Glass pits and underlays

Some new screenshots were added to the combat helo website gallery, at the end there, you might want to check them out. Just me playing with some DOF and FOV settings which you can do from a Quake style command console in the game (aka chat interface).

Terrain Underlays

AD has been doing a bit of polish work and discovering the joys of the blend layer in the terrain system.

The terrain system uses 5 layers (with specular and normal for each one) and these are blended by a shader to produce a really fast base layer. Now he's starting to experiment with a secret SIXTH layer (a bit like the ninth chevron in Stargate but doesn't involve blowing up a planet). This blend layer maps a single texture (e.g. from a sat image) onto the painted terrain. It's something tried briefly before but results were mixed and not so obvious at ground level. He's been playing with that to bring out more detail and subtle variation.

Not that you should be flying at these altitudes in game, unless you're a Predator drone (get to da' choppa).

I was looking at SQLlite3 for adding a primitive streaming system for dynamic ground detailing, it's used everywhere as a client side embedded database, even on phones. It has an R*Tree index module for doing fast geospatial queries which is a good method for adding grass/veg/rocks and general junk in selected areas that users need to turn on/off for performance tweaking. It's also free so well within my price range. Don't know if the performance will be acceptable but it's something I will try for the Herat map after we complete the firing range.

Putting the Glass into the Glass Pit

After a material update over the weekend I had the glass in front of my instruments back but there were some subtle graphical issues with view angles and the cockpit night lighting shining off the surface like it was paper.

So after a bit of stepping through the shader code this morning not only did I learn some really cool things directly relating to doing infra-red stuff with the emissive channel but also fixed the computed normal for the glass. The standby instruments also got the glass treatment with a cockpit mesh update. I was actually quite shocked when I saw the difference. Almost makes me want to try and render real-time cubemaps for ultra high performance PCs later.

Now the Easter weekend is over it's back to the vehicle database and enhancing the pyrotechnics.


And now for some WIIIIIIIIIIIIDESCREEEN

To illustrate some tripplehead performance. I did have a very far DOF post filters on and ansiotropic was set to max (16).

the return of rotor blur

With a lot of pixel shaders, especially in the cockpit area, combined with really wide resolutions eat up GPU bandwidth. Tripplehead res typically reduces performance by a half. Just more pixels to crunch. So it IS a real GPU tester but we've not gone through optimising shaders or even art options for maximise performance yet. Since I'm mostly writing this game for me, 30 fps being my comfort zone it's in my interest to keep it close to that region. Although if you're going to be using a small window with MPDs dotted around your desktop of course you'll get much better performance.

How the hell do I turn this bloody rain off? Grrrr.