Dante-JT

That was easy, that clutter was more of an artist-made feature than programmer-made thing. It was just a 'single' object per 10km X 10km area embedding all clutter for that area, in a way it stands on top of landscape surface. The single object approach is for the system to draw it faster - it works as a 'layer' of 3d objects on top of landscape. In other words, any 3D engine able to load 3D objects would be able to do. Just depends on the patience of an experienced artist to spread the boulders over the landscape correctly creating that huge layer of objects. :) Not yet from JT, but you can check some high alt tests in Air Ace, the other flightsim project experimenting TSE: http://www.thunder-works.com/furball1.jpg http://www.thunder-works.com/formation.jpg (these are online tests, BTW - network seems solid.) That's a slightly more complicated question. :) But the water is fully 'programable' in the size/intensity of the swells and roughness of sea. I will try to increase/alter sea state to grab a few pics later.

Don't worry, this weekend I will experiment with heat-effects / afterburner effects with this shader engine - specially important for Daggers. ;) About Pucara cockpits, see this short test video, I didn't have the canopy glass yet and the instruments aren't ready yet, but you can see a generic Atlas Terrain test mesh and and how good it looks, shaded and with excellent performance and view-range as well. Terrain textures that we have for our exclusive Falklands/Malvinas terrain meshes are better resolution than this demo textures in the video, so expect it to be far more impressive when we start using the right terrains and textures. Arnold, speaking to my gaming industry contacts, it's seen it's exactly the other way around: by using a proven tech, there is much less scepticism from publishing companies and this indeed open doors for us. Most of the companies in the game industry that contacted us with interest, offered their own tech or parts of it to speed up JT's development. By the way, as explained, our programmer will be doing a clever job with the OGL wrapper and TSE will just do our render display output and probably an Atlas terrain instance will be used for better performance/quality, but the rest of our flight simulation engine that was coded (Flight Model, cockpits, instruments, HUD code, AI...) will be fully used and these are the actual core parts of our effort - other than that, it would not be a flightsim engine, just a game engine like many others around. ;)

It will make development go faster, because now we can actually focus in doing the game properly, instead of just the painfull effort of trying to do an engine and then starting to develop a game on top of this engine - I must confess we're very delayed in all things that really matter to simmers, like campaign, realistic comms, ground war, GUI, mission planner, and realistic aircraft operation... :( To sum up, we were trying to create our own "Torque" (sort of) but when it will be finally close to usable, it will be already obsolete...this happens in the gaming industry a lot... luckly, content and gameplay are what matters to gamers and we now can concentrate in the game itself and this way let the Torque makers care about keeping their TSE engine up-to-date. :)

FM! Don't forget flight model as well! :) The V/STOL one is getting very neat! Indeed! What platform would you like to see JT being ported?

Thank you ! :) Other people think so, like most high-profile gaming sites who have JT sections (Gamespot)! Yes, it's the big advantage of the Atlas terrain engine. The view range can be extended on the fly, and can be very long. I've always watched 3rd party 3D engines but all of them seemed too FPS-centric, but this one changed all. Seems even flightsim-centric in some demos. So far what we have in this TSE JT is the good old Atlas terrain shown in their latest demos - it's very good quality resembling a Terragen-generated terrain with cast shadows and snow caps and all that. But we're working to bring also our primitive but effective terrain method of directly loading the Falklands terrain meshes in blocks of 10km X 10km - that will be easy too. Probably a mixed approach will be used: our terrain blocks loading for the most detailed areas (the island themselves) and the Atlas approach for the really huge and snow-caped Argentina/Chile areas. Thanks! :) It's already going smoothly!

Yes, very cool the AA flight game, I'm not sure exactly what is the market because it is halfway between flightsim and BF-like fun but so far what I've saw is technically way ahead of similar games (Aces High, Warbirds 2004, the like). I did a Ju-87B Stuka for Air Ace (model and textures) to give a hand to Phil and it's a lot of fun to do WWII planes. :) Great musics you did for it, btw! Yep, for indie like us probably is the best cost/quality ratio in the market. But as all softwares in Beta (Wikipedia says its Alpha!?) it for sure has its little bugs, for example, I see odd effects in the muzzle flash textures... but lets give some time for the guys, I'm sure in 2-3 months it'll be very solid (ah, don't confuse TSE with TGE, the newer seems to be a fresh start). TSE will do graphics output in Jet Thunder. More or less what we do with FMOD Sound System, which does sound output for Jet Thunder. So, no big deal. For old school users with pre-shader gfx cards, our good old shaderless engine will be used, if such a thing as a flightsimmer with a gfx card that old will still exist in 2007. :) Steve now has the task of linking the current scripting (LUA) in JT with TSE, which Steve already did (something similar) at his daily job which is also games. And other more serious tasks, like porting the nice JT cloud engine to TSE (which so far has no proper clouds, the only big shortcoming I see now in this rendering system, but it has good particles, and a cloud engine starts with particles, that's where Steve will start the port).

Sure, that pic is the more calm sea level, there's a few parameters and it can be altered giving rough dark seas or calm lake waters. I will try later to enhance the roughness of the water, it's all shader parameters. Yes, for shaders output/render display, we're testing a beta version of the TSE Atlas Terrain Engine, it'll probably be complete after next GDC so I can confirm its use in JT (if some shortcomings are addressed, which I'm sure they will and so I'll be paying their full commercial license, enabling us to use in a commercial product like JT and it also has cross-platform capabilities).

:) End of the mystery: we're currently testing a new 3rd party rendering output capable of latest shaders technology, so far we're impressed by the results and how easy it's been to transfer current JT content (models, textures, cockpits) to these new more advanced graphic specs: It's already flying very smoothly here, excellent performance, and it's very cool, I'll bring a video soon with these shader effects. But this new 3rd party rendering system is still in beta, but this also means we can watch closely how it develops and request flightsim-specific features when and where its needed. In the other news, the already huge library of models for JT is still growing up with the Roland II air defense system: And currently in production, the ARA Bahia Buen Suceso, one of the merchant ships used to ferry supplies from Argentina to Port Stanley:

Surely you won't be getting hordes of Sea Harriers attacking your Daggers flight. Hostorically, you'll be getting one CAP (2 Sea Harriers) from Invincible and if you're really unlucky, also 2 planes from Hermes. If you fly as british pilot, you may get jumped by the escort of an argentine attack group, argentine attack groups were flights of 2 to 4 planes (Skyhawks or Daggers) and the escort flight was usually a flight of 2 Mirage IIIEA.

Don't worry with current apparent slow progress, there's very very good news ahead and maybe an announcement in the upcoming weeks. :) Stay tuned! In the meantime, people who waits for JT could try the Falklands Mod for SFP1, good effort there.

Our site was back on 1st January as expected. Myself and Scary "Steve" Pigeon did yesterday a few nice tests that to fine tune the deadreckoning/tweening network code, with useful results. This could lead to our first online 1-vs-1 dogfight movie. Hopefully I will complete the enhanced Skyhawk cockpit this week (with all gauges working) and this will lead to the first Dissimilar Air Combat in our flightsim with one player using one plane with its own cockpit and the other in other plane with other cockpit and systems - I will let Steve fly the SeaHarrier FRS.1, he always loose visual id on my plane and needs to rely on the onboard radar to find me :) The argentinean A-4B Skyhawks are radarless and guns-only, it will be tough :) We got jet engine dirt smoke trails (like in SFP1) this helps a lot the situation awareness, although I don't know how 'dirt' is the SeaHarrier - the Skyhawk I know from airshow presentations, it's spot on :)

erm.. I don't know your e-mail :) please contact me at dante @ thunder-works.com yo no coneço su e-mail :) por favor éntreme en contacto con dante @ thunder-works.com

Here is the A-4C 'Charlie' with nose correction, refuel probe correction and the extra wing store. It looks quite close to the one in the photo you posted above. :) One huge milestone to be completed next months is to include the continental airbases (starting with Rio Gallegos) so I don't need to 'spawn' these birds in mid air over ocean to get screenshots - also air-to-air refuel with FAA KC-130 must be focus in next months (it's just a 'draft' now).

Yes, that A-4 is just an A-4B wearing a A-4C skin for test purposes. I will post some pics of our proper A-4C model - should look exactly like that second photo you posted, same colors ;)

Screenshots of the Halcones with corrected refuel probes and cannons - I will check later for more specific detail in the front gear door comms antenna:

¡gracias por el vídeo! Thanks, very cool. Specially the low passes!

Updating this dev log, we're been busy with some 'upgrading' of JT models to 2006/2007 standards. This means more details, more parts for damage modelling, and specially higher res textures, that Marcelo 'Marcfighter' is providing with great results. Some screenshots I've took (still on my slightly ancient pc, notice the fps), they're of a rare very high altitude kind :) One of the nice improvements done recently, is that Steve somehow reduced to almost none the z-buffer flicking we had in the rock formations and ground clutter at this distant/height, so JT is pretty solid visually now and also running as a full native Win32app:

Yes! NaturalPoint kindly submitted a Trackir unit so Steve can implement the support. However, it was not supported until now due to some console/Win32 issues that were sorted a week or so ago, so finally I think we'll see Trackir fully supported in JT in February. Apart from the console/Win32 issue, should not be complicated as we already feature mouselook capabilities.

As soon as my new machine is up and running I will feed people here with videos, first one showing the Pucara hunting that AI Gazelle helicopter around Mount Kent. Nothing composed there, only the sky textures have been used our good old overcast one (seem also here) but improved in a way that have the overcast mixed with a couple of actual volumetric clouds here and there - causing that nice overall effect. The helicopter rotor effect is here already, and the new terrain you guys already saw in action, in various videos. Only problems I have with Pucara now that will look ugly in a video, is that looking to the sides you can't see the wings and propellers like it should be, and the guns are messed too (its using gun firing positions from Harrier, all programming overlooks). I would show a video of the Avro Vulcan bombing too but it would look quite odd :) Since the programming didn't allowed yet for proper bomb bays in planes, that Vulcan was exported into the JT engine with the bomb bay opened and a few bombs, err, positioned just out of the bomb bay door. But it IS JT 3D engine anyway, you can see that the lighting is all messy because the programming didn't implemented day-night cicle too and what I did to look like the dawn bombing of 1st May 1982? Imported into the engine a darker sky texture with dark dawn clouds. Works, and the best for the public, when the day-night cicles are programmed properly and I can polish the sky textures accordingly, it will look far better than that screenshot (because the scene lighting will be changed accordingly, by programming - changind position of sun in 3D world). Thanks! Hopefully this year all of this will be completely ready/playable in a demo. Elders Scrolls: Oblivion? That one looks gorgeous indeed!

Yes, I've checked it - at the moment, yes the contrails are visible from really huge distances way before the plane is a visible dot - maybe it's even overdone as these planes weren't so 'dirt', engine wise. Anyway, then we should work in high altitude white contrails - these should be really visible from miles away, and stay much longer in the sky.

They were discussing the supposed Audio file from argentine pilots during the war, check this thread here: http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?showtopic=9579

Fates sorry for this post, but I've replied your PM and oddly, the reply msg isn't in the Sent itens folder, so it felt like the msg reply didn't was delivered somehow. Did you received any PM from me at all ? :)

Don't tell anyone, but F-14 is one of my favourite planes of all time and I agree that it lacks a simulation worth of its reputation (except maybe for Fleet Defender in 1994, but I doubt someone today will be willing to go back to MS-DOS times and play it in 320x200 VGA :) )

Great video! I was aware of it. Has some rare footage of ground activity in argentine airbases in 1982.

I agree completely. If a sim goes too open, it ends up being rather vague, as you said, lacking a more defined ´goal´ - feels like you ended with an incomplete product in hands that you need to fill the blanks - that´s ok for some people, but the majority of people wants a complete product for what they paid. Red Baron 3D was good. Most 90´s sims were good due to the great immersion they created, with the right mood according to the conflict they simulated. Mig Alley was great too (I hope they do a remake, same work like they did with BoB2: Wings Of Victory). scary_pigeon last week did some impressive camera experiments (he was impressed too by the replays in Ace Combat 5) so, expect some rather dramatic and dynamic replays in JT. ;)