scary_pigeon

this will be possible - but why? :-) our textures are so wonderful already :-) I know what you mean though. it was one of the fun things about wwii online. One thing our engine can do, which may or maynot be interesting, is load textures from the internet. I dont know if that would be interesting or not - but there you go :) edit: damn, day dreamming not world war ii online: IL2

with regards to hud contrast. I am aware that the aircraft have brightness settings, I dont think the sea harrier had a clever clogs system that you described where perhaps it brightens up above horizon and is less bright below.. ..but the brightness settings are important for night time flying to avoid killing your night vision -which is kind of useful in game - after all in combat games like wwii online at nightime we switch our lights off to get a better picture of the screen -but if we had bright HUD features we'd be dazzled in that darkness. so I think this control is important to have and not hard to implement.

with regards to the horizon lines being glued to the real horizon. If I understand your comment correctly - I think the problem is maybe the skydome. in this test shell there is no terrain or real clouds and things like that, just a skydome, which might have the horison drawn too high up. I know that when you point the thing up, on the hud it is straight up, and when mathametically level, the hud is level. I think the skydome might just be too high up in its suggestion on where horison is. edit: ahh, i see your point, cheers! the benefit of showing early dev stuff to our followers! a larger hud object/ wider vertical texel difference should correct it.

still just in the cockpit test shell a simple movie of the HUD behavior http://www.thunder-works.com/movies/hudtest.avi we've not done this before so its a bit basic, in the past we just had a simple skyhawk gunsite. dante continues to improve the cockpit at his end, my texture set and dial set isnt as complete as his. But i made this movie for the curious. What i'm pleased with is the level of scriptability in how the HUD and cockpit behaves. future things for the shell are to finalise ways to script key presses and other inputs also radar behaviour. The levers and things are supposed to move too, the nossle lever, the throttle, the pedals, the stick etc.. ..and as for the stick, I see it has a rubbery thing at the base. not sure how that will look when it moves about.

I think we were trying to miss it on purpose because at the time you would have expected to see the ship sink, but that wasnt included yet. (in some versions of our code that is now there in simplistic way - in the prototype, seed project- the campaign system, ships are set to sink under the water if the water if the hitpoints are breached) which reminds me, sadly we continue to use hitpoints because we havent yet done proper armour modelling. We have correct collision detection, but not armour modelling yet. the sort of broad approach I think that will be used here is that we will map the collision point into texture coordinate information. This will let the texture people on the project also create armour thickness textures. I suppose its not perfect as such an approach doesnt model all the different armor types. I've read some baffling threads in wwii onlines forums about this sort of thing - But I think the approach will be good enough and a lot better than hitpoints. pucaras seem pretty tough little aircraft. I'm not expert on aircraft capabilities but from what dante said, the pucara has decent armour, the skyhawk is pretty tough too and shots at very light angles are not going to do much damage. anyway.. ..i'll do a bit more programming then its bed.

cheers :) the positive vibes we get on these forums are valuable. at times it has kept us going when we've been fed up. just knowing people are clicking our site and things like that reminds us that we have promises to keep.

currently doing HUD tests this is occuring in a shell with a mock up HUD what is occuring at the moment is that we're moving more and more towards scriptability of everything. I am going to sent keyboard, mouse and joystic events to be handleable by the script. textures can be flipped, dials removed and added during script operation. this programability starts giving you ideas of what is doable - suddenly clickable cockpits and things become kind of obvious how to do technically. you can see how we come across a bit of a problem that we'd brainlessly not thought of - well, id not thought of it anyway! that only the ladder without numbers will work - numbers to represent pitch will have to be done another way using probably, the 3d font system thing I've written. as when upside down, 60 degrees will look like 09 degrees - which is just nutty. but for now, we'll leave it be probably. progress is a little slower than I liked - its christmas, and I have to do extra hours at my warlmart store.

just to let you now. current focus is on HUD. trying to make it programmable. a few ways there are to do this. We will hopefully suceed in this soon. it would be nice to find a way to easily configure new HUD's and things.

well what I've been doing so far. I've come across an FPS problem. I've been unable to so far fix it. it is odd. One version of the code it runs at >60fps (something to do with my monitor being LCD seems to often make this a limit - the video you see, that version runs at that speed) now I've been creating a new version to do more clever things, as limited as it is, it runs at <20fps and as far as I can tell, no more objects are being displayed. it is really strange. thought I'd add some more before bed. I've written a bitmap text thing into the engine. Will be able to place such text anywhere at any orientation - so will work well for HUD text I believe. which raises a bit of question.. What about HUD's? sometimes people want to use a wider field of view - but HUD details might be too small to read.. perhaps instead we might enlarge features slightly to make them more readable at wider angle views? this is similar to how cockpit struts are made thinner to reduce their obstructiveness to a more real life level - that we have two eyes so struts can be somwhat seen around. or perhaps just essential info printing clearly at the bottom of the screen might be enough? Heading, Pitch, Speed, riserate, sliprate - some of these and/or more

brilliant, its always a moral booster to see that people are eagre for us to finish. I do like the idea of having a download option. I think all developers/publishers should do this. I've seens some simple but effective rain effects for the first time the otherday in that flightsim show.. but for some reason at first my eye was confused and thought it was a screensaver on a grey background - and that the moving dots were tiny wilderbeast! - but then I got it and though, 'oh. we could do that.' and the sea harrier - it has a windscreen wiper.

well you can use the hat switch instead of the mouse.. ..what might happen is we'll do something a little like IL2 - along the bottom of the screen print essential flight information like alt - speed, head and possibly rise rate.

well I went there today. a lot of serious people. I had a go on one of the set ups, the helecopter set up.. ..and the guy said - snidely almost i wonder? - you'd be good in Arcade i was trying to make the helecoptor go upsidedown. and when i landed it, i let it drop vertically into the ground and anounced, "Perfect Landing!" I spoke to Just Flight publisher guy, left them a cd, explained a bit of what its about... ...we're not that bothered about getting a publisher yet but the notion could be interesting. we may self publish in the end which may be most profitable and with the element of freedom that we've so much enjoyed. advantage of a publisher option could be, especially if they would sponsor the project - would be accelerated production. Done epic amounts this week, on my week off from work working full time on the project - I feel at that rate the game would be complete or in beta very quickly - and completing stuff is always nice. Well, it was interesting, never been to a flight sim show before. I'd like to go to one were theres like IL2 being played networked. something more explosive!

would there be a spare PC there do you think?

definately, on the video you see how the mouse moves about - thats because I was moving the window across my screen so i could read the console - where I output flight dynamics stuff. with out riserate its nearly impossible.

sort of unofficial, well, okay, i made.. movie. its good for these WIP stuff, but has glitches and things - and obviously a skyhawk cockpit instead of a harrier cockpit. a WIP harrier takes off from WIP hermes and lands on her again. uses xvid codec http://fluffysteve.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/harrierc.avi

at last. I've finally got round to doing collision detection for the boats with aircraft landing gear. This is an important mile stone for us. we can now park our harriers on the ships. for fun, I thought I'd land on the helepad. we've had the vtol thing since the start of it. but for some reason we ended up focusing on the other jets - the mirage elevons at one point were facinating - and the docs issue.. ..but with this oh it was fantastic. clumsily hovering about then that though.. ..will my collision routines work? I lowered the throttle and let the aircraft sink and was waiting for it to sink below the ship. I feel completely delighted. it felt so good.

:) little bug, the turrets face into the ship! i recently got some scripting sorted out for boats. Now they can follow waypoints and be largely programmed through LUA. I'm thinking that the next thing to do is land the harrier on one of the ships.. well dante's not online at the moment probably I will make the skyhawk behave like a harrier, then I'll land it on the helepad - I just have to write some more collision routine stuff. well. I have one more day after the rest of this nights programming to get something ready for that flightsim show. I imagine take off and landing is at least something - perhaps a mission of some sort too.

well. I've done some things today. now object placement is handled by lua, and soon aspects of AI. I've really started to be get to grips with this. lua is a nice generic scripting language. with regards to games development in general. I am impressed by anybody who can design these games. we've just made it up as we've gone along. not always right, but the complexity stands leagues above anything I've ever done. the system is beyond my ability to design - so it has sort of evolved. And like in real life, evolution is dirty with dead ends and stuff you cant quite get rid of like apendicies that cause problems and the odd tooth growing out of the ear. anyway, I'm just tired and talking nonsense. Recently theres been a lot of umming and arring for me as I develop the thing. some problems can be tackled in many different ways and so not bothering to analyse it full I just guess - and I'm pleased with my recent guesses. This LUA work is a fundamental change its going to let us do lots of good stuff and lots less work for me. Dante will probably learn bits and bobs of LUA as he fiddles around and come up with lots of clever ways to do stuff from that since the lua language is so flexible. Perhaps when the demo is released there will be clever things from that from demo players. There will for example be provision (though it may be slow - to sieze control of the FM from the internal one) previously until now, what you see in our screenshots, though they kind of work - and the gun turrets actually work, if I bothered to hard code them - its all set in the source code on where everything is going to be. now with LUA that changes, its scripted. Tomorrow will be the day were we get warships moving about following waypoints. Tomorrow or day after we will try to get it to be able to land our aircraft on our carriers. Hopefully on friday I will be able to rush together the alpha for saturday. Im very excited. Its been like walking lost through an endless forest and suddenly we step forth or about to as major things are being resolved.

the problem is, that I missed my personal deadline, so I decided not to call the show organisers to have a stand space allocated. instead I'm going to try and hurry something together for the sake of it. I can then take some CD's maybe offer them to a few people, or see if I can have a chat with a magazine if say PC pilot is present. There would just be me present as I am the only one based in the UK

i've just finished coding for the night. and for the first time in a long time ive managed to avoid playing rome:TW for a whole day. consequently some decent work by me has been done. I'm now working to build a really rough alpha, that should be done at the end of the month - i want to go to the flight sim show in birmingham with something in hand. It is going to be very tight and I might not finish what I want to finish in time. the current phase is building the mission system, and then to get the objects behaving right across the battlefield. perhaps it will be necessary to cheat at first - like AI aircraft that dont really land or take off, just spawn above their airfields going at a decent speed? we shall see. at the moment prioity goes towards the mission and AI - when that is done, the whole thing becomes showable. This will be a substantial task and so i fear i will not reach this milestone by nov 27th particularly with the other necessary things like improved cockpit and stuff.

i suppose the main news is that I've been getting less obsessed with Rome: Total War. this leaves much more time to work on my game. I've missed my personal deadline for something i wanted to achieve though - nov 15th I wanted to have a basic demo available minus lots of features - but some sort of battle situation. what work I have done on it, is of course, the mission situation. currently the placement of objects is kind of hard coded - well it is hardcoded - so i've been working towards making this LUA defined. Still have to reprogram and create the AI to work with the scripting. lots of stuff has to be brought together for example, there is an autopilot AI for aircraft, and a combat routine - but ways from the mission system have to be found to decide the parameters for this autopilot so it follows the waypoints. im scratching my head a lot on this. why the personal deadline of nov15th? wel on November the 27th there is a flightsim show in Birmingham, UK that I thought that if I new i'd be ready by this date, that I could then be confident that I could make a decision to attend to set up a stand there. - it would be a late booking for sure. Instead, I think I'll just turn up as an enthusiast, and if I have something to show, hand a demo over to a few people, perhaps PC Pilot or something like that. damn, our PR strat is advanced and well planned :)

well there are moving carrier elevators planned - i just we find time to make them spawn from that. it would be kind of neat. but fiddly.

ships should sway like ships not islands that is for sure. the elevators - do they work? like twiddle and stuff like that? yes.

i was waiting for dante to reply because hes the sort of center of our organisation - he has become the sort of grand supreme leader in all this :) S! to dante anyway he has all the information, and has organised its gathering. We've had an argentinian whos been ferreting about the argie airforce gathering stuff. so we have now got some good sources including tremendously cockpit photos taken for the purpose. We've also got flight manuals for several of the planes. I know we have got the Flight Manual for the Mirrage3 so accuracy here should be assured. I'm not quite certain but I think we've also got flight manuals for the etendard and the skyhawk. Though i'm not certain. What has proven difficult to obtain is a flight manual for the sea harrier fsr1. We really need this otherwise we'll be mainly educated guessing based on accounts - for example Sea Harrier over the Falklands - from that book you can sort of at least discern the functionality and capabilities of the sea harrier avionics. Also we assume that HUD symbology will be similar to HUD symbology of other british fighters - so we can lift that from the Tornado which we do have some sources on. Ideally though we need to get an FM otherwise the sea harrier will have to be realism patched some future date - still though - if we are finding it hard to get the Flight Manual for the sea harrier - then perhaps it will be hard for forum people to say we got it wrong. sort of like i suppose, belief in god - because you cant prove there isnt one... ...this is how the harrier really is - prove us wrong! and please do! :) LOL.