Combat-Helo dev blog

Stuff you thought was going to be simple but wasn't

2012-01-19T21:49:00.000Z

Swimming was one.

Setting up controllers in XPlane is another.

Yes the things you thought were going to take a few days which turned into a week and a bit (you could almost say 'two weeks'). Josh at Leadwerks gave me a leg-up on how to put an MMO style launcher together and I've almost done wrapping up all the security for the necessary database, key code generation, CVS style updates and all the stuff we need to match individual content to clients. We'll make available downloadable content (DLC) such as new maps and the occasional helicopter (the planned CH-47D), not to mention the odd mission pack.

No, this key won't work, it's a fake

So there was a lot to do to make a simple one shot MMO style launcher. The back-end server stuff had to be built from scratch. The launch .EXE calls home, applies on-demand updates and preps game settings for launch. For simple security sakes I layered server-side scripts for handling the updates, admin and audit. Auditing is handled by triggers, SQL injection is futile since only one procedure is exposed to clients.

Any DBA will tell you Auditing is an important part of any security. If you build any kind of database exposed to the internet and you don't build your own layer on top of any default transaction logging then you're kind of asking for trouble. The database engine used here is not known for keeping detailed logs so it was necessary to build one anyway. Things you might want to think about if you ever need to create systems like these are making log indexes suitable for frequency analysis (this one method Twitter uses to spot spamming), fake open doors and keys and silent alarms. My favourite trick in the past was a fake database that gives the intruder a high and makes them believe they have walked away with the crown jewels while evidence is collected. That sort of none-sense is not required here, I kept this one functional with a tiny footprint.

The Pilot ID we'll be sending out is the key to your content; install once, play as you like. If you share copies around on your network you can launch 'offline' no worries, no need to be connected to the internet until you want to update. It's nice if you want to buy multiple copies for your network and support the effort put into this project but I'm poor too so I know how it is.

Little bit of script consolidation and testing to do before we let this loose in the real world.

Nothing serious but one reader sent in this...

2012-01-06T11:11:00.000Z

From an Australian gaming mag (and those guys are tough cookies) at the bottom of a review of Take On Helicopters...

Thanks for the mention guys :) the picture is a bit out of date though, but what the hell.

New scratch built industrial buildings

2012-01-02T16:49:00.006Z

It was over a year ago we were notified that some of the models we had purchased from Dexsoft might possibly have been stolen. After a period of investigation the probability was quite high this was the case and Dexsoft contacted customers to offer new packs. However months later I was unable to get a reply about these replacements and only in November when doing a review of outstanding assets and licensing we had to either press again or do a re-build.

Dave elected to take it upon himself to do a rebuild and not wanting to have to reposition every building adopted the same dimensions with the exception of adding much needed 'basements' (a basement is just an extrusion of the exterior wall so that it will sink under terrain so no gaps are left if the centre of the model is positioned on uneven ground.

Originally the models were made for use in first-person games and LOD0 had details such as railings and girders. Dave completely built (from scratch) versions complete with new textures and made them more efficient at the cost of some detail. An original building had 5213 polygons, after a rebuild only 728 polys (which is iPhone territory).

Original stolen model on left, rebuilt from scratch on right

Scratch build on left, original on right

Any small indie developer takes a leap of faith when purchasing models from 3rd parties, you don't know where they came from or their history. In this instance we got bitten as did the 3rd party which handled the situation well (but it would have been nice to have the replacements anyway). No harm was done, anyone using or releasing games with 3rd party content be aware.

Thanks Dave for once again being on the ball.

Update

Started work on the updater again.This is based in part on the Leadwerks SDK downloader which is pretty much everything I needed given a little twist and a slice of lemon. Hopefully some of you will be seeing this in the near future. At some point we'll add user names and a regcode system prior to any content downloads (these will not be required to play).

As much as you might want to click on it, you can't yet :(

With any luck the 'one click' update system will let us add rolling improvements at the cost of occasionally annoying you with a download when an update is available. I just want to be able to push one button, get the latest changes to any content I own and go.

Support for different builds (content)

Happy New Year - Another year older...

2011-12-31T22:39:00.003Z

I (Richard H) take the opportunity to indulge myself in a little year-end editorial and pick out some of the personal highs and lows of the past twelve months. Warning: may contain rambling, digression and woeful inaccuracies.

Is it over already? What happened this year?

2011 a year where the most wanted man in America was shot (along with 4 other people that nobody seems to remember) by US Navy SEALs. A year where governments attempted to convince themselves they have any kind of control over economies despite the billions spent on technology and infrastructure to remove people out of the loop. I call blasting away mountains to improve packet travel time by mere milliseconds pretty compelling evidence of the forces being thrown into this new hi-tech computer based trading war. When the speed of light is too slow to make money over the competition and shortening your cable by removing hillsides is the difference between profit and loss what chance do governments or people have in this trading scenario? And it's all happening without much talk or opposition.

The 'adventure' in IRAQ was laid to rest with US President Obama announcing US troop withdrawal. The British army was there in the first half of the previous century and didn't fare much better, although the suggestion that using poison gas on rebels in the north was not acted upon, that was one of Winston Churchill's bright ideas curiously. Always seemed ironic that.

Freedom swept across the middle east, starting with Tunisia as despot after despot was felled in popular uprisings. You'd be forgiven for thinking it was some sort of Facebook game.

Earthquakes and devestation

Japan moved 20 meters westerly and horrific scenes of coastal devastation were broadcast live as the resulting tsunami from the massive undersea earthquakes swept away generations of familes, homes and soon after any remaining nuclear power comfort zone.

Japan has never been a stranger to holocaust, scenes and stories of annihilation and devastation are popular in Japanese culture, see the opening scene of Akira. This is something they have lived through time and time again. My late father-in-law was a Hiroshima survivor, sponsored by US scientists after the war he became a US citizen and then a notable scientist and Quaker. He told me once of thanking Oppenheimer (at a conference) for ending the war in his country, how awful must things have been when getting nuked and loosing your family was in retrospect the better option? It's something I can't even begin to think about without breaking down in tears.

Game devs want more pie

It was the year every game studio and his dog decided they wanted a slice of the Mincecraft pie without any consideration of what makes it so popular. The phrase "just like Warcraft" was replaced by "just like Minecraft", or if you're an unethical developer, "Just like Farmville".

Unethical is a strong word to use but I'll use it for any type of game that preys on innate human weaknesses to make you play them rather than well designed gameplay. This can be aimed at a lot of games that exist in the social arena. I blame a large part of this down to the adoption of the "Monthly Active User" metric being used as a key performance indicator (KPI) for IP acquisition and exploitation.

Another example of game success passed around developers is "Angry Birds". What they often don't realise is Angry Birds was not an out of the blue success, the creators had built up experience working on around 50 games between them prior to launch. The game mechanics are stupefying simple, any programmer or user of Little Big Planet can put such a game together. It is no more sophisticated than Gorillas (shipped as BASIC source code with MSDOS 5 see wiki), it is a single player artillery game. But everything surrounding the mechanics is a finely tuned presentation based on their collective game experience. It takes experienced designers to make Angry Birds, not programmers.

Indie because we say so

Somehow the meaning of 'indie' became fluid, when news of companies like EA announce the formation of an indie studio to engage social and mobile spaces it has one reaching for my "WTF?" stamp. In what way is this indie? Indie is folks trying to democratise games in a way big studios have been blocking for years, indie is independent thought in the game-space or some pretentious twaddle like that. Indie is not trading on skin deep looks, big bucks advertising budgets but game mechanics and freedom to experiment. Freedom to fail.

Start-ups being handed hundreds of thousands of pounds in government grants could be said to be independent. Certainly this year saw many studios spring forth from magic money with little to show for it, and some priced beyond reason. It smells of the dot com boom bust of the early 2000s. Studios are good at being handed funds (in the words of Lord Stark) 'when it's safe'. Hey investors, how about taking some risks on real projects? We could have done this bloody game in half the time, does that smack of enough bitterness? Yes I'm bitter. OK that's enough, better now. Moving on to some of the personal gaming highs this year.

Video game highlights of 2011

Shogun 2 - Creative Assembly
Magika - Arrowhead Game Studios
Assassins Creed Revelations - Ubisoft

Most of the games I had time to play this year (and that's not many) were a mixed bag. To be fair even Assassins Creed was a face-roll fest (not much skill required) but managed to keep one going through sheer story and production value. At the opposite end is Shogun 2, Creative Assembly's triumph combining many elements they've tinkered with in previous games and spades of neat game elements into their two tier strategy game packed with historical facts.

Magika is a hilarious indie action game where blowing yourself up in interesting ways seems par for the course. It came out of nowhere and fair to describe the tone of the game as something you'd get if you threw Reservoir Dogs, Lord of the Rings and Monty Python into a blender. Thanks guys for the laughs.

Honorary mentions: Battlefield 3, Portal 2. and Kerbal Space Program. That latter being great fun if you're into building your own monstrous launch systems and killing space crews in spectacular fireballs.

Video game disappointments of 2011

I bought 'em, played 'em, felt gutted.

Test Drive 2 Unlimted - Eden Games

Wow, after the brilliant but only slightly flawed first game they didn't need to do very much to make the second game a winner. It was like the anticipation of a new Star Wars film (The Phantom Menace), in the words of Harry Plinkett, how hard is it to screw up? It's like mashed potato, just add water. Well they managed it IN SPADES by populating the game entirely with really awful people. I don't want to play these characters, I don't want to interact with these characters. One forum poster dubbed it "Douche-bag simulator".

Skyrim

An honorary arrow in the knee because Oblivion with a face-lift seemed cool at first, erm how much was spent on this? Disappointment still ringing from the hours I put into Oblivion only to find the openness of character development can result in halting any progression after xxx hours. They filmed this live action trailer which could be for anything, my step-son suggested that it could work as a dandruff commercial, see for yourself...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1AenlOEXao

Let me know if you hit the same wall in Skyrim.

Batman Arkham City

I finished the first Batman game a total of FIVE times. I can't think when I've ever bothered to do that with any other console game. Finishing ONCE is a rare thing.

Arkham City lost me after a weekend of play. Too much freedom and visual clutter spoiling an otherwise masterfully visualised city environment. Riddler on the Roof, he's painted dayglow green crap everywhere to solve his collection meta-quest. And worse, there's really no logic to some of the puzzles, (the rooftop chicken run with the magnetic ball for one), I can absorb bullets but I can't rip open a chicken run to grab the ball and stick it in the hole? Put me in the game like you did with Arkham Asylum please, but ill-considered content like this kept taking me out. Sometimes less is more. The artwork is amazing and the laser effects best I've ever seen, a real visual treat with jarring game elements that kill pacing.

Combat-Helo

I had to mention this. Still not out yet and my internal build seems so close yet needs more cowbell. I was really looking forward to seeing a beta released around now and spending my time apologising in public forums and working on improvements. What happened is a series of poor choices on my part which I wouldn't choose to do again. Problem that a normal team could rally around is too much for one programmer to deal with (such as the much needed engine occlusion bug which broke a key avionics sub-system). Another mistake was getting pressured into announce a release period which was just setting myself up for disappointing people when problems arose. I broke my own rule and paid the price. While I still feel bad about that I love the team even though they probably hate some of the choices I made, I can't disagree. Will the release meet expectations? Probably not. Will it fly? You bet. Besides my wife said she'll cut off my bollocks if I don't release it soon or get a decent paying job. Can't argue with that either.

Video and film highlights of 2011

Everything is a Remix

If there was ever a documentary that shows how ridiculous, damaging and outdated modern day copyright and patent laws are, Everything is a Remix is an entertaining documentary series in 4 parts. Everything around us is a remix of some tool, idea and material. Without the freedom to copy, transform and combine existing ideas and technologies creativity is stifled and with it western economies. How different our world would be today if the same level of litigation was around at the time of the industrial revolution.

Sons of Guns - Discovery Channel

Once you get past the gratuitous 'gun porn' flag waving aspect what I love about this series is the sheer love and enthusiasm from the employees of Red Jacket Firearms featured in the show. Sure they love to blow shit up and you might question the sanity and choices made (as do the employees from time to time) but the company is not run as a democracy (insert discussion here). Now airing the third season it's perhaps the most popular show on Discovery HD. It had me yelling, "I got a guitar GUN!" Cracks me up every time.

Cowboys and Aliens (imdb)

The film was better than the title. Reminding me a little of an old b-movie Valley of the Gwangi (imdb) it was a reasonably fun and gritty take on the what-if monster genre.

Super-8 (imdb)

A charming revisit of what an 80s Spielberg movie would be if made today....set in the 80s. Yes we wore those clothes in school. And if you have a 5.1 surround system then the train crash scene will terrify your neighbours. Written and Directed by J.J Abrams.

Cool science stuff

Energy from paper, discovery of hundreds of 'earth like' planets around nearby stars, the possible discovery of the Higgs Boson and Mentos in diet coke. Granted the last one is a bit late but is the only practical experiment I actually conducted in the kitchen. I did clean up though.

Here's hoping that next year science will bring us phones and portable computing devices that can keep a charge for more than a few hours.

Oh and the amazing new bulletproof liquid armor from BAE systems would be handy in the field. Currently it requires 10 pints of Newcastle Brown Ale to feel bulletproof and lightweight however field tests show the subject to be less than agile.

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE
(or I'll hit the UNDO button at midnight and we'll have to try all over again)

Parting quote:

"Goodbye. Goodbye to all the 87 software houses who are no longer with us . . . hello multinationals with your contract lawyers and your cut-price rotten little programs ..." - The Pi-man's end of the year message to fans circa mid 1980s

Bogged Down - Chin Up

2011-12-12T10:08:00.000Z

I apologise for lack of updates, long time since the last one (weeks it seems although I have two unpublished ones which are no longer relevant). I've been avoiding online spaces during this time, work has been bogged down with the multitude of tasks not just relating to the Combat Helo game.

I'm working on the flight model again this week so don't expect any updates in a while. I did get started on an updated FAQ and will publish that ASAP. Lots of things happen around this time of year with concerts and church services, when you have a musical family there's a lot of evenings taken up with those.

So I don't know when we'll have something to show for all this work. It'll happen when it happens, there's no budget to finish and I've got huge debts that require me to stop at some point and take time off to do other work.

On the plus side I did get a nice pressie from one of my brothers which is going to buy a nice cheap car (sensible, used K car but importantly has a working HEATER, a nice to have feature for UK winters). Something to be said for being happy just by virtue of being in a car that's warm.

"Do you know what’s killing Western democracy, George? Greed, and constipation. Moral, political, aesthetic. The economic repression of the masses institutionalized." - Bill Haydon from John le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy 1974.

Quick update - optimisations

2011-11-17T12:41:00.000Z

Last week I identified one issue relating to UserEntityData introduced with the last engine update which prevents consistent update of Enity data due to some change in the hierarchy and no documentation on what was changed.

So I'm faced with having to re-factor (meaning to changing code but same behaviour) core sensor code. It's the sort of thing that is utterly frustrating and makes one want to throw everything out of the window. It's not as if there aren't enough things to do.

There's 4 major issues I'm not happy with:

Flight Model bridge refinement
Ground dynamics
Horizon gapping and other asset problems (licences/legal, audio)
Events / Triggers

I know I can rush some of these things and end up with something I'm not happy with. And if I'm not happy with it I don't see why anyone else will be happy. The majority of potential customers don't follow this blog, they don't care about how much work or team sizes, finds and lack-of, how or why, and often they don't care about the word "beta". To do what's right in the long term means having to not cut corners and do what needs to be done.

Sucks though.

Who would have thought building a stand-alone study sim of the most advanced attach helicopter on the planet would be so difficult? What gives?

Lest we forget

2011-11-11T11:00:00.001Z

11/11

Random pics of the Day

2011-11-11T00:51:00.000Z

Some pics of the day.

Battlezoneesque - eerie (debug stuff)

Shadow puppet time.

Planning terminals awaiting attention

This is how I start every day

US Army showcases AB3 - Apache Block II to Block III in video

2011-11-06T11:21:00.001Z

US Army released video showcasing the new Block III Apache in a virtual training environment.

The video covers in a nutshell...

Weight reduction
Improved software upgrade pipeline
Increased engine power 701-D engines and improved drive system
Better digital battlefield intergration
UAV commanding
IFR certified instruments
Reliability and servicing improvements
RFI range triangulation
Maritime classification
Awesome new logo

C-SCOPE

2011-10-26T17:24:00.000+01:00

While Dave is away hopefully keeping his head above water (all those Bear Grylls survival videos should come in handy) I've got not much else to do except worry and get on with my to-do list.

C-SCOPE was something I remember saying wouldn't make it but turned out to be a freebie since everything was available to simply drop it in.

[C-SCP] button on the FCR page overlays FCR target symbols on TADS video and HMD. Makes finding those hard to see vehicles a piece of cake.

C-SCOPE FCR symbols presented on the HMD

ref: http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/docs/ah-64-mfp-1-33.htm

The High Action Display is currently getting an update for the ACQ interaction (I've tried really hard to work through what this does and how I can gamify it to make something both usable and understandable by normal people).

Also I'm overjoyed at getting news of our ATC audio recordings and looking forward to playing with that.

Rain Stops Play - Bangkok Floods

2011-10-22T10:58:00.000+01:00

Dave who is the artist on Combat-Helo is currently in the process of evacuating his home in Thailand as the floods in Bangkok have made living difficult. With no fresh drinking water for days, no supplies in the shops and place of work closed, services breaking down it's time to jump ship.

Blue indicates server flooding (clearly) Red=flood defence

BBC carries the story here

Dave's last act before evacuating was uploading the latest Chinook work to our server alas there was no time to upload the PSDs. Good luck and fingers crossed we'll hear from you in a week or a month... :(

Don't Panic

2011-10-19T19:45:00.002+01:00

Yes Panic.

When you're rushing to get a reasonable build ready for hammering out problems I'm finding I'm making all new problems. Going over the HMD code I realise how badly it needs rebuilding, there are existing elements that need updating, a few new ones that require adding. There's no way to rebuild the HUD in time.

Another problem. LUA in the Apache entity. Works in the first instance, but fails in subsequent entity spawns resulting in the inability to mount the aircraft. It's an issue relating to LUA accessing keys stored in the model. I want to rip out all the LUA code from models except for the model initialisation that puts on pylons and attaches the rotor models. Not much time to deal with that either.

Dual Seat configuration.

The interaction between front and rear seat was not well thought out early enough, instead I opted for a 'duality' where all features could be operated from either seat with just some interface differences. I should have opted for a strict seat A can do xxxx and seat B can only do yyyy. This was a mistake in my attempt to simplify control but ended up introducing more complex logic.

It's not too late to undo this but a difficult process to start. If I have to design this game all over again I think I would probably nail down all of these problems from day one. Hindsight being wonderful.

TrippleHead - lot more pixels to post process, looks great but a GPU strain

Amazing what you can find on the internet today.

2011-10-19T13:48:00.006+01:00

Not a Combat-Helo post. I'm engaged in a spot of design and research but was looking for some old material online and found I had left a digital trail pre-dating commercial internet use.

28 Years ago I drew this. I was in high school. Shocking really. I used Z80 machine code to generate the 'impressive' sound and visual effects in this game. *wince*

A lifetime of programming and tinkering, stacks of hard drives of unpublished projects ranging from Spanish school time-table generators to a Black Shark snapshot campaign generator.

Some material I doubt will ever be revived, the Memotech MTX 500 version of Next War was stored on cassette tape, probably oxidised beyond recovery. However the code lives on in other forms, the dynamic campaign system was enhanced and put to some use in a PC build. Some of which will form the backbone of the Combat-Helo campaign. One day I hope to merge the big war game with the Apache simulation and revisit the forgotten Fulda Gap scenario.

More unreleased WWIII fun and games
NATO vs Warsaw Pact at the Fulda Gap

Even my own attempt at producing a self-indulgent comic based on our exploits in the Star Wars Galaxies MMO...(PDF dug out of the old SONY Online game forums).

Even though the game will soon have the plug pulled the footprints we leave behind in the digital space will live on...for a bit.

I've rescued the original PDF and made it available here... Orion Outpost Chronicles part 4 - PDF

Anyway back to work.

Minigame...I mean gun

2011-10-17T12:21:00.001+01:00

AD has started some great work on the armaments of the CH47 that will form the first major DLC pack for the full release of Combat-Helo. Each door position will offer a fun interactive activity, usually in the form of throwing out obscene amounts of virtual lead.

For more pictures please see: ADs SimHQ CH-47 blog update thread

Mini-gun, I don't get the mini part though.

NTS Next To Shoot aka TAB targeting

2011-10-15T23:25:00.004+01:00

[NTS] Left Upper button. Next To Shoot is the ubiquitous video game cycle through targets. Or TAB target if you play MMOs.

I've touched upon how radar works in this blog entry from August - Radar - A Discussion

The Apache can automatically selecting priority targets based on some sort of criteria. This short blog post touches on how I've elected to do this. Again if you're familiar with the 1996 classic, Janes Longbow 2 there's nothing unfamiliar here.

The TSD (tactical situation display) collects data from visual cues (look at object), radar and TADS (again look at and store). A linked-list of 3D entities is stored and sorted by range. The list is re-sorted by what type of object it is.

Target object sorting as follows:

Fast Movers
Helicopters
Air Defence with Radar
Air Defence
Armour
Wheeled

Aircraft normally only show up in air targeting modes. The image above has one on the GTM Radar which is a BUG but that helicopter (another Apache) is on the ground.

Then these are sorted by range.

The [Cycle Target] key (default: TAB) steps through the list. This is different to the [Padlock Cycle] key (default: LCTRL F4) which applies to your head view and steps outward through visual targets sorted by range only. Sometimes the nearest isn't closest to the centre of view.

I'll touch on how I've programmed the game internally. A linked list of objects that are picked up in the FCR footprint are added to a TSDcontact list if the entity pointer (an entity is a vehicle) is not already present.

The game maintains separate lists from sensors and a Tactical(Situation Display) list which is used for referencing entities on the TSD. It also allows for messages received by the THelicopter message handler to add entities to the TSD when the player presses the 'ABCC download' button to download shared targets from a shared digital battlespace (fancy name for a simple array). To upload your TSD list you press the 'ABCC upload' function. I will think about expanding this to work on several channels in later versions.

Tactical Sensor Lists

The TSD used in our Apache vehicle is simply an instance of the TacticalSensor class which is used for all AI but the inputs are wired up differently.

These inputs are updated when in use, typically triggered by a player pushing keys. I've colour coded the inpus accoring to type. FCR is radar type area scan, high volume, Orange (HMD) is using the Mk1 eyeball, TADS in blue is an optical sensor (longer range eyeball) and Red is known data from external source, which you can imagine as a radio or some data modem.

As potentially there might be a hundred active AI vehicles in close proximity having all of these using all kinds of sensors, doing lots of volume searches and entity queries is woefully inefficient. Fortunately the natural hierarchical structure of unit can be simply used to make things much more efficient.

Since entities are grouped into Formations which share waypoints and mission targets, they share a common awareness. The same TacticalSensor class we use in our Apache. Only this time the inputs come from the different entities in the formation. Some will have an active sensor system, some are unable to supply input.

They periodically perform a sensor scan (interleaved to spread the load) to refresh their group TacticalSensor list.

Oh NO! The MIG! Target Priority

I'm sorting the linked list when updated based on criteria that I want based on experience from other games of this type. Worked for them, works for me.

In LB2 a Mig was triggered at random if flying over 250 ft. If not spotted quickly it was almost certain virtual death. To give these a high priority I added a Priority field to the SensorClass and arranged the icon IDs (1,2,3,4 etc) so by default the Priority value can be taken from the icon ID then modified later. Now the most dangerous entities can be simply sorted on this field but we could for example assign an entity as a "Primary Target" and add +10 to the Priority to have it automatically sit at the top of the TAB target list.

Very handy for scripting tutorials and the like. For example we can now spawn a virtual waypoint marker on a target range and command the avionics to give top priority.

So whatever the first entry on the linked list is, that's the NTS object, the second in the list would be the ANTS.

PFZs

Another often asked about feature in Combat-Helo is the ability to create PFZs. Which is something that only applies to the Hellfire missile system which is coming in a later update as we've not yet implemented it. However our Tactical list makes this a trivial matter to implement. We have a static list of entities, mouse input on the TSD map and mouse driven events. Everything needed to add PFZs and NFZs.

Correct weapon symbology coming soon(tm)
Whole HMD needs a going over.

Random Pics of the Day

2011-10-13T17:46:00.003+01:00

Starting to feel the pressure now. Both the financial and stress factors are weighing in. Doesn't stop me working but it's hard to switch off. On the business side there's a ton of things on the to-do list, it all eats time taken from production.

Spooky, ok so the lip light isn't actually on his mic.
If it was you wouldn't see this.

Boeing sent me a poster back in 2002, this is a homage to that.

This time with the rear seat.

Taking out bad guys without damaging the good guys is a challenge.
Experimenting with simple TSD display and labels.

On top of this I'm studying some Unity material and shader programming. I could use a beer, a real one.

GROME 3.1 is out

2011-10-13T11:12:00.000+01:00

Quadtree software has released the 3.1 update to Grome.

Grome is a fantastic terrain editor I've been playing with for future enhancements and rolling out a larger terrain systems in the future. If you play flying games and RPGs on consoles chances are you've probably already seen a Grome edited terrain. It's used by nearly every major player in the simulation industry. Incorporating a plug-in system, OpenSceneGraph and now new improved Unity integration.

What's new in 3.1

I'm quite keen to see how it works in the up and coming Leadwerks 3(D) engine which is looking to sport threaded streaming of assets. If this could be incorporated alongside the vegetation system it would be perhaps the most powerful and complete 3D engine for less than 1,000 USD.

Did I mention the FCR offset?

2011-10-11T17:31:00.005+01:00

Remember the spinny radar thingy in Longbow 2? Scan sectors sizes and off-axis settings for the Longbow FCR (Fire Control Radar)? No?

If you look at the heading tape of the screen-shot you'll see in the heading tape the "butt-cheeks" (two Ds back to back) on a heading of 225, off axis by 45 degrees. This indicates the direction the radar is pointing, as the FCR display is 'always up' in GTM mode. This can be a little disorientating and the radar footprint is mirrored on the TSD, this paints a clearer picture of where it's pointing. Failing that you can see the radome outside the aircraft turning as it seeks out the designated offset.

(And why are all our aircraft IDs Z666? We shall never know. If you have a TrackIR and explore the cockpit nooks there's even a Clint Eastwood reference in it).

Radar offset angle is set by clicking on either of the two LEFT RIGHT arrow buttons on the MPD or your designated sensor left/right control input when the FCR is your selected sensor. (If TADS is selected the sensor control steers TADS instead). NOTE: The offset can not be moved while the FCR is active, although you can queue movement by hitting the offset control then quickly cycling the FCR burst key. Got it?

It will be in the manual. Promise.

Vectors - all vectors, no bitmaps

In the front seat, TEDAC view of the FCR

Apache Maintainers

2011-10-09T21:22:00.001+01:00

On the topic of fuel systems, someone shared this video recorded at an FOB. One of the more difficult jobs.

Fuel XFER

2011-10-07T14:07:00.002+01:00

Dull day, so lets post about something most normal people find dull. Fuel flow controls. In the Apache D model this is administered on the FUEL MPD page.

Not much to say about it, I'm bored already. It does what it does. Our Apache has two internal ballistically shielded self-sealing fuel tanks. Fuel can be drawn or transferred from one or the other to adjust weight distribution. Activating fuel boost engages the rear tank cross-feed valves as seen here. Fuel transfer between tanks should normally be left to auto unless you feel the need to play with it. HTR flight model should take account of the weight distribution.

Marching ants

Fuel flow takes about 4 seconds to change, while changing, indicated fuel lines are drawn in high intensity white before returning to green.

The most important button on this page is bottom right [CHECK]. This brings up the a sub version of the page where you set your bingo fuel status if you get an alert reminder in the UFD.

Bingo Time

Award for dullest sim video goes to...."Fuel Crossfeed"..yeah. There it is. It's Friday.

Shaders the old fashioned way

2011-10-06T17:09:00.001+01:00

Yes were still using Notepad to edit them. Well that's not quite accurate, I'm using Notepad++

What's nice about Leadwerks is being able to create a shader to add new effects or change how the engine renders something without anything getting in your way. So when Dave asks for a version of the cubemap that will blend in some particular way it was no problem to quickly put it together. He's doing terrible things to make filthy looking windshields, chrome toggle switches and this rather neat looking rear view mirror.

Who needs fancy wysiwyg editors....well it would be nice sometimes.

Dirty Mirror finish

It's a double rainbow! Testing blending and reflections.

AD posts more Chinook updates at SimHQ

2011-10-04T12:57:00.006+01:00

AD posted more Chinook goodies at SimHQ Link here >>> SimHQ - AD Chinook Update

What am I looking at?

It's a little creepy, crew heads now reflect the pilot helmet sight (PHS) and gunner helmet sight (GHS) Vec2 offsets, so using trackIR, mouselook etc will operate the appropriate crewman head position (with suitable organic tweening). These positions are stored in the aircraft state so will work across all aircraft (AI and player) as well as multi-player. How creepy is that?

"Everyone gets everything he wants."

"All I wanted was a mission,"

"and for my sins they gave me one"

Shot on my iPhone. This is what TrackIR and mouse movements do to the crew head positions.

*edit*

There's a few pages in the system that are informational only, the FUEL page was one, I fleshed it out a bit tonight, adding a working cross-feed system complete with animation (yes the real one does that too). It's lacking the fuel check and bingo settings (to be added later). Setting the bingo stat is part of your start-up checklist, it would be a shame to leave it out.

Combat-Helo Prologue wip Video in HD

2011-10-03T15:23:00.005+01:00

Now available.

*edit* A few additional notes...

The controller setup page shown in this video has a number of devices listed. These are just the ones I had plugged in at the time of recording. All DirectInput controllers should be available, some will have ready to fly config files (most Saitek sticks, Logitech).

I forgot to turn on the post processing effects since I work without them (generates more heat). There is a LOT of changes going on to various sensors and the IHADSS won't be updated to reflect these changes until I've done the MPDs. So please no accuracy police, I'm aware of the various bits and bobs. It's all in hand.

YouTube Link: http://youtu.be/L8AHX8uXHpQ?hd=1
Vimeo Link: http://vimeo.com/29957378

Screenshot of the day

Cleanup in lanes 1,2,3,4,5 and 6 please.

Padlock, shoot, padlock shoot, HMD mode
cleans house at close range , almost too easy

Two years old

2011-09-28T22:56:00.000+01:00

Yippe..the 18 month project is now 24 months old. Horray. Short post but I felt I couldn't let it slip by unnoticed. Especially with all the Tipex (White-Out) all over my Project Planner.

KBU, FCR mode logic

2011-09-22T20:04:00.002+01:00

First screen-shot of a quickly put together KBU (keyboard unit). This is a flat 2D image you click on, taken from the texture used in the cockpit. I wanted to see how good/bad it looked since we don't have time to develop a 3D one.

Clicking on Air Surv will abort current FCR operation
and switch to an active air scan (air surv mode)

The keyboard command list is looking horrible if you want full control over this. The shot cut keys work fine however. I made some tweaks to the heading tape symbols and the Air Surveillance Mode has been adjusted according to recent feedback posted. No sweep indicator is displayed (? is that correct) but the radar is still active. And not NTS or targeting is available. This mode is not available if either crew station has FCR as the selected sight. Either crewman selecting FCR or cycling through HMD/TADS/FCR will cancel this mode.

I made attempts to smooth out the logic for simple joystick control so you can hot key from mode to mode.

FCR Scan and FCR Scan burst will cancel each other out with immediate effect, no waiting for a scan cycle to complete (which is what it did before).

I'll adjust the scale of the FOR box shortly. The dot isn't active yet, will fix that shortly and then I'll correct the cue dots in the HMD,

That will be as much time as I want to spend on the FCR. I think it's not too shabby and does nearly everything it needs to do for now. Completing the command list for the sensors now means I can finish the default control setup for new installations.

For full control on a joystick you need 3 hats minimum.

4 Way Sight Select (HMD, TADS, FCR)
4 Way FCR Mode Select (GTM, ATM, other to come)
4 Way FCR Footprint Set (Zoom, Wide, Medium, Narrow)

There are also keys assigned to FCR Mode Cycle Up/Down to keep the control count down on smaller sticks.

As always if I've got it wrong then please leave some feedback however I'm unlikely to embark on any more major changes for now. Quite pleased with the detail and how it works.

CH-47D Overhead Panel Complete

2011-09-20T17:51:00.001+01:00

Dome light fixture, fist pass on panel illumination

Sensor tidy/fixes today...

2011-09-19T17:59:00.007+01:00

Bored with writing XML code and needing to add missing commands to the master command list so I can complete the default/new install player code. Self review day. This is going over my feature list and checking what's implemented against my much reduced feature list. Sometimes there's a gulf between what I remember I did and what's working correctly. Also a good thing to do on a Monday.

I came across a couple of things I missed...

FCR now tied to Main Bus Electrical circuit (won't operate unless powered)
FCR Burst Mode added
Current sweep angles assigned to Avionic.ScanVolume
Hot keys for setting scan volume (INS,HOME,DEL,END)
Wide, Medium, Narrow, Zoom (accurate terms? on stick marked as WMNZ)
Changing scan volume resets the active sweep.
Commands for FCR and TADS should no longer interfere with each other.
PGUP puts commands into TADS operation mode
PGDN commands operate FCR

And all FCR/TADS commands are now transmitted to the Avionics class via the message queue. Of which there are many.

*edit*

Air Surveillance Mode logic added

Alternate Sensor Bearing shows where the other crewman's
sensors is pointing on the heading tape.

The Alternate Sensor Bearing (small needle), the Pilots MPDs will update the CPGs active sensor position and vice versa.

Now with added "buttcheeks"
(FCR centreline sized large enough to see)

Air search mode completed.

Finally got the colour correct and track count added top right

New MFD buffer export shows image is offset slightly

*edit*

Missing FOR added, looks a bit better

There's supposed to be a way to rotate or offset the scan volume, in LB2 this rotated the wedge. Currently is locked down the centreline. In burst mode the scan line (opps...drawn in default white in this image), makes a single sweep cycle (left/right). And I also missed the call to the field of regard box at the bottom which I'll fix now.

A chunk of fixes today and more things I can now tick off. Air Search and the offset track should be completed tonight leaving the TADS to go over tomorrow and that will be pretty much all the sensor buttons and functions done.

Lip light

2011-09-19T10:27:00.001+01:00

It's early morning and I've not had chance to get much visual work done. Lot of tedious read/writing of XML data but nothing photogenic.

One problem I have testing during the night is doing startups. There are hot-keys for instruments (CTRL I toggles all interior light stations in a flight ready mode) however the lighting panel located by the left hip is near impossible to see.

A SimHQ post pointed me at something unrelated (ground fire acoustic acquisition system) and something I'd heard mentioned before in passing but didn't twig. The mic mounted lip light.

Lip light - 3 bright green LEDs

Activated by a capacitor switch with the upper lip or tongue on the back of the unit.

Writing this blog entry took longer than the implementation. Here's some pics to illustrate my guesstimation of cone angle and colour (I'm told my first colour was too blue-green so here's a more yellow-green that matches the above photo better). The yellow-green mixes with the existing instrument lighting to produce another green. Still a long way off from making "purest green" (Blackadder ref.).

Where are my keys?

With instrument lights, two shades of green

Lighting panel, left hip

So that's lip lights added. Next.

Update from the CH-47D workshop

2011-09-17T16:54:00.003+01:00

I'm busy working flat-out on the Apache and game core, getting it ready for serious playtime. This week I had to rewrite a couple of small classes all eats into the schedule. It's irritating to do because I want to push this into the next phase which is the testing cycle. Meanwhile thousands of miles away (we're a global outfit by virtue of having seats in different continents - and that's all) the Art Department (AD aka Dave) as been busy working in his virtual hanger/cardboard box.

Always a pleasure to see a new batch up update screens first thing on a morning and this morning contained a nice surprise.

The first batches of switches have been added. I think Dave has redefined the role of technical artist since he also went and did the research. And this is the EASY panel. Anyway, here's a breakdown of the main components.

Looking hot. Making the cockpit database is going to to be too :/

Overhead panel

Centre console from pilot side, collective in foreground

Some of the switchology is going to be interesting to do. The crew station intercom of which there are 3 duplicate panels on this console won't have much use in game but could be assigned a switch to station command. We have the crew-chief/ramp gun, left/right door guns and loadmaster as possible player slots.

AN/ALQ-156

Top left on the centre console. Part of BAEs ASE gear (link)

Below this...

AN/ARC-220

HF Aircraft Communications System. 2.0000 to 29.9999 MHz high-frequency range

TSEC/KY-100

Remote Control Unit

Found a diagram of the display board (link).

I don't know what this is for either, yet.

AN/ARC-164

10 Watt UHF AM radio that operates between 225-399.975 MHz and includes independent guard receiver for monitoring (link).

AN/ARC-201

Frequency-hopping, FM communications transceiver. 30 to 87.975 MHz band (link).

The research Dave subjects himself to is for visual accuracy, labels, layout and switch type.

I remembered to add a "reverse axis" options in the quick-start control settings. I got stung by that one before. There's a realism tab for tweaking settings but some more 'eccentric' options will still require a manual edit.

This weekend I'm going over the setup options fixing save/load issues and another pass on the MFDs checking the pages (I found some that link to nowhere, probably scale not set correctly and everything is getting drawn off the page).

You don't see this often, debug landscape texture for
checking distance and movement

At night the menu background switches to a
FLIR mode effect.

Added a 'lip light' so you can see what you're doing in
a dark cockpit (all shadow details on).

Selling out

A t-shirt store will be going up next week so if you want to show a bit of support you can grab one. They are similar to the ones I had made up last year for floor-shows/events but you'll at least get to pick what colour you want. Coming to a blog near you.

The new face of indie game development,
alternate revenue streams, aka merchandise!

All proceeds will go to helping offset development costs plus you get a piece of material with some printing on it. What's not to like? I wear one, now you can too. Plus an exciting new range of cow-wear.

I still have a Microprose F19 Stealth Fighter t-shirt, pink on black. (Why pink? We'll never know) one of the many freebies they would give away in first edition game releases. Hmm, they lost how much?

More Franck Shader Magic - Cone Step Mapping

2011-09-14T22:32:00.002+01:00

A short update tonight. Franck released his conversion of the Cone Step Mapping shader. Now I hadn't heard of this one until he mentioned it. I'd seen POM or Parallax Occlusion Mapping which at first glance this looks very much like it.

This is a flat object with a texture that casts shadows. It uses a pre-computed map and much faster than POM. This is shadows sans geometry. It's pretty amazing actually. I don't have an immediate use for it in out game but I can think of a few areas I wouldn't mind trying it out. Such as the runway border regions and the quilted Chinook interior. Will do some tests in the coming days.

Screenshot from Franck's demo scene

I've been rounding out more mundane GUI code. The artistic concept was to try and capture a 'systems' feel, like that of the fuel system MPD screen with interconnecting lines showing option paths instead of fuel flow. I'm not convinced it works aesthetically but it does the job. Anyway, if you have a hard time with the options screen then heaven help you in the cockpit. I tried to stay away from a full MPD look which was used in GUNSHIP! and I think Longbow 2. Green didn't look so great, orange is our title colour so it had to be orange and something else which is GUI_BLUE. Note the "special tab", you'll only see that with some hardware attached.

AD has been working real hard on the Chinook control panels. He's finding that the texture map is too small to bring out text details which will probably mean breaking it down into more textures. The Chinook is looking like it will be way more detailed and use more textures than the Apache. It could quite possibly be the single worst helicopter we could have chosen in terms of detail and technical difficulty.

*edit*

Using panel drawings as a template mapped to the cockpit consoles. This provides a guide for placement of labels and switches. A most labour intensive task is taking groups of these controls and baking ambient shadows for every single switch onto the panels.

Digital sets like the one with the keyboard below will require an extended version of the TComputer class so it will have a display buffer and can send and receive messages from other parts of the helicopter. Of course it helps to know what the hell it is first :)

Officers Mess

A demo for Ace Combat Assault Horizon appeared today on Playstation Network. I was crestfallen at how awful the Apache was treated. Lovely visuals, but barrel rolls from a hover to evade missiles? I almost cried. As far as my console gaming habits are concerned, this is lined up to be the biggest disappointment of the year just behind Test Drive Unlimited 2.

And finally, I tweeted this earlier but my local airport has some pretty violent cross-winds. We caught the back end of the Hurricane which hit the US east coast and yesterday I hear the unusual sound of turbines screaming instead of the usual reverser roar. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14906539

Great fun. Should have been on my flight when the pilot was doing S bends on landing.

Dum de dum. Monday afternoon.

2011-09-12T15:12:00.002+01:00

Mid afternoon blues setting in. Coffee break and some pics to post, that should kill five minutes.

TADS symbology buffer now has things to render

"Needs more cowbell" (some of you might get that ref)

You might notice the TADS is no longer stuck in that minty flavoured 'night' mode. Turned out that was a by product of me using the wrong buffer (MFDs all have two buffers, one for a video feed and another for symbology but VIDEO has it's own buffer). I was using the raw video buffer on the TEDAC. Took me a few tries to figure out why non of the symbology was appearing.

Boeing trainer press/web photo link

The TADS/FLIR camera rendering will be based on the shaders I did for the PNVS, currently it's just an edge-enhanced image, there's no heat or light mapping applied so it doesn't look as FLIR like as it should. Irritatingly because the camera is attached to a helicopter, small forces in the physics body (vibrations) transmit themselves to the TADS image. It shakes like a son-of-bitch at high zoom. I need to add camera stabilisation to the simulation! Go figure. The alternative is to detach the camera from the helicopter chassis and apply a bit of smoothing, which is easier.

Darn, still got coffee

AD asked me not to post one of these because one of the collectives has yet to be moved to the correct position (I'm left handed so I don't have a problem with it *grin*). He's all over the Chinook like brownout in a sandstorm. Anyway, because it looks so darn good and it will kill another 5 minutes while I drink my coffee here are some of his progress screenshots.

In engine real-time captures

Oh, were're building a weird CH-47/D variant apparently. I hope we can build the door gunner stations and loadmaster hatch to this detail.

Finally after many hours of memory issues and AO burning pretty much every surface has now been mapped.

FXAA 3.11

2011-09-11T13:51:00.000+01:00

Franck Poulain completed his conversion of Timothy Lottes FAXX shader for Leadwerks Engine 2, this brings it up to the same version that I understand is used in Battlefield 3.0.

I've been looking over the firing range with the new full-screen anti-alias shader to see if there are any visual artefacts or performance problems and so far it seems to work great.

Showing solidarity in flag form on this day

Looking over some vertical structures you can see some interference patterns but these are related to cascaded shadow maps.

Apache avionics are not initialised until required
hence the blank displays. One to fix later.

Edges around the canopy look better. The cockpit interior still does not have post processing effects applied but would probably benefit from FXAA, I think the performance improvement would justify a user graphics option to enable cockpit post effects.

Performance hit seems quite small at these windowed resolutions. It's well optimised as it needs to be for consoles which are a few years behind now.

So thanks to Tim at nVidia for publishing the original work and Franck for making the conversion available to the the whole Leadwerks community.

Now if only we can get some pseudo volumetric smoke and the tree LOD transitions smoothed out some more.

Just in ADs CH47 3D cockpit WIP

2011-09-10T19:22:00.002+01:00

AD's been working in the hanger on the CH-47 again and just sent some of the first player cockpit textures, it's a big deal from my point of view as the high detail cockpits are a lot of work....and re-work.

Here's a selection of updates from work done today.

*edit*

But wait there's more....new metal texturing technique, no more photo-textures.

Voting is over, OH-58 Kiowa WINS

2011-09-09T11:10:00.000+01:00

I don't know guys, your love for this helo is misguided.

Humour aside, it was interesting to monitor the vote. The MH-6 Little Bird is the iconic light helicopter made famous by 'war' movies like 'Black Hawk Down', small, nimble and can pack a punch.

The percentage split between the Little Bird and the Kiowa settled in pretty quick, with the Kiowa maintaining 68% on average. To keep it simple, 30% to 70% split in favour of the Kiowa helicopter.

The vote was started as I wanted to gauge the level of interest, at Tricubic there's a desire to add a light helicopter and the MH-6 was at the top of the list for a number of reasons, I'm not a fan of this one but clearly there are a few. More than I thought.

I conclude there's a lot of fine Longbow 2 fans frequenting my blog. I never liked how this helicopter was presented in Longbow. If we do implement such a helicopter at a future date it would have to deliver some new game mechanic.

So if you voted for this (or voted against on principle and didn't like the second choice). Please add your comments below.

Smart auto configuration and selection of consumer flight-simulator controllers

2011-09-07T21:42:00.002+01:00

I've not made a 'serious' programming post in a while so this is my attempt to sound worthy and contribute something that might be useful or insightful (this is an expanded and updated version of a document I posted on Google+ a few days ago).

Introduction

Imagine you've just spent an hour (or five) downloading a new combat flight-simulator, hurriedly gone through the installation process and clicked on the .EXE. There's a pregnant pause while your hard-drive goes bananas loading a series of splash screens before finally presenting a glorious menu.

So you click the FLY button and find yourself for the first time presented with a bit of green at the bottom of the screen, some blue at the top (if you're lucky) and as you touch the controller your viewpoint begins to hurtle sideways or spin around. Worse still, everything seems fine until you try taking off only to discover the throttle is connected to the elevator controls, or the toe brakes are controlling roll.

It's happened to me in any number of simulations and games. Then comes the arduous process of going through set-up screens to set your joystick axis to the correct control and remove your steering wheel assignments. Console games have it easy, just load and go. And that's what I like in my games and sims. To quote someone. "Linux is only free if your time's worth nothing".

Developing on the PC platform is made easier through the use of middle-ware. As is often though, there's little focus on the input interface. How can you handle touch screens, with multi-touch or exotic RTS keypads, 10 button mice, multi-media keyboards and a plethora of dedicated flight simulation joysticks in one easy abstract interface? Some libraries try to tackle these, the cross-platform SDL library does a reasonable job and was used in Combat-Helo until recently.

To ensure everything works smoothly for exotic simulation hardware DirectInput is the way to go but there's always a few small gottcha's if you're engaged in trying to smooth out that end-user experience. Hence this blog entry where I want to share some of the lessons learned.

Enumerating Devices

DirectX provides a mechanism for querying each joystick type, the drviers can specify if it's a gamepad, a steering wheel, a yolk, first person shooter device etc. Well you're running a flight simulation so you might think you can query all devices and look for only those flagged as flight-sticks. Well, wrong. You can but it's not safe to do so. Some joysticks might be dual purpose, the driver author only gets to pick one descriptor. Sometimes they are just incorrect for whatever reason.

Identity Crisis

For example, Saitek drivers for the Pro-flight X65F force sensing HOTAS don't identify themselves as a flight-stick. They flag themselves as a first person shooter device when in reality it's a desk hogging 45 button, 8 axis dual throttle metal monster with an illuminated control panel. I wouldn't be using it in Call of Duty but it's first rate for games like Hawx. I will add that I'm using the stock drivers that come on CD with boxed product and also this is only a concern when implementing auto selection logic.

"Not a flying toy" Saitek X65F 12kg of desk metal

Most sticks I've been testing use DI8DEVTYPE_JOYSTICK (0x14) with a subType of 0x02 but every so often you'll find one that uses an off-the wall descriptor. So this isn't a safe means to pick out a default controller(s).

Below is the contents of a file generated by Combat-Helo after a game device audit during startup (values are in decimal).

Detected devices: Index , Type, SubType, OEM String
0 24 3 3Dconnexion KMJ Emulator
1 20 2 Logitech Extreme 3D
2 20 2 Logitech G940 Joystick
3 20 2 Logitech G940 Throttle
4 20 1 Logitech G940 Pedals
5 24 1 SpaceNavigator
6 20 1 Saitek Pro Flight Rudder Pedals
7 20 1 Cyborg F.L.Y.5 Flight Stick
8 24 3 Saitek X65F Flight Controller
9 21 2 Controller (Aviator for Xbox 360/PC)
END

Compound Problem

Another thing to note is the Logitech G940 is reported as a compound device. One physical plug but is visible to Windows as three distinct joystick devices. If you need to support all the features on these high-end devices then opensource cross-platform libraries like SDL don't cut the mustard at all. Until there's an alternative such as OpenIN from the Khronos group it's DirectInput or partial support.

To make auto-selection of devices and configuration more difficult, both the throttle and joystick of a compound device may be flagged as full featured joysticks. What we don't want is a throttle ending up as the primary controller.

So regardless of the expansive descriptors available to joystick controllers in DirectInput, you can't trust them and will need to rely on a combination of descriptors and device caps enumeration to get number of axis, buttons and force-feedback.

For Combat-Helo what we did was put place joysticks with sub-type 0x02 at the head of a list. Also any devices flagged as the correct type (flight-stick, full featured) would then be added to the head of the list moving the rest down. For each device you enumerate each 'object' on that device, an object is a button, axis, slider etc and often the text string can yield clues. For example an axis named "Throttle". However I've yet to try this on a non-English PC, so it's something to be aware of.

Eventually whatever device is first in the list should be the best all-round first choice from which the users first-time action-mapping can be assembled and saved. After which it can be edited or deleted at the gamers discretion but I hope the first choice was close enough to the mark to minimise those first flight blues.

Use the Force, it is strong and is weak

Force-feedback (FF) axis can be a really good indicator of a primary controller since usually only the joystick will have this feature. You do need to be careful as rumble-pads can look like they have two FF axis, it is conceivable that a flight simulation enthusiasts might have an XBOX controller attached, they certainly are a good analog of the Apache CP/G TEDEC hand-grip.

Suggested implementation

My test system is not typical. My goal was to consider some basic logic to prevent conflict and configure a complex simulation to be ready-to-fly out of the box. Configuration menus offer easy ways to change any conflicts if/when the logic fails.

I want to take this opportunity to thank Madcatz (Saitek UK) and Logitech for their kind assistance and support.

Quick control set-up and edit panel, auto select
chose the compound HOTAS.

Back to school

2011-09-05T01:05:00.002+01:00

(Hmm, not sure I like the new blogger editor, but anyway)

A quick post about what we've been up to this weekend.

I've added some shader effects for the GUI, drawing focus to active elements on screen. Nothing fancy. The joystick / command editor has been fixed in stone, too late to redesign it but it does contain 4 panels (yes a whopping 4 separate pages).

Quick start with major control axis shown as an active display
Command list by category
Axis control per device
Special

The special page is for any joysticks we add OEM support for. Currently we plan to add special support for Saitek LCDs on the X52 Pro and Logitech G940. The cockpit database contains a list of lamps which can be mapped to the G940 indicators, I'll be adding a similar list for some digital values such as torque settings for output to the X52 Pro.

Other hardware will be added when I get units I can tinker with.

This is the last of the major "end-user" areas apart from the mission preview panel.

The config file had more user options added to it.

FCR

The FCR is updating the TSD but I'm not sure if the TSD tracks should fade over time. I will be adding the next to shoot symbology shortly.

I need to fix the DAY/NIGHT settings on the MFDs (brightness works, but the all green mode doesn't).

CH-47 Chinook

AD is back in the CH-47 cockpit with detail on canopy frame and foot controls. We aim to have around 64k polys for our interiors with materials batched efficiently for real-time performance.

The CH-47 presents a bit of a challenge in that it's intended to be a portalised object or POB. Meaning you'll be able to walk from the outside into a detailed cockpit interior and hopefully you won't notice much of a transition.

Force Trim

I had a stab at programming this a few weeks back and I haven't found a method that works in DirectX. There doesn't seem to be a mechanism for setting the centre unless I'm missing something obvious. I don't know how Eagle Dynamics accomplished this with Black Shark. The only effect I tried was applying a constant-force with a magnitude calculated to keep the stick in a fixed position. Since you're not supposed to send force commands too quickly in case it makes the hardware overheat (according to Microsoft's documentation) I was reluctant to increase the stick updates.

I really need to talk to someone who knows about FF joystick programming to get force-trim working properly.

Operation Kickstart

This is the working title for the firing range since we didn't have a handy name for it. Since then I've had a couple of pretty nice suggestions, my favourites being, "Combat-Helo: Nickel Ride*" or simply "Combat-Helo: Gunnery".

*Nickel ride being the name given to a WOC Warrant Officer Candidate's first flight.

That's all for now.

Radar - A Discussion

2011-08-31T16:17:00.010+01:00

I thought I'd do something unusual since the previous blog entry sparked a bit of conversation about radar and capability.

What do we know about the Longbow FCR Fire Control Radar?

The Longbow radar system is the mast mounted dome structure, easily observable (the same dome is also used in the Longbow UTA system for controlling UAVs but for the rest of this entry we'll assume it's housing the FCR) .

The FCR antenna has a mechanical offset arrangement but electronically scans a wedge. It has two primary modes of operation, ground tracking and air search with a number of variations for ground. Other snippets relating to ground modes can be found here.. http://www.voodoo-world.cz/ah64/ah64dl.html

The range for ground tracking mode is fixed at 8km and air search mode is I understand to be half that (inverse square law of radio wave propagation).

Janes Longbow was my bible for a while but clearly the 25km range settings on the radar are an interesting estimation of capability.

Combat-Helo will feature just the AIR and GTM mode and maybe an RMAP mode later if I can mock up something that looks reasonable.

To pick up on ric's comment...

BTW, I remember that when playing both Jane's Longbow 2 and modded (more realistic) EECH that when we lock a target in the FCR the type name of that target ("M1 Abrams" for example) appeared in a upper right display (I forgot that display's name). If this is what happens in real life than there must be some sort of database that stores the radar signatures for all known types of targets. What remains to be confirmed is if this feature (in Jane's Longbow 2 and EECH) is realistic or not?

The upfront display showing the target ID was totally, 100% a game conceit. For which I'm partly responsible for persisting. I spent a lot of time researching for the official EECH game manual and on occasion suggested how to blend authenticity with game mechanics. Remember at the time the bible on the subject was the seminal Janes branded Longbow, so it did share some features. They helped present important information to the player nothing more.

AD writes...

Again it's speculative, but I'm guessing the FCR simply looks at the size of the radar return and estimates a tonnage, then looks for generic vehicle feature returns such as wheels/barrels/turrets etc. Then it compares the feature and displacement returns with a database of generic vehicle types and provides an estimation of what it is.

If the FCR could identify the difference between say, an M1A1 and a T-72, then you'd have the basis of an IFF system. I'm sure the FCR page on the MPD would display different symbology for the two vehicles, or better still, a label, instead of just the generic H symbol for both.

There's a lot of problems with this. Labels are BAD things to have in small letters in a vibrating cockpit. Difficult to read.

I'm a systems guy so I'm in my element here. I built my first home computer at the age of 12 before my school had one. Then at 15 I built a weather satellite receiver complete with software so I could see my country from space. Making boxes talk to each other is something I had fun with at an early age, certainly my parents didn't know what I was up to and since I got teased at school for being a 'professor' I learned to play dumb early on.

With radar, the key to pulling out object details is wavelength, this also limits range and penetration.

Millimetric radar is a good frequency as it can pick out small detail, it's used (for example) at airports for foreign object detection, it can pick out moving objects from the background, sense cloud, rain, fog for weather radar applications. It was also why I wanted a tree/vegetation system capable of collisions over a large distance (to attenuate signal returns realistically).

Inverse square law of wave propagation says energy dissipates with range quite rapidly. With MMW (millimetre wave) radar you need less energy, however atmosphere and terrain adds scattering from water and dust in into the mix and this works in BOTH directions. Different frequencies give different penetration of atmospheric conditions.

Here's a page reference to a book on the subject with a study on medium and freq.

Keep in mind that a lot of signal processing is required because the signal return contains A LOT of information. It's not a black and white picture where you can see a turret, or a wheel. It's a sea of fluctuations that contain everything in-between.

Here you have a radar supplying a stream of data to a frame store.

Just picture what it's doing for a second. An antenna beam sweeps left to right, right to left, at different elevations sending signals returned from backscatter, dust, rocks, metal, walls. Everything without pause.

So you have a frame buffer with a lot of raw data, what happens to it?

A computer running software will filter out a lot of the unwanted bits. Always lagging behind the radar feed. It will search through the frame buffer looking for tell-tales that might suggest that part of the buffer is a structure or has been absorbed by rain, or hit a hard metal entity. Such indicators would come from a list or database, it might be a collection of peaks that in a certain combination like the chemical signatures contained in light. Whatever the format you would have *a clue*. Something software can look more closely at.

Combine it with a number of other clues, you would know the signal strength, the distance, angle, from which you can inference movement, is this a strong metallic object? How tall? Peaks would indicate structure, a combination would be a crib into structure type. Relative height of peaks might yield orientation. No one thing would give you an answer but in combination over seconds of processing you're in a position to generalise IF you have a key. And that key would come from known vehicles.

( I digress: Remember Airwolf's epileptic fit inducing target database search? What was quite funny in that show was that Airwolf would often identify the target incorrectly.)

By simple implication of the physical arrangement and description of function of these kinds of radar systems, you can deduce there is some database used to flag RCS returns as "returns of interest". I don't know if that's a real term as I just made it up, it could equally work in banking.

While it would be possible to include cribs for 'technicals' I'm guessing it would require an expensive engineering program to do this, as a programmer myself such specialist updates can be quite expensive.

But there are inherent dangers in expanding such databases. After all, a civilian vehicle with a large metallic load might conceivably exhibit a threat signature. From a simple back of the envelope cost vs risk factor, I wouldn't authorise cheques for such a program especially in the light of the development of more important upgrades.

I can see you

The current MTADS/TEDEC Arrowhead system yields much improved visual imaging at higher resolution at greater ranges. Imaging can show heat from power lines, people and vehicles. These are much more beneficial in terms of reducing crew risk and collateral damage.

Engagement doctrine usually requires *visual identification* so any tools such as auto classification are simply that, tools. Crews are not button pushing monkeys they are trained to use *all* the tools available to them and communicate with other elements. Professionals.

Game stuff

Last night while developing code to aggregate sensors for the game...this involves making units share an AABB or axis aligned bounding box, which is the sum total of the groups 'awareness' volumes. I discovered the scan volume for the ground radar maximum sweep is the same as the scan volume for air radar. Or so it is in Combat-Helo.

This shared group sensor volume is part of a culling process that occurs over time. If an entity enters this volume, it does not mean it is seen by the group. It only gets added to a list which is later checked for angle and visual line of sight (if applicable). I also take into account how long an object is sighted and this 'confidence' value decays over time. This also deals with entities tested if they happen to pass behind single trees, they don't get removed from the list unless they decay 100%.

Group sensor volume checks are staggered in a fashion similar to how you process cellular automata sand games, not all are processed every single frame but instead are cascaded and prioritised. This way, the number of units with active sensors should scale it up so you can have a rich real-time battlefield of emitters and receivers.

Friend or Foe?

If you look at photos of the Apache flight controls you can just make out the FCR mode selector. The 360 Apple Quicktime cockpit tour of the Mk1 Apache provided by the MoD is where we took our cockpit images. Mason Electric had a PDF brochure of the hand grips but I can't find a working link.

The Apache FCR has multiple modes which I think one was asked about recently...RMAP is a rectangular version of the FCR aids the pilot by adding vertical seperation by arranging tracks in a rectangular format. And probably has a zoom feature too like the fore mentioned F15 ground radar. This was the only FCR mode I was adding for time reasons and I'll create my version of RMAP later.

The FCR as presented in Combat-Helo does come with a FoF mode for rookie gamers (everything colour coded). It's a total fabrication but I do endeavour to add gaming elements for the new to simulation crowd, here it is...

FoF mode active on my test range

It's important not to be exclusive in combat simulations so I don't consider these things as a waste of time. Quite the opposite.

Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies

I'm going to have a little soapbox time since it touches upon some of the above and thanks to a Discovery Channel programme about the Westland Merlin helicopter, a possible lack of hubris with these kinds of technologies.

The issue I have with auto classification/fof assignment in the digital space is seemingly little to no safeguard. Once software has made a decision about a flagged entity and this is passed though a network there's little time or incentive to backtrack. With databases there's always a trail so you can follow all transactions but often they are slow and difficult to get at.

Tests show people are more likely to trust information from a computer. It's on the computer and computers know more than you do, they don't have emotions, ambition, they just take cold hard data, run programs and tell you what you want. They they can't lie.

Right?

Wrong.

Let me tell you a story. Actually a story about a story.

Michael Crichton wrote a book about a dinosaur theme park and like many of his novels featured a theme park where technology is out of control. OK that's a novel turned Hollywood movie franchise, what has that got to do with anything? What elevates Jurassic Park in the sub-genre of "technology gone bad" was the well observed suggestion (and examples are given in the novel) that technology is most dangerous when it gives us the illusion of control. Jurassic Park the novel (not the movie) warns us that computers can deliver perfectly solid 100% accurate information and still lie.

Let me tell you a real story where this happened (but still kind of Dinosaur related).

In 2005 at a Texas oil refinery operated by BP, 15 oil workers were killed when a unit overflowed and exploded. The computers at the time happily reported the fluid level was at the top of the sensor just three meters high in the tank...in fact the fluid level was way above above sensor near the top of the tank, overflowing down a gas vent pipe, past 3 pressure valves, into and filling up another tank where it spewed out into the open air where the highly volatile liquid landed and ignited on a nearby truck. Massive explosion, resulting in loss of life. The sensor gauge was accurate, the computer displayed the level as recorded without any indication of danger.

(Dinosaurs = oil, yes? In case the link wasn't clear.)

Russian Helicopter Radar

A final note about the Russian use of ground radar on their helicopters.

The Russian Mi-28N was said to be equipped with both millimetric and centimetric radar which added to weight and complexity. The centimetric FH-01 was housed in a radome similar to the Longbow and mast mounted on a Ka-50-N "Nochnoy" (night).

http://www.military-today.com/helicopters/kamov_ka50_hokum.htm

I had some photos from a Paris air show showing what was probably a mock-up of the two radars, if I find them I'll post them here.

Sanding off some of the rough edges

2011-08-26T23:34:00.006+01:00

Really busy week going finding lots of loose ends and fixing them. The switch from SDL to DirectInput was made flawlessly improving hardware support no-end. General GUI tweaks were made to make things more consistent. I found a lot of unused TSD code which used an orthographic camera render, makes me wonder how much more there is lurking.

FCR symbology had a pass (Dave sent me an updated vehicle database but I'd lost it in a sea of desktop files, now resolved). It was good to see the symbols popup. A range selector is missing, that's now added to the frighteningly long list of immediate issues to resolve. At least they are small things that can be ticked off rather than whole new features requiring weeks of work.

An early scoreboard / laptop terminal will be added shortly, that's the final game glue component needed for a firing range game cycle. It bookends the flying part in an open-ended way and now the FCR/TSD glyphs are populated and we have all the necessary object data in our database I can go ahead and work on this.

Would this be classed as a wheeled vehicle
or air defence unit?

Sorry, graphics from my programmer art sand-box
* not a production map *

Calibrating ranges and checking LOS by placing
entities in the game world. 8km max

One major issue still to resolve, the physics / flight model integration.

I had chance to study a lot of future campaign and AI code and have some exciting ways to get more bang per buck using 'sand'. Or rather the way sand games optimise performance, the connected node structure of the campaign lends itself perfectly to some of the methods used in these games.

Potentially a lot of air search radar units can impact performance which will be vital to deal with when it comes to scaling up the engine for season 2.0

The GUI could use some more spot graphics, medals and rank insignia come to mind.

"We have cows" - Pure3Ds Cows liven up
my test zone. I am pleased with Cow.

And Finally

During the summer holidays my kids and I had a pet project to create an iPhone game in 48 hours. They hadn't seen much of me sadly, but I wanted to give them the taste of the creative joy that comes with making digital content. We have a working game with a lot of place holder graphics and some amusing encounters. It was a ton of fun to just create something from nothing in such a short amount of time, it's something you don't get on projects that last 2 to 5 years. We licensed music and some sound effects from the BBC, some effects were created Foley style (such as 1 pounds coins being dropped onto a pillow for the purchase sound).

It's really quite a nice mobile game which will probably end up on the Apple store when the girls finish their Manga characters. The bear looks fantastic, I'm really proud of the effort they made.

I think I was able to get across the idea of 'gamestate', device centric input (fat thumbs in small spaces = less stuff), sprite atlases, legal issues about assets and new swear words when something doesn't compile. Another important idea I try to convey is that of speed or flow, a game maintains a rhythm or cadence that is pleasing in human speech even if you don't understand the language. So we removed / rejected ideas that interrupted the natural flow except where demanded. If I ever get to afford to buy an iPad (replacing the sofa which has holes in it has priority) it should play quite well for a throw-away game that took just a few days to make.

King in 100 Days - Choose Your Next Move

King in 100 Days - Mercs from The Village

Game progression - Ranks

2011-08-12T11:58:00.005+01:00

Just added these to the game. As part of your player profile progression that will at some point be flagged as active, both you and your AI buddies will be able to rank up through career milestones.

What does it mean? Not a lot, shiny new stars to polish, the threat of constant ridicule and at the upper tanks, the opening up of the campaign options that allow you to call in 'specials' which I won't go into except it involves asking high-command for aid which will 'draw an aid card' from the deck. I considered gating mission editing for non-player crews until your 2nd or 3rd promotion but tossed this away as I don't want to turn it into a career climbing game. It's more decorative with a bonus mid-way for working hard.

AI crews on the other hand will have attributes that reduce the time required to find and engage targets (through the use of a metric I term "track_positive", a magnitude which is a combination of accumulated time from a sensor or direct line of sight contact provided by the TSensor class which degrades through loss of contact). As they rank up, they should find and engage quicker with improved survivability.

Player profiles and editing is almost completed, division patches added so far...

1st Cavalry Division
1st Infantry Division
1st Armored Division
2nd Infantry Division
10th Mountain Division
12th Combat Aviation Brigade
21st Cavalry Brigade
82nd Airborne Division
101st Airborne Division
404th Air Brigade
74th Flying Tigers

More to come later, I have patches and suggestions from the community that still need to be added.

The FCR is semi-operational thanks to the TSensor class which works efficiently for player and AI entities. This works equally well for line of sight as well as active sensors, the slow part is grabbing all viable entities in the sensor volume, this list is cached and can be later scanned for more precise or direct visibility checking. There's a player "padlock" mode (F4 default key) that will move your head to the nearest viable target in your "current field of view" only. With the cannon slaved to your HMS it can be all too easy to burn through 1200 rounds of 30mm. It's not uber accurate since you need to stabilise your flight path and give it time to settle over the area of the target. But any shells that miss tend to do AOE damage anyway. Will have to fine tune the damage and/or tie it to difficulty settings. Putting three pickups next to each other and hosing them with a 10 round bust will wreck one and seriously damage the others (a secondary explosion typically wrecking the next nearest one).

Couple of important things I still need to do, initial joystick configuration since I don't want folks having to use XML editors and I've broken a particle shader somehow (need to investigate that).

Once I've got the vehicle classes in the database (yes, somehow we missed that vital bit of information) the FCR should be classifying returns correctly then we can upload them to the TSD.

Update on new video

Sorry about the delay on a new video showing the firing range, it is coming but I hope you appreciate not a priority right now. Just rushing to tick off more features so I can get a functional build ready.

And finally...

2011-08-02T17:35:00.001+01:00

Some pictures from the firing range "Operation Kickstart" (working title). Here I'm using the numpty targeting padlock mode, it's non too accurate if you're moving fast.

Padlock steers your head towards the selected target, if the gun is slaved to your HMS then pretty much where you look and pull the trigger 30mm will rain down (within constraints of your head and cannon). Labels optional.

Lets start with the old Duke at your staging field.

Leadwerks does trees, helo killing trees

Testing structure damage

Cannon depleted, lets head home

Screenshot of the day

2011-08-01T15:43:00.001+01:00

Continuing the erroneously titled screenshot-of-the-day weekly spot, I present some images I just pulled from my programmer art test area with all the graphics settings turned up a notch.

We own the night, or at least rent it

This is the detailed external cockpit view, working gauges

We have an anaglyph shader somewhere too

Tank park for gunnery testing

A hidden game exit portal

"Black Helicopter"

RTS anyone? Lets me visually inspect splash damage.

I'll be testing the structure demolition in the firing range production map shortly, more screen-shots will follow later.

Collapsing Structures

2011-07-31T18:12:00.002+01:00

Since this recording was made, rubble models have been restored so the ground level debris is looking as it should.

Just a few more FX states to add (fire and flammables where indicated) and then pretty much 98% of game entities (other than trees which we can't do anything about) should be destroyable to some degree.

With visual settings turned up a notch

Night fishing

I'm in deconstruction - Structure Removal

2011-07-29T23:08:00.003+01:00

Structures database is now installed. Currently going through the damage functions making sure structures can take enough of a beating from thirty mike mike. Materials having different properties require slightly different effects. Some entities will explode, some crumble, some give off secondary explosions. Fuel storage tanks when ignited should destroy any nearby lightweight vehicles or structures.

For testing I got make a new fast loading playground and recreated some scenes from a golden oldie, Novalogic's Comanche Maximum Overkill. Again forgive my programmer art/map design skills, they do what I need them to do.

Far too much fun. I'll get the bulk of this finished over the weekend. Some of the effects I want to achieve is a simple building collapse into dust (vertical movement into the ground masked by emitters and covered with a rubble mesh). I put in a few chimney stacks to see what I can do with those.

The gas station (we call them petrol stations or BBQ centres) is going to be a little tricky as like a lot of the more complex models in Combat Helo, they are reduced to single meshes for performance reasons. We had a discussion about blowing holes in mud compound walls and making them persistent, meaning a damaged wall will stay damaged for the duration of the campaign. What makes this tricky is that these walls are 500 instances. Internally the graphics card has one wall and draws the same geometry many times in different places. And variation in such structures has to be handled at the vertex shader level using some parameter that is unique to each of these 500 wall copies. With the Leadwerks engine you have two things you can vary, the vertex colour, and vertex alpha (one thing if you want to be pedantic). So we're going to implement a vertex shader to put 'breaches' into wall sections based on bit patterns in the mesh colour.

The idea being, rather than the literal approach in FPS games (hole at the position of missile impact) we'll adopt a tactical approach. A tactical breech will occur at a fixed location but enables a point of entry/escape in what would otherwise be static geometry. Functionally the same.

Scoring

Scoring (yes post mission scores just like in the old days, when I didn't have grey hairs) are going to be calculated from the structure values of buildings/vehicles along with realism settings and mission difficulty. With deduction for ordinance expended and mission outcome.

Also I want to finish up the player edit dialogue this weekend (dedicated to getting the closed beta ready in August).

Have a fun weekend.

*update* AD has been working on special destruction objects.

Quick update

2011-07-28T17:04:00.000+01:00

I added ADs new vehicle database, he added some fields which will be great to use later. Some of the effects didn't scale correctly when using the data so I'm in a process of tweaking the effect elements as I come across them.

And just this minute I took delivery of the structures database so will begin adding that now. Buildings will have to collapse into a lot of dust and smoke, not so much fire. We have some rubble models that I'll try and blend in with the building destruction.

Manuals, key bindings and more

2011-07-26T11:48:00.001+01:00

Organising the key bindings and adding missing functions. Adding these to the game manual as I go. Six down, about 100 to go....*sigh*

*update* Now up to about item 30 in the command list, new combos and logic for snapping to MPDs and back again. Much smoother and logical command key flow. Shneiderman's Golden Rules of Interface design serve as helpful guidelines for putting together any kind of software interface. The main ones being reduce short term memory load (by chunking), consistency in command grouping and short-cuts for advanced users.

The vehicle database is now being loaded, still to do, put in db lookups where needed (during damage updates and effect triggers). I'll finish that in the morning and hopefully we'll have the structures database ready to include soon after. That will stop things like barns and roads exploding. I promised a video of some pyrotechnics and this will go some way to make it a bit more logical. No video till I'm done with this weeks job schedule, also I want to do a more cinematic weapon cam.

Headtracking with padlock view is quite a powerful way of gunning targets, look at an object, hit padlock, line up as required and rain down some 30mm till either you overshoot or the target is destroyed.

Gobed - Game object editor

2011-07-26T02:16:00.001+01:00

A tool to let us tweak settings in game on the fly has now been passed to AD for setting up all the necessary data for the firing range. I have a very busy week ahead putting in a number of features needed to get the game ready for the first closed beta testing.

I got the go-ahead to start updating the flight model with the current FM code from the test-bed, it feels very stable, Fred added a function to write out data for analysis, so even if the instrumentation is faulty there's some virtual flight recorder data to examine. HTR has proven to be a predictive flight model, behaviour in the flight model being later observed in a real helicopter. Looking forward to getting this bedded down. I'm sure there will be a lot of tweaking to do later.

The official web site still has a mid 2011 release date on it which I think is a little optimistic unless you consider closed beta a release (unless it escapes). Someone needs to take these dates around the back and given a good seeing to with a cricket bat.

AD proposed we call the firing range Operation Kickstart which prompted a round of YouTube viewings of the BBCs Junior Kickstart programme and the amazing antics of champion Dougie Lampkin.

Achievements - the things you didn't know

2011-07-24T17:18:00.000+01:00

While putting some of the player recording keeping together I was debating adding achievement records. While you might think they are throw-away pop-ups, even to the point of being annoying, what you might not know is that in the console world these systems are rather sneaky ways of gathering information about player habits.

They tell a publisher how long people play games, what mode of play they prefer, how far they progress, what sort of game mechanics they adopt and much more. This data is automatically uploaded and can be mined for all kinds of information that go some way to shaping the sort of games that get made.

It's all good clean data that's of more value to the likes of SONY and Microsoft than it is for bragging rights.

Oh, I just unlocked an achievement, "Time Waster - For blogging instead of getting on with some real work". Hope my boss doesn't see that one.

Player profiles

2011-07-20T23:38:00.001+01:00

Following on the work to add more of the elementary game components, player profile data is loaded at launch. This stores career values like:

Name
Rank
Squad patch
Last map loaded.
Flight time

Not much else yet. Tomorrow I'll finish off the kill counts, score etc. That needs to go into the class dealing with weapons fire I think, need to chew on that. My early diagram says player kills are registered post flight as part of the mission debrief but it's possible for the player to avoid the debrief in an open ended environment.

I stole eight US division patches (1st Cav, 1st Infatry, 2nd Infatry, 10th Mountain, 21st Cav, 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne), there will be a few more to go in.

Fixed some command console issues, also I like to have the '/' slash key ready to take a command so fixed that up. Currently it's the only way to set altitude bugs till I get a working Keyboard Unit into the cockpit.

Also added some fade in/out callbacks for special effects and scene/mode transitions.

I will try and encrypt player data to prevent casual 'cheating'.

Horse before the cart

2011-07-19T14:51:00.002+01:00

Just to show the standard game menu which has only just been added. You'd think it would be one of the things you might put in first?

A quick tour, of the game start-up. The client application will load the last session map (or default) and position the camera over your last location (base object if that data marker is available). If no base data is present it defaults to the player start location as written out by our map editor.

Currently there is no campaign data for the firing range (never needed it till now) so no helicopter or pad information otherwise those pads would be populated by Apaches or Chinooks.

On the main menu we have the thumping background music as previously heard in earlier videos and a Predator drone style orbit camera with desaturated video and video line effects going on. We could probably put in some HUD effects for extra presentation points even moving the camera focus from target to target across the map (e.g. below).

My aim was to try and pay homage (rip off?) the old Janes style base menu screens which were spatially compressed to fit many base features into a 640x480 screen. When you do this in 3D it looks ridiculous if you have to PLAY in it. But what will be added later is a shortcut, click on the hangers or aircraft to jump to that location (after triggering the first menu item).

I have the campaign save state to do so once that's done the first option in the menu should change to "Continue". Selecting the first option will always zoom you down into the player controller (little guy) who's still looking a bit strange (cuboid with a ball for a head).

Also fixed, Apache weapon hot keys, broken Apache exit (slight co-ordinate mis-calculation).

Audit time

2011-07-18T09:49:00.000+01:00

After a quick review of what's to do prior to closed beta release for the firing range...this is a subset of a larger list but represents the most significant.

Initial user settings and hardware detection / configuration.
Overhead menu for options and mission loading.
Progress bar scene load (game will appear to hang when in fact it's still loading data).
Manual cockpit view panning and seat adjustment (offset).
Crew model adjustments.
Advanced flight model update.
Landing gear dynamics.
Exotic rockets warheads.
Stores jet.
All human crew speech (recordings), will substitute with text messages for now.

I skipped a ton of small changes, things like missing command key assignments which can be done quickly in a a couple of passes.

The tools for the databases I fell down on, I gave them to someone to fix but they didn't do it, that's my responsibility for not pushing as hard as I should have.

The timing is good since starting this Monday I now have a longer working day. Working to crunch favours my personal work style; Just-in-time panicking. There's a ton of things I'd love to improve but for now it's just good enough and there will be time to perfect these things later.

There's some obscure avionics logic bugs that are hard to track down, modal lockouts relating to weapons mostly, if I had to do it again I'd use bit fields instead of nested IFs.

Screen-shot of the day

2011-07-15T17:51:00.000+01:00

Shouldn't blow stuff up in your face. Player damage is being recorded by not yet actioned.

G940 now with LED control

2011-07-13T23:27:00.001+01:00

Today I added some code to apply any OEM specific support in our DirectInput controller DLL. Here is a desk photo of the G940 throttle unit with the buttons cycling through each colour (green, amber, red, off). I had some link issues with Logitech's supplied LIB and I hope it's just confined to the debug symbols (turning them off fixed the link error).

Tempting to program a game of Simon for it.

The force-feedback functions are done but it's worth mentioning that there's a gulf between a powered joystick and simple force-feedback. What I'm finding is that the range of powered motion doesn't always match the full range of motion in the joystick. Those mechanism are typically designed to apply force sensations for gaming purposes. I had high hopes that such devices could simulate a force-trim system but not all devices are created equal. They can approximate to varying degrees.

If you're in the market for a new HOTAS and considering one of these for a helicopter simulation then I suggest a forum search for Black Shark players and the G940. I'm personally torn between non-FF and this device. The lamp buttons are kind of cool but presently there's no way to link them to game values.

In Combat-Helo, the virtual cockpit data contains information about switches that are considered lamps, there's logic to switch lamped buttons on events. This is an obvious place to add a hook for a devices 'lamp' list to illuminated cockpit switches. And I could add some fake ones for RWR warnings, it should be quite quick to implement that way.

Finally I'm able to map the funny guarded "arm" switch on the Saitek X65F with this new wrapper, that joystick has 50 mappable buttons alone, never mind the POVs and axis. It works fine alongside the G940.

Other news. It's almost time for another progress video. There's some niggling issues with the rocket aim to sort out, when I'm happy with the rockets I reckon it's time to show off some firepower.

If you have some cool non standard hardware device that we can support in Combat-Helo then email richard at tricubicstudios dot com.

DirectInput - Logitech G940 support

2011-07-03T15:40:00.001+01:00

Logitech have been really great in offering some hardware support, enabling me to add force-feedback into Combat-Helo. So thank you to Logitech for that.

Force-feedback support was not planned for first release. We were not using DirectInput, I had spent a time working on improving a cross platform library which on the Windows platform used SDL (Simple Direct Media Layer). This has a number of caveats, namely support for limited number of axis per device and originally only 16 button support (which was extended to 32). Some throttle axis were not recognised under SDL due to the way the manufacturers drivers sample down the input mapping to fit the Windows Media library which SDL uses. If a HOTAS has 16 axis and you can only choose 5, some are going to get missed. It was going to be a problem later and I knew it.

Two things were going to happen, either I had to write a DirectInput interface or wait for the Khronos group that oversees the OpenGL specification to introduce their own cross-platform input/haptics library. Since the latter didn't look like it was happening anytime soon the former seemed inevitable.

Then someone on SimHQs forums asked a question about force-feedback support and in particular drew my attention to the G940. Let me quickly explain something about how helicopters with flight control systems work....

The cyclic (joystick) control commands the main rotors to provide more lift in the direction you move it (keeping it simple here, there's a whole can of physics whoop-ass behind this). To maintain a forward airspeed you might be required to physically hold the cyclic in one position for a length of time. With normal PC joysticks, those with strong self-centring springs this is impractical. Not only is it fatiguing to hold something against a strong force for any length of time it's not terribly realistic.

Since I tried to design the game to be adaptable to be playable on a wide variety of controllers, from XBOX 360 joypads (twin thumbsticks) to full floor standing cyclic replica controls (such as those created by Komodo Simulations Ltd.) a common solution was to implement a software trim system that was invisible to the end user. Auto-Trim would covertly position the virtual helicopter cyclic back to the centre position over time and part of the advanced flight model (AFM) provided by the HTR flight physics engine.

Then there's the manual trim option for joystick hardware that can provide either an electric clutch or force-feedback to hold the stick in place. This is where we run into problems using a library like SDL. It doesn't work too well here either.

It was the last straw. Time to make the change. Sadly I've been here before, MinGW (among the fastest compilers made) hates me and never liked compiling DirectX headers and linking the 3rd party libraries. So what I did was create a DirectInput interface using a DLL in VisualStudio2010. Now all advanced hardware is being detected, including 3DConnexion's Space Navigator 3D mouse which is a brilliant navigation device.

As it happens...

The provided software for the G940 installs an SDK for accessing extended features of the hardware.

What extended features? The split-throttle unit has 8 LED buttons (as it happens there are 8 bits in one byte). A small library is provided to Get/Set the red and green LED status as two single bytes. If both red and green bits are set you get orange. And you can remove the caps and put your own legends under them. Seems like a good idea to add warnings/status light mapping to these switches.

I'm just stoked that the problem of full input mapping is sorted. I'll be adding more of the force-feedback functions to the DLL over the next few days among some of the other avionics features that are currently being finished.

Leadwerks 3 wip on iPhone

2011-06-29T10:37:00.000+01:00

Just something cool from the blog of Leadwerks CEO Josh Klint, an early view of Leadwerks Engine 3 running on the first of several mobile platforms. OpenGLes2 seems to be able to manage the more advanced shaders quite well. Android and Mac cross-compilation too. Being able to cover these platforms in the non too distant future is quite exciting.

Blog entry here...
http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/blog/1/entry-674-multiplatform-madness/

AD updates his diary on SimHQ

2011-06-14T10:59:00.000+01:00

AD added some screen-shots of new assets and general polishing that's going on for the USA firing-range facility being built as a pre-pay beta/support training/prologue release mini-game thing.

You can read it here...

Oil pipeline and animated pumps

Particle Ribbons

My news is more technical. However I've been working on my own particle system that will serve to improve rocket motor smoke and as a side-effect will (later) work as a backbone for an imposter/3D particle cloud system and possibly even dynamic ground vegetation. I'm really pleased with results so far.

Particle ribbon - 75m long smoke trail

The issue with most particle emitters is that objects travelling at really high speed (several hundred meters per second) move so far between frames that smoke particles can't keep up, leaving large gaps especially when viewed at a perpendicular angle. This system is more in-line with how AAA games solve that problem by filling in the gaps between frames.

Advanced Flight Model

Also the advanced flight-model has had a lot of love and is feeling really nice. Fred has done a great job. Some issues relating to anti-torque control and stabilisers to resolve but I'm really pleased with it. It's certainly responsive to small inputs, to get the absolute best flying experience I would recommend a full sized helicopter cyclic replica. Given the amount of controls on a real Apache cyclic any advanced HOTAS comes highly recommended. Although an XBOX joypad still works we'll need to fix up some damping.

Some details need to be worked out on migrating the new flight model into the main project source. The engine instruments need to be hooked into the FM power-plant outputs as well as hooking up the inputs.

It's all one step closer to the testing phase.

Screenshot of the day

2011-06-09T13:10:00.001+01:00

Time for another one of these filler posts. Hey, you don't have to read'em but I have to keep posting or I begin to lapse.

Spent the morning testing the new Leadwerks Engine 2.43 update which improved weapons fire by having collision hulls generated at load time. And a problem with recursive AABB bounding box calculation. AOE weapons use bounding boxes to begin damage testing.

Problem with clustering small objects such as rockets so close together in a scene with a large camera range are the z-buffer errors that arise, these appear as clipping or z-fighting. What I've done to mitigate this is apply a proportional z buffer offset to 'enclosing' entities.

float dist = length(modelvertex.xyz - cameraposition ) / 512.0;
float z = DepthToZPosition(gl_FragCoord.z);
z = z - dist;
gl_FragDepth = ZPositionToDepth( z );

This takes the distance from the vertex and camera, then applies this as an offset to the depth buffer. It's useful only for decals or large hulls, any error in overdraw is masked by camera distance. Annoying stuff like this takes time away from game internals but z-fighting bugs me even more. There are still parts of the Apache that exhibit this, the glass parts of the TADS for example but you only notice them with the night vision system.

*update*

US road-markings...

If you have access to BBC iPlayer....

2011-06-09T09:27:00.001+01:00

Our War - 1. Ambushed

Concerns 3 Platoon 1st Battalion Royal Anglian regiment in Helmand province 2007. Using their own helmet cams the MoD granted the BBC permission to use their footage in this uncompromising account.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b011vngx/Our_War_Ambushed/

For those without BBC iPlayer access (because to the BBC the world wide web doesn't actually mean world wide) you might find this available as a torrent somewhere.

Rocket Man.....

2011-06-06T17:32:00.001+01:00

...burning out his fuse up here alone. Or something like that with apologies to Elton John.

I'm having problems sourcing decent internal and external 70mm rocket audio FX. Going quietly insane browsing online videos with enough quality, no music or talking, background noise. Might have to see about recording something, internally its similar to someone banging on a metal shutter.

Made some big improvements to stores loading, adding of preset load-outs and I nudged one of the shorter hydra rocket types so it sits forward in the M261 pod to make them visible (to facilitate zone loading).

First attempt at rocket motor burn effect

Wind - 5MW generator turbines

2011-06-05T17:51:00.001+01:00

AD has been tinkering again. He's been making noises about wind-farms on and off for a while and surprised me with this one today.

These are US sized, 80 meter tall 5 megawatt wind generators complete with rumbling wind audio effects, anti-col lights and animation of course. Can't express enough how massive these are, such structures fill up screen real-estate economically which has traditionally made them a background object of choice for racing games (along with Ferris wheels and Space Needles).

Here in Yorkshire we have quite modestly sized wind-farms which caused some issues with radar returns at RAF Fylingdales if memory serves.

My first attempt at flying through the blades in the AH64D wasn't a great success. AD broke up the model to allow individual blades to come off when damaged.

Headtracking Software

Cyclic brought to my attention some alternative head tracking software: FaceTracknoIR

I'll be investigating how we can include this alongside other input devices. I like this one as it's within my budget (free with optional donation).

Alternative hardware we were looking at was Kinect for hand-tracking for operation of virtual MFDs, at least until the "non-commercial" nature of Microsofts Kinect SDK came to light. So until there's clarification on Microsoft's SDK usage, plans for virtual cockpit operation via Kinect will be shelved.

APKWS - Laser guided Hydra rockets

2011-06-04T16:24:00.005+01:00

We've discussed this before and is something I might add to the line-up of available munitions after the Hellfire.

http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/apkws-ii-hellfire-jr-hydra-rockets-enter-sdd-phase-02193/

I was scratching my head over the launch order of Hydra rockets but found a post at a military photos website.

Hand typing all these position offsets within the pod was a bit of a pain. A certain amount of trial and error was involved. These will only be visible in the pods if Max Object Detail is turned on in graphics settings. As they are I'm not fond of having them in the tubes due to potential scale/fp issues later. But I needed the offset data for the ballistics.

MPSM almost largest of available 70mm rockets

Not a loadout you would see, 19 Illumination rockets

*edit* Photo added for comment below...

FFAR Launch

Update for this week

2011-06-03T23:20:00.001+01:00

You can tell it's been a busy week since my blog update frequency dropped. Usually a good sign that lots of cool stuff is getting done. The tool-set has some save problems to be fixed this weekend. The biggest mind bender has been the math behind trajectory solutions both predictive (against moving objects) and static. I'm quite impressed by how much of this had to be solved by the lead Longbow 2 programmers amongst all the other things they had to contend with. You can research these things on-line, Wikipedia is often a good first look but once you throw moving helicopters into the mix it gets complicate fast.

This week we have laid foundations for content tools, auto-update software, added the FFAR rockets (still working on these) and the ballistics solver. Looking through the source there's also the cubic spline stuff for multi-player positioning which is now in the main project but awaiting interface between that and the Raknet network library.

Pylons which carry munitions under the wings got their elevation code so they track up and down a small amount to help stabilise rockets during launch. DoF was also tweaked, something I'll use for screen-shots and vids (CTRL X to toggle).

Working on rocket trails and zones. Once that's taken care of there's the remaining two HUD modes and the advanced flight-model to finish. Once those milestones have been reached it's time for polishing prior to first stage testing.

It's been a lot of fun working on this, never get tired of tooling around at tree-top height. I will miss working on it when it's over.

One last thing, AD made a short video of the Firing Range map (still un-named) which a nice lonely piano piece. The calm before the storm.

Back-end tooling

2011-05-30T15:45:00.004+01:00

This week saw some changes to the flight model test bed, fixes for the helmet mounted display, changes to how the mask is positioned to allow for custom sizes and the class for handling FFAR rockets is being added. This last part raised some issues with different warheads doing slightly different kinds of damage and how different objects should reacted to these forms of damage. It was clear the object database file needed population. As much as I love punching in numbers for hours on end (no not really) it made more sense to give the job to someone else.

I finally got off my bottom to start writing some simple C# tools to facilitate content production starting with the vehicle database. Data is stored in a localised development database then exported to the game. There's quite a lot of data to add with regard to crews, sensors (line of sight) and weapons. For now this is enough to get some calculations in for armour penetration which I need to test the different FFAR rocket warheads. Dave expressed an interest in ricochets which is doable since at every impact we know the amount of energy and angle of impact. I'll stop short of thermal damage for now. Most ballistics and armour penetration math comes from (again) Physics for Game Developers which lists some coefficients for common shell sizes. As we want to include asymmetric protection in our simulation, tank armour is weaker at the rear or flanks, we need to express this data as a coeff modifier in the database.

Mk1 vehicle data editor -

While building the campaign database it became apparent that connecting maps would be possible with an additional field to index which map each campaign element belongs to (e.g vehicle groups and strategic nodes). It wasn't something I considered as production was focused on a single map. Since maps take so long to hand craft splitting regions into discrete maps wasn't in the design document. Longbow 2 divided up the terrain dataset into a sliding map arrangement which is a bit different. The option should be there to allow us to load in the next map over when crossing a map border (or trigger zone) at the expense of having a long load screen. I'm not going to add this but I will leave open the possibility to go down that route should we want to add DLC to expand existing campaign maps. Ideally we'll end up with a better version of the engine in 12 months time which can stream in additional map data seamlessly.

*update*

Game launcher/auto-updater. Need to sort out the server requirements but it shows promise, better than other off-the shelf solutions I've tried. There's news, serial number and other elements to add.

PNVS - short video

2011-05-22T15:24:00.002+01:00

Short video showing the PNVS, mostly complete, some level balancing to do which will wait till testing.

http://vimeo.com/24074674

*Edit*

Tinkering with the PNVS/HMD mask today to fit symbology and again one of those quirky realism vs. expectation problems became apparent.

Looking down the HMD egg with video on, the video underlay appears as a slightly ill-fitting rectangle within the near circular lens.

To borrow a crude diagram...

Which looks like a family slide-show thus...

This looks odd without graphics for a surrounding combiner lens frame which is something I'm resisting. A recent AAA console game had this which might look cool but blocks visibility. A more rounded image is better on my eyes (see below). I really prefer my original one though.

PNVS, programmer now very satisfied

2011-05-20T23:30:00.002+01:00

I have a terrible head-cold and ache all-over so not in the mood to sit at my computer for much longer, on the whole there's no real visual difference you'll detect in the PNVS in this re-write today.

I found a texture output channel Leadwerks only uses for Global Illumination (emissive alpha), we don't need GI so I hijacked this to store heat-map information. This is normally invisible and can only be viewed when rendering a copy of the gbuffer (or small rectangular area) via a PNVS post shader. This is hiding heat information in the scene which is then made visible when writing a mask or rectangle over the buffer using the PNVS shader.

Heat maps can now be added to smoke and flame effects, these should work for TADS, NVG, PNVS rendering without special treatment. Which is what I wanted in the first place but couldn't easily, the Leadwerks pipeline is a little cramped at this point and I felt it was important to do this in a single pass for performance reasons.

This also works with any shaped mask and works flawlessly with GLOW maps (emissive textures used for headlamps, instrument lights etc.), these don't use their own alpha channel. Only issue is the instrument symbology which uses this alpha channel to mask off video underlays on the MPDs, this results is symbology showing up quite bright in close up external views (which just looks pretty but not intended).

One thing still to do, calibrate the mix of background and heat-maps to balance illumination in total darkness.

This week saw a fair amount polishing to view system, two different camera motion systems and more weapons tweaking. Camera motion based on Cubic motion conveys smooth formation flying, since posting a short demo video on Vimeo I've since changed it so the motion is based on the 2D motion of the tracked object in the frame so there's less 'wobble' if it's flying towards or away, and plays 'hard to catch up' if flying across your point of view. Works remarkably well. The other camera motion setting will be good for weapon cams where short attack and decay vibrations convey kinetic energy.

AD set about the tree normal problem, creating a new set of trees to experiment with along with custom billboard models. If you see strange looking elf trees over the next few days don't be too surprised. Dave spent some time playing World of Tanks which inspired some ideas on destructible environments. Completing a building in rubble model that I hope can be re-shaped to fit small models when they are flagged as destroyed. We can use the FX system to mask the transition with debris and dust.

Heat maps now a post-effect, making invisible buffer information visible

Terrain is too dark, will fix that

Improved sky and ground visibility

Added some heat information to the terrain tile shader based on red albedo and specular.

Some fine tuning of light levels and electronic noise. Viewing the PNVS without any 'egg' tinting so I can see what the buffer looks like. Bright objects seems to flare OK, here's a strobe going off.

Dust and light particles push to the heat buffer. I left in a smoke type that masks heat which might be useful for aerosols.

Screenshot of the day

2011-05-17T22:35:00.000+01:00

Today was reasonably productive. Pencilled in for this week is completion of the HUD which is under-way. Although I took time out to fix some outstanding game camera class issues, auto panning and zoom flypast view and hand-held camera motion. Both of which I never get tired of.

I was reminded about the IDM or Improved Data Modem this morning which is how you share targets and PFZs between aircraft. The place-holder message handler was put in (message route is HELO > AVIONICS), I just need to get it to add an alert message into the upfront display with a suitable bleep. Then it's a matter of parsing the message content.

Camera shake really kicks up the drama, but don't overuse.

Had a lot of fun just cruising around capturing choice flypast and formation views while testing. I noticed some rotor-blur issues (write masking) that will need fixing and a rare unexplained mesh occlusion where the main body of the helo will vanish for a few frames. I've noticed the stobes do this and think it's some AABB bounding body issue in the engine, it's so rare I've not been able to pin it down yet.

Cannon reticule almost done, currently missing means to manually enter range data but the game console will do for now.

Another quick update

2011-05-15T23:12:00.000+01:00

A query at SimHQ by "nadal" prompted me to add another setting to the HUD config to allow for users with colour blindness to change the PNVS video to any hue they want. This brings it in-line with the HUD symbology. Both can be configured with different hues using RGB values 0 to 1 (0 min intensity and 1 is maximum intensity).

Also added a dynamic field-of-view to the flypast camera (F5) which makes for nice screen-shots and videos.

Gun firing during a sideways flypast

Programmer Not Very Satisfied - PNVS

2011-05-11T21:07:00.001+01:00

It sort of works which is the main thing. And it's fast. Combining the functionality of the PNVS but ease and speed of pilot point of view rendering. Each pass of the deferred rendering stage, geometry, light and transparency is blended in a different way to recreate the PNVS image that's 99% perfectly aligned (I added a very very small level of transparency so the image slightly lags when moving you head quickly).

Manual mixing of video levels for a good balance

Alas I couldn't do this in the way I wanted but the results are not bad. It was a royal pain to have to clip geometry, the material to 'see through' needed a flag adding to it, the fragment shader needs a uniform to know if the PNVS is active or not, heat-maps have to be added to materials. The good side is that the diffuse colour is still there but the heat map is rendered into the 'glow' buffer so they kind of radiate if you have your glow video setting enabled.

Contrast and brightness are enhanced in the final PNVS image via a post-processing shader. I could in addition add the old light amplification function to this too but I don't think it's necessary. During full daylight it burns out your retinas if you have the video level turned up to max.

All in all I'm sort of OK with it but not satisfied. I simply wanted to blend heat-maps as a post-process and not a form of multi-texturing which is inelegant.

AD had a little play and looked at some of the interesting glitches that occur when you're clipping geometry so you can see through it. This is down to the move from a virtual camera to a 'mouse look' view point, you can move your view beyond the constrains of the PNVS. So AD suggested a rather neat solution of fading the PNVS image at the constraints which works brilliantly. Nice smooth fade out when nearing the edges although I chose not to apply this in external views where bad clipping isn't a problem.

Still need to sort out the scale and mask size/shape which won't take long. AD has everything needed to build heat-maps for the remaining assets. Soon everything will be a blaze of black and green. Did I mention that tracer fire looks pretty cool?

Transparency, lighting, particles, heat glow maps

PNVS redux

2011-05-10T12:08:00.002+01:00

Short update on this.

Dispensed with the headache and nausea inducing PNVS camera. Copying the physical arrangement virtually does not translate to a 2D video environment. And thanks to that man who emailed to sympathise while sitting on the pad, that made me feel less of a wimp.

I've got a much much faster and smarter solution working for the PNVS and I'm very happy with it. A few rough edges still (it needs more of a smooth edge) post-processing will add contrast enhancement and edge detection. Parts of the helo are visible through the floor of the cockpit, like the TADS barrel and forward avionic bays, these need to be removed using geometry masking when the PNVS system is active. Since the PNVS area always stays in the same place it's easier to accomplish.

What I need is a Portal hole. Again shaders to the rescue and I'll employ a texture channel to act as a discard mask when the PNVS is on, unless something simpler comes to mind.

Anti-col light half in and out of the PNVS frame.

devs quick test zone, lighting and transparency blending

Transparency and lighting is now blended to the PNVS buffer. Gunfire, explosions etc looking quite good at night in refreshing mint flavour vision (tm).

Some post-processing gives control over contrast and brightness while desaturating the image. Still to do, image enhancement and then the large task of adding heat maps to all necessary assets which when rendered in a single pass will be applied to the emissive output channel. And it hardly costs any frames, brilliant.

first heap map test

Crew and external cockpit detail

2011-05-09T15:19:00.001+01:00

The Duke now sporting detailed external cockpit and crew complete with working glass instruments. Excellent work AD. We'll get some rudimentary animation sorted out, head movement will be tied to sensor operation shortly.

Peek a boo

2011-05-09T11:45:00.000+01:00

Get that laser out of my face!

PNVS is giving me a headache, literally

2011-05-08T14:28:00.001+01:00

I'm not going to post a screenshot of the PNVS yet as it's still quite primitive. I'm just putting in the building blocks of setting up the camera, rotation constraints etc.

Currently I'm taking a camera view from the nose of the aircraft and blending it as a layer under the IHADSS. The camera is not stabilised for head roll which I'm guessing the real PNVS system is.

First impressions of flying with the PNVS in this early state is that its bloody frighting. My eyes were not happy with it. A slight ghosting effect caused by subtle differences of the distance between your head position and the nose camera and rotational delay of the PNVS unit is something that will either take some getting used to, or will have to be thrown out as just too unpleasant for gaming. Bordering on the f*cking horrible actually, no wonder crews get headaches and this is on a monitor never mind an eyepiece. I'm getting headaches too.

The way to do this is good old fashion game conceit and match it up with the main camera perfectly aligned with no lag otherwise nobody is going to want to play night missions. It's not a problem you get with night vision goggles since your POV is the same, in many ways that's easier to implement.

*edit*

The camera position is now locked to your viewpoint much how goggles would be and adjusted the fov to match. Ignore the masked area for now, it's all going to be changed. The PNVS images needs to be larger than the IHADSS image so it fits inside the circular mask. Heat maps are not being rendered yet, and the PNVS material does not have the night vision shader applied yet.

What it does show is the sense of having the ability to 'see through' your aircraft, like having x-ray vision. As it is now, I can perform decent landings at night without going cross-eyed.

IHADSS back in the tool-shop

2011-05-07T00:25:00.000+01:00

The final part of the weapon system for the Apache involves a ton of logic to get this working in all my little black software boxes. It needs to handle many situations, for example the CP/G firing a missile with the gun obstructing the launch rails. With different sights selectable by crewmen, messages and high action display format needs to be updated in a timely fashion for each position.

General things still to add, aim reticules and more heading tape markers for various things. Some improvements were made to the internal HUD rendering, a fair chunk of it could be optimized later much like I did with the MPDs.

The High Action Display now has zones for messages updated by the ApacheAvionics class, slip ball and the FOV box needs some logic to deal with the currently selected sight. So that's some of my worksheet for the weekend. I move the whole H.A.D down a bit as it was too low to fit all the messages that are supposed to be around there. Native resolution is 512x512 for the interested.

Screenshot of the day

2011-05-04T22:27:00.004+01:00

Only took one today so it wins by default. I recently changed the arming system to make things a bit tidier, sometimes pods would slightly sit under the surface of landing pads and the arming option is disabled if there are no arming crates around.

One change I want to make is how rockets are loaded into 3 zones (rocket tubes are grouped into 3 areas or zones that can be selected individually allowing you to load your helo with 3 different types of rockets). There's a need to present this graphically in the above interface, somehow.

*update*

Thanks for the suggestions on zone loading. Keep 'em coming if you have any more.

This morning I was quickly adding some performance options to the config, cockpit pre-loading and real-time lighting. Pre-loading is something that engines like Unreal do to prevent stutter, here it's a bit more fundemental as cockpits are potentially quite large, there can be a bit of a pause between mounting and being in your seat (around 5 to 10 seconds first time you mount). To streamline this I added pre-load cockpit option (on by default). When we have two or more cockpit interiors to choose from this option will be of more use.

Went for a joyride this morning over the range to test it out. The new AOE cannon burst damage really comes into it's own, still takes a few rounds to take out vehicles. HUD work today followed by more work on the vehicle database.

Here's another one of looking back through the dust-off effects, I added user options for contrast, saturation and brightness. You can get some interesting looking views depending on ambient conditions and time of day.

Returning to base. Oh look it's lunch time.

Just a few more for fun. Only changing the saturation setting in the config you can play in glorious mono...

Well almost, the effect is ruined in the cockpit as it's rendered in full colour along with the HUD and explosions on the ground (which in full colour against a grey backdrop does look rather arty farty).

Colour? Who needs stinking colour? :) Enough of this, more serious work is coming up.

20 knot smoke

2011-05-03T21:43:00.002+01:00

For someone who wanted to see what smoke looked like at 20 knots.

Busy weekend

2011-05-01T23:32:00.003+01:00

Sunday night, this weekend we're we're back at full three man team strength. I can tell Fred's working hard on the physics as my DropBox folder is constantly getting updated. Inspired by a Microsoft blog of how a remote team collaborated on a project we used a combination of Skype, TeamViewer and Dropbox to edit and test live across countries.

AD has been fine-tuning his graphic pipeline and performance. As always Combat-Helo is a work in progress. After release the intent is to continue to fine-tune and improve for as long as we can pay the bills for it. As always AD kicks it up a notch, always finding new ways to makes things work that bit better.

Recent shots published at SimHQ of the US Firing Range / training area.

His work makes my screen-shots look crap in comparison :) Most of today was spent adding blast radius damage effects, wind and replacing the potentially seizure inducing 30mm cannon muzzle flash with a non-flashing gas expelling effect which is almost there but needs some artistic love to get the materials just right.

I am very pleased with the explosion and secondary effects and I think all the functions are in place that we can throw in some good vehicle data to make it behave. It's starting to play like a Longbow game of the 21st century.

I can't thank the team enough for their hard work and giving up their free-time over the weekend. The Milky Bars are on me chaps.

Plumes at approx 1,800m

Plumes at approx 1,000m

Took 3 passes to bag 6 targets, first two in the middle, then the left two followed by the right in a final overhead pass.

* edit *

Modified cannon impact code to do AOE damage to emulate exploding shells. Anything in a 10 meter radius of each impacting round is subject to damage checks. Each 30mm round is said to be like a grenade going off so small amounts of frag damage are applied.

This greatly improves effectiveness and gunnery.

Realistic delay of explosion sounds I've kept in for now. Coming up next up is the HUD update for weapons.

Splash!!!! Arghhh Arrrrrrghhhh!

2011-05-01T13:12:00.002+01:00

Splash damage, the effect of damaging nearby objects based on proximity to an explosive force.

Very easy to implement and abuse. In my first attempt I didn't realise that entities such as a vehicles individual wheels, turrets, in fact any child object on a vehicle would also generate damage mesages. The result was a single tracked vehicle repeatedly applying small amounts of damage to every nearby vehicle and object. Everything, and I mean everything exploded in a fraction of a second and scared the shit out of me.

OK, next try I made sure to only apply splash damage to the parent vehicle. Success, nearby vehicles/objects began to smoke. Moving to the firing range it was all too tempting to try it out on the stagefield.

Spawning an AH64D I mounted, armed the cannon and pulled the trigger. A few rounds thudded into the concrete apron...which then exploded..still incorrectly flagged as damageable by 30mm the resulting splash dmg of the 1km long object was passed on to nearby objects. The entire airbase, local road network, phone poles, basically everything as the database isn't being passed over them yet, exploded. At an FPS of about 0.01 it was hard to see what was going through the wall of near motionless flame. The entire map blew up in my face. Too bad I don't have one of those low frequency transducer Buttkicker devices, I think I could persuade my wife to get one if she could remotely activate it.

Well that's one way to bring a computer to its knees.

OK, clearly a little more thought is required here. I changed this so now a list is built and filtered for each explosive force which eliminates cascading effects. Effects will also be mitigated by the vehicle database including splash damage factors, for example, a fuel tank is likely to do more damage than a lamp stand. Indeed, objects such as flag poles should just break. I referred to Just Cause 2 for tips on how this kind of process can be set-up. This is a straight mesh swap with a damaged model and a non-persistent debris object that is driven by the physics engine till coming to rest. To make this happen without additional art work requires CSG operations on meshes. Otherwise it requires pre-rigging meshes to split or just additional models such as what we did with the vehicle entities.

Damage over distance

Inverse square law is a nice simple to understand physical law that applies to some force or energy that radiates out from a single point. Energy spreads over an area in proportion to the square of the radius. There are variations, one of which is inverse distance law which doesn't drop off so quickly and a tiny bit faster in terms of CPU cycles. It's simple enough to describe the attenuation of a blast as a percentage of 1 over distance.

blast_percentage = 100 * (1 / distance)

When damage is applied to an object this base damage value is modified by armor and damage type. If we delay our splash damage messages by (distance / speed of sound in meters) you can get a very interesting cascade effect that approximates the propagation of the blast wave so not everything will explode at the same time.

Third attempt, still OTT

So, tip for the day, if using ForEachEntityInAABBDo, create a list, filter it for the source entity and make sure you're only adding top level entities. And skip duplicates. Keep the source entity handy as you'll need that to compute distance as a damage modifier. If you're using physics to punch objects around you can also use that to apply a force and send objects flying everywhere.

Above all, have fun.

Sorry, just a handy target rich area for stress testing.

More pyro events and secondaries

2011-04-29T23:46:00.001+01:00

Expanded the pyro-fx to let me chain events for doing secondary explosions, or ammo cook-off (complete with audio). Turned out pretty good, added some random tints to smoke, fire scale and audio pitch variation to sell a scene of burning carnage. Someone asked for smoke plumes, by golly we've got smoke plumes.

I was quite pleased with the final blast wave effect, a combination of simple expanding geometry and increasing light radius (with intensity as inverse square falloff) sells it. Almost all done in code and one texture file. There's a key that if present swaps out a destroyed model for another mesh to give a bit of control over the look of some objects, such as specials we might want to add later.

As fires die out it secondary smoke plumes are timed to spawn. I'm not using transparent smoke (although it's available), I don't think a 3D card has been built yet that could handle this scene with coloured smoke effects but when they do it would really give it some gravity. We'll keep that feature off-line for now. We'll add some notes to the vehicle database to govern secondary explosions and smoke quantities.

Impact craters from explosions now despawn after their allocated number has been reached.

Fixed some arming issues relating to ground height and AD had an interesting notion to link stores availability to the quantity of ammo crates laying around. It's a nice idea but I'm chewing over practical issues, campaign system should not have to do a stock take and count 3D world entities, it should be one way otherwise madness might ensue. But I like the idea of a visual representation of stores availability and it's no hardship to have an ammo crate flag a stores reduction at a base when it gets freed. So it could be made to work and keep me happy.

Ended the day working on more core simulation code (looking at the powertrain system again and getting numbers to test engine timing / temp functions).

Smoking or non...oh wait.

HDR brown and fine-tuning with video playback

2011-04-28T02:09:00.002+01:00

Now I'm able to get more stick time in I've been making lots of little fixes. Something as simple as 8-way coolie hat control for panning around the interior and exterior helps a lot. Could probably manage right mouse and pan control logic for exterior vehicle views.

The normals on the trees really need addressing, I suppose I need to get off my bottom and look at those. It seems to be the LOD2 mesh but as I've mentioned before, I need to try a community shader that adds a bit of variation to them.

I added a bit more detail to the explosion effects. A simple expanding sphere with opacity maps and flame, very subtle, along with initial flash and smoke. This combines with additional fire and smoke effects and more than sells the idea that you're trashing columns of vehicles. The next trick is to add to the game message handler a means to fire effects so scripts or remote clients can trigger them.

Had an OpenGL stack overflow issue today, I was using TWO glPushAttrib() calls to move two colours onto the stack for poping in display list. I don't think this is legal even though it worked but glGetError() was still reported it. So I changed it to not do that. I'd rather add a bit more code and be cautious than break something. It's hard not to resort to tricks like that when you come from an 8-bit assembler background.

Visual Debugging

Using FRAPS to do captures has proved to be a handy tool in the past. It has the benefit of being totally wysiwyg, cheap and simple. You can consistently step backwards and forwards through a recording to examine objects in motion, measuring between frames if you have to. VLC has a handy speed jog dial and frame step feature which I've been using to examine effect sequencing, some elements are timed to last only 60 ms, blink and you miss it.

Alternative method might involve some in-game replay feature which requires something of a client/server topology which this game mostly has but it's a bit too complicated to capture everything in one place. It would take some re-working to fully adapt the code to do that which I don't have time for.

A couple of frame captures on my test zone, here I'm examining a video of blast wave effects for fine-tuning them. Somehow these captures are much darker than the video. Also I shot a night scene to see light propagation from explosions.

The next step is to do a similar test at about 1km from the event. In most games these things happen at close ranges, if the overall effect doesn't sell or have enough visual impact one option is to scale the effect parameters according to the viewers distance. Only visual testing will tell.

Parting shot

Starting to prep for the new Mk2 flight model which means some place-holder functions go in and disentanglement of the old one. So time to put the old bird up on bricks for a bit. Might not be flying for a few days.

AD alerted me to a bug I'd introduced in the joystick code which I was able to promptly fix (index out of bounds, a rookie mistake but dead easy to spot).

Walkthrough of some content creation

2011-04-27T21:14:00.000+01:00

Yeah, working with a 200 dollar engine, a box of beer and nothing better to do. We Brits have a tradition dating back to the 80s of creating software with next to no resources. From 1K computers with cassette tapes to health-care systems written in BASIC. Yup, I've done all of the above in the past, but nothing prepared me for the lengths that AD (aka Alpha Delta, or as I like to think of it, Art Department) has to go through just to make a bunch of phone poles to fill some screenery.

As a programmer I think I would have done things in a more programmy way. But sometimes brute force is just as efficient, all that matters is getting the job done.

ADs SimHQ Dev Diary continues with a breakdown of making phone poles.

Glass pits and underlays

2011-04-26T13:31:00.003+01:00

Some new screenshots were added to the combat helo website gallery, at the end there, you might want to check them out. Just me playing with some DOF and FOV settings which you can do from a Quake style command console in the game (aka chat interface).

Terrain Underlays

AD has been doing a bit of polish work and discovering the joys of the blend layer in the terrain system.

The terrain system uses 5 layers (with specular and normal for each one) and these are blended by a shader to produce a really fast base layer. Now he's starting to experiment with a secret SIXTH layer (a bit like the ninth chevron in Stargate but doesn't involve blowing up a planet). This blend layer maps a single texture (e.g. from a sat image) onto the painted terrain. It's something tried briefly before but results were mixed and not so obvious at ground level. He's been playing with that to bring out more detail and subtle variation.

Not that you should be flying at these altitudes in game, unless you're a Predator drone (get to da' choppa).

I was looking at SQLlite3 for adding a primitive streaming system for dynamic ground detailing, it's used everywhere as a client side embedded database, even on phones. It has an R*Tree index module for doing fast geospatial queries which is a good method for adding grass/veg/rocks and general junk in selected areas that users need to turn on/off for performance tweaking. It's also free so well within my price range. Don't know if the performance will be acceptable but it's something I will try for the Herat map after we complete the firing range.

Putting the Glass into the Glass Pit

After a material update over the weekend I had the glass in front of my instruments back but there were some subtle graphical issues with view angles and the cockpit night lighting shining off the surface like it was paper.

So after a bit of stepping through the shader code this morning not only did I learn some really cool things directly relating to doing infra-red stuff with the emissive channel but also fixed the computed normal for the glass. The standby instruments also got the glass treatment with a cockpit mesh update. I was actually quite shocked when I saw the difference. Almost makes me want to try and render real-time cubemaps for ultra high performance PCs later.

Now the Easter weekend is over it's back to the vehicle database and enhancing the pyrotechnics.

And now for some WIIIIIIIIIIIIDESCREEEN

To illustrate some tripplehead performance. I did have a very far DOF post filters on and ansiotropic was set to max (16).

the return of rotor blur

With a lot of pixel shaders, especially in the cockpit area, combined with really wide resolutions eat up GPU bandwidth. Tripplehead res typically reduces performance by a half. Just more pixels to crunch. So it IS a real GPU tester but we've not gone through optimising shaders or even art options for maximise performance yet. Since I'm mostly writing this game for me, 30 fps being my comfort zone it's in my interest to keep it close to that region. Although if you're going to be using a small window with MPDs dotted around your desktop of course you'll get much better performance.

How the hell do I turn this bloody rain off? Grrrr.

Screenshot of the day

2011-04-25T00:03:00.000+01:00

Captured some nice screens while experimenting with depth of field and field of view. But this was my favourite.

While engaging a compound and dummy SAM site at point blank range, the first round just misses the mark, the other 9 rounds are not far behind.

Bit of an accident...

2011-04-24T21:12:00.000+01:00

Currently fixing a video underlay issue but it resulted in an accident that I wanted to post here.

What do you think to having a full screen MPD overlay toggle?

Fire in the hole

2011-04-23T09:43:00.001+01:00

Too bad we can't set vegetation on fire in this engine. I added some real lights to fire effects that I'll modulate over time during the update.

So taking it back to the range for a quick trial of the cannon against our target vehicles. Without completed IHADSS symbology for the cannon, the old TLAR system is employed....to not very good effect. After around 3 passes I managed to hit 4 targets.

Trying to engage from a hover.

How did I do? Not very well.

Gunnery is hard, ever harder without cannon stabilisation and HUD symbology. Setting the cannon to fixed forward to boresight targets worked better, understandable considering the lack of auto range adjustment atm.

On the whole, the fire effect system works OK, needs some fine tuning. It's certainly visible from 1,000m and shows where I have some adjustments to make. There's no wind generation atm in the Environment object (which controls temp, time of day, rain etc) but that can be easily added to smoke plumes later as a velocity (trivial).

It's got me starting to think about trigger zones (game mechanics) for this range and basic comms to get some game play element in it. Nothing fancy, just a zone at the observation post when crossed begins a timed run-in and tracks your performance/accuracy until you leave the range area then you get a radio message and pop-up display of targets, hits and score. All in character of course.

Short term things to do over the next few days...

HUD cannon symbology, auto-range and stabilisation.
Varation in smoke plume effects
Enhanced initial explosion effects (they get lost in the 30mm round hit effects).
Big one, transparencies are not being rendered in the TADS view for some reason.
A popup MTADS image would help.
Add score value to vehicle database.
~~Effects Update function to modulate ambient fire lighting.~~

I love lists.

* update *

I couldn't help myself. I need to to stress test in a target rich environment. I improved my home-brew effect factory so it's possible to defer effects and specify fade out times. Also I added the fire lighting modulation (point lights again) which sells a burning mass of vehicles at night.

I also added the steer functions for the Apache spotlight and put a corona over it. The corona billboard is getting culled when it shouldn't be. Probably the same bug effecting the sun corona. One to file.

Observe this!!!

Opps. That's going to cost me. Sadly I used up all my ammo before I got the targets on the range and only managed one BMP.

Happy Easter everyone!

Looking at the Sikorsky X2 "Raider"

2011-04-22T18:55:00.002+01:00

Druid posted a link to this presentation on YouTube...

This is a helicopter I've been following on and off. The pusher rotor gives the aircraft an enormous speed advantage (something tried early on in the AH-56 Cheyenne advanced attack helicopter program culminating in the AH-64 Apache).

Eliminating the swashplate through active-blade technologies (where each blade can control flaps many times per revolution) sounds great on paper. Such a system has already been tried on on UH-60s to greatly reduce noise and vibration. Ideal for spec-ops.

I seriously doubt we'll ever add an X2. Certainly the CH-47D is in the works, after that who knows. We short listed helos like the MH-6, AH1 Cobra, I still want the MH-60 as a close friend has many memories of flying that one. It's a LOT of work crafting study sim avionics from bits and pieces of scattered information.

What makes the Apache D so appealing (and I'll quote someone here) is all the gizmos. You don't really get the same buzz with the AH-1. The CH-47 provides a fantastic way to expand the kinds of missions players can fly, beyond that it's hard to nail a mass appeal helicopter (three words that don't belong together....EVER). Everyone has their own likes.

Even the RAH-66 never made much impact. It appeared in a few SEGA games, Razorworks and Novalogic traded on their hi-tech appeal. Stealth helicopters as a fashion came and went.

Perhaps the best known helicopter is the Blackhawk and partly for the wrong reason, crashing. I guess we'll evaluate it when the time comes. But I do love the debates.

Please share your thoughts and opinions on the X2 and other helos either here or on the SimHQ forums.

My Favorite Coffee mug

The simplest things make my happy. Just in...our homage/nod to LB2.

Cheers AD. It gives me a sense of completeness you can't possibly imagine. Oh that sounds a bit psychotic. What I mean is, ever since I felt the dedicated helicopter game needed a revival, I knew it needed to have this as a comforting reminder that the days of mimes are numbered.

Kablewie

Smoke plumes and some fire effects. If you turn on coloured shadows (global illumination) it does some impressive things, smoke shadows across the terrain. Can be pretty heavy on the GPU though.

Lunchtime blues.

2011-04-21T16:10:00.002+01:00

Spent my lunch time kicking my heels and decided to try using some of the footage I put together the other week for a quick video. Wanted to show the mouse cursor moving seamlessly around from surface to surface but FRAPs had the cursor setting off. So here's an OTT music video instead :/

Back to exploding vehicle code for me.

Looking back over the blog, it's a year and a half of my life and Dave too, it wouldn't have worked without his dedication. It's funny looking at the old videos, back then I saw in my head what you're seeing now.

I knew what we could do, AD made it a reality. He's knocking out 3D models of Gatorade and probably cursing me for making him use the primitive tools that came with a 200 dollar engine. I think we did alright considering. What we could have done with a 20,000 dollar engine (saved a lot of time for sure) but I'm glad we stuck it out. Learning experience.

And of course we couldn't have achieved the fidelity we have without those who did what they could in offering offering specialist expertease and guidance where appropriate. You guys can see your influence in the game and as a result I know more about this stupid helicopter than I ever wanted to, but still just a fraction of the complexity.

You could spend years adding code to simulate every electronic and mechanical nuance but it wouldn't get you any closer to the experience. It's like measuring, the smaller the units you use the more accuracy you need and so on into infinity.

Soon the focus will be on flight model fidelity (as frankly I hate my current implementation) then it's balls to the wall polishing for a limited beta to get some data on how to make it system friendly for a firing range mini-game release to claw back some of the monthly costs of development.

Thank you all for your continued support and kind words, and to you regular blog commentators who make me laugh during the day when I need it most. And to Pizza Toast, you're always there for me when I'm peckish.

Screen-shot of the morning

2011-04-20T11:43:00.002+01:00

Number 1659. Moment of Zen.

Cursors/Zones and offscreen-buffers

I was sent a detailed layout of how an XBOX 360 controller could be mapped closely to the CP/G handgrips for inclusion as default controller layout. What struck me was the predominance of the 'thumbstick' as an important interface component. For a while now "mouse to buffer" problem had been bubbling around my head, it was something I tried months ago but put aside for later. Well yesterday was that later and using a special mouse pick and taking the xyz (well xy anyway) from a valid pick on the virtual display surface, then subtract the local entity position, you get a valid relative co-ordinate you can simply scale to suit your display. It works much easier if you have a display co-ordinate system that has the origin in the middle of the display.

curpos = Vec3(mfdpick.x, mfdpick.y, mfdpick.z).Minus(mfdpick.entity.GetPosition(1)) ;
 mfd.SetCursorPos(curpos.x, curpos.y) ;

In SetCursorPosition() you'll need to multiply x and y by some scale to match world units returned by the pick and object width/height ratio). Works independent of screen resolution. Our implementation allows you to easily move the system mouse across and through many virtual displays. Who needs Scaleform?

Below is an example of the FLT page, all pages now sport automatic generation of hot zones (debug in red), the thumbstick/mouse controlled cursor is near the middle (green circle with 4 lines radiating out at 45 degrees). The system mouse is automatically hidden and shown when moving across virtual display surfaces.

This was needed not just for interior helicopter use, but it's also a big part for the mission planning and map interface.

Mission planning or command tent functions can be considered a "hub" activity. When not in your helicopter, this is where players should be spending the most time. So it needs to have a gravity, an environment to match this weight. Meanwhile AD worked on some ground objects to use for virtual display devices. The mission planning system will be run on a laptop. Using code developed for the Apache TSD with some interface elements added, you use these much in the same way you interface with everything else, walk up to it and use the darn thing.

Mission Planning furniture

The Xombat Laptop open

You can even close it but save your work

As a hub, mission planning needs to occupy enough virtual space to allow easy user identification as a place of importance and allow easy navigation with around 4 other players present. So we're looking at a whole walk-around table with laptops and assorted non-interactive furniture.

Mission planning on the laptop taps into the campaign engine and planning involves taking that route data identified by a snappy codename and assigning it to the player editing. The projector serves as a public viewing device, it is a read only interface that can select a single mission profile to view. This allows a single planner in the laptop interface to edit a mission profile while everyone else in the command tent can see and discuss. Missions are assigned to the player operating the terminal or attached to a specific aircraft on the pad. Missions are finally bound to aircraft when a player mounts as the pilot (assume sort of data cart upload on boarding).

Base radio set. Buttons work apparently

I'm finishing off the mouse/events for the TSD and FCR (symbols etc). They mostly just emulate existing MPD bezel button presses but it also needs to select glyphs such as individual Hellfires etc.

So, for that uber CP/G experience, an XBOX 360 joypad is the closest off-the shelf controller you can currently buy.

*update*

Gratuitous images of operating existing MPD functions with cursor controller. Just got the "mouse up" to sort out for drawing PFZs.

AD has been working on some refreshments and reading material...

The flight manual seems a little thin. My A-model binder is about 3 inches wide :)

*edit* Here's an original fresh-install locker from Longbow 2 complete with my favourite mug :)

Apache Helicopter Pilots Kill Mimes!

FCR new look

2011-04-18T15:19:00.004+01:00

I hadn't planned to do more work on the FCR radar system. I wanted to try out some ideas for target tracking and adding commands to select scan arcs (Narrow, Wide, Zoom). AD is having problems visually sighting targets on the firing range so we're going to add the same controls to try out a snap FOV change.

Part of the same Helo avionics and ApacheMPD class. I had to make some tweaks to some of the re-usable elements. My prototype code can't be used, too many differences now. This is much much better and faster.

Wide scan 90 degrees

Medium scan 45 degrees

Narrow scan 30 degrees

Zoom scan sector 15 degrees

Your virtual collective should have a HAT assigned to quickly set the scan valume for FCR GND, FCR AIR, TADS and game FOV snap.

Choo choo

Josh Klint kindly gave us permission to use the Leadwerks train model, I think AD is adding a railroad to the US range map as I write this. His last message read "choo choo".

*edit*

Oh yes, as if by magic...

New Combat-Helo site live

2011-04-17T20:57:00.000+01:00

A new webzone thing for Combat-Helo is up at www.combat-helo.co.uk

SpaceNavigator beta drivers

2011-04-16T20:57:00.002+01:00

I just thought this was pretty neat. New beta drivers from 3Dconnexion have joystick, keyboard and mouse emulation mode.

Setting it up as a walk controller in Combat-Helo was pretty easy. Was able to configure it for the Leadwerks editor without much difficulty.

Things you wouldn't see IRL but might in a game

2011-04-13T20:48:00.002+01:00

More junk to decorate maintenance areas with. This is more in keeping with Origin's Wing/Strike Commander than a real military tool shed. Just a bit of fun to decorate the place with, screen-shots taken in the game editor.

One feature I wanted to include in the game but might have to shelve was some level of 'pimping ones ride'. It wasn't overly ambitious, just the ability to attach decals earned via achievements or campaign completion to various helicopter parts. Then Apache Air Assault came out on consoles and suddenly it seemed like an old idea. This kind of maintenance tent could be employed to manage upgrades or repairs if we go down that route.

Some in-game shots of these areas...

When trying to plan a sortie, there's always going to be some joker wanting to gate-crash the party tent.

Thanks for that.

No smoking in the tent please sir.

Dave, it's raining.

2011-04-12T17:22:00.000+01:00