Game progression - Ranks

Just added these to the game. As part of your player profile progression that will at some point be flagged as active, both you and your AI buddies will be able to rank up through career milestones.

What does it mean? Not a lot, shiny new stars to polish, the threat of constant ridicule and at the upper tanks, the opening up of the campaign options that allow you to call in 'specials' which I won't go into except it involves asking high-command for aid which will 'draw an aid card' from the deck.  I considered gating mission editing for non-player crews until your 2nd or 3rd promotion but tossed this away as I don't want to turn it into a career climbing game. It's more decorative with a bonus mid-way for working hard.

AI crews on the other hand will have attributes that reduce the time required to find and engage targets (through the use of a metric I term "track_positive", a magnitude which is a combination of accumulated time from a sensor or direct line of sight contact provided by the TSensor class which degrades through loss of contact). As they rank up, they should find and engage quicker with improved survivability.

Player profiles and editing is almost completed, division patches added so far...

• 1st Cavalry Division
• 1st Infantry Division
• 1st Armored Division
• 2nd Infantry Division
• 10th Mountain Division 
• 12th Combat Aviation Brigade
• 21st Cavalry Brigade
• 82nd Airborne Division
• 101st Airborne Division
• 404th Air Brigade
• 74th Flying Tigers

More to come later, I have patches and suggestions from the community that still need to be added.

The FCR is semi-operational thanks to the TSensor class which works efficiently for player and AI entities. This works equally well for line of sight as well as active sensors, the slow part is grabbing all viable entities in the sensor volume, this list is cached and can be later scanned for more precise or direct visibility checking. There's a player "padlock" mode (F4 default key) that will move your head to the nearest viable target in your "current field of view" only. With the cannon slaved to your HMS it can be all too easy to burn through 1200 rounds of 30mm. It's not uber accurate since you need to stabilise your flight path and give it time to settle over the area of the target. But any shells that miss tend to do AOE damage anyway. Will have to fine tune the damage and/or tie it to difficulty settings. Putting three pickups next to each other and hosing them with a 10 round bust will wreck one and seriously damage the others (a secondary explosion typically wrecking the next nearest one).

Couple of important things I still need to do, initial joystick configuration since I don't want folks having to use XML editors and I've broken a particle shader somehow (need to investigate that).

Once I've got the vehicle classes in the database (yes, somehow we missed that vital bit of information) the FCR should be classifying returns correctly then we can upload them to the TSD.

Update on new video


Sorry about the delay on a new video showing the firing range, it is coming but I hope you appreciate not a priority right now. Just rushing to tick off more features so I can get a functional build ready.