Dante-JT

Fates: yes, I miss the shaders heat blur effects too, but don't worry, I think this is under control: as my daily job, I work in a brazilian games company who is developing a MMOG style space sim game called 'Taikodom', one of the programmers is Fabio Policarpo who is co-author of a few books on the subject and has full knowledge of advanced shaders programming and effects using the latest GPUs, there's some hyperspace bubble distortion effects in the aforementionated space sim that use similar techniques used in heat blur effets, I'm in talks with Fabio about this and hopefully when the time comes, he'll fill our gaps in the effects department - but for now, I prefer to have a fully playable campaign with naval engagements first, to add eye-candy later SkorpioN: suspension in landing gears will be taken into account, it's one of the goals of Steve's compound system, to have a fully animated aircraft including suspension up and down (specially interesting for those tough VTOL landings with the Sea Harrier). Support personnel and vehicles around the taxiways and flight deck are also technically possible, this only takes time and needs some references, but rest assured, this is very important for player's immersion - nothing worst than a completely empty/dead airbase or flight deck.

I've worked hard this past week to integrate our Sea Harrier FRS.1 model into the engine following the new guidelines of compound objects for damage and anims, so it has been split in many parts then joined/defined with the config file that Steve leaves in each aircraft directory, so far it's looking good in the new system so I'm posting a few screenshots of me pretending I'm doing VTOL approach in HMS Hermes: More to follow when I actually re-work the landing gear (as they're different, 2 main gears plus 2 wingtip legs) I was testing it around with gear down position and I'll wait until Steve finish the database to add the Sea Harrier properly so it can have its own exclusive config file for landing gears - and thrust nozzles which obviously will be animated - they're already set to be. The ships also need to leave a wake in the water, these are all important details but to be added when each simulation unit are properly added in the simulation's database and has its own config file and features. This week will also see heavy work in the Sea Harrier 3D cockpit, which I will be posting some updated here, hopefully.

I have piles of info spread through magazines, books, flight manuals and .html/.doc files. It will take a while to catalog all these and post here. But the major sources are a 80's enciclopedia released in Brazil called "Aviões de Guerra" (War Planes or something, translating) it has no international publishing as far as I know but is really in-depth and accurate regarding that conflict - I will scan some pages in a few days to post here as example, I think there is no probs. I also have the book on the Harrier by Bill Gunston which I'm using right now because it has a rather decent photo of the Sea Harrier FRS.1 cockpit as it was in the beggining of the 80's. And of course I have "Sea Harrier Over The Falklands" book. From time to time, brazilian press issues an article about the Falklands war in the aviation magazines here (particularly "Revista Força Aérea") they did superb articles about Skyhawks and Mirages in the conflict as well as they did a full article inside HMS Invincible were one of the pilots who write for the magazine, got a ride in a two-seats Harrier. I will list some of the references later.

I've successfully integrated the HMS Hermes in the JT's 3d engine, although it lacks functionality, I'm basically testing it for textures weight and polycounts and everything seems fine so far, no impact in frame rates: Also I've received updates from Ariel Cancio who is modelling the HMS Invincible: The bottom line is that soon the Sea Harriers will have two nice floating homes to attempt VTOL in.

Don't worry, we will feature the radar warning receivers the Sea Harriers and Harriers used, if I remember well they were Ferranti or Marconi devices, installed in the tail plane of the jets. Gives an edge over the argentine aircraft as argies weren't fitted with any RWR (perhaps the Super Etendard was, but I'm still lacking info in the avionics of this jet). And, yes, myself and Steve read the book Sea Harrier Over the Falklands, there are even some bried, but useful descriptions of the operations of the radar and nav systems of the Sea Harrier, a must read ;)

Probably Steve recently forgot to write in his diary or is too busy to do so :) On my side, I'm very busy getting the carriers ready for battle, starting with the HMS Hermes: And will be followed by the argentine carrier 25 De Mayo. Then, it'll be HMS Invincible time. And after, the Atlantic Conveyor (well, not exactly a carrier, but, you get the idea :))

Following in my alpha-channel .tga experiments, here a bullet-shattered canopy plexiglass: I realize that I have to enhance our default Jet Thunder pilot 3D model, it was made by myself, he's starting to look really ugly compared with the rest of the graphics, that's why he's partially hidden by the canopy frame in the pic Probably in next revisions, he will feature the correct flight wear of an 1982 argie air force pilot - the same too for british, Fleet Air Arm and RAF, not just this generic clothes texture I've rushed.

B) :D I've damaged my aircraft more: B) :D :P Next step for me, is to add .tga alpha-channel detail, so we can have damage looking like if a giant mouse has been at it - like the wingtip of this real Phantom:

A little/short progress update here, the Type 42 destroyer now wear a texture: In the meanwhile, Steve is starting to integrate damage modelling.

As Thunder-works will help funding Steve's purchaise of a new videocard for JT development, I'd ask for suggestions about a good video card in UK with a good cost/performance ratio. At the moment JT is being developed in a 1.4 GHz machine with GF4 MX card. Very humble, but IMO it's good to develop a flight sim with such low resources as it motivates extreme optimising - as a result, JT runs very well at the moment and doesn't even has any LOD approaches implemented. But to stay current, we agree that we must use latest graphic technologies like shaders...so, I ask, what's a good card ? Steve wants to dive head deep into shaders programming, to have nice bump-mapped sea and post production effects like the specular glow in metallic surfaces and other effects seen in latest games. (Remember that a uber card such as 6800 or X800 wouldn't be a welcome suggestion, they're too fast and Steve would become be lazy at optimizing the display routines B) :D

Indeed, I've tought of that too - it could be done with a modern shader effect as seen in recent car racing games where everything gets blurred except a small cone just ahead the car - this adds immensely the sense of speed.

This makes me feel alliviated B) The next plane that I'll split in parts will be the Sea Harrier - don't forget that the final models will have at least 2 parts for each wing (excluding the control surfaces, usually 2 or 3 of them, making a total of 4 or 5 parts for each wing) - you're fiddlying now with a simplified version of the Skyhawk model. Make it modular enough so a model can somehow 'grow' its number of parts and hit boxes.

As far as Jet sims go, SFP1 and Lomac had also pretty good damage too, so it's a must to at least follow their example with wings falling off and individual hit points for each part of the aircraft: Kudos to Thirdware and EagleDynamics for their accomplishments! This is a really tough part of the development of a flight sim. Lets hope we manage to accomplish a good DM in JT.

Ahh, I see :) I still didn't get hold of such informations. Only Shar, MIII and A-4 at the moment.

Hi Ash! :D Front shot of the Pucara like this?

Don't panic, Steve :) As you can see, kindly ViperBR saved the day with his free video hosting at his AA's wesbite The videos are now here and here, already correctly linked in our main News page and Media page.

A quick update on what's going on in the modelling of the naval units, this is the Highest LOD model of the HMS Hermes being completed by Ariel Cancio, needs some extra details but the bridge detail is getting very accurate: and now, Atlantic Conveyor, a container ship, was converted to carry Harriers and helicopters and was hit and sunk by Exocet missiles on May 25, 1982, it is the Low-LOD version, Ariel Cancio will then give his 'treatment' later to add as much fine detail and accuracy as possible: Medium-LOD versions of the vessels Type 22 Batch 1 and Type 42 Batch 1: When these are textured and in the engine, we'll post an update in JT's website.

Nobby, County class destroyers will be modelled, and the Wessex helicopters too. ;) Tenato, Cool! What model have you been doing for PF? Scout51, we're now working in the gun emplacements for the ships, so expect for next update, a scooter bombing run under a rain of tracer fire coming from the naval units ;)

I agree completely, a good overall front-end should be in place instead of just bureocratic spreadsheet like menus. It should be something that creates a moving atmosphere, to immerse the player and build the feeling that he's participating in something big. As you mentionated, rescent WWII first person shooters did it very well, with a polished frontend setting making the whole experience more cinematic - this is the joint effort of art directors, animators, professional musicians, and in some cases even advice from movie directors. The problem is that this is costly, and flight sims today are quite a small business, that's why the developers lately prefer to focus in the flight sim itself. But we'll try to follow the high profile approach, actually in my daily job I work in the game industry in a rather high profile MMOG title, so I'm getting from this experience some hints at how it is made and how much this frontend production costs.

It will take a while, unfortunately. But on the other hand, I've been receiving proposals from publishing companies interested in acquiring the rights to publish Jet Thunder, so it's a good sign that there are still commercial companies interested in the flight sim genre. But we should procceed with a lot of care. My goal is to go as far as possible with our own resources, before signing with some publisher. Take for example other rescent flightsim about Cold War Era jets, where the publisher forced the product to the shelves way before it was ready... hurting it, the genre, and all parties involved.

Steve, try to record in Fraps at 30 fps, but in Virtual Dub while encoding the video, set the frame rate to 25, this makes it slightly slower and gives a more correct feedback of what the game actually looks in motion. Baco-Ecv56, yes deadly stalls and spins are modelled at the moment, problem is, they're just far too deadly. Stall and spins behavior will be given special attention soon. I've suggested that Steve should take a good look at JSBSim.

It may come as a surprise to many, since you may not have an easy access to Spanish language sources, but many people in Argentina still claim that the attack was real, and from time to time, a new article is devoted to the action in different publications. As far as I know, the two surviving pilots involved in the action, Gerardo Isaac and Teniente Ureta, still claim having hit the carrier. Anyway, the fact that almost 1000 crew members of the British ship never confessed any attempt at cover-up, and that the ship never displayed any battle-damage, clearly backs up the official British version that claims that ship attacked was HMS AVENGER. Well, there is a homage to a person who died in the HMS Invincible during the war: http://www.sama82.org/garden/2/5/3/home.htm . I think it was Baco from Ecv56 who was commenting this in the squadron forum, it was something to do with one of the A-4s being shootdown at cannon range, very short to the carrier, and debris of the exploding plane hitting the deck of the carrier caused some casualities. This is still an unsolved mistery. :ph34r:

Indeed it's a good idea to research in this topic and see if they really had an impact in the air war that followed.

There's an old Amiga and less known flight sim called Jet Pilot, it was more or less what you described, following a fighter pilot career - there was not much combat apart from Dissimilar Air Combat training between british Lightnings and German F-104s (it was a English Electric Lightning / F-104 flight sim, graphics were spartan but it was hardcore to the bone, fantastic achievement for the low resources in the hardware it ran in). We're still a bit far from starting to ponder about the career design issues, but we'll try to follow the Falcon 4 approach of signing a pilot to certain squadron and there he will follow his career correctly.

Cheers KevBaz! Great project you have, I'd been following it closely - will make me dust off my OPF when you release it! ;) Btw, the HMS Sheffield in your mod's website looks awesome!!!! Congratulations, great job!