Friday, 3 June 2011

Update for this week

You can tell it's been a busy week since my blog update frequency dropped. Usually a good sign that lots of cool stuff is getting done. The tool-set has some save problems to be fixed this weekend. The biggest mind bender has been the math behind trajectory solutions both predictive (against moving objects) and static. I'm quite impressed by how much of this had to be solved by the lead Longbow 2 programmers amongst all the other things they had to contend with. You can research these things on-line, Wikipedia is often a good first look but once you throw moving helicopters into the mix it gets complicate fast.

This week we have laid foundations for content tools, auto-update software, added the FFAR rockets (still working on these) and the ballistics solver. Looking through the source there's also the cubic spline stuff for multi-player positioning which is now in the main project but awaiting interface between that and the Raknet network library.

Pylons which carry munitions under the wings got their elevation code so they track up and down a small amount to help stabilise rockets during launch. DoF was also tweaked, something I'll use for screen-shots and vids (CTRL X to toggle).



Working on rocket trails and zones. Once that's taken care of there's the remaining two HUD modes and the advanced flight-model to finish. Once those milestones have been reached it's time for polishing prior to first stage testing.

It's been a lot of fun working on this, never get tired of tooling around at tree-top height. I will miss working on it when it's over.

One last thing, AD made a short video of the Firing Range map (still un-named) which a nice lonely piano piece. The calm before the storm.

Posted by Numfundle at 23:20

4 comments:

  1. aao_uteam_xcrosser4 June 2011 at 02:11

    Looking really amazing. Excelent progress being made and definitly looks worth the wait for those who are waiting

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  2. Anonymous4 June 2011 at 04:13

    any estimated release date yet?

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  3. Numfundle4 June 2011 at 10:33

    As fast as we can :/ Depends on how quickly we hit several milestones needed to ship the firing range. As you should be aware we're planning a two stage release.

    A "prologue" firing range for getting familiar with the helicopter and gunnery will ship minus campaign and multi-player. This is a sort of paid for VIP beta which we hope will raise enough funding to complete the Afghan campaign and provide feedback from players to help shape the full version. Multi-player will added to the prologue later.

    I can't say when this is going to happen. This year certainly. Last year I was saying we should have a beta ready by this Easter but didn't take into account how much time I had to spend job hunting and government regulations that specified I could only do 14 hours a week unpaid work while unemployed, utterly ridiculous.

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  4. x4 June 2011 at 10:55

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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