Dante-JT

Well said, scary_pigeon. In jet sims, I was used to wait for wingtip contrails while tracking enemy aircraft visually - when the wingtip contrails are clearly visible means the plane is entering guns range and I should try to place the gun reticle between contrails to track it properly when passing from lag pursuit to pure pursuit - a useful and realistic cue indeed. Yes SkorpioN, all the Skyhawks (including the Q) will do a comeback soon because I'm reworking their cockpit functions with the newer Lua approach currently used for cockpits. Got already the control stick, gear lever and throttle lever animated working like the ones in current SeaHarrier cockpit, also now I should be able to add the altimeter numbers (a counter left of the needle center) and some other instruments that have these sort of number counters.

We're reaching the bandwidth limit of our host - this is bad because website will go offline, but good because means interest in JT is very high :) scary pigeon, please contact our host and buy a little bit more of bandwidth, as you did once and saved the day, I will PayPal you the costs like we did the other time :) We apologize for our technical difficulties and hope to be back online soon.

It is been tested in systems similar to this one, with good results: -AMD AthlonXP 2400 -NVidia GeForce FX 5900 -1Gb RAM -Windows XP Not the final system requirements, but should give a clear idea of a system to run it in an acceptable way.

Possibly open like SFP1, although at the moment its near impossible for modders to do anything, due to the unorthodox nature of the engine and absolute lack of related editors/utilities(new content must be painfully added by hand, amongst other things).

I know... Deacon ;)

Thanks for the heads up, I've tried it yesterday and the FM is top notch! I've tried X-Plane (which has full trust vectoring as well) but this one is the best so far - lets see how we can improve V/STOL in JT - anyone responsible for this SFP1 FM tweaking(Moon Jumper?), is interested in doing our JT FM tweaking? ;)

How familiar :) Although the real one is much more brown-ish than ours, so I have to tune down all that green shades left. The Falklands/Malvinas are notorious for the (almost) lack of vegetation.

Probably it's caused by the fact that the rocks are darker than the ground they're standing, so as the distant ground goes grey due to fog, distant rocks go grey too but a darker grey for being in a darker color initially...the only imediate work around would be to have clutter never much darker than the ground it stands. But they seem to be fogged (and in near future, LOD'ed) accordingly, check the rock outcrop and nearby rocks to the left of HUD below, they're many miles away: At the moment, I'm very busy working in the modelling of Port Stanley (Puerto Argentino) city, the most important buildings (Governor's House, Cathedral at Ross Street, Upland Goose Hotel, etc) but I am not going to post pics here now - let the pics go for our website news update I will do near Xmas day :) In the meanwhile, I'm trying to persuade Steve to let we integrate some shader assets from a mate from other proj - so we may have finally some complete pics of Port Stanley, its harbors and jettys over shinny reflective water ;)

Yes, Sea Harrier FRS.1 and Mirage III. Btw, while Steve fix the height code (colision to ground) I did 2 videos testing a located-camera: http://www.thunder-works.com/hover_fun.zip of course, this SHAR hover model needs tuning: too strong RCS, specially yaw. And its still lacking all expected effects (heat blur, particles kicking up from ground, foreign objects ingestion ;)

Yeah that's what I've tought - and why I didn't posted anything there yet. :)

Thank you! :) Seems a very interesting forum...with a 67-pages discussion on Sea Jet (our beloved Sea Harrier) amongst other Harrier discussions... I will give it a try later, although I don't know how would be the best approach there.

DamienB, could I kindly invite you to help me with historical specs on ships DM? I'm pretty sure our system (when advanced stuff is done) will be pretty much capable of checking damage by ships compartments (hull divided in a number of 'hitboxes', bridge in another number of hitboxes, masts and weapon turrets also individually damageable) because the system already does very well in checking if a aircraft received a bullet role in a wing and the wing should break apart from fuselage or if the entire airframe should desintegrate due to a direct hit by missile. So, as a starting point, would be nice to have a placeholder T42 or T22 for first naval DM tests, with: - a certain number of hull compartments (I wish to know what are more sensible to bomb damage, what compartments can be sealed, and so on) - the bridge (how the structure is divided for breaking apart or colapsing due to heavy damage - how the ship resists to fire hazards - and where are located magazines, fuel and other incendiary compartments that could make the ship explode and sink in one blow like the HMS Antelope or WWII HMS Hood. Any help will be appreciated. :)

I'm doing Port Stanley city, focusing on harbor and jettys at this very moment. Ariel is working in Oerlikon 35mm AAA cannons in the vicinity of Goose Green. Steve is staring at the JT's source code - his next step is colision detection for object's collections and swap for a 'destroyed' mesh version - this means cities can be levelled. these two are indeed undermodelled at the moment: Sea Wolf doesn't even exists and ship DMs are indeed horrible now (one hit box for whole ship, awful - hopefully ships will be collections of hitboxes like airplanes, this is next priority for Steve after statics colision code.)

Thanks for the heads up! The situation with the markings and numbers is all going to change, but some important programming should be done for that - we must have ways to change just a number or squadron marking in the sim without changing entire texture (as, embarassingly, is the way to do now). No problem with the nit-pickin', thats normal with us :) yesterday I was watching the Iluminados por el Fuego DVD and noticed many innacuracies too - the attacking Sea Harrier in one of the scenes wearing a 'white belly', amongst other things :) Btw, do you have any photos displaying the with a union flag daubed on top of the bridge and the vertical black recognition stripe? Would be really helpful ! Soon I will be re-setting up all those warships, at the moment the code for them isn't taking into account their compartments for separated damage/hitpoints and other important things we have in the airplane's compound method.

Thank you very much for the videos! Those Pucaras are noisy aren't they? :) Interesting link about Ceibo 2005, they have a nice promotional video there too.

It is that fast. A while ago I've insisted that we should have one extra detail texture layer for close detail terrain - this extra detail texture has less repeats than the 'main' close detail texture but does an excellent job as intermediary between main terrain texture and close detail texture - with tweakings in the repeat values in terrains.cfg, I've reached that level of apparent terrain density in the video - more terrain density, the faster it will look when flying low.

I did a little one: http://www.thunder-works.com/clutter1.zip download and unzip, should work in Windows Media Player as I used Windows Media codec... I will do a proper one when Steve put back the low altitude turbulence effects (they improve the sense of low level flight) and hopefully fix all the cameras (fly-by cam etc) - I should populate more the terrain with clutter, as performance is still very very high.

Some preview pictures of what I'm working at the moment: very important (but very tricky to get right) ground clutter. This is Mount Tumbledown, one of the first important battlefields to be seem from Stanley while moving West, it has a rocky outcrop creating what looks like a 'dorsal spine' that runs from East to West over the mountain's peak: Rocky peaks around Mount Willians and Sapper Hill region, the islands landscape must have more rocks than a Flintstones cartoon: A closeup of some wind swept bushes (I'm hovering very low and slow here, ignore the alt reading in the HUD, it's distance from sea level, not radar-altimeter): Mount Williams as seem from the start of the 'walk' uphill, I'm still hovering very low and slow, the bushes and stones now really bring a dimension to the hills: ...and now hovering at the top looking downhill: ...more to come, expect to see ground troops running for cover behind rocks in the near future.

I've read that the Harrier Gr.3 indeed had issues with their inertial navigation systems. Of course it could be included as extra options in difficulty menu. But if I remember well, the other british Harrier, the Sea Harrier FRS.1, in Ward's book its been described as 'superb' regarding its navigation system (the NAVHARS).

Very important concern, interesting that I've also thought about that. What I'd suggest is this: - have the objects collection as a load on demand terrain like we have now, but with objects.cfg in its folder so it has a hierarchy or group like the aircraft - have the col mesh folder inside this folder (same as we have with aircraft) - have another folder called damage_mesh, it will contain versions of the objects collection, but twisted and damaged, like ruined versions of buildings etc. The idea is that once a building is hit by a bomb, instead of dropping it from objects collection (like you do in an aircraft) you swap it for its damaged/ruined mesh version. So, the object doesn't go away and this makes easier for you to work out a programming flag of DAMAGED=1 or DAMAGED=0 in the objects.cfg or anywhere you see fit, that the server must understand to show the correct object if damaged or not.

Personally, I've started the project with something that was physically possible for a small hobby team like us: one british plane (of course the Harrier) and one important argentine plane (Mirage/Dagger or Skyhawk, more towards Dagger due to multirole use in the war). It's a long history, but somehow we have been forced by our argentine fans :) to insert Skyhawk, SUE and Pucará too! :) No problem, Skyhawk and Pucará can be done confortably, the Mirage/Dagger faces a few problems regarding flight modelling (it's delta-winged, supersonic, requires different equations than we have now) and the SUE is still a bit covered in mistery (soecially it's Agave radar and Exocet operation). I agree with you that there's an unbalance of plane models. A good proposal would be to have also the Avro Vulcan as flyable for british side in future expansion (I've received a lot of requests for this, it's a very popular airplane despite the long time-consuming missions that it will face); I've thought about helicopters too, more specifically Sea King, Lynx, Gazelle, with the balance pending more for the Gazelle for its simplicity (lack of avionics) and sort of 'gunship-lite' role it had in the war, carrying a 20mm cannon and a rocket launcher - although it was severely punished by ground fire, with even 2 losses on the same day at the San Carlos landings.

Today I've placed one of the first landmarks of our scenario, the Bodie Creek suspension bridge, a few miles south of Goose Green: A pity it is too low over the water (10 feet) to attempt a 'fly under' stunt. :) Next landmarks to be placed on JT's map will be the lighthouses, first the one at Cape Pembroke:

Yep, and I've emailed to you the fixed files. AWL_Spinner, we did experiments with rain and overcast in the past (here) if you squizzy your eyes or have a very good monitor you can see a few thin rain drops falling over the Skyhawk there. :) I think one of the next tasks for our heroic solo programmer :) is to bring back the clouds and think in a more clever way to do overcast skies (in that Skyhawk pic, the overcast sky was just a change of sky texture, won't work as planes usually are able to fly high over the cloud mass - I hope we can do an effect like that in Lomac's overcast which is brilliant.)

I was up until 4:00 AM today trying to fix landing gear problem in Sea Harrier - the logic was the inverse of what was visually displayed, so 'up' showed like 'down' in external view and so on... was a really fiddly thing to correct by script but now it is ok and I can sleep well. :)

Not yet Crusader, can you resend ?