scary_pigeon

one idea i have pondered is dizzyness modelling. if you start messing about spinning yourself in circles when you stop the ground appears to tilt. i suspect this because your eye is rolling to match the balance in you ear (which continue to change because the liquid in your balance parts of your ear are still sloshing a bit) there would be opportunity for a currious Role Playing mode in dogfight servers - the more of an ace you are, the less dissorientation you suffer from - perhaps even CFS3 style improved gforce tolerance - such a policy would tend to make virtual pilots in dogfight servers understand the value of survival better. no more ditching planes to get a new one because its got a few little hole in it? this would be an odd feature too. I have no idea how it would play in an online setting - looking forward to trying it out to see if its a flight or a flop of and idea.

This seems like something to think about. dynamic campain is in very early stages so these sort of suggestions are good.

dont worry - we havent dissapeared - we're just at a particular 'boring' phase of development. fundamental parts of the engine are being written or modified and arent pretty. I personally have been for the last month working on the network code. such screenshots arent worthy of mention on our site - so before updating it proper - we'll most likely wait until there is something new and interesting to show. oh yeah: the tectrahedron is just a test object of the other client - and theres a spacefield to give a sense of movement since the relatively slow loading time of the landscape slows down debugging/tweaking of certain aspects of netcode.

yes - the gr3 will be there as flyable.

some people wonder about this: only at high zoom levels in IL2 for example - is it that we are viewing the world as at actual size - assuming a sort of average distance from players head to monitor. It is a narrow field of view. Yet - in the wide - more fish eyed lense view - this better represents the field of view the player would truelly have if they were actually in the cockpit. Because right now, as you read your monitor your eyes can see in detail over the monitor area and peripheral out almost to your ears. Perhaps a way to combine the two would be to reduce forshortening - the reduction of size with distance- of aircraft in the game - actual size at close ranges - yet slightly larger than life at longer ranges in an attemp to get the best of both worlds - truer identification of objects at a distance - yet being able to view in more wide angle mode. Some players speculate that IL2 uses this approach in their forums. I'm not sure if we'd do something like this -at the moment there is no fiddling with the geometry at distance.

this is not on the mainsite. It is a favourate screenshot.

ah yes - i thought it meant the client was a server-client that sort of autonomously decided weather it was worthy of declaring itself a supernode. but yep - in my daydreams of massive multiplayer net coding - I do indeed envisage an a sort of server farm - perhaps ones overseas with a fast connection to the central one.

Oh without the communication across the battlespace - it would almost be pointless. I agree this aspect is essential. if you're flying brit on cap you'll get radio messages telling you about possible trade.

at the moment everybody still uses server-client model of one form or another because of the security issues. Basically the client ought not to be trusted at all - the system suggested in the link looks like its a form of peer to peer. Peer to Peer is actually interesting in some ways - the defacto standard of the internet is ever becoming ethernet. Like my broadband connection - the activity light is always flickering even when my computer is off -because it is picking up - and ignoring traffic around my neighbourhood. Basically in a connectionless broadcast network that is ethernet - that continues to form the backbone of the internet as a growing defacto standard as opposed to how it was supposed to be - ATM - then a lot of packets broadcast go to everybody anyway so a udp - peer to peer broadcast to all approach to network games is probably the way to go in the future. So all those security implications with peer to peer would ideally have to be solved. When I was researching this a few years ago it appeared that many ISP's blocked UDP broadcast packets which is a bit of a shame. But for this game - the network approach will be a traditional server-client approach.

well i must say, it is my goal, that we beat dantes estimates, but so far dante has been proven right.

i think we'll manage to achieve same quality as IL2 on the slightly older gfx cards.

I have been pondering this issue. I imagine the server might define what to do in this sort of situation - maybe a selection of AI quality to use. Perhaps aircraft should return to base if player drops connection or fight on. the choice of the server. - perhaps a plane that has a player drop just fights on and nobody can spawn into it.

with regards to clickable cockpits.. I dont really like 2d cockpits and dont want them in the game. clickable cockpits in 3d is possible but not currently our most important priority. It might get in. hope is a good thing :) 3d cockpits add to the immersion because they look much better when head shake is modelled. And if I had 3d goggles it would look rather interesting too.

we use opengl.

this sim is basically Dante's Dream. long ago on forum I asked for wwii objects to include in my new engine... ...instead I got harrier objects.. Oh well I thought... we'll do a harrier sim. The idea of doing the falklands was for several reasons including that the harrier featured in that war and also, that the terrain is nice and boring. Nice and boring means less work for mapping out roads and things like that - just a small island. Though that concern isnt perhaps so significant now since the decision has been made to model a larger area including the more populous argentine mainland.

currently we mainly play the working code in a window which can be stretched to any shape and maintains the appropriate aspect ratio. 16:9 would work. for example: I suppose if I had multiple graphics cards and monitors, the window could be stretched over many monitors.

theres always render to window mode. this might suffice?

its a tuning issue between high alt texture and low alt - its okay.. ..next video will hopefully feature some sort of ground attack example.

It isnt possible to simulate real airflow, just to make approximations. It is real art-science stuff writing simulation of any kind from simulating the universe to games approximations are always at some level made: but I think I've got the physics pretty well done. My approach is calc 'authority' of control surfaces based on airspeed and forces at several important points on the aircraft. Some sims use table based approaches were they look at real performance data and force fit the behaviour leading to the plane feeling like it is on rails - I think CFS3 is an example of this. Others go the emergent approach - IL2. My approach is IL2ish. It is my favourate flight sim. that is to say, torques, forces, inertial tensors. rotation is an interesting phenomena. human beings live in a world were angular momentum doesnt really exist until we start doing things we were never evolved for - like driving fast, flying and building spinning toys... ...our little meagre minds dont intuitiviely understand the behaviour of a gyroscope how a torque in one direction will cause to precess in another. normally in flight these strange angular momentum effects are not really there, but I think they add a hint of something extra real when modelled. Our approach will be to fiddle with the flight sim aircraft constants - for example, lift of wings, wing area (for drag in manouvers) and other things to try get the emergent behaviour to be close to the real plane. I've done a little bit of flying too, and think I know what I want out of the physics engine - something like IL2 in its flight model (I've not got lock-on yet so dont know how this feels) is the best I've so far played with regards to feeling of flight.

im the optimistic one who always thinks it'll all be done in a few months - dante thinks early 2005.

me too. my favourate plane in IL2 is the IL2. I love vulching... ..I found I could score pretty well in air to air in a fighter, but nothing compares to the joy of pissing people off on the ground >:) I am expecting that the pucara may have similar potential - especially if we include dogfight maps were the airbases are close by.

err, no, we will be replacing them with F-35B's and the carriers with new shiny Nuclear carriers nearly on the scale of Nimitz carriers Having those tornados wouldnt be historically acurate, I was talking about a second modern times "Falklands 2" campaign in addition to a totally historically accurate one yes, the navy gets the fancy new JSF... ...but there is an anticipated 5 year gap or more were the navy has only ground attack harriers. it is as though for now, the royal navy is just a fairly potent auxilary unit of the US Navy. we're reliant on being in a US task force with the nimitz type carriers for air defence. But yeah, in 5 years time its a different story. I think right now, the indian navy is getting our sea harriers.

i dont think that will be a problem.

We are aware of these features of the harrier and will put them in in some way. One thing though - the need to use water is only necessary in hotter parts of the world. with regards to falklands 2... ...british defences are pathetic - we've built them a nice new shiny airbase that are defended by 2 tornados - Theres nothing that could stop an argie invasion now and what is worse - they'd have an airbase to imediately station fast jets there with all the necessary facilities. What has britain got now - a few small carriers... that in the next year or so are having the sea harrier decomissioned infavour of ground attack radarless(!) GR7's and GR8's.

I'm slightly interested in a modmode... ...IL2 lets you play like 32 aircraft flying around shooting each other - it would be an utter farce if any of these could be changed to behave anyway the player wanted: But perhaps also to have a mod mode to encourage user development? I would envisage a mode of restricted online play, say just 2 players to maintain the pre-eminance of the restricted authorised mode - but for the mod mode - where anything goes. just 2 players online. This would lets the mods develop their bits and bobs ready for conversion to the encrypted mode.