Thirty mike mike

The 30mm chain cannon is complete with the final additions of the muzzle flash and lighting effects. Each round sends a damage message to any object it encounters along it's trajectory, the applog window is correctly recording  entities when hit.

A couple of screens of the cannon being put to use over my test-zone. It flashes a bit, but looks pretty cool. The TADS follows the pilots view around atm to help pick out objects for shooting. It's quite a handy little mode. Hopefully we'll have a movie at the end of the week to show it in action.

The "Duke" would really benefit from a blurred rotor model option, if only for screen-shots as it loosed something in stills when it's not updating at 60 fps.

The Duke is the nickname given to prototype Apaches by the US Marine Corps, which never got far being navalised. The Marines sticking with the popular AH-1 SuperCobra. 



Blowing the bloody doors off

Shortly we'll have the pyros for destroyed objects, AD showed me some concepts based on the LUA crater object and fire emitter, which will suffice for now.

If you liked the old smokin tank effect from Longbow 2 then this might look familiar...

What's needed is some kind of programmable particle animation system that's available in other engines and y typically come with a bunch of re-usable assets. Alas we'll have to do without till one either comes along or we can roll something simple. I'll see if we can't get the turrets popping off too.

An XML object/damage database will be added later improve the simulation of munitions against different armor types.

Oh, funny story, a slight bug in the ground-crew re-arming system meant I was able to shoot myself with the Apache.  I ran out of ammo and had the grnd override switch on, before landing I triggered a 10 round burst of cannon which was queued up in the Apache waiting to go off when I re-armed it...on foot. Opps.


TEDAC Shader

The TEDAC also got a bit of love today with additional working 'lev' and 'gain' knobs which pass values into Aily's edge enhance shader seen below at max settings. It's just concept atm as I want a certain look to MTADS images which requires careful examination of other implementations I've seen and really liked.

I also linked the pilots video intensity knob to the TEDAC 'level' control which just controls image intensity, it gives you a means to control it from the rear seat if you have underlays active. And we need to do this as our MPDs don't have individual video level controls.

Thirty mike mike = 30mm