable by anyone other than Steve practically C++ help will be welcome specially in the things we have very badly covered (or not at all) like wingmen comms, arming screens, mission planning screens, ATC comms, the ground war, the whole view system etc etc.