Ground vehicle automata - Boragh APC

Ground vehicles are important in any combat simulation. So far our vehicles (lovingly built by David) are static placements except for a couple of vehicles we converted for the vehicle test program.

Our vehicles will be grouped together into "formations" (squads if you want to use a less technical vernacular) consisting of up to 12 different kinds of vehicles. Each formation will follow a set of instructions, waypoint>action  and each vehicle within that formation will attempt to maintain it's relative position.

That's the general idea. Now to turn static models into war machines with a purpose. I turned a tracked Iranian Boragh (a BMP-2 APC with a peculiar turret) into a tracked/ten wheeled vehicle. Using the LE Scout example as a template it was easy to extend this to work on a more complex vehicle. Even drive it around in the editor.

Density of the particle smoke effects (now matching the terrain colour thanks to new shaders) is based on vehicle speed. The vehicles turn and have full suspension however the tracks are static, this is hard to spot with all the smoke, grass and movement of the vehicle.

They drive independently in a straight line, what's needed now is some logic to follow a point relative to the current lead vehicle in the formation. This is an exercise for later.

Implementation of tracked vehicles using Newton vehicle physics may prove too resource hungry. Worst case scenario is 12 x 10 wheels per formation and formations should be spread out to have a few km between them but that's not always going to be the case when people build their own missions. The current Vehicle command set is not complete and does not allow (as far as I can tell) any method to make vehicles "sleep".

An alternative idea is to make a single "sliding block" for each track and apply enough force to move the vehicle along. This would work better for a tracked vehicle and this is how it is done for a Locomotive using Newton physics.

More work on the Apache Computer, my first "Hello World" program on it. No, it's not a real functioning computer but a message queue display device with some event timers behind it...and yes, a working clock. Last five cautions and warnings are displayed at the top. So when you hear your pilot or gunner yelling "We got some caution and warning lights, check your panel!", this is where to look.

The time is from PC clock, you can see when I take these screen-shots now. The time will eventually come from current theatre time (based on mission start time). I managed to fudge a slight fuzzy look not by using a shader but adding a brown pixel outline to the font. Simple duh.