So taking it back to the range for a quick trial of the cannon against our target vehicles. Without completed IHADSS symbology for the cannon, the old TLAR system is employed....to not very good effect. After around 3 passes I managed to hit 4 targets.
 |
| Trying to engage from a hover. |
 |
| How did I do? Not very well. |
Gunnery is hard, ever harder without cannon stabilisation and HUD symbology. Setting the cannon to fixed forward to boresight targets worked better, understandable considering the lack of auto range adjustment atm.
On the whole, the fire effect system works OK, needs some fine tuning. It's certainly visible from 1,000m and shows where I have some adjustments to make. There's no wind generation atm in the Environment object (which controls temp, time of day, rain etc) but that can be easily added to smoke plumes later as a velocity (trivial).
It's got me starting to think about trigger zones (game mechanics) for this range and basic comms to get some game play element in it. Nothing fancy, just a zone at the observation post when crossed begins a timed run-in and tracks your performance/accuracy until you leave the range area then you get a radio message and pop-up display of targets, hits and score. All in character of course.
Short term things to do over the next few days...
- HUD cannon symbology, auto-range and stabilisation.
- Varation in smoke plume effects
- Enhanced initial explosion effects (they get lost in the 30mm round hit effects).
- Big one, transparencies are not being rendered in the TADS view for some reason.
- A popup MTADS image would help.
- Add score value to vehicle database.
Effects Update function to modulate ambient fire lighting.
* update *
I couldn't help myself. I need to to stress test in a target rich environment. I improved my home-brew effect factory so it's possible to defer effects and specify fade out times. Also I added the fire lighting modulation (point lights again) which sells a burning mass of vehicles at night.
I also added the steer functions for the Apache spotlight and put a corona over it. The corona billboard is getting culled when it shouldn't be. Probably the same bug effecting the sun corona. One to file.
 |
| Observe this!!! |
Happy Easter everyone!
Hmm. A really aggressive normal map on that crater might work wonders with the lighting.
ReplyDeleteGood update before Christmas ;)
ReplyDeleteYou love lists,We love screenshots, remember this:)
" A really aggressive normal map on that crater might work wonders with the lighting." Examples, examples please ;) (If possible view in FLIR ... )
Btw vegetation on fire is impossible at this moment,or not at all impossible?
Vegetation fire is not at all possible as we don't have access to individual tree matrix data at run-time. It also means they are not destructible in this version of the engine unless there's some way to get at that data...I'll ask.
ReplyDeleteNo point showing FLIR image as transparency isn't being rendered for some reason AND I'm still dithering about what approach to take for heat maps.
And it is good to you can not! It's not Populous,or another Magic Carpet ;) Btw IMO the best result was a fire burning in FAR CRY 2 absolutely brilliant view http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA3wgk8BCLg
ReplyDeleteThat guy has some anger issues.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't mind real-time destructible trees if it's easy as I wanted to try rolling heavy armour through it.
This is why streaming this stuff from databases is best. Much easier to manipulate but it comes at a performance cost.
BTW CryEngine 2 is going indie this year.
Yes I heard about it.In my opinion Far Cry 2 is one of the most underrated games.Powerful engine, I would not be surprised could you do with this engine CH ;) Huge open spaces, tens of kilometers of open world in conjunction with the Havoc(physics) gameplay was really great for dozens of hours.They killed this game without released tools for modding.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you on FarCry 2. A very entertaining game with a very unique feeling because of it's setting (Africa). It had a pretty decent story and a genuine feeling of freedom.
ReplyDeleteBeing able to use an engine like that would have been a massive advantage. So much development time is wasted trying to work out how to do simple things and workaround Engine idiosyncrasies. Just having a complete game API would have saved a lot of time developing things like effects, weapons, animations etc.
I didnt realise the crater normal map wasn't loading. Just looked into the mat/shaders and have put together a new vert and frag + a better normal map. It looks good and bumpy now. Bumpier than the ground actually. I'll take a look at the terrain texture bump maps soon and see how they can be improved upon.
Cheers
Great the last 2 screenshots !
ReplyDeleteHappy Easter to all :)