Team Challenge - Day 3

It's not very challenging so far.

Dave completed preliminaries for the tracer fire objects. Some questions about best use of materials. In 'FLIR' mode, or heat-vision, we'll want them to glow pretty hot. We have 4 tracer colours made up.

editor shot - red tracer mk 1

The art department set to work on researching firing ranges. The goal is to build a reasonably accurate area for purposes of live fire exercises and use it as a pre-release mini-game to help fund continued development or just give it a bit of focus. This is a good opportunity to create what I wanted to include in the game originally, a UK or US location to complete some flight training before being sent on your campaign tour.

In almost no time at all satellite images and photos from the web were being examined for inspiration. What should it look like? Where will be based?

what does a shooting range look like?

Aldershot small arms shooting ranges

Just to get a feel for terrain, colour, size, scale. When you're starting on something new, collect data.

We'll probably have a geographically neutral location with a fairly generic set of firing ranges, green, lots of trees and clearings. Observations towers, targets. Enough to allow pilots to get familiar with cannon and rocket systems.

new arm switch

We also updated the cockpit too, with dual operation master arm switch (in yellow) with the ground override.  The squat switch now triggers a vehicle event, this is sent to the avionics class (on landing it disengages master arm if the ground override switch is off). A veritable spiderweb of things going on here, you have potentially two players operating buttons which are also flagged by the vehicle landing/taking off. Sorry I call it a vehicle as the helicopter is derived from the vehicle base class (class hierarchy is: ApacheHelicopter > Helicopter > Vehicle).

Being a very visual person the right side of my brain is dominant, I can see enormous complexity visually but totally suck at trying to use words to describe them (left side of the brain) so I apologise if I'm not doing a good job. This is also why I do really badly in phone/skype interviews, the wrong side of my brain is engaged leading to total confusion. I digress.

Next we'll slave the gun to the pilot head position adding a limiter on -elevation if the squat switch is on (see why we needed that thing now?) Then to activate the gun reticle in the IHADDS code which I haven't seen in over a year. What are the odds it still works?

The book, "C++ Coding Standards" by Herb Sutter and Andrei Alexandrescu made me chuckle, it carries my favourite quote, "The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from." It's a very sensible book for C++ programmers interested in best practice.