scary_pigeon

thats probably a good idea.

well latest thing is that we've finally got bits falling off the aircraft - not just spawned debris - but bits of wings and stuff like that.

I've had two power packs in the system though both were perhaps underpowered? sometimes even in jet thunder my system suffers that savage crash that the others do. what happens is normally the system is over extended on resources - liek ive had loads of browser windows up and the comps been on for over 10 hours - then i try to compile and run and it freezes after trying to put lots of stuff I presume into virtual memory. Then it goes blank and crashes just like IL2, rome and so on.

hello :) What will probably happen is that we follow an IL2 style approach. We've had some discussion about that between me and dante as it was a bit of an issue on weather to be open or closed - but on balance we just dont want to endanger the online play possibility through 'modcheating' we do however plan to be very open with the fans who would like to do mods and will operate a program of updates to include third party content or possible to have third parties develop expansion packs. They might then earn something for their efforts. but thats in the future - firstly we must get it all done!

I've been doing too little coding recently, i have to confess. This has been for two reasons - i've doubled my hours at my dumb job and another is that when I get home from my dumb job at Walmart, I find an irresistable desire to play Rome: Total War. codewise though, we've moved on a little, we're happy somewhat with the FM for now and the coding now centers on collision detection -which was perfect - but only worked for one solid object - with our objects now split up into damagable parts the routine has to be reworked a little. Then there will be a few more things from that on how that affects the FM. so depending on weather I can break my addiction on Rome Total War or not, hopefully by end of this week we'll be at a point were we're landing on carriers and stuff like that. --- my playing of rome total war highlights a problem with my computer. I wonder if anybody here has any suggestions. On this PC and another many games crash. The screen just goes black and it reboots at some apparantly random point in the game. I have this problem in IL2, IL2FB, Doom3, and Rome Total War. both PC's they crash on, its weird. the only thing that they have in common is that their motherboards are both got VIA corp stuff in. the problem occurs on all the different gfx cards I have used (3 nvidia models now an fx5900xt) its most distressing.

an update? why not.. ..not a great deal to say except the last couple of weeks or so have been absolutel awful and demoralising. the FM works but I can never quite get it how I want it to be. problem is, i've probably become obsessed with the FM. Sometimes when working on something u get obsessed with one tiny fragment. and every day its been like, oh my god i hate this. fiddling with numbers inputted into the fm and then seeing what happens, is spin behaviour right and believable? whys the nose bobbing up and down still, stuff like that. i must resolve to put a freeze on working on this as the plan is to get other people to do the FM at some point between now and beta. I am not an aerodynamics expert. I've got good general physics so things seem about right but not perfect. Its like the difference between pretty good: - Strikefighters and feeling spot on: - IL2. right now in someways we are between the two though still the flight behaviour is generic - the current target aircraft -the skyhawk only loosly accurate. Next stage is.. ..a gigantic multiple choice. I could code more weopon system stuff perhaps of warships and aircraft. Or now with our fancy carrier objects make sure stuff is landing and taking off correctly.

oh cool - people read this page :) lately we've been jolly pleased with the damage model for aircraft. http://www.thunder-works.com/anims_a4b.rar in this archive is a small movie that shows our moving parts. we want now to do the same trick with warships. And at the moment this is what I'm working on. When we have the next version of the warship c++ classes ready we will then try to set up carrier demo. the milestone we work towards at the moment is a complete example of a mission against the british fleet in the skyhawk. the fleet will be defended by sea harriers and other ship defences. We need to be able to damage the ships selectively - to knock out AAA and SAM, radar and other things. btw personally I dont rate the exocet at all. a crappy easily jammed, easily shot down even, subsonic missile in very short supply. I think iron bombs are the main threat to the fleet. The skyhawk has a reputation for being a tough airframe too. also, we have to improve our FM. Our goal of course is maximun realism with compromises only optional.

C/C++ is pretty much the standard - that is one reason. A standard snowballs and you get lots of well developped 3rd party API's available like SDL, OpenGL, FMOD etc. C is also fast. Its also the language I'm most profficient in. which in reality is the main reason why C is being used - but I chose to learn C because of its use already as standard with regards to games. We are experimenting with script languages too though - lua embedded in our C app.

hurah. it works. this is just in a test shell. it ought to be fairly straightforward now to insert these new compound object models with fancy damage model into the developing game. The shell lets us selectively damage one the many components that make up the model as well as rip bits off that then fall away.

the last week or so has been focused for me on our new fangled compound object system in development, investigating possible script languages for inclusion. as things have developed: more moving parts added in and more to come - codewise its simple, just working with dante at the moment. Other art types would have freaked out how we do it. what?!?! has been the response of some that I remember. the last triangle in the object acts as the pivot axis. This sort of approach is quite hackish and upsets the types of people who do strikefighter mods i think... ...anyway I've had a bit of a headache on this recently: now that we have bits that can fall off. should think about collision detection. In the end to maintain speed we are going to try using a much simpler object with which to test for collisions. Still puzzled about armour modelling - weather or not to bother. simple hitpoints might surfice especially in the interim - so long as rediculous things arent allowed to happen - like tracer rounds sinking capital ships. if necessary though I have plans to implement such measures. ----- now that I've figured out how to embed LUA code in a C program there are some interesting possibilities. One possibility that interests me is putting the FM in LUA code- this will be slow and nasty but I think it will aide prototyping. LUA of course is an interpreter language - a virtual machine runs within the game. LUA is an easy language to get to grips with and there might be opportunity for others to assist development of the fm beyond what I have written.

I've read it. it scares me.

hello nobby. its what I ended up getting. now my next problems are: new pair of glasses - my specks are scratched to bits. and also now to actually utilise the card properly. I'm still only using opengl 1.1 functions as my opengl book only goes up to 1.1. The bits and pieces on the net I do find baffling at the moment - when there is more time I will investigate. But maybe we will get other programmer(s) in to the team. Anybody know anybody who can do Pacific Fighters type oceans?

there will eventually be clumps of grass for sure. just not got round to trying it yet.

its not hard to do.

no. this had not been thought of till now.

another nights coding: previously, we have had moving parts in the model of our aircraft. but for a period we stopped using them for a bunch of technical reasons that I've forgotten. the moving parts were experimental and were really for when we were showing the mirage elevons at work. so everything had elevons - and i just commented out the code for that... ...but now its back and done properly - script programmed. This is quite pleasing we were stuck with other throwbacks previously like stop go animation for gear - terrible. dante encourages me to stop playing with some aspects of the special effects and get on with the functionality - like the moving parts and further gameplay. i do enjoy the pretty aspects of it and wish to re-implement pretty lighting. In our previous screenshots it can be seen that it looked like we really knew what we doing: the specular (highlight) reflections are quite nice and quite realistic looking. But this was done in a software way using the correct maths but obviously slow. Terribly slow. Now we use opengl lighting but have so far not quite managed to obtain the same quality. Though I'm certain we will and I look forward to adding subtly applied reflection maps.

i sent the test exe for the new aircraft display routines that are in development to dante so he could expand the example script. here is the result with an experiment of my own. Using the landscape detail texture on the aircraft as a test. the idea is to make it look interesting.

well this stage took a little longer to get to. a new script based approach is being used here of arbitary complexity - I've only so far bothered to attach the wings, the tailpiece and the fuselage. there is more to do - apply new collision detection routines and some other things.

indeed, this sort of programming is borrrrrring. time for dante to do some programming, all that he write above about it being split in this part and that part... he'll be doing all that in a script :) the system will be rather flexible in this way.

hope? it is certain. this is practically a non issue for me. easy - but fiddly at the moment. sort of like counting beads coding wise.

today, I manage to avoid being hit by a SUV. serves me right for cycling round traffic island the wrong way. viperBR what is an SS? your offer to help hosting future movies is important. our bandwidth gets flooded when we make news.

indeed - interesting. perhaps in the campaign we can let them enhance the airfield?

just thought I'd better give you advanced warnings so people dont say, OMFG - thunder-works has collapsed too! - our bandwidth usage has been unusually high this month due to the release of the new movies. we're not far off the limit - and will probably remove the download for the movies until we get more bandwidth payed for. The worst thing might happen is that the site might go down for a while.

splendid, he is our hero. :)

infact - I am going to remove the movies.