Herat city, almost

This is months of painstaking trial-and-error, optimisation and experimentation. I said months ago, "We don't have the resources or time to build a whole city, just a close approximation". Well it's an approximation but it's more than what we anticipated was possible. Given that the old girl Longbow 2 had a small village, a dozen or so muddy cubes, this is 2010 and we can afford to push it a little.

Putting the demo together for Summer Sim 2010 next weekend, the updated map includes Herat city which is not a center for our first campaign map, geographically or strategically as it's close to the north-west corner of the map. But it is a regional feature, the city is the gateway to Iran. One of the campaign scenarios involve a armoured invasion by Iranian forces in an attempt to do something about a deteriorating security situation in which NATO led US forces are caught in the middle and ultimately you decide which way that goes. The city will present a real challenge for pilots, not only is it a maze of structures and narrow streets, there are not many open areas to perform an emergency landing should the need arise.

I don't think we want to build another city like this. Hopefully you'll be able to appreciate the amount of work that's gone into the environment. Flying over the rooftops and sat dishes in the pilot seat with a full HOTAS is a dream come true, I certainly never expected anything like this when we started last September. It has the feel of an old familiar sim mixed with the new and we're not finished yet. AD has done an outstanding job in realising the setting. If there's one criticism I can level, there's not enough of it. I'd happily fly for longer than I perhaps normally would in other sims as the detail is better. There's always something interesting over in the next valley, or a nice low level route to challenge your flying skills.

We chose from the outset not to put the player in Helmand which is where the worst of the troubles are. It's a question that's been asked, why not?

It limits what you can do with scenarios and we wanted the Apache to do what it does best, spank heavy armour. Italy is currently the occupying security force in this region which is set to pass on to the US in the near future. Here we get to play out two different kinds of warfare. And what starts as one kind, if you do really badly in one campaign, may step things up and move you into the second. And if that happens you'll be flying over Herat, weapons hot.

*edit* Just tried FPS mode. Well FPS is overstating it, Combat-Helo allows you to roam around and explore but our environments are not tailored for that vantage point.

But trying it out I realised that our vertex shader that aligns the road geometry to terrain doesn't work for the physics. Which means I'll have to bodge a raycast on the player controller to allow you to walk on road surfaces. Well this is how vehicles were going to drive on it anyway. The PHY (physics model) for the road mesh is actually burried deep under the terrain when you reach the city.

And a lot of the basic buildings and compounds in the city have simple PHYs which perhaps need a little work to get them to match the volume of the city block. Once you fix one, it fixes all instances so theres not that many to do.