Dante-JT

On my side, while I wait for Steve to release a scriptable terrain shell so I can build for real the islands map (based on the hires terrain mesh we have), I have been enhancing some parts of the art content we have now, for example, now the pilot object displays historically accurate uniform colors, life-jacket and the correct helmet and mask:

I was aware but I was a long time without checking it, I have to say that the progress you show in those threads is stunning!!!! I love Falcon 4, probably my #1 flight sim of all time, unfortunately I didn't followed its progress since SP3 days... I understand very well your trouble getting F4's avionics aged enough - JT is being focused from the ground up in 60 to 80's aircraft so it may suit you well (when its ready enough). As I'm a tech-junkye, please give me some technical aspects of the models you're doing (poly number, texture size, damage hitpoints/assembling parts etc) and why the F4 engine is being outweighted by them. We got a bit of support from FAA (Fuerza Aerea Argentina) and recently, of Museo Malvinas (1982 conflict's museum in Olive, Argentina). We have some ex-combatents in the british side as well sending very good documentation about the british hardware used. But looks like you guys are even better covered than us in this aspect ! Awesome! That river tiles are completely unbelievable ! Fantastic work! Tell me some tech specs, I'm curious now!! :) For example, what size is each terrain tile in the sim's world (in kilometers?) For example, in JT we're starting to go into chunks of 10km x 10km terrain, each can have a multitexture tile (of 2048x2048 res, but 1024x1024 is safer now, S3TC compressed for sure), then a high definition detail texture to give the sense of speed at tree-top level comparable of what you see in flight sims like the IL-2 series. It's very interesting for us, because it was a conflict of country A vs. country B, with approx. same technological level, not a conflict about coalision A vs. country B with severe tech. level unbalance (like war in Iraq 1991 or today or the Balcans in the 90's), so, as historical modern conflicts go, it's one of the few left with this characteristics that may fit well into a good tactical fighter flight simulation. I just have to say that at the moment and in the following 2 or 3 months, we're still too much in "structural" phases of development of our engine (yes, we're still developing a flight sim engine and not already the flight sim itself) and we aim to be very modular, expandable and without serious limitations that my limit simulation's detail. Our current goal is to develop the Sea Harrier FRS.1 fully (we have all tech. documentation about it, and it's by far the most sophisticated and complicated aircraft in the Falklands theater) onde we have it flying in a convincing way with the basic systems working and so be able to fly a complete mission (air-to-air at least) then we will be able to start a internal testing, where knowledgeable people like you and your project mates will be able to test it and comment/give suggestions/help. The Mirage III is still far away, we don't know how our flight physics system will deal with its delta wing and supersonic flight. Probably it's a problem for our mate Yyrd to deal later :) SRTM and DEM data manipulation, its such a rare skill :) I'm the person doing this in Thunder-works! What is the resolution of the terrain meshes you are collecting from the Angola theater? Hope we can talk - Best Regards Mad Dog McEwan - South Africa combat360.com Team ==== For sure! You can talk further to me by email

Yes, its worth to check the teaser and the backstages making of videos in their site, extremely good production quality, it was filmed at the islands really isn't ? It's worth the teaser and backstages video for me to see a split second of a Sea Harrier doing ground attack, very well done special effects, I've even captured a screenshot from the trailer showing it :) I wish they do a follow up movie with this quality about the Fuerza Aerea! Any hope of this movie getting an international release so I can watch it in Brazil any soon? I will buy the DVD, I've emailed the author and he said the DVD price (35 pesos) but forgot to tell his mailing address or bank account for me :) Anyway, it's very nice, considering the effort, team size (really small it seems) and budget (nearly zero it seems). That Invincible carrier model in the trailer looks strange - our warships modeller Ariel Cancio said.. but we appreciate the effort and I think he deserves a JT demo when we have some missions set up (if he enjoys flight sims :))

I agree, ground crew and their equipment scattered around is important, we'll have it for the aircraft carrier decks and as well for the conventional airbases. A little 'copter sim called "Vietnam-Medevac" from few years ago got this in the right direction with a bunch of generic 3d characters walking around the bases and it was very low-budget/small team-sized and all, unlike Novalogic's Comanche 4.

This is exactly the kind of visual I'm aiming for, hilly with rocky cliffs. We got the Falklands mesh at a very good resolution. This means that we don't need a bitmap heightmap greyscale thing anymore, because the terrain mesh is already generated and ready. In the past we used a terrain generated using a heightmap greyscale bitmap thing, but it was low res and the resulting terrain was too squarey. There was also an attempt at OpenSceneGraphics but it wasn't integrated in the game and so was dropped. Steve gave me yesterday the green light to start this new approach of terrain building, manually crafted by the artist (myself) so instead of trusting in a poor heightmap that will generate a low res sterile and boring terrain, we have now the chance to manually adjust the heights in each terrain block and add 'detail layers' (coastlines, roads, cliffs) all manually placed so there will be no trouble of the odd road ending in the sea and things like that found in more procedural/uncontrolled approaches. This is the kind of terrain mesh resolution we're getting with this new manually-crafted method, looks very hilly and rounded, extremely accurate resolution (it's the hilly San Carlos area there) its missing now the detail textures and also the coastline wave splash effects, but these will be added soon:

I am busy now implementing a clever way to create a map-accurate coastline contour. Previously, we avoided screenshots showing the islands coastline (it was completely straight and squarey). Now the coastline have map-accuracy. The screenshots below are taken from a chunk of 10km X 10km around the Port Stanley airfield, based in an accurate mesh of the islands that we have, the textures are just placeholders and yes, I will cover the entire coastline with those sea cliffs and wave splashes (using the clever pivot triangle reference for position of these objects): The approach of using an alpha-channel mask cutout for coastlines is used in Targetware as well. This is our alpha-channel/transparency texture layer for the region in the screenshots, notice that I've cut the airfield's boundaries as well to have a completely z-fight free scene:

That A-4 cockpit is placeholder, I took a detailed photo session of the A-4 on display at the Malvinas Museum in Argentina as I've took of the Pucara as well - yes the level we're aiming is the Pucara quality, but they're still at 'raw' state, needing many artistical retouchings over the base-photos to achieve that polished Lomac look - a thing that needs time and patience - that's one of the reasons flight sims take so long to develop ;)

This day, May 1st, back in 1982...Sea Harriers attacked the Port Stanley airfield with cluster bombs and cannon fire: shame about the pic above, the cockpit isn't already the Sea Harrier one as the cockpit testshell and the flyable executables aren't merged yet.

While Steve is fighting against the network code and Yyrd is fine-tuning the FM, I'm dedicating a bit of time to the nature present in-game scenario we have now, adding content such as coastal cliffs/sea rocks and enhancing a bit our clouds: Soon, expect to see native birds fauna over the sea cliffs above. ;)

heheheh. Seriously, I'm quite pleased with the performance of JT in my humble computer at home (Athlon XP 1600, 512mb, GF3!) it's always at more than 50 fps, and 1) there is no object's LOD system active at the moment (but we did the LOD versions of the planes) and 2) the terrain system just has a very simple LOD system 'by terrain chunks' (i.e. the terrain chunk far away is a simpler mesh while the terrain chunk directly ahead of the player is a more dense mesh, it's not dynamic like a ROAM system but seems to work and could do well for now) - this means we have a lot of room for improving performance in the 3D engine, but all this comes later - first, I wanna do a few missions in the game, like attacking the Stanley airfield or some Hermes CAP. ;)

If the programmers don't manage to ruin too much the code we have now I guess the system requirements will be the same league of the IL2 sim series, except that at the moment we don't have any Shaders 3.0 water like in Pacific Fighters.

I agree, and I already submitted the textures of the concentric circles for scary_pigeon, I think he didn't placed them because of fear of z-buffer glitches as the concentric circles are at zero alt (sea level indeed) but, now the engine is much more forgiving of textures overlayed at zero alt, as my Stanley airfield runway demonstrates. :)

I agree completely, don't worry, the islands will be only rocks, sheeps and Port Stanley, as they are really, but in Argentina itself, it's a country, there will be huge cities, harbours, railroads, railroad bridges, railroad tunnels, and everything else one could find in a normal 1980's country. I loved the idea of the Airwolf style volcano hideout :) I'm playing with this map creation bit in JT, and as I'm seeing with the Stanley airfield layout, JT will be flexible enough for fun online maps. Btw, I thought IL-2 have some fun things in the scenario, like the trains - I even placed in the mission editor 2 trains comming at each other so I could do the stunt of passing between the two moments before of they impact each other :) try it! I still have the trk file I think, I tried many times to get the right timing :)

I'm working right now in the Port Stanley airfield layout and objects, so I'm very busy, but its coming together nicely. I'm using as reference a DVD documentary I bought, "the Fall of Port Stanley", it has News footage that helped me build the feeling of the place (muddy, rocks scattered nearby, fuel depots and planes in the open, no protection against air strike); I also used that famous black&white photo of the 'Black Buck' attack results to build the position and ratio width/lenght of the runway; I've uploaded a few working in progress screenshots, there are two problems: 1) the entire airbase is in the middle of the ocean instead of in the real position, that's because I still don't have a little config file where I can give coords to new stuff in the game's world, hopefully Steve will address this soon :) 2) the plane parked in ground doesn't cast shadow, so I won't be posting a website update until we implement shadows for planes on ground (looks awfull without), but well, it's cosmetic stuff, we're focused in making the game playable first. :) The .rar archive with the pics: http://www.thunder-works.com/stanley-airfield-JT.rar I will also build the Port Stanley city soon, so it's very busy times for me, but JT's world needs to be populated - it's so empty at the moment!

I agree completely, that's why we don't have a release date posted on our website now. A funny thing, is that I work (as daily job) in a rather big games dev studio, they're doing a massive online sci-fi game (I just do the art there), they had a extremely tight schedule (1 year and thereabouts to release the game, nutts), it failed to meet the announced release date of March 31, the result is a complete riot in the related forums, with people wanting to boycot the game and there's even some death threats. I'm glad they postponed its release, it is still far from product release state. At the moment we don't have any fancy things in JT, related to per pixel lighting and all that, it's plain IL2 1 level of technology and so its lite for todays hardware standards - of course I want to have some pretty eyecandy for the final product, such as self-shadowing, heat blur effect and so on, but first we will have a game, eyecandy comes later - and it only stays if the game still plays good with all that turned on. Indeed, regardless of the lack of accuracy (and they claimed it as accurate and approved by real pilots and all that nonsense, its what pisses most people) the Novalogic sims were successful, I remember the days of that F-16 vs MiG29 game (around 1998?)and there were hundreds of online players in one server ('Novaworld' thing if I remember well?), simulation apart, it was cool in terms of stability and network performance (I'm sure most people in 1998 were in a 56k modem, and even so it played very well online). For occasional fun we're playing in Thunder-works now a very little (5 MB !!!) free flight sim done by a japanese guy alone, the graphics are completely crude (think Amiga-like flat untextured polygon filled graphics!) the simulation is also very novalogic-ish very simple (!) with 12G turns and magic 360-degree radar and the like, but even so it's enjoyable because it has very good network performance, a huge number of things to do, planes to fly, scenarios do try and, as Steve said, it's too simple to be unstable at all :) I agree, of course this is all a lot of interface work to be done, and if there's a part of JT were we are way behind, is in interface work - we have pratically nothing so far but we will make it accessible - btw, I don't think of HL's interface to be such as nightmarish as you say :) seems again you're doing references to some sim out there in which you become frustrated at some point :) We have to make it up to the name of our sim - 'Jet Thunder' means also the jet roar or the extreme thundering noise of a jet passing by at full throttle, so don't worry, we will cover that as it deserves :) Excellent post about padlock, we will follow your suggestions as they make a lot of sense. This is an area were JT is very weak at the moment, in overal views feature (just a mouse-look, external view, cockpit, fly-by, nothing more) so maybe we should outsource this serious issue because Steve seems too busy with other parts of the code (like campaign server/networking, they have the priority now). But all in all, excellent posts chimpymcflightsuit ! We appreciate this detailed feedback from the flightsim community.

Yep I got them all :) But I need also a 3-view schematics drawing of the ship to get the dimensions and relative volumes correctly, and I was also busy with the cockpits (and I'm still) so I didn't have a County Class Destroyer model work-in-progress model to show to you now :(

Mirage IIIE and (Dagger later) 3D cockpits in development now: Steve, how was the missile firing tests? Are you already modeling the warhead/damage they cause? In other words, are you having missile kills yet?

Well, at the moment the Instant Action has no one to shoot at

This sounds good :) I have to check it closely.

Yes, as we there were pratically no armoured vehicles in that conflict, the main mobile ground targets are troops, and we will model them.

I started to program the interface, indeed we can't have a demo anytime if we don't have a proper game front-end (menus, interface, pilot logbook, etc) running properly and integrated in the game. At the moment all it does is to load the game (clicking in an "Instant Action" button :)) and to Exit to Windows in the respective button...Lots of work to do, but we're optimistic! :)

I'm advancing in the textures job in the Pucara 3D cockpit model, based on the photo session I've took in my trip to Argentina last month:

Indeed there are no native trees in the Falklands, but it is full of rocks and large rocky formations that were essential to the progress of any ground fighting and we surely will fill our landscape with them:

I've followed with interest the news about the PhysX since its first announcement, it's truly interesting and I've did a look at the SDK they have for download. But I am not sure about how easy or hard will be to make Steve's physics code be processed by this unit - I'm guessing here that it will be a straightforward job :) But Steve who has the final word in this. Personally, I think it will be awesome to have in JT some of the features claimed, like deformable terrain (with ease - I know there are games doing this now by software) but I look forward to have naval or artillery shelling creating huge holes in the battlefield or the Harrier's thrust digging a realtime hole in the terrain under its hovering

Yes, I think this can be easily altered to splash in any direction. I'm also obsessed by these small little but funny details - I enjoyed a lot the Lock-On Flaming Cliffs demo due to the new crash landing effects in that Su-25 ! Fabulous ground physics as well. I wish we could bring JT to these good levels in terms of overall fun factor (yes, nearly everybody enjoys to just play around with the physics and damage systems of a game when they're becoming bored of the missions!) At the moment in JetThunder I enjoy doing the jump in the ski-jump deck ramp in the HMS Hermes, the physics are becoming good and I think it will be another flight sim to experiment new ways to crash in a funny or dramatic way and them save the track for the amusement of the friends in the web. :)