Toying with odds and ends

Not been able to get much work done today. Shocking events in Japan and the mudanity of domestic tasks. I find it hard to keep up with current events as I really can't stand the inanity of rolling news broadcasts.

Dave was giving the Apache cockpit a bit of a polish, improving some of the canopy framing, I noticed more detail on the nuts. And he's finally working on the boresight device on the dash which I hate the look of. Polish passes come as and when we feel like doing something else.

While AD was working on that I tinkered with the HDR shader. I'm not liking it but I wanted to post some shots to show what a difference tweaks to post-process filters can make. My intent was to add a vignette effect which is a dark shaded region framing the image, you often see it on Top Gear motoring programs, FSX add-on videos, Apache Air Assault used it to add visual drama. Its like adding a perma 'g-loc' effect to your game.

"Who's messing with my medication?"

A great combination of post-process effect layers add visual production value to such games for relatively little effort. Leadwerks has fantastic post processing capability which is open to expansion and experimentation.

"I'm blacking out, hellllp" HDR and vignette 

I'll use it in videos but for me it gets in the way, although it might have use when we come to doing the PNVS and FLIR imaging. By ramping up the pixel intensity you can create some washed out visuals.

By simple tweaking of post shaders we can create different moods and looks. When we get to the 'final edit' we can lock down how we want the visuals to 'feel'. Although one interesting concept could be borrowed from the 1999 film "Three Kings" (dir David O Russel). This employed a negative bleeching process which related to the characters moral ambiguity, gradually wearing off as the film progressed. Colour intensity helped relate the story even if you didn't notice it. I don't know if this has been tried in a video game as a progression of the hero story, certainly war based shooters have copied the bleeched look in an attempt to try and look more like action movies.

Targets

Targets have been occupying my mind. Last night as I was finding new ways to blow up command tents in LUA script and throwing dozens of non-shadowed point light sources at Leadwerks wondering if it will slow down my dev PC (it's still hitting 60 fps with a full stream of tracers with individual light sources).

The slides from GDC about Battlefield 3 (now using a deferred rendering engine too) looked quite interesting, using cell based optimisation to squeeze performance out of the Frostbite engine. Slides here

A recent YouTube video showed soldiers running under transparent smoke with shadows (transparent shadows). Battlefield 3 Trailer - See smoke at 1min 30sec this is a feature of Leadwerks Engine 2.40 using pureLight technology (btw you don't need pureLight for this, it's part of the engine). Pretty amazing mix of global illumination and dynamic lighting. Something we tried for rotor down-wash with quite impressive effects.

Dave sent me some concepts for 'paper' targets which serve to illustrate how small people are and the difficulty of picking out usable information from helicopters.

Durka Durka!!?!!

Deadly cardboard cut-outs

Hey, it's a video game, we can do anything we want.

I don't know if Dave wants to plant an old school bus in the firing range or what. But I think we might go for a 'container' city. I sent him off to watch "Blue Thunder" (dir John Badham). See what he thinks.

Rather than go through each and every LUA file for models I think I'll opt for adding something to the scene processor that tags objects with the message callback used to register damage taken. Regarding how much damage something can take, I find the .INI system for models still works well for this kind of simple information. If it just records armour type and thickness for each quadrant you can use some simple processing to work out thermal and kinetic penetration requirements. Again, see the excellent "Physics for Game Programmers" (Grant Palmer) published by Apress.


Flight Sim Show - Italy

Fred is attending a flight sim show in Verona (http://www.modelexpoitaly.it/eventi-pvi.asp) next week where he's organising an FSX helicopter event. We'll try and get a new video showing the firing range and weapons deployment ready for that.

Nice one Fred, it looks like a lot of fun.