what am I doing now?

[scary_pigeon 0]

ahh brilliant, great to see you idle - what are you up to these days?

[Guest |d13m0b]

ahh brilliant, great to see you idle - what are you up to these days?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Not very much at the moment. Mostly programming I'd say. Currently I'm doing two projects; a sms-program to linux and a eggdrop configuration program for windows (small projects I do while not doing other freelance stuff and school). Also been doing lots and lots of freelance programming lately.

 

I moved to Trondheim as scheduled (you may remember this) and finished up some school. Planning to attend at the uni. after christmas. Hoping to end up with a masters degree in artificial intelligence. :)

 

And you? Still working at the (k-mart?) supermarket?

Edited May 16, 2005 by |d13m0b

[scary_pigeon 0]

Not very much at the moment. Mostly programming I'd say. Currently I'm doing two projects; a sms-program to linux and a eggdrop configuration program for windows (small projects I do while not doing other freelance stuff and school). Also been doing lots and lots of freelance programming lately.

 

I moved to Trondheim as scheduled (you may remember this) and finished up some school. Planning to attend at the uni. after christmas. Hoping to end up with a masters degree in artificial intelligence. :)

 

And you? Still working at the (k-mart?) supermarket?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

yup. ASDA owned by corporate facist Walmart.

[scary_pigeon 0]

an update.

 

 

last few weeks we've been working towards a demo. it has been necessary to do a lot of work on the network code.

 

in some ways the netcode is quite good. it splits the world into sectors - events and information is spread between other clients - as well as from server run air/land/sea bots - based on which objects need to know.

 

i realised that a way to accelerate programming of all this is to continue with our savior - lua scripting.

 

using a sort of text chat approach its possible to script program a lot of the net code - particularly the events and many of the events we havent thought up yet

 

this system is now feeling complete - fully tested in shells. next step. apply all this in a graphical client.

 

not long now - demo will be soon

Edited May 20, 2005 by scary_pigeon

[BananaBob 0]

Great News! I must admit, I was somewhat skepticle of this sim coming to fruition but it seems you guys are coming along at an exceptional pace! Look forward to the demo and the finished product!!

 

~S~

Bob

[EnolaGay 0]

Impressive stuff! Are you looking into multithreaded code?

 

One thing I noticed flying a few days ago in the Tomahawk, I was holding mid downwind, doing 360 orbits. The sky was clear and the sun shining. So I got those shadows from the cockpit frame traveling across the instruments as I turned around. Would be cool to see that in a sim.

Basicly shadows cast onto the instrument from the airframe.

[SDirickson 0]

I've always thought, when you play a simulation, you spend 95% of your time in the cockpit. Stands to reason, the cockpit should be as graphically intensive and realistic as the rest of the sim. Though most sims now use the position of the sun and launched weaponry to cast a glow into the cockpit, I have yet to see actual shadows from the airframe. It would definately be a step in the right direction.

[EAGLE 18 FLT 0]

Look forward to a demo, my squad are in great anticipation of this sim, I'm sure we'll all be buying it! and downloading the demo.

[scary_pigeon 0]

gay:

 

its got a non blocking server with a finite state machine approach to avoid lock ups.

 

hopefully the demo, after closed testing will wow people. a little like how IL2 demo wowed me.

[+Dante-JT 6]

On my side, while I wait for Steve to release a scriptable terrain shell so I can build for real the islands map (based on the hires terrain mesh we have), I have been enhancing some parts of the art content we have now, for example, now the pilot object displays historically accurate uniform colors, life-jacket and the correct helmet and mask:

[Aerny 0]

Hey Dante,

 

This looks very cool again! Things are getting better day by day!

 

Cheers,

 

 

Aerny

[+Crusader 2,101]

hey s_p and D-JT,

 

your work looks better and better. keep going :)

[EAGLE 18 FLT 0]

Amen brothers, your work improves everytime I come back here!

[Guest |d13m0b]

I suppose the canopy and the pilot is different objects and not "attached" to the model of the plane, so you'll be able to eject yourself?

 

How about implementing animation to the pilot, with gestures. How neat wouldn't it be to fly side by side with your wingman and giving him a thumbs-up or the good 'ol finger!

[scary_pigeon 0]

hehe.

[HawkHums 0]

Couldnt you just add a moving head.??

 

If the aircraft is pulling up the pilot is looking in an upward direction.

Or when a aircraft locks on to a target he looks in that direction.

 

This could work, cos most of the time you would be too far away to see other pilots looking at you. BUT, if youre in a dogfight and overshoot your target, crossing over canopy to canopy you would be looking at eachother.

 

The players pilots head would look in the direction you put your view towards.

 

In the end I think this would be better suited to a WW2 sim, but still would be nice.

 

P.S.

Did I miss this...

what ver of Harrier is in this conflict ? (AV-8A/GR-MK3/GR-MK7/etc)

Looks like Sea Harier AV-8B

[Argentine Pucara 1]

Couldnt you just add a moving head.??

 

If the aircraft is pulling up the pilot is looking in an upward direction.

Or when a aircraft locks on to a target he looks in that direction.

 

This could work, cos most of the time you would be too far away to see other pilots looking at you. BUT, if youre in a dogfight and overshoot your target, crossing over canopy to canopy you would be looking at eachother.

 

The players pilots head would look in the direction you put your view towards.

 

In the end I think this would be better suited to a WW2 sim, but still would be nice.

 

P.S.

Did I miss this...

what ver of Harrier is in this conflict ? (AV-8A/GR-MK3/GR-MK7/etc)

Looks like Sea Harier AV-8B

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

The Harriers featured in this conflict were the Gr.3 Harrier and the Sea Harrier FRS. 1. By the way, the Harrier AV-8B didn't enter service until 1985 and was developed by McDonnell Douglas Aircraft in the United States.

Edited June 2, 2005 by Argentine Pucara

[scary_pigeon 0]

movie:

click picture above

 

some readers of this thread will have seen such movies before of me chasing another aircraft, however, now the code is significantly different.

 

there is a server client approach. on this server, bots or other human players can do their thing and this movie is where I am testing this out - in a modified cockpit shell prog the netcode - were I follow sea harrier. where double teaming a poor but nimble skyhawk over featureless infinite grass.

 

next steps go like this:

 

add in the bullets - on the server I can see the bulets wizzing about - this is not yet implemented visually client side. this is next step.

after that: implement collision detection and event system for this server-client approach.

 

then the rest of it. place the landscape back in and create some more interesting missions.

 

 

(the landscape is not in this movie because it is quite slow to load when I am just wanting to tweak netcode, fm, cockpit avionics)

Edited June 5, 2005 by scary_pigeon

[PapaSmurf630 0]

Do you have a ex-harrier pilot or any one who has had experiences of flying this aircraft? How do you know what the FM is like in the real aircraft? I heard it's a pig to fly...Will you make it as difficult to land vertically as it is in real life?

[Aerny 0]

Looks good anyway

 

Aerny

[scary_pigeon 0]

the last few week or so has been concentrated code wise on server-client event stuff.

 

it progresses quite well, we are on the verge of at least the developers, being able to shoot at each other across the net. i'm waiting for a fairly rare period when dante is actually at home rather than is main job, so he can try the client to fully check the multiplayer stuff. Its just too awkward to test on one machine.

[scary_pigeon 0]

bad, news, that didnt work as planned. until now i'd only tested the code on my home pc and sometimes you get issues that low latency and very high bandwidth can hide.

 

So for hours I expect now to be sulking infront of my pc trying to find the niggly little bugs.

 

 

edit: and the hours pay off, we can see each other - it works quite well - im in the UK, dante is in brazil.

Edited June 15, 2005 by scary_pigeon

[ECV56_PaulTen 0]

Glad to see that you solved the preliminary bugs

[scary_pigeon 0]

Glad to see that you solved the preliminary bugs

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

still bugs to tease out network wise. its really very tedius. i've spent the last 6 hours running it, waiting for it to fall over at some random point - try figure out where about in the code this happened then move try something to maybe fix it.

 

right now, i am again waiting to see if something goes wrong. for the last 15 minutes ive had two clients logged in and all seems to be well.

 

haha. as i sat there waiting for odd things to happen. i noticed one of the planes vanished from view. This is odd. hopefully tomorrow I will fix it. It is important that these netcode bugs be fixed early because the netcode approach is the heart of our system for both multiplayer at single player AI driven ones.

Edited June 21, 2005 by scary_pigeon

[A4-AR 0]

Hey!... good job guys!

Any news about the Mirage III and the dagger´s cockpit? And the Cyrano II radar of the Mirage IIIEA.

Some friends and I can wait for the release of a demo, best luck from Cordoba Argentina