Merry Christmas Everyone

Back again to say have a Merry Christmas.

We'll be back to work in the new year, I'm taking time off to dedicate myself to the family. Snow has arrived again, and it's looking to be bitterly cold. Time to get in the egg nog, cheap supermarket port and stale cheese biscuits. Have fun y'all.

Replica WAH-64D control update

Rich at Komodo Simulations has a new design for the replica Apache controls which should be more accurate. If you've missed the discussion thread then see this.

Komodo manufacture replica helicopter control systems, seats and joysticks.

Weekend expression.

First weekend on the run-up to the holiday season.

Two things happened, first, I unboxed SSX Tricky for the Playstation 2 and lament that there hasn't been a hi-def remix for the current-gen consoles. It's still a brash, loud and stupidly over the top game. Great fun to pick up and play. While playing it, it was easy to forget everything else that follows.

The second thing...well that's everything else. I've had to deal with money matters, lawyers, game design issues and job interviews. All in one week. Granted I've not had a job interview in years for a game programming position, usually it's pitching for work and never had to express myself or my skills. Being English, (and a Yorkshireman) I tend to undersell. Dave who;s been working hard on the 3D art will say I'm the king of understatement, produce wonders and brush it off as nothing at all. Sometimes nothing at all can look wondrous.

A dear old chum from the 404th squadron (Stingray) had some helpful advice on IP law in the US. I can't discuss specifics (by co-incidence I was also contacted by a freelance journalist working on story about simulation and intellectual property) but he looked into issues surrounding the use of military aircraft, paid for by tax-payers, and the use of images and names of publicly funded hardware in video games.

Do you need to license such things? His analysis was most entertaining but he summed it up in two words, a "definite maybe". I love lawyer speak.

Meanwhile my oldest brother is in hospital pumped full of morphine, his liver cancer presumably catching up ready to take what's left of him and I'm unable to do anything about that except blog. Except I can't do it at the hospital as to use wi-fi services there patients must pay extortionate amounts to large telecoms. Everywhere you look a corporate entity is trying to suck money out of you while you fight for life. Vending machines, the privately run car-park outside, wi-fi. All of these things that surround you in these places are stupidly expensive. Don't get sick.

My wife is currently preparing food for hungry musicians at the local centre, it's all she can do to give something back to the community. I wonder what it would take to install free wi-fi in hospitals? And how much red-tape you'd need to cross just to get equipment in the building. I think I just found a new mission in life.

Coloured particle shadows

Just added coloured shadows to the rotor downwash/duster effect. It's a feature added to Leadwerks Engine when it added support for pureLight. It does require something of a beefy graphics card to render real-time smoke shadows. It certainly adds to the scene, some artefacts appear at some ranges from the shadow map. Need to investigate that.

A small problem emerges with the CH47, the helicopters are one way "portals", inside and the outside view is rendered around you seperate from the internal view. This way enviromental objects such as smoke do not intrude into the crew space. However we don't do the inverse, the CH47 has a large open cargo door at the rear. For performance we don't portalise aircraft interiors when the observer is located outside. To fix it, one option might be to insert a mask for cockpit/cargo areas into the foreground world. A simple cube/shape that matches the internal dimensions of a vehicle rendered in the foreground world maybe? On the whole it's only noticeable when looking up close from the rear. I wonder if it's worth the time and trouble.

*edit* btw these are test objects in the editor simply used for checking the materials, scripts and lighting. Also the new SSAA screen-space anti-alias is being used.