As I sat down to implement the generic event system I was reading Game Coding Complete which discusses something similar, the Actor class. I was reinventing the wheel...badly. The wheel is overrated as an invention. By far the greatest invention was the second wheel, lets face it, the unicycle isn't the most practical form of transport.
I digress. Actors. If you want to know more about them see Actor model at Wikipeadia
Then I came across this public domain implementation by Otus which also has a remote sockets version. Should work nicely as we need these to fire n-times every t-seconds for displaying alerts.
Also David worked on analogue flight gauges. There's different ways you can implement gauges. Did we want lighting? A glass face? My initial though was to build them like real instruments with different layered discs (hi-res textures with alpha) rather than 3D objects. Looks like we're going 3D for now, the kinds of instruments we have don't need anything complicated.
I'm not sure we can do anything more complicated with the instruments as specular on alpha surfaces is broken and we don't have a shader for reflections.
ReplyDeleteRefraction can be done via code according to LE's tutorial section, not sure it's of much use but it might lead us towards something interesting. Rain drops on the canopy?
+1 T.
ReplyDeleteI'm buying at least two copies of this when it comes out. I was hoping for DCS: Apache but that wont come for another 2 years minimum. And it wont be a longbow (UK Version is better as well).
This will be a huge success especially since these helo's are being use right now in a war, the interest is strong.