Rotors engaged

One of the really cool aspects of working on games is when all the little bits of code are assembled and things start to work, objects come to life.

As much as I really hate the awful stand-in Apache model, I mean look at it, it's a horrible green-brown and has black bits all over it. It's a mutant helicopter from the sewers of Mars, terrible. To show my distaste, here's some grey scale screen shots.

Our game now lets you spawn and board any Apache entity. Once in the cockpit you can spin up the rotors and admire the shadows flicking over your canopy and sun shield. This is an Apache coming to life in our game world. Missing some sound effects though.

For all the test programs and stand-alone programs made over the years to see it come together in such a short amount of time is gratifying.

Still a lot of work to do. Some of the shots have the Depth of Field (DoF) effect turned on while I was experimenting with focus pulling (looking in and out of the cockpit). This is something the user can turn off and I only added it as I thought the effect in Operation Flashpoint DR when you brought a weapon up was cool. I'm not convinced it works for flight simulation.

Out of the pilots left window you can see the new cold-start generator, this actually works, you can walk up to it and turn it on and off. This was an accidental and easy to add feature as a result of how we're building the camps to be interactive. It will be possible to include crew-chief operations if we wanted to go in that direction.

Not sure it makes for a fun or gripping gaming experience, even if it does come complete with trailer hook. Here's one generator under camo netting covering an M1A1 work area.

I'm hoping that one day our helicopter will look as good as this one. The MilViz model.