scary_pigeon

well we do pay a yearly sub. but they keep having crashes and such. im thinking of maybe moving host or reducing bandwidth - for example, using bittorrent to distribute movies. its probably viable because quite a lot of people are downloading them at once.

shouldnt be a problem - only i lost my code to unlock it which is a problem.

can anybody suggest a webspace provider? when dante puts the movies online they kill the site each time and our useless provider ignores our emails. so our website is going to go down in a day or so till the end of the month :( - sorry.

nice screenies. nicer than the ones i have. different texture set.

there will surely be other scenarios appart from the falklands one.

nice models i sometimes wish i could do stuff like that. today though, i've added contrails. i think this sort of effect is important as trails give visual cue. specially important perhaps with the sort of restricted screen view issue in these sorts of games. maybe for game purposes the prominance of contrails could be enhanced to unobtrucably enhance player situational awareness - different than say icons.

yes, im thinking about making a change. i had thought about hosting part of the side on a spare pc in the house but that could be expensive though advantagous in other ways.

yup i've been aware of that for a little while. i figured that by january in a few days we'd be clear again. i paypaled them some more money. hopefully they will sort it soon. thought we'd slip through into janurary and be fine.

the effect is demonstrated quite well sometimes with reading. try holding a book sideways at 90 degrees. the writing is not easy to read. bit if you hold the book upright and move your head 90 degrees over it becomes quite easy to read in comparison to sitting upright with book leant over. well for me it is anyway. as ever, these sorts of effect - switch them on or switch them off.

do you want to do ours? how are your LUA skills?

this definately shows possible benefit of showing dev stuff in progress. i've not noticed anything like that. i wonder if fog is switched off for these objects, or maybe its fine and its illusion type thing. i dont actually have much of the ground clutter its on dantes machine. edit: thought about it a bit. maybe is is product of in games the fact that everything is very zoomed out and wideangle. it means that when you look into distance from a vantage point the difference in distance could be 40km - so large rocks and stuff that you visually see as in the distance might be a lot nearer than you perceive them?

yep we're still working on it. we really want to put together some sort of demo soon and face many bugs to get rid of. Dante continues to build more terrain segments. he seems to really enjoy building the towns. the main bug i've been chasing recently is terrain height calcs.

that be because it doesnt take much g to change where subjective vertical is. when you roll your already doing some turning. if you was hovering though, it might be different.

yes, natural point were nice enough to send me a unit. unfortunately i have trodden on it - the thing that sits on your cap - but the idea is definately have track ir 6dof in the game. it is not in at the moment because i havent yet managed to get the code to work. I will though. that is something fun i might do today.

i never implemented look into turn as thought it was bad idea - i think i will add it today or someday to see what it looks like. all these effects can be scaled down.

did a little bit of freestyle coding - nothing important so far as it turns out i've got to attend a hockey party later. I played with the camera a bit trying out the zoom in when turn technique. i saw the effect quite well playing 'live for speed' earlier. What i did was manually zoomed out during the straight sections and the zoomed in for the turns - currious if that would enhance and combine different benefits of different zoom levels towards feeling of speed and excitement. the idea is that when you zoom out you see objects you move a more in the edges of the screen so there is more movement on the screen when driving forwards but zoomed out than zoomed in driving straight. but this situation changes when you do donuts or hard turns. The amount of pixels a tree or some other object off the track moves when you turn 45 degrees is less when zoomed out than when zoomed in. so i zoomed in for when i had the car turning and zoomed out for straight. i then thought, aye aye? what if i do that in jet thunder and program zoom to be affected by sustained yaw/pitch motion? and this is the result: http://www.thunder-works.com/media/zoomturnlow.avi the effect is slightly overdone and i havent decided if i am going to keep it or not. the idea is to give both impression of speed when flying straight, and impression of turning when turning hard. note the textures in use are not current, dante needs to send me at some point a big update.

edited out

of course i joke about that, erosion by bullets - its just the more advanced stuff isnt implemented yet.

im looking forward to flying this one too. favourate plane in IL2 was the IL2 - i can imagine IL2 moments.

thats because you've not worked out how to mod the scripts to make an aircraft behave like a boat. though unfortunately aircraft dont yet have gun turret capability. but yeah - errosion via little bullets will sink these ships 1 bit at a time.

invincible is believed to have been sunk? but it sailed home. well project wise, in the end i did pull myself away from quake4 and do some programming last night. We've been changing the way we handle buildings. there are some odd things about our terrain system, things i've forgotten and I actually spent some time going over things finding out how stuff works again. But now, just like the terrain, dante places static objects with lightwave and so is able to use his favourate 3d tool as an object editor with the script conversion tool i wrote. Now buildings are added. I'm hoping to shortly solve all collision bugs with terrain - the problem of flying over complex terrain somehow causing some weird freeze when ground collision detection is active. seems to be a problem of too many terrain triangles being shortlisted for tests when there should be no more than 4 or 5 at a time, not several thousand. So something is quite right that needs fixing.

hopefully just that right now not done that sort of thing. relying on complete texture.

1) 1 unit is a meter 2) I cant remember how far away we have the skydome rendered. I know that we render it in the first pass. It should be as far away to avoid things like head shake created some sort of odd parralex against point stars for night time flying. And also maybe with 3d glasses a close skydown would stand out against distant aircraft? 3) skydome resolution is 1024x768 at the moment.

thinking. probably just keep it as texture swap maybe not have objects fall off. or maybe a new flag in cfg about weather an object when damaged collapses or not. that might be useful. somehow though have to think how we maintain the game state. have to work that out - its all to do with the network code. that when you log on, a picture of the world must be given - of what buildings where damaged, either as some sort of complete download or regular updates. will figure something out.

well we actually now move into areas. terrain needs a proper way to handle statics. I'm mulling over a couple of alternatives trying to decide which one is best. Dante's favoured one is to create the objects positioned in an art package with some script stuff added - basically our compound destructable class for aircraft reused for collections of buildings. Has some positves and some negatives. as do other approaches. probably this is the approach we will use. already i've worked today before my shift at asda on the code. a concern i have is i have to resolve how to damage an object - a part of some load on demand terrain so that when you fly away and back again, it is still damaged and also, if you log on later on to the server that the objects are still damaged.